Exit Left
And if they are all right
and I am all wrong,
I’m worth nothing more
than a nine-to-five
turning keys in dead
-letter boxes
and it’s all been ego
all this time, nothing more
than little-baby screams
from a big boy’s mouth
– then all you do is
set me free. Convinced
of my own worthlessness
and of no use or wit to anyone,
why stick around
to see through the movie?
Someone always dies
at the end, so it might as well
be me. My only present
comfort is knowing
that another little name
will be added to a very long list,
a roll of dishonour for all of us
who dishonoured life
by walking out before
the credits, terminally unimpressed
by the colours, lights, hopes
and dreams.
A life whose shadows
fall far enough, we are told,
to allow us to share
the stage with the terminally
blessed, born to beauty
and grace. We must be grateful
for that weak little shade
cast from the great ones
who bask in the closed-set lights,
glad of our chance to hold out
their coats when they smile
onto the stage;
and all my fellow failures
rise to applaud as one.
Ian Mullins
Whereabouts
One of these days,
when every drop of rain
is an Atlantic ocean
and I am drowned so slowly
that drowning
might be mistaken for living,
breathing, walking out
in the world,
I will walk to the edge of the sea
and just keep walking,
because every day
is one of those days:
and with each one
I step closer to the real,
unimagined sea, the soft sweet
breathlessness of drowning
saying come chain your bones
to those broken before you
and together we will bind
the oceans to smother the land
and all find the peace
of our dreaming.
Ian Mullins
Dogsbody
Too much damage
over too many years
and now nothing
is still; every atom
agitates, every eyeball
in flight or fright.
Bones are an old bicycle
with shattered spokes,
skin a white sheet
splattered with rust.
It’s in here
all the good work
is undone, where every lash
is self-inflicted.
A loud vacuum
screaming in a space
where only the town crier
hears the town’s cries,
while the citizens themselves
can do nothing. They have
their own funerals to arrange.
Ian Mullins
Stunt
Skin tears at me again;
and the only way to appease it
is to feed it, give it
more skin to sandpaper,
more dust to be hoovered
until the bag needs emptying
again. Surely it's gathered
enough seed to shape
a new me? An improved model
that can communicate
with other devices and laugh
away life, be bemused by dust:
not sit scratching itself
into ever-tinier seeds
that don't care how they grow.
Ian Mullins
Sorted
Sort it he said,
so I worked through
the paper pile
dry as last week's confetti
and there she was:
I'll kill myself
on the fourteenth
if I don't hear from you.
Her claim was closed
on the seventeenth.
Perhaps three days of hope
was three more
than she could bear;
three days waiting for
envelopes to drop like
stillborn calves littered
in a pen.
Doesn't say how she died.
Maybe posting that letter
only booked her a few more days
of fuss and fret
she could have lived without.
Or maybe she screamed
and suffered, the way
we all probably will in the end.
I passed him the papers.
Sorted I said.
Ian Mullins
Not Long Now
It ends here,
in the most distant corner
of the charity shop
behind the brushes and
the brooms,
where the warped 45s
I haven't listened to
for almost as many years
will lie flat in the sun
waiting for old people
to leaf through them
as though looking through
sheaves of other people's photos
in the hope that they might
spot a face, someone
they once thought they knew.
A face that says
ignore me;
I'm only passing through.
Ian Mullins
