Promising Mercy

To go around there is perhaps enough,
but once again he has appropriated all
the sleep and now the wind sustains
your insomnia like the jammed right
pedal of a haunted psychotic keyboard,
moaning and wretched and frightening
as it smashes, slashes and gnashes
against the windward end of the house.

You are straining to catch its meaning
and it begins to sound like the amplified
screams of half-rabbits, crush-bound
to the nocturnal finality of a golden road
turned black as funerals or as the sky’s
mysterious emptiness about which
the tethered Southern Cross revolves, two
accusatory pointers as quiet as hawks

alighting to feed in the swirling morning’s
eerie ground fog and, if the sudden rifle
cracks of tin-foil blister packs promise
mercy, they also awaken his editorial
opinion that it would be impossible to hit
rabbits in winter given they were probably
hibernating in their burrows thus well
clear of any tyre: wide or not, fast or not,

and this blasted wind will rip this roof off
and, as he seeks to swap horizontal soap
box for the hypoxia-enhanced agitations
of dreams, a little miffed, you retort that
rabbits do not hibernate, even as you’re
shocked to realise the bludgeoning wind
has dropped and you’re only stopped from
falling by the silent, honed edge of his cliff.

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Nigel Skjellerup works in the Ōtautahi Christchurch healthcare community. He also cares for a red-eared turtle, two cockatiels, and a pug named after the Spanish verb ‘to love.’ He is a humane Virgo, and that just about explains everything.