In this Haibun the relationship of the poetry to the prose is what I call parallel: the poems do not intensify or illustrate the prose; they come from a parallel world and complement the prose:
ablaze with light
a ferry throbbing
into the black night
Here is a man – as light as a sparrow. The skin round his mouth is hard as a beak. I balance the nipple of the nylon drinking cup between his lips feeling his arm like an anglepoise against my side. His gasping widens the splay of my fingers on his ribs. He won’t bother with today’s local election results floating on the radiowaves like ghosts through the prison walls and he won’t ever again taste a drink or confront with his withering intelligence an obstinately literal Prison Officer. He concentrates on something inward – nothing as capricious as thought, but a landscape, perhaps, an arid boundless place where the pain helps focus his attention on watching the distance beat by beat.
in blue space
a cloud
evaporates
This is the Winchester Prison Hospital Wing, a rattling dungeon of Bedlam shrieks, dog-ends and sputum-tissue, neglected by a cheery Trusty, and a smarmy nurse. I go to find the SMO. I say that he’s nominated me next-of-kin, can she tell me the prognosis – and realise with astonishment that she hates everybody, even me. She refuses him morphine, sneers, “He’s devious, he’s not dying.” I stagger out of her office, the words she spat ringing in my ears. “I’ll give him painkillers when I’m good and ready.” Fergy deals with it better than I do. He’s had four decades to learn. I am deeply ashamed that I cannot care for him, that I have to leave him there.
tugged half under
mooring buoy
in the ebb tide
At the newsagent’s I puzzle over what a man is: How to be a Sex God is one cover story, followed by Shooting Machine-Guns with the Rednecks! and The Berk Who Lost Two Million! The cool names are Brett Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh, and the photo feature is Autoerotica, (pin ups of cars, I think).
His father was a man – a hard-drinking wife-beating friend-brawler, who thrashed Fergy with a belt-buckle. He cooked Fergy’s pet rabbit and forced it down the child’s soft mouth. But you can’t refuse your father; his alcohol and violence rushed up Fergy’s capillaries, entryists, pickling his heart, and erupted on Christmas Day as the drunken boy of twenty-one killed his girl bride.
moon and sea all night long force six
Fergy has never had a sniff of a BMW; he scorns the men whose cells are ripe with girly pix, men “in thrall to bimboism,” (that’s his phrasing, and he calls it “self-inflicted bondage, the injustice which they have imposed upon themselves,” in his gravelly mining-town Geordie). Money does not cascade through his hands in jackpot imagery: he earns four pounds sixty two pence each week. But he is a stone in the shoe of a Governor, indomitable with murderous convicts, and bracing to my bland goodwill. Over forty years of incarceration he has found the irreducible core of a man: mind, and will. There is no likeminded thinker to appreciate this. He tells me, “No-one will ever know I lived.” His speech is cast in Victorian prose from the prison library, poured through the pursed vowels and rotten lungs of County Durham, an eloquence finely wrought and strange: “I am a caricature devoid of humour…”
labouring
through a patch of brilliance
the tiny boat
Fergy is in Heaven. He is not conscious that for his last hours he has been released from his Life Sentence into a hospice and lies in a bed of lovely linen in a brightly painted room, flowered and sunned through rose curtains, and he is touched with motherly care, perhaps for the first time, by a great exponent of the Hippocratic oath whose kindness opens the sluice on my heart’s pity as none of the callous neglect ever did. It is goodness that makes us cry, not suffering. Fergy is Christian and I murmur in his ear about angels and light. His body now is stiff as saltcod, drying into the warm air.
I thank the doctor. That pathetic bundle of clothes! Away from there, breathing deeply where a fine mist is coming in off the sea.
on a rusty buoy
the fog bell feels
each melancholy wave