pluming against my medial arch

First, part of a prose poem which has been trying to emerge since Spring.  I
need to splice it with another narrative before it's going to make 'sense' (I
use that term loosely).  Will someone explain Higgs-Boson particles to me? 
They're going to find a way in there somehow.  As is the influenza epidemic at
the start of the 20th century.  My prose poems are often borne out of a
collision of disparate fragments of stories...  Sometimes it works...  sometimes
it doesn't.  

My heart's full pelt,
escaping.  My foot's fulcrummed on a spike of the cemetery railings, pitching me
into the street on the other side, the live night.  In this moment of pitching:
the eureka of mass equals pain.  I fall.  It feels like an aeroplane's crashed
through my foot's soft tissues.  I won't see the wreckage till daylight.  Then
I'll cradle smoke.  Pluming from inside of me, against the skin of my medial
arch.

                        
................................

I submitted a poem
called 'Two Men Sitting Opposite Each Other On A Train, Who, Bizarrely Are Going
In Opposite Directions' as part of my doctoral thesis.  That self-consciously
cutesy/awkward title was perhaps a smokescreen to disguise the fact that this
poem wasn't happy - it was a sonnet into which I was shoehorning too much
undeveloped material, hoping it would all gel in the reader's head.  "Oh, it's
surrealist" was my defence.  Pah!  "Oh, I'm lazy" more like!  I love surrealism.
  It's a big influence.  But for me being 'weird' is too easy, and often comes
out as fey eccentricity.  I have to force myself to work towards the deeper,
imaginative core...  Anyway, it went like
this:

Fish-mouths hole-punch surface of a
river.

Humans hungry to prove they've got
innards.

Leaking amber-gooked bandages for
eyes,
returns from a London hospital,
thinks:
"Garlic-clove slivers of my eyelids -
gone!
Eyebags, impediments on the path to Youth -
gone!"
He's wading upstream to his ageless
tomorrows.

Opposite seat.  Train's crossing
estuary.
Mudflats clipped together with buoys, gulls,
terns.
A man who behind his cataracts
keeps
crawling out of Warsaw sewers to be
gutted, or
saved,
                         craves sea.
    
                                       Daughters mouth
like
mothers,
                   treat him like a doll with no
ears.

After workshopping this poem at Nottingham
Writers' Studio recently I listened again to what the poem was wanting to say. 
I realised that I'd set up this contrast between the two men because the poem
was wanting to tell me something about wounds.  The honourable wounds
of an old Polish soldier, contrasted with the less-than-honourable wounds of the
man who's had cosmetic surgery.  The poem was wanting to express a certain anger
about the latter.  My anger.  So I'm currently rewriting the poem. 
I've cut out the old soldier, bless him.  I'm sure I'll find a home for him
elsewhere.  I'm concentrating on the first man, the 'Narcissus' figure, and I'm
placing myself firmly at his side. 


Narcissus had a surgeon
cut
the inconvenient skin
from round his
eyes.

New moons of it were tweezered
out,
incinerated through
north London
skies.

My unrealised and compromised anger
seethes through some of the irony I now employ.  It's there in these first
stanzas of suspiciously predictable rhythm and rhyme - which will inevitably get
a little bent out of shape as the poem progresses.  The word 'horror' is the
first instance of a trochaic beat, and also of the rhyme being
disrupted...

And so I breathed him all that
night.
I craved a text to know
he had
survived.

At Waterloo we rendezvoused
-
brave face, brave face - and when
our train
arrived

I had to guide him to our seats
-
ignore the looks.  I wiped
my sweetheart's
cheek -

I nursed my hero's treacling
wounds
as if they did not make
me feel
horror.

There's more to come.  Can I let
the irony collapse into "You're pathetic.  How can I feel sympathy?"  Such
directness might be a necessary challenge, although - perhaps too enamoured with
pop music - maybe I hanker after directness a little too much.  I'm not a pop
singer, after all.  Being direct and saying it in a way which has never
been said before is a big ask.  Finding new ways, and evocative ways, to say
things which have been said before is what the poet does, and this might
preclude directness...  We'll see...