(for Graham 1960-2021)
It’s now been four years to the day.
I’m still hollowed and angry and want someone to pay
For ending our story before we could say
All the things that we needed to say.
The CPS wanted a crisp clean-up treating
Police time more expensive than lost futures
Bargaining justice away for a fleeting
Time-served and guilt discounted stay.
Disruptors of society’s fragile sutures
Today deserve no mitigating plea.
For several years they send away
Protesters, as enemies of you and me,
But a killer was home by last Christmas Day.
The family man, who went out to snort coke
Claimed a moment of madness, a cynical joke.
Not too drunk to madly run half a street’s length
To strike from behind with a madman’s strength
Neath a hairdressers’ camera – he wasn’t aware –
An unknowing victim, left rippling there
At the point where he hit the grit with a crack.
Sauntered arrogance then, from a friend taking back
His Harrington jacket, to brag like a club turn,
While CCTV seared the punch like a slub burn.
Love’s troubles evaporated in a second
In that gutter he left with so much unreckoned
A fighter with unscarred knuckles, he’d no chance
To scrap, or to run, to dialogue or dance,
Although he had shared with his mother his dread
In her puzzled urn. Did he feel that she beckoned?
Or somehow responded to what he had said?
He said he was ready for letting her go
And had planned a memorial tattoo, a show
Of a symbol of love in her ashes and ink
And he asked my permission: so what did I think?
I had never understood why he wanted to be written
On with tiger snarls
And names of those he was smitten
By, who moved on while he remained in the dreaming marls
Of neverland, man-child sustained
In a world of violence
And now forever arraigned in silence.
For a moment I felt sibling guilt, that maybe
The repairs would start if it was me
Who took the etching. But he left no design.
Looking into myself, I just can’t find mine.
It’s not there to reveal, so I’ll never know.
And my mind to his rhythms can’t manage to flow.
I just slump on his bench, an untempered tableau.
Beswirling through trees, a brass band plays on
Berating the breeze. His lines may have gone
But on this day, of all days, it’s always his song.
.
Stephen A. Linstead
.