Daniel Hinds reading The Corona Prince
Three poems by Daniel Hinds
The Corona Prince
By now, you must have heard his legends.
You abide in his empire.
In the kingdom of the rising star
He rose from a small bowl of hot bat soup
Pausing long enough for sunken eyes,
Slimed in matted hair, to glare like an alligator
Surfacing to see the prey come to drink.
He stood full height, small feet in the primordial,
A hungry ghost in black scaled armour.
Skin the colour of hardened phlegm.
Consistency of a patagium wing.
The old man’s whistle cut short
Before it could cool the broth on his upraised spoon.
With the red light behind him,
The West saw only a body, a thin line of shadow:
A judgment of God over Egypt.
And turned aside their gaze.
On the other side of the sun they say
He fell from the stars with the ink black space
Poured onto the armaments of men
Under the shadow of an eagle’s wing.
In truth, his womb is the mucus
Of your lungs the red crown points pierce
As they breach and spit the flesh
As he flails and splutters from the eldritch.
He is born a thousand times each day.
The thin golden string of your life
Is his cut umbilic cord.
His ritual ointments are soap and wine
Darkened water. Courtiers, wring your hands.
His long fingers will squeeze the drops
From your neck, like a tight mink scarf.
For libations, he sups the sweat of his subjects.
Like Stoker’s creature he hovers by the bedside
And runs a cracked tongue; stokes flames.
His palaces are spotless white.
With the pomp of pale robes and gurney carriages
He leads procession after procession
Down the scrubbed and stretching corridors.
A pied piper with a liking for liver spots
And time folded into wrinkles.
His subjects shuffle behind.
Like poetry,
He lives on breath and air
And the liquid libations, the flecks that cross
The vermillion border.
Unlike poetry,
He does not survive long on paper.
Smiths and scientists labour
To construct the spear
To spike his groin.
Their designs drawn like a meal made
From a cook book covered in spewed up slops.
The ingredients expert eyes discern
In the detritus at the bottom of your bowl:
A thin and silver shard of his crown
And a scraping of his phlegmatic skin.
A king caught in his coronet.
Count to twenty
And you will name his successor.
The Sequence
I
Is a criminal line up where every figure
Committed the crime.
Guilt against the backdrop of a black
And white height chart.
A rogues’ gallery
Where every painting is hung.
In a sequence, they all hang together.
II
The egg fertilised and splitting;
The planned pregnancy
Becoming unplanned octuplets.
A line of succession,
With sometimes seconds in-between,
If the midwife’s eyes and hands
Are still greedy for the slime of birth.
III
Picking your cards and blind fingers finding
The same soft fabric. They all wear the same suit;
Odd bodies pressed and dressed to match,
Or better, whatever your opponent’s holding.
All of your hard-won hearts pulse
In time and dribble: a cobweb of red lines.
Or perhaps it was a paper cut;
Your red prints marked
And stained every card you drew.
IV
The small portraits of kings and queens
Framed in wood
By the reaching branches
Of a long overgrown family tree, knotted
By centuries of interbreeding,
Like a vast maze of umbilical cords.
V
When the cups stop moving,
Finding a ball in each cup.
VI
One cup overflowing into another.
If you have a thirst for a mixed drink,
The sequence will see it quenched.
VII
Not just the palm lines of your hands
But the spaces between fingers, hand and hand.
Your nails
Turned, not always in the same direction,
By a single screwdriver set.
VIII
In a sequence
Every word is bigger.
Blackened worlds hang in white space;
The space between is small.
Sundog Howl
‘Better bring
A shovel.’
– Scott Walker, Sundog
When Scott Walker died he left me his voice,
Tore out the redness of his throat and pressed it in black.
Scott, you go night flying
And I walk in the day.
I put my ear to your coffin.
Heard nothing.
You promised you’d be listening,
You and Brel; bet your getting along real well.
They buried you like a dog’s bone
Finished playing.
Scott, you walk beneath the earth.
There’s no dancing near your grave.
The later stuff, you couldn’t dance to.
Thought I’d bring a shovel, and a show.
Later, I heard you punching the meat
Over by the funeral spread.
The thumbs of spring
Have closed your eyes.
The disc turns and turns again.
The sundog sets
The sundog plays
Another set piece.