Heads

by Niall McDevitt

1
head and neck cleft, consciousness a black sol
fizzing out its life via mass observation,
talking nonsense at the end, confessing
sweet nothings to an emotional public.
call me a narcissist.  my face is not over yet,
a shop souvenir on display at City’s exit,
eyes and lips stock-still as a Billingsgate fish,
a face set in its ways now, inflexible.
but my afterlife comes with new skill-sets:
mute spokesperson for an espionage state
I am suavely shrill.  also, the phantom limbs
below my locked jaw dance pavans and voltas
as entertainingly as the Earl of Leicester.
it is raining applause.
I can stick it

2
the ready supply of heads depends now
on me, but it’s not liberality that donates
this beef globe to the general eye
as a totem object.  it is state theatre.
(my own eyes hang on as costume jewels
compacted with plans, dulled glitter.)
the viewing figures behold me less
as nuanced actor than bloody prop
but throng to espy the ghostly chrism
in my par-boiled and tarred aura, ogling
as I deliquesce in Elizabethan weather,
a dinner-host to sycophants, the murders
of crows, though saving a just desserts smile
for my only friend
the Keeper of Heads

3
Falstaffian blubber traded in for flagpole
I stand erect on drawing-bridge turrets
among the most upright of Majesty’s subjects
bobbing in gusts, the fresh and/or gone off.
there’s nothing much to do here but deter
you from doing the things you really want to,
posture clenched, philosophy Hobbsean,
my idea of eternity portcullised.
exalted above the mortal? or toffee-apple?
England drags itself on Thames’s hurdle
by the irritable bowels!  lord chancellor,
your law screws my head onto a stick, because
it does not think as I do, in numbers or rhymes.
I wouldn’t pole-axe myself
into pure and impure

4
fourfold man, cut to the chine, quarters touring
suburbia, coming to a gibbet near you.
here at Traitor’s Gate my head feels no burden
but a tickle at the bottom of the throat.
pendant eyes fix not on William the Bastard vistas
but on the indelible image of the last thing seen:
the afforcing blade’s triangle of silver,
vatic, pointing out everything I’ve done wrong.
caesarean death, now I understand power
as I understand the inner life of a hog
hung for the blood to slow and stop.  nothing
pleasures me on the rod.  unconsciousness
at the climax of the ceremony—pain’s apex—
launched me into Elysium
like a cannonball