nerve center

by Tempest Miller

Banana dress, he wears as he walks in the prevailing wind of the beach.

He knows too well that a day is fleeting,

crushed in an instant like a soda can.

And he goes through town walking very quickly inland from the sea and cove.

He walks over bridges and steps on storm drains.

The bells of townspeople Morris dancers follow him everywhere

as he retreats beneath rumbling skies to degenerate old churchyards.

His dress becoming a wispy and flamboyant skirt,

a golden thread.

In the churchyard as the grave keeper.

That is his job.

What a strange town.

Hiding under graveyard trees that grow

very thick and large with free branches,

digging up muck,

tossing it filled with bones over his shoulder.

Rabbits in the graveyard.

This town with all its dead people,

the demography forever trending towards old and white

and dispassionate conservatism,

have entrusted their bones,

corpses to someone so glorious.

Everything so disparate in this graveyard,

him the completely bespeckled, all-knowing oneness of man.

Like the Buddha.

Looking at him you come to understand he is not only a grave keeper,

but a treasurer,

arbiter of the whole town and its traditions,

like a guard at the Tower of London.

He is not ideological but relentlessly scientific

in his understanding of past and present.

He wishes to influence the long-term,

sees everything as malleable, an institution, and men and women cast in nickel,

lead.

To fall in love with the man in the banana dress,

to sail out to enveloped, murky islands of disease,

eating exotic cuisine and dirty-cheap tacos,

and stand in the castle halls of mirrors.

Across the room from each other,

the spices still on our lips,

jousting in a prism of royal glass.

That is the nerve centre of all I want.

*Originally published in chapbook England 2K State Insekt.

Photo of Tempest Miller

BIO: Tempest Miller (he/him) is a queer writer from the UK. He publishes a monthly chapbook on Amazon. His work has appeared in JAKE, Boats Against the Current and Swamp Pink. His instagram is @tempestm1ller.