IN MEMORIAM ROGI WIEG
After 42 years I’m a badly wounded tiger
without stripes, no longer a tiger by William
Blake, no Divine symmetry. Survived
like an antique, badly running clock after
restoration. I know every hold, but I
don’t owe it to myself to cut my throat
right through. It doesn’t get better, I’m a
dislocated, rotting knee in a wood, a piece of
no one’s hip, so I belong in a sack that’s
taken to a lab for identification, no
name, a number’s enough, I don’t want bullshit
about the bereaved and their pain. That’s their
business. I planted a bulb, a weird
tulip came out, which became an iron bar that bent and
rusted. A piece of metal like that belongs in the ground. Living
without a woman is rolling down a muddy slope
without limbs, with a woman it’s climbing along a
sandy path, pausing and panting and seeing the sea
retreating and leaving a bed full of letters, words and lines
behind. Give my body a place someday where a grey
woman will come and put ‘A-Z’ on top. Do it without doubt!