Apology

      Apology to the unregistered dead.

...collateral history has proven that patient claims of Satanic ritual abuse were false... 

Colin Ross in Satanic Ritual Abuse: Principles of Treatment.

No cloaks here

just the April snow

shrouding the war memorial

in a two cemetery

one pub Aberdeenshire village. 

A jogger keeps the same rhythm he did all winter

over banks of filthy snow too high and wide for buggies

and little legs. 

                              I am not buried

still marching but now cushioned

and growling in a fluffy red dressing gown

bought by my father six sizes to big

instead of naked and drugged I

medicating the nerve of another wisdom lost

to years of grinding

I was a soldier as a child.

Armed in the hills and boothies,

Rigging the heather, watching the traffic,

popping champagne corks in the ruins, cracking bones

and crow barring crates.  Until differences in strategies 

took me back to the burn where I told them my plans and they 

showed me there’s.  Cold stones and chilled Angus water.

                  Limped back to urban fields in the East.   Finding 

everywhere the same dark tired eyes of the masonic rams 

back in Blighty.  There was ‘no I’ again until my teens.

A warm May day in Southern England.  The leader 

of his field lectured on briefing ‘survivors’, probably in Latin 

or something.  A mental note survives:

...Emphasize the democracy

don’t mention the money

and if you can’t remember any baby sacrifices

make one up...

      
‘You will see the world.’  They said.

     ‘I will be drugged, disassociated and under orders.’ What

does it matter if its half full or half empty when its a golden 

encrusted chalice full of your baby's poisoned blood

But we worked and read when we could.

And when I go, think only this. 

There is a corner

in every Holiday Inn

That will be forever me.

May hail is clattering off the glass and wakes the monitor.

My son still singing, shouting, and laughing

in his sleep.  There is a hole in my jaw that

throbs every nerve in me.  I'm still scrunched knees 

buckled since the red and white banner of BBC rolling 

news. Haut de la Grange on the telly again 

and not for Bergerac.  They didn't dig up much

just words 

scrawled in cellar, a concrete bath, ashes 

in an improvised fireplace and teeth that pressed 

jagged roots into my bloody palm since the mid eighties.

Something still burns, real and tangible as the phallic toys, 

tarpaulins and fallacies of ritual abuse denial.  Definitions 

of Western Cultures exclude proof of human foot 

soup or marinating fetuses and neighbors.

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