Young Mr Vrana
has become,
according to neighbours
in his Central-European high-rise block,
frozen in his own footstep.
In the over-steamy basement
they sit with the unwashed shirts
at their feet
like The Blackforest
and whisper...
oh the wifeless grow mean or twisted as a root
and those are the frozen men who lie
with solitude
on filthy bedsheets.
Always slumped with a book or bottle,
they like to watch themselves grow old
over the cold tap
and can
breathe up the colour in a room
and use it.
Pani Myslíková, you must watch him
on the stairwell
or in his dark door-way
and tell me
is that not a pteracdactyl?
In his rooms above,
Mr Vrana flaps around the kitchen
in his slippers—
just him, being cruel:
favouring a shirt
with a two-week rest
on a chair-back
but burning some pants, unfairly,
while ironing.
He ignores
the dishes
in the sink,
neglects the laundry,
jumps on the bed
in his shoes
and when he thinks
about people:
something wonderful:
his breath hides in his throat,
colours run.
Arrested
shredding the cobbled strip
fast, faster 'til one sharp–nosed
brunette
cocked a belly–hip
and opened a smile
which glimmered me
on the spot.
Let Down on Ječna
It was funny:
she said she had an angel;
that we all do. He wasn't sure
but mostly he just
wanted to leave. Out on Ječna
Street the stopped trams
looked like an eighty–foot-long
trickle of blood. An ambulance
blew through traffic.
A body under tram wheels.
Brunette. He saw
they were afraid
to move her. Saw
shoppers shocked
above their mobile phones
and her face like a slack bloody yawn
but he couldn't see her angel.
Was it invisible,
tending her brow?
Or had it, unseen,
like a man going about his business,
slipped into the crowd
Poem Written for the Reading with Stephan Delbos at the Anglo-American College Library in Prague 15th May 2009
Or maybe its a short letter,
Stephan,
We are children of late last century, and now, as
the lights go down, we must ask ourselves
this: Whoever did good work only to die
in the mid zeroes of a new millenium?
Soon we are gone and dust and we gather now
what flavour we can from the world, as Jack Spicer carved
on the page: It is salt and pepper the death that young men
wish for. Tonight
I write with my legs stretched out
ahead of me, bloodless, one leg laughing
the other numbed dead and it's true
I have wanted to kill, but this is not hate, it is only
love. We must find our own way down
as water does. The shelves of the libraries
are filled with prayers like these. Tomorrow
we'll read our poems.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Poetry
Chris Crawford
Christopher Crawford, born in Glasgow in 1974, studied mechanical engineering and has worked on various oilrigs and seismic vessels in the Gulf of Mexico. His poems, fiction, essays and reviews have been published, or are forthcoming, in Evergreen Review, Blatt, The Prague Revue, GRASP, The Clare Market Review and Gently Read Literature. He has lived in the Czech Republic since 2002 and works for the Czech Coal Group.