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Read by Rob Halloway Press Officer, Sussex. Click on photo to hear may take a minute or two to load

The Mafia in Sicily

There is a leaden oyster-coloured stone. It is a

man's soul.

The giant holds the stone like a pearl balanced

between heaven and hell.

The stone is an unwell son, or a sun over Sicily,

or a poor

man's soul. It can be whatever the giant wills it

to be.

The soul he holds should be a symbol asleep under

the giant's thumb.

In the nightmare of nature there is a barren land,

Sicily.

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Among the poor available sons who trembling await

the giant's second coming

is one who is not the sort death approves, one of

flesh as well as stone,

one heavy in my heart with heavy past loves - Sicily,

the canvas of my close

family; a carcass slung under my liberty (I who

have been asleep with giants

under the sides of their eternal quarrel would need

diptheria

and poisoned water to hold the giant's tribe in throe.

Infamous figures

they possess the Sicilian earth). The giant is

paymaster to defeat

under the enrapturing poppy, a paradoxical prophet

of stone atrocities

in a stony land of deep poverty; he belongs to the

special torments,

this obese giant among the giants, unbending, quick,

yet piscine

and roughly as pliable as molten metal or the metal

stones.

All the poor available sons belong to the giant above

The soul is squamous where the giant holds it above

my wrath

Useless, soiled. He puts it down. The giant holds

the other sun up

in his webbed fingers like a blind stone. The stones

of Sicily are blind.

Like me they've lost the light of the sun. Under

water, blind to the light,

they've never begun. All that the giant despises we

once nearly possessed

and loved, except the few who lie in the lush

apocrypha

within the giant's colossal caves, black, fortunate,

truly lowly

but not penurious. They are unworthy, asleep under

the sensual giant

For the giant hates as he loves, furiously, and these

are not giants.

But they are happy splashing about amongst the blood

pools inside the caves,

happy as a slave is to evil, no longer dissembling

or afraid under a marathon

calf slung carelessly where many confused Gullivers

once travelled,

over the land of Sicily, under her seas, over these

obscene dwarves.

in black suits. I watch them come, the gaint's

crustaceans, out of the caves

and up the hill into our valley. The placentas

weigh heavy, so why

do they come? They come to play in the valley.

The valley seems lush.

the valley is barren so they go, womb-weary.

Back in myopia against

the massive breast of the giant, this false god, blind

to the light

of the sun, aborted foetuses they sleep peacefully

counting bodies not sheep

nor fish. Blind to the light of the sun where the

giant shall begin to create

more dwarves out of the fishes and symbols, they who

have never begun

have lost Christ's light, the light of the sun. They

too are the poor available

sons with the pitted teeth of australopithecus.

Many men died on those teeth

which drip blood onto the great thigh of the giant

of Sicily.

For centuries blood has stained this water, flesh

pitted these teeth.

I searched desperately for diptheria. I was a giant.

in Adam's Apocrypha