2006 - Vol. 3, Issue 8

"1964"

"Never be late," was knocked into me.

Fifteen minutes I sat there
waiting for the Careers Officer
where posters of young farmers
with calves scarfed around their necks
walked towards me

in between the Royal Navy piping me on deck
and the sickly smile from a boy
standing over his lathe.

I ticked Footballer, Postman, Forester
But the man with the mustard tie vomiting down his shirt,
brylcreemed hair (a greasy tarmac road
with a white line axed down the middle)
landed me with laborer in a slaughter house
saying "Epileptics with literacy problems
don't get work: you're lucky!"

The farmer wanted his cow back
the Navy pissed off
And the engineer gave me the finger!

"The Slaughterman"

She shuffles backwards
Resisting the chamber.

Into the slaughter box
he forces her,
poleaxes her back
and like bullet holes
crimson shoots the ceiling.

He teases her last few seconds,
gun to her head, between
her gob–stopper eyes,
changing his mind
for those last moments of shit,
before cracking home.

He turns on me, taunts my virginity,
"Your age I licked out cunts:
cats with their throats cut."

He mimics my epilepsy: shaking.

His months of abuse force me past consequences:
I chin him with a knuckle–duster:
a puppet with no master. His jaw dangles
and he screams a baby's scream.

"Trying To Escape"

for every one in B Spinal ward

The window opposite my bed
frames part of a Victorian asylum,
colored red and black.

Counting bricks my pastime
of the six–by–four:
a hundred–and–two!
Like Monte Cristo
I begin to scrape out mortar
and chalk days on the walls.

With each crumb that falls new beams brighten —
holding closed fingers to the sun.

My hands blister and I dream
of palm trees running down into waves
or making love in the black and yellow grass.

I riddle loose a brick from the wall,
pushing my hand through for the map
to a treasure, I pull out a wheelchair.  .  .  .

"Bomb Damage"

Something was itching my eyes to stare
over at the machines.

Only I seemed to hear the bleeping
yet my whole family was standing there
and everyone who had ever lived,

the whole universe even,  all screaming
not to look. Yet the bleeping seemed

to bounce off every childhood picture
and get–well card
in the Zagreb hospital:
like a ball to my feet.

Then I made my mistake
and looked at a face,
a kind of no–face with holes for eyes
nose, mouth,

legs missing from the knees down
still stuck to all those bits of shrapnel
somewhere, which banged her life apart.
A little girl, bandaged

in mummy,  almost pretty.
Some nurse had taken an age
getting each lap perfect
so proud that when we look

we might still see a person,
someone whole.

"1964," "Trying To Escape," and "The Slaughterman" first appeared in Peter Street's 1993 collection, Out of The Fire, from Spike Books.

"Bomb Damage" first appeared on
http://disabilityarts.com/depth/peter-street/