At the heart of this respectable city

is some filthy secret.

I know it.

I can see it in the dark glint of the river

in the evening

from the railway station

where I sometimes wait on a cold platform

for a late train to take me somewhere else.

It never comes.

It will never come.

I know it now.

He who brought me to this city

ripped my heart out

ripped my pure and loving heart

out of my bruised chest.

He took the best of me.

He knows it

but he pretends

with all the other weak pretenders

that it's all right

everything is fine, everything is fun

everything is carnivale

like the giant ferris wheel

whose skeleton is filling up

a part of the evening sky

where the stars once had a place.

It is as if there needs to be a show

for everyone to be distracted from the space

where the real wheels are turning

and Jason and his circle of assassins

make their killings.
When I met him in my own country

he was a beautiful thief in the night

adventurer and sailor

smelling of salt and sex

a secret foreign scent in a place

where my senses had arrested

and my own beauty was wasted on old men.

He came and took what he had come for

and then he took me.

In that order.

In the order that I failed to see

and then became accustomed to

as we do

when we place ourselves

somewhere on the lower rungs

of someone else's ladder.

And he was climbing high

believe me

ambition was the hot flame

that I mistook for passion

in his cool eyes.

He was a wheeler and a dealer of bad hands.

I should have seen

how he operated in my country

in my poor country

where all the important deals are made

by foreigners like him

and all the important foreigners

are aided and abetted by monsters

and by dupes like me

and everything is made legal

in clean documents, suspiciously sparse

and written mostly in English

which is the tongue of international business

more than it is the language of poetry.

In my country

where the belief in poems is still strong

and the language fairly chokes on images

I imagined him a poet, a balladeer.

Not a racketeer.

Not the kind of man

to use you.

I listened to what I thought was his song for me

and I surrendered my inherited resistance

to the siren song of strangers

and I was moved

to betray my own fatherland

and my father

and my blood

to be one with him –

the smiling, wealthy, worthless

Jason.
Now I sit in this vast ugly house

in an affluent and vulgar suburb

where he has put me

and his children

so that we are respectably out of the way

while in the very centre of the city

at its very core

where respectability does not count

so much as money

he and his hip-swinging harlot

play their games

force their way to the front of fashion

dance the dance with the rich and famous

shove their faces into photographs

like pigs into a trough

and then to hide their vomit

throw around the stardust

of the glittering gold

that he and his brutal buddies

have fleeced from my country.

Blood money.

My blood

and blood that runs through the veins

of his children.
This little matter

he has overlooked.
Poor Jason.

Poor filthy rich Jason

cannot see where his betrayals have been leading.

Jason my husband

in case you haven't noticed

I am bleeding.

I am bleeding.