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Not quite moribund, ...so in those days caution was cast aside.
Their banks, no longer cramped by slighted rules,
Now spewed out credit, portals opened wide
And sure enough, a plethora of fools
Each aping each, poured headlong through the gates:
Sires pledged their scions’ futures without stay,
The plastic card, hostage to all the fates,
Flushing all moderate hopes and dreams away.
The flood was up: bright images of wealth
Drove to a feeding-fit till all was spent –
Plain dealing, honour, time, resources, health -
On tawdry gear of false entitlement.
Nothing was left to fuel the days that came,
And when the banks, voided of all but debt,
Imploded, minting words to cover shame,
Then was the fate made clear, the ruin set.
The Capitals rose first , savagely burning,
Screaming betrayal, bloodying the streets;
The armies, now unpaid, to brutes soon turning,
Became militias, warlords, armed élites.
The countryside with a bedraggled crew
Began to swarm, famished and traumatised,
Ransacking unsown fields for all that grew,
Leaving their dead to rot un-solemnised.
Communications were dead: all lines were down
Cutting off land from land, no-one to blame,
And hospitals and shops in every town
Lightless and lifeless. Then huge blizzards came
Early, unsparing: soon there was no mark
Save for nomadic fires by wood and farm
Flickering slowly out. And bare and stark
As drowning men fling up a helpless arm,
Only church spires, so desolate and gaunt
They seemed to mock the earth with bygone joys,
Become at last the hope-deserted haunt
Of owls and bats, where once came girls and boys:
While in the unfrequented polar North
The ice-cap groaned and cracked, and then
Broke forth....

Time to kill… For the thrill
I love to Kill
Bill.

Uma mayhem causing
Yellow jumpsuit blurring
Bloodied corpses whirring
Ridiculous plot-lines stirring

Defeating faceless foes
I’m sure her eyes are closed?
I’ll have to pause…
Re-wind.
...esuapotevahll’I

They are.

Wow oh
Wow oh
Wow.

Play.
One slice head decapitation
Double flipping leg emancipation
Back kicking arm extrapolation.

And when all is still
I survey the scene
That bloody sheen

Gonna be a bugger to clean

Bill.

A lifetime passes in one - lost - breath.
And in that moment a whole world changes.
Silent.
Nothing more to ask, nothing left to say, nothing more to hope for.
Silent.
In that silence, a life thought of
And the one - lost - breath
Maybe in Paradise it was found.

Is this what's left - this M.E. this shell?
Where is the me I knew so well?
Is this what's left - this life this Hell?

A quarter of a century
Of symptoms passed without a key
To unlock why this transformed me.

Is this what's left? Then surely I
Should face the aftermath and try
To live what's left,sans moans, sans sigh.

The Aftermath of Sexual Assault

Chief Witness; all frizzy hair, talking too fast to the camera,
but confident.
Bravely or brashly honest she recounted each detail
remembered with relish,
“Yes, it was foolish to be out so late at night
in so lonely a place, frolicking.”
But they often did it to cheer themselves up.
Her friend recognised one of the boys from school. They followed them.
She was afraid of the unknown boy.
Instinct. She should have known.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
“Then he touched my left breast. Here. Like this.”
She upped the evidence offering it to the lens so we could view it clearly.
Exhibit one framed in lace.
We the jury arranged implacable expressions.
Upright in our seats.
Detached from the sex.

“Take your right leg to the blue spot.” Unwillingly he brushed her thigh. “Now you
wrap your left leg behind mine on green.” She laughed,
infectiously.

And what happened next?
She told him where to go.
In the dark frightened she climbed on the log.
Standing over him she taunted that she was old enough to be his mother,
if she had had him at fourteen.
But she was trapped.
No other way down but where he stood at the step below her, waiting.
So she launched herself at him.
See how honest she is?
She could have said he dragged her down.
But that would be a lie.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his thighs
and they tumbled to the ground together
all tangled limbs in a heap.

She bent over, yellow hair dangling, to touch the yellow spot while he
tried to balance behind her politely, face twisted in embarrassment, loins twisted in delight.

And now he was struggling on top of her, the worst would happen.
And what did she do next?
What anyone would do, of course
drew herself up on her left shoulder, reached her right arm back
and punched him.
And when he scrambled to his feet and ran away, she ran too -
And punched him again.
She appealed to us from the camera screen,
“Well, no one has the right to touch me there!”

Even the shy man who sat in the corner for three days was coaxed by boredom to
reach both arms to the red spot between her young knees before he realised the danger of enjoyment.

The witness for the prosecution agreed with the nice defence lawyer:
Yes, they rolled down hills in the dark.
It was her idea. It is fun.
No, he didn’t touch her breast.
Yes, she walked him hand in hand to the river.
They might have kissed. She didn’t see.
She couldn’t tell a lie.
Before her friend launched herself at the attacker
from the tree stump where they both sat.
He fell over.
Well, she is large and he is not.
Yes, she punched him.
No, he was trying to get up.
The prosecuting barrister stood up again
and tried to take her back to the statement she had made
the week after the event.
She looked away from us in the jury box
remembering the story she was supposed to tell.
We rearranged our implacable expressions.
Upright in our seats.
There was no sex.
Her face crumbled. Her head went down.
All came tumbling down,
Case collapsed.

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