Iain Britton

I made some boy fall in love with himself today

While Singaporeans dropped a boy down the hangman’s chute today, I

made another boy fall in love with himself,

made him laugh at knowing he could beat me at laughing loudest. On a whiteboard

an army doctor plays his game ruling up verticals and horizontals to

create a picture, a 21st century impression of a man,

executing a poet without making him bleed, without colouring in the rope which

will bruise his neck. This is the way the poet crumbles. The boy went off,

feeling as if he could leap the planets, as if they were stepping stones to another

system, orbiting around everything else that seems to be orbiting in this

Big Bang of cosmic shrapnel. Today I’ve recorded in my yet-to-be

written diary that Erich Fromm is coming – he’s bringing a book on human

destructiveness to read,

axiomatic bubbles to burst and a fur-fat woman for me to stroke and rub,

for me to push my snout into,

to search for that sweetness in her skin. I’ve made a boy fall in love with himself,

by listening to what he has to say about living at the end of a street, by

playing football in the park like Pele,

by turning his bedroom into a shrine – where a wooden

god lives in a carved shaft by his bed. No graven images before me,

says the black book.

No other gods. No idols. No hoarding of icons for dubious worship. I’ve made him

feel better already. The doctor, as if camouflaged for fighting trees,

feels for the pulse of the day and listens for its heartbeat, the sounds of neurons

splitting insideout. Today

Erich Fromm will introduce me to the pleasures of preparing my flesh

like a dinner,

for his gratification, for my gratification but unlike the boy,

I’ll have more wooden gods before me, more icons to worship. I’ll

live in my squalid sanctum and play hangman with anyone who

tries to jump or holler or trample on my plans.

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