The Lost Years
by Patrick Warner

i.

Rip the flex from the electric clock,
braid bare wire ends to the steel sieve's rim,
and plop it like a helmet on your skull.
Now reach and plug the three-pin in.

The shyest creatures come out to play:
wild lynx, mink and whiskered otter;
wrist-thick trout that tremble and shudder,
regale you with tales of salt water.

Now write of your fabled breakthrough,
the wall cracking open below the clock,
no Narnia fur-trimmed portal this,
but the broken teeth of chiselled brick,

with the frayed ends of one-inch slats
and fat-lip lumps of mortar hanging loose.
Earphones like moss pads over ears
with Back in Black on continuous loop,

that demolition soundtrack giving way
to something altogether country:
birdsong, and nearby a trickling brook,
sunlight filtering down through a canopy,

and awe like a shock of long thick hair:
like that aforementioned colander
hot-wired to frig the hard-wired brain,
and shock you into the free-and-clear,

so real, at three A.M., when every beer,
when every tumbler of amber rum,
lighting the way from there to here,
shone like a lantern, frail and paper-thin.

ii.

The sun that day was not the sun I knew.
Crash-test dummy amperes struck on anvil ohms
unzipping phosphorescent candles, hot-car joules.

So cruel the way its gammas sparked gamin,
the way it powered down, obliterating shade,
green-housing me, by a no-name petrol station.

Later, the fumy pumps were lanced, the tuberous
tanks dug up, the toy-land car-port canopy knocked
and carted off. The shop converted to a key & lock.

Tulk's, a name I often think of when I think about
the interval between that pot-bound, heat-struck day,
and the day I surfaced, a hemisphere away,

sockless, shoeless, shirtless, clueless, with nothing
but a pair of check pants bunching up my balls
and the memory of wind whipping past my ears,

a bellows that fanned the embers of that sun
with everything pent up, jammed, stuck, on hold
about to rip through muscle, burst through skin.

iii.

Ashen my younger face emerging
from the ashtray's mush of ash stabbed
with burned-out Seadogs, jack-knifed butts.

Dusty footsteps lead across the floor
between black moons of long-playing albums,
lead all the way to the double bay

that overlooks the hard-tramped snow,
the aftermath of what? a lover's dance,
a midnight stagger around a streetlamp,

hands warming in each other's pants,
footsteps frozen at twenty below.
We were young. Then came the thaw.

Like jump-leads, these butter knives,
their blackened tips still surface
in our kitchen drawer from time to time.

Mole
Anansi