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@rock-rex.bsky.socialSep 26, 2026, 7:04 PM

Three poems from "The Stations of the Cross" (part of "The Sockets of Golgotha" [1978]-79).

#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #thestationsofthecross

"The Stations of the Cross" title pageI. He is condemned to death There is a hill to climb. He knows it, sees an endlessness revolving to a future that he’d thought he wasn’t sure of. He can feel its repetitions. Its smoothness is unmeasurable, featureless. He’d arranged to meet her in a restaurant. The place was crowded, and he had to share a table in the middle of the room. When at last she entered, out of breath and eager to apologise, the restaurant had emptied, and he sat exposed and stranded. “You picked a funny place to sit”, she said. Did he feel it then? rippled in the finger-bowl he used to clean the grease away? Or later on — the slow necessity that smothered him, that hugged his will, insisting on the journey that he had to take anyway. (“You have to take it anyway”, she’d said; “why not start now?” “Nothing’s fated”, he’d replied, “necessity’s a fiction that we use to make excuses.”) Waiters in the restaurant were smiling, as though he’d missed a joke they’d seen long since. Perhaps he played the fool, but he was damned if he’d admit it. Frankly, it attracted him. You can say he fell; he leapt.II. He is made to bear his cross Across a greater or a smaller distance, glances — and he can’t be sure that a connection’s made; he can’t know if the distance has been lessened by the glance. There is a line formed across this distance. Between the two points in his mind the line is made (almost) tangible; almost he can pull on it, almost reeling in another mind. It’s not the distance makes him fail, but it’s the lack of colour on the way. Sadly the greyness persists even along this way. Catching, however, in one hand (between finger and thumb) the tip of balance, and holding it steady and secure, he can act with a freedom not normally his — he smiles slightly, lets his body settle and relax a little. Wood. The table’s scarred by years of use, the room with knots of people talking; he just hears the nearest of them, and reluctantly loosens his grip on the restaurant’s balance. He falls over slowly into a fluid memory, letting the smallest of his thoughts surface; floating on his back, supporting a weight he could not identify. And awoke.III. His first fall under the cross But there is snow here, and the black night concrete glistens where it is exposed. Somewhere on the empty length of platform there’s a lamp — down at the end there, by the driver’s cab, just where the platform dips to meet the gravelled space between the lines. The whiteness of unmelted snow reflects the small lamp burning, picking out the platform as it slopes to where the chips of stone lie black between the sleepers. He is cold here, in the gap between departure and arrival, and the one lamp at the railway station’s end does little more than emphasise the way the platform dips down in an even ramp, and how the black wet concrete is eroded by the snow, becoming gravel where the sleepers mark the merging of the slope. His beard and moustache brittle with his frosted breath, his tears unfrozen, standing here alone, the inter-city train departed, waiting on an empty platform where the only lamp’s too far and dim, he stamps his feet, his breath a cloud, alone and lonely, drawn to the darkness where the platform plummets, where the sleepers lie on beds of stone, of little chips of black and glistening gravel, and the snow white in the crevices.