Here’s another filmic poem. I like to write from the perspective of a film maker, and often move around the poem in the way a camera man would. Checking the angles, looking for the cut away shots, adjusting the lighting to build the scene up. This poem takes place in an undetermined Latin American town. A small town. There’s an element of threat in the piece, which is another thing I like to see engineered into a poem. Some risk. Some tension.

Eduardo

Our fine neighbour, Eduardo,
known locally as ‘an hour with the pig’
is folded in viridian evening beside blocks and hooks.
Folded neat and hot, he is all helmet-like.

Teeth grind of moped. Lolloping begonias.
He plays Carmina Burana considering workaday beauty,
yet it is a bad Decca recording and he tires of it. He loves justice on TV
and the weekly surgery of romance: the doomed brides.

‘Eduardo,’ they shout. ‘Do not sleep at your sister’s place tonight.’
He is pinched up considering his inept grasp of planets,
He is everyone’s fastidious shark, happily cutting, cutting,
cutting to the end.

Fermina does not have his weakness for display.
She is emboldened by her single mole, a loyal creature
beneath the mighty storm and a century of town smoke.
‘She will phone tonight,’ Eduardo says,

‘and discuss the shapes of her cabaret, her sour winds of love.’
Eduardo imagines crudely that her mattress is the horn of plenty
despite his abhorrence of winter perfume
and spitting gutters. There are no coyotes.

He chews on the spandrels of some grey meat
and picks out sequin pips for Fermina’s wan retrieval this evening.
There is so much affection in his brother’s gaze.
Lodged inside the weathered purse of his face he is quite terrible.

He has always procrastinated over business meals like this.
Fermina will be revered inside a new family procedure
where we shall leach from out our shadows towards the stitches of stars.
Our mouths are gaping now in the drapery behind her.