Everybody's mouth was a zero
A new poem by Tim MacGabhann sees a late night rescue on Halloween night summon the ghosts of addictions past and the fragility of human connection
Twelfth-Stepping the Minotaur
1.
No matter how wasted Carlos got, he’d drop a pin.
The Google Maps line was a red tangle
through alleys more dank with piss-smell
than his mattress. My route was a ribbon-thin
cut on the dark, like those he’d scribble on his arms,
before swabbing up the blood with torn-out Psalms.
‘Serve the Lord with fear!’ I heard him intone,
which was my cue to check in.
He put his bloody arms out to me —
a kid, suddenly, one who’d grazed his knee
and needed Daddy to come galloping.
'If I stand up,’ he said, ‘I’ll wet myself.'
Easy to hate him. When had anyone helped me?
But then he felt so warm in my fireman’s lift.
2.
It was dark, and the streetlight was banjaxed.
Phosphor seethe of rain turned the road film-noir Proust.
Loose wires sizzled. My foot caught on tree-roots —
eucalyptus, the worst tree, thirstier even than me.
Their growth turned the pavement to a broken ruck
that made me think of Kafka and his ice-axe:
maybe a thaw wasn’t what he was after,
but a brightly sharded opacity —
a notion slammed in half by my car-door.
The storm played theremin-wails on the radio.
A concrete siding had burst over Viaducto.
The empty night and the underground car-park
were my days on the White Widow — rushing dark,
all drop and no ground. My heart was a trapped hare.
3.
He was in Huitzilac. The road’s bends were wild —
past a torched mall, past a historic bell
rung by some lad before he was shot to hell
by the army, and past a lake that held
a drowned town under its waters.
The floodlit cupolas glowed like chalk.
In my head, the towers snapped like poppy-stalks,
left juts of masonry were broken molars.
I parked under eucalyptus — the worst tree,
thirstier than me, sap like napalm
seeping through desert-calmo bark.
The moon was a bottle-lid pinged through the dark.
My chest twanged for Bordeaux and Valium,
the need a scud of tadpoles wriggling through me.
4.
My first year clean, I’d hide in bed,
missing the drink-spins, dreaming I was a bin-bag
loaded with rotten mangoes, waking with a gag,
sinking darts into the soft of my head.
Everybody’s mouth was a zero that made noise,
just endlessly subtracting. I’d pray
for the blare of earthquake-warning tannoys,
for gas to flare under every tree,
row after row, the boulevard ablaze,
as though jet-strafed, because I couldn't see
a future without the bad voice in me
rumbling open my sagittal suture
and skittering me straight to the boozer,
where I’d freeze before the bar-mirror’s Medusa.
5.
Those bad days weren’t as gone as I might want:
the wakings, bloody-knuckled, in a schoolyard;
the wine-bubbles thick as frogspawn; my prayer
of 'Let this thing in me lie down and die for once’
never, even for a second, answered;
the alchemy of bad pills igniting as good pills,
their sudden lightning opening floors
into squares of dazzle; crying for no-one,
crying only when my brain was walnut-dry,
squeezed free of all necessary chemicals.
Rap my sternum, and you’d hear a fluted sound,
like air blown into an empty bottle,
because dinner was the bath that I ran
and slid into, water pressing down hunger.
6.
Nine years in fifteen-minute tape-loops:
the early house’s cherry-red beer-taps,
cinder-specked streets, dirt-colour glare,
the morning soundtrack a freight-train rattle
numbed to a rumble by the day’s first bottle,
then noon sleeps, velvet with stout, all the quieter
and all the darker for there being no stars.
I’d picture myself as an old rosary
wound around fingers that have lost their bones
but kept their nails and hair. Dust caked my filigree.
My Jesus was deeply flayed by corrosion.
Light would spill down the bricks of my crypt,
and God would lift me out for a check and a sniff,
say, ‘You’ve a ways to rot yet’, and drop me again.
7.
My walk to the square passed as a clitter
of almond-husks dropping to the ground.
From here, the map’s red line snarled around
a row of parked trucks. Fog pooled on their containers,
dripped from the frowning eaves of warehouses,
caught in little no-worth pearls on my coat-sleeve.
Violet light fell from the San Judas altar —
a gilt pod, decked with candles and gerberas,
his gaze so sure I felt like I could leave
the earth by grabbing the hem of his robe —
in an oval of flickering mist over
Carlos, lying prone under Frito packets —
so still: too still. My heart beat in my teeth.
But then he yawned. I breathed out. The light strobed.
‘What are you wearing?’ was all I could muster.
8.
Buckled cardboard horns were taped to his forehead,
dirt and grit stuck to the Sellotape,
over a bull-mask dinged half out of shape.
He looked at me and groaned. ‘Hallowe’en,’ he said.
Around each iris was a maze of veins.
Lifting him, he was lighter again —
he’d been drinking his sleep, smoking his meals.
His smell poured bad pictures through my skull,
but the map took us over cobblestones
and through memories of me and my father
eating Creme Eggs and reading the Beano
on the bonnet of his car, back from somewhere
grey and marshy, with trees the colour of bones,
but safe now — the sky dark, the lamps solder-yellow.