A Ring Around His Bed Music by Spleen Erebus Dave Migman At the ringside, looking, his eyes, looking, his ruptured veins, jaundiced, eyes, his eyes, I fall into his eyes I am his youth, father his youth is inside my heart, my blood, the dissolute core, cried out, father, Dad… Da… his breath slowing, inaudibly, his skin so cold, growing, death is growing here, in this room, (un)life is fixed in the death ring, on the sheets, my mother weeps, my mother is weeping, my mother wept, in a distant room, a corridor away, a world away during a black year, on a day of death. The febrile air coaxed clarions, the butterflies were still, their atom-thin wings, mosaic fragments from archaeological digs, the birds still fed, still feed. Father, you are going, I hold my hand before his nose, father is gone, I cry out, pendant mother weeping from my neck, a bag of loose skin and ageing bone, father, we cried, we topple, the cancer is growing, grown gone, it has taken my father away. Inside my core, his youth is there, his father’s youth is there, on and on, a succession of cupped dolls, encased, mask after mask like I saw in dreams in my youth, pig face ripped- clown face ripped-pig face ripped, looming over me, the edifice of death-death-death. Here at the ringside, mother, father, sister, her daughter, eyes swimming, misting, fathomless depths of emotion, I hold his hand, he is crying I am telling him of the child I will never have, I believe it, he weeps, Now, then, last year, now, that death is all around, trickling in the gutters, pooling in the eyes that pin each butterfly to the cork, in the museums, in the fossils sparkling on the pavement, in the fork, in my stabbing motion, in my cock, each ejaculation, latent, primed, there, death, always, death, no escape… At the ringside looking over, the morphine stupor, we are waiting, just waiting, nothing to be done, no miracles, no cures, no redemption, just a clocking tick, the tock that tells, the prime, the time between screams. Father. you were an angel, on your mountain, you poured scorn like cups of tea, father times I hated you, times I forgot you were always there, treading in my core, the insatiable core, you were hidden in the wires, in the spaghetti of my veins, I call you, I still feel you, gone father, gone, no more, an unmarked rest, a rowan tree, a frozen pond, swans, the geese croaking overheard through bleary skies, it goes on, the dance continues, we tumble into the ring, we are gladiator victims’ poets, we are unaware, you always said they were no good, but I think you were wrong. There is good in the world, there is evil, they are two charmed snakes forever circling, consuming - there the paradigm shifts, returns, shifts, gets knocked flat, bloats into a hedgehog ball, bursts into creeping cells, an arrangement of atoms, bound by attraction and repulsion, like mind, mind like, my mind flipping magnets in the polar wind, yet I seek the moments father, I seek these smiles and I seek this life, while I am living father, can’t you hear the geese? I am trapped father, you are free. I am bound in opposing planes, love them-hate them-need them- loathe them, circling-seasonal-bastard-serpents, blasted like Santorini, destroyed me, healed part, animal, mud, two quarts, the rotten eggs, the dirt I have uncovered, I cover, I reach out, my claws, you trim them and slap me about. I wish you were still here.