Poems by Andy Jackson (Scotland)

Published in Issue 27

Immorality Now!

I am heir-apparent to a graceless dynasty,

building my portfolio in landmines, driving

up the price of grain in fourth-world nations,

asset-stripping, selling futures. Trade is thriving.

I’ve not been clean since sixteen but the vices

of my past can now be treated as diseases.

It’s great to be straight, but spritzing water

into Bolly was the neatest trick that Jesus

ever turned. Did I tell you how I had my way

with mother, daughter and precocious cousin,

all of them within a week, none of them aware

that I had bagged the set? There are dozens

of them out there if you know the places

where they go. Once they sniff the stench

of middle age they’re panic-buying petrol

for the fires their husbands cannot quench.

I take day-trips to Norfolk, gassing badgers,

sleeping with the locals, spitting in their cider.

In my dreams I’m crouching in a jungle hide,

gun in hand, waiting for the last white tiger.

Today I came across a tiny wounded bird,

wings disjointed, heart ballooning in the wreck

of feathers. I smoothed them down, looked

into its trusting eye, and wrung its neck.

Jimmy James

As one young thing is squeezed into the light,

his first breath fortified with all the brightness

of the age, another wheezes in the darkness

till the dark expunges all he knows – the nights

delivering the dozen sketches that have made

his name, fresh each time to Regals and Locarnos

in the provinces. Now, there’s just a sad lacuna

where he ought to be, the nights he played

and slaughtered them in Birkenhead and York

don’t make footnotes on an empty page. Cigarette

in hand, he lurks downstage, a wraith in silhouette,

fakes the slur and stagger, and yet when he talks

you know he is the only sober person in the place.

I watch the grainy twitches of his subtle craft

turn to vinegar, the muscle memory of a laugh

now just a vacant look on Our Eli’s leather face.