Ineffable

I sit upon the floor inside

my childhood bedroom, wondering why

it is that God cannot be seen.

‘God is in everything,’ I’m told,

but I can see this isn’t true.

He isn’t in my radio.

He isn’t in my Action Man.

He isn’t in the church on Sunday.

Although I look, I cannot see

him in my mother’s shouting face.

I manufacture God from things

left lying on my bedroom floor:

some wooden blocks; a dried-out paintbrush;

the engine from my brother’s train-set;

and a wig from the dressing-up box.

God balances next to the bookshelf.

‘Hello there, God’ I say, but God

does not reply; he doesn’t have

a mouth. ‘Here, borrow mine,’ I say.

I wear God’s wig and start to talk.

I talk like God, or how I think

that God would talk. I open-shut

my mouth, then open-shut my mouth

again as silence fills the room.

I stand there, mute, more fish than God.

‘For God is very like a fish,’

I say, in pompous, priestly tones.

I open-shut my fish-God mouth

for one last time, de-wig myself,

and put God back inside his boxes.

Bloodlust

How can anyone eat a black pudding?

Giant, sausage-shaped animal scab,

the clotted life-force bled from an animal

so that a hangover may be combatted

courtesy of a Full English with all the trimmings.

It is more delicious than a punch in the face,

and as visually appealing as a blood-spattered windscreen

at the scene of an RTA.

See as they knock themselves out

with their perverse culinary tastes

and inability to think outside

their own heads.

House Fire

I want to burn your house down,

not because I like flames,

or want you dead,

but as a futile gesture

of my granite rage.

I want to set your house on fire,

or maybe break in

when you’re on holiday for two weeks,

and leave the taps running,

and the central heating on

with the thermostat on full,

to see how you react

to having everything you value

taken away from you.

I want to set fire to your house,

to seal every door and window frame,

and fill the house with gas.

And stand in the hall,

and stare at the light switch,

remembering, remembering, remembering.