LANDLOCKED
by Robert Ford
If you lived around here, with slaughter for history,
you’d end up just like them, growing moustaches,
and belts of lazy fat to go with the empty-eyed looks.
You’d tuck your trouser legs into your boots and kick
every dog you encountered, on the stairwells, in the bars,
and alienate your wives, there being no room for romance
where the ocean, with its soft repetitions, has never been.
With ethanol and torpor to seduce you, to hold your hand,
you’d stumble across solid moments in the emptiness,
where all this fury suddenly made perfect sense to you.
Gyroscope Review - !22