Phillip Medhurst

Your order is for presentation

Of tasty titbits hung up in my mind

Like kippers in a shed replete with smoke.

Each morsel swam once in your stream alive,

A brief encounter, pickled, mummified,

And racked as ruined hope which I now cure

As parcelled portion of my history,

A dish that’s had its day. So take and eat,

For this my body is, my flesh, my blood.

Declaim my death to all when I have gone.

Avert your gaze from last night’s takeaway,

Dropped by this drunk unsteady on the way

By habit trod when, thus inebriate,

He made a mess of rhyme, then went to bed.

If you do not, you are a nosy hound

That sniffs the random snack to see if there

Some thing your fancy takes, before the wind

Blows paper, polystyrene, bones and all

On to Gehenna, trash’s second death,

Or a recycled resurrection.

Few are the things I know that I did well.

I got some grudging praise from time to time;

I valued these encomia far too much.

When tempted, all too easily I fell,

And ev’rything concocted burned to ash.

I erred and strayed to famished wilderness.

So like Tobias with his unstitched fish

I grill these in’ards, exorcise Self-Doubt –

Although that demon dogs my footsteps still,

And all roads seem to lead to Azazel.