Poem 209

Musing on PTSD, the inability and impossibility of really coming home after you’ve been invisibly changed by trauma, the lonely chasm in communication, the inconvenient individual truth of damage … it could equally apply to soldiers returned from war but there always seemed to be hostage situations in the eighties, a lot of yellow ribbons round the old oak tree …

… the radio dedication of the Tom Jones song is both ironic and appropriate here because the guy in Green Green Grass can in fact only return as a dead man … 

… I like the rustle of menace underneath this, how intimations of violence keep breaking through something as anodyne as the standard 60s gap-toothed school photo with globe, the disturbing sense that he’s brought something home with him that could be calamitous …

Green Green Grass Of Home

Home is the hostage
       home
for Christmas
for the shots of whisky
the crack of the nuts
safe home inside the garden perimeters
      looking at photographs
school photos of stupid hair
a smile knocked full of holes
one hand on the desktop globe
                                                           point to where
                                                               you were held

he walks up the lounge and back
reads the spines of National Geographics
catches up with the gossip
      it's good to have you home
says his mother leaving what she's doing
     it's good to have you home
say the papers and the cards
shout the neighbours over the mower
it's good

           down the road I look and there runs Mary
                 dedicated on the radio …
                                                                talk about
                                                                laugh

home is the hostage
naked late at night squatting
eyeing the little tree and its lights
feeling his scarred balls
                                           draw up against his body