The Underside

Funny how on the surface it’s reminiscent of dead
spidery things, or a black tossed-and-torn sail washed up at
some distant shingly mooring. It’s upside-down-topside-out-
inner-ripped; a little bird retching about. It’s got six
steel bones swinging splintered, sticking painfully out through a
billowed bat-wing. A single shaft of talon, upright-curled,
has lost its sting. All last night it was buffeted and blown
about by this carcass-chucked graveyard. Dumped by the waste bin.

What remains hidden on the underside is far away
from apparitions of broken bats, shredded sails and wings:
it is that a dark-suited working man was wandering
wetly home in the water and wracking wind of the back
street. His feet fall flat – squelch fully out – and he is face-red,
back-bent, drip-dropping and cursing and cursing and cursing.


Simon Peter Everett, 2010 ©