Saylum

The poet is hung, drawn and quartered in the foggy market square. All black and grey and red. The butcher stands in the middle of the night, calling sausages a pound a pound while the mayor weeps big tears onto his belly and the candlestick maker is drunk and his wife with her hair in rollers chases him with a rolling pin, her slippers slapping on the cobbles, almost crushing the cat, and the poet hangs flayed in an X dripping blood onto the fruit and veg in the cart. This is Saylum. The friar is a liar and he competes with the crier for the ears but the baby wins, and the undertaker in his squat black hat stoops seven feet tall ‘tween the stalls, but the fountain doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for years. The tower strikes the hour while the baker spills the flour on the floor. The man in the stocks stole a box without locks, and the boy and the girl chase a hoop with a stick, and the fox licks his lips for the chicken of the butcher, and the poet drips blood in the mud while the funeral man in his squat black hat almost crushes the cat, sausages a pound a pound. The baker burns his bread on purpose, selling pity loaves by the dozen, while the hatter mourns the death of his daughter and doesn’t say a word. The giant lumbers with his protruding brow while he’s leading the cow on a rope, with his hedge-cutter hair in the market square and his sore knuckles and tin opener top hat flap, with his braces dangling behind as he shrinks, and the woman with the red lips is winking in the doorway. The butcher kicks the fox as the clock ticks and tocks, and the chimney-sweep boy with his chimney-sweep head is eating the bread while the poet drips red on the pavement. He denied all charges, said it was a diary, said the rhymes were accidental – pick any book off the shelf, said he, and I’ll find you a rhyme. But he couldn’t, and the judge in his white woollen wig is buying the pig from the butcher. Good with apple sauce. What’s apple sauce says the judge. This is Saylum. The town where things sometimes happen.

(Prose poem, written April 2022. Photo: me)