UNDERSTAND LESS almost a Dadaist

slogan, anarchist oppugnancy

voicing the truth of power. Some are left

as ghosts in their own lives, materialising

under assumed names, ventriloquised by grief.

Destruction is safer to contemplate than healing,

I find, although my appetites are strange

even to me: I cling to gallows-humour

as others cleave to the cross. Cast CRUCIATUS

and see vengeance realised, bowels frothing

with boiling lead. You understand / condemn

and either way are caught in an imposture,

scrying closed-circuit footage, hearsay’s undead

certainties; the imagined reek of blood.