Tug Dumbly - Bad Economics of a Haunting

Bad Economics of a Haunting  

If memory was an employee, you’d

fire it for gross inefficiency, 

not just for what it doesn’t remember,

but for what it repeatedly does.

I lived a year away from home at a school

and have relived every day in that place,

every master, every boy whose face I’ve

torn through tracing paper, some missed

ever since, like that girl once glimpsed

on the Jersey Ferry in Citizen Kane.

                 

And I have relived every sadist’s forehand

smash of the cane through cotton jim-jams

to leave my arse a railway switch-yard

of black tracks, joining up with the tracks

of adjacent arses in the shower block,

which now, I’m ashamed to say, conjures

nothing so much as a death camp.

And still I hear the spider purr of that

woodwork master burring the name of his

favourite boy as he bends into him behind the

humming lathe; see still the kindly Reverend's

adam’s apple wobble under his dog collar

and his face sorrowing to a Pieta

as he says this is going to hurt me more

before whipping me like crimson Christ  

after Wind in the Willows in his English class.

But my heart hurt more, by this betrayal

of one I’d loved the best.

It wasn’t Dickens. Beyond the scatter  

of beatings and fist fights, that year is mostly

minuteness and mundanity, the threading

stuff of small human exchange – banterings

jokes, jibes and mocks. I re-see every weather,

every stagnant bar of Sunday heat, every

icicle drip from a tap in a frost. Odd details,

like the foul margarine that congealed

on bread like a cracked sheet of frozen piss.

I see this all again. Every which way I’ve

relived the year in that place for more hours

than ever I was there. And just why mystifies …

like an amphetamine affair that implodes

in a week, but moves in to live a lifetime;

like all those bad debts and drug buddies, the  

one nighters and trashed friends and shame

spectres greyly lurking round the landing,

crashed rent free in your apartment head.

Most uneconomical hauntings these,

most inefficient, these spirits unbidden,

all the more niggling, amusing, disturbing

because most dramatic duds, utterly

un-heroic and mundane; neither horrorful

nor sorrowful; most just gently throbbing away

with a melancholy I’ve grown attached to, like

a phantom limb; like a Tom-Tom's termagant

nag telling you to take the turnoff back there

it wanted you to take. Something inside

must somewise like you teasing it, torturing

it, picking at what won’t be healed over.