Bob Beagrie
Exiled from Neverland
Waking to a numb index finger, stiff from the night’s chill, as if it had been stuck in a damp hole in a dike for hours on end while the Noordzee thrashed in a toddler tantrum at being blocked from leaking through the weak spot to sweep its devastation across the flatlands. There was often a feeling of dread at an uncontrollable and impending future that bubbled beneath the skin of the present, a ravenous reptile with snapping jaws which the hand, in retrospect, put down to residual, repressed trauma held within its make-up, a loss branded into its cellular structure leaving sharp, tingling, throbbing, pins and needles in the phantom body it was no longer attached to. This dread was a dead man’s chest buried among shipwrecks in Davy Jones’s Locker but which its conscious mind could never quite hook out and grasp just as water will always seep through your fingers. Dawn still a long way off and The Dog Star, Venus, The Herdsman watch one another like gunslingers around a poker table. There was an arthritic ache in the second joint of the finger as feeling began to return. Shaking off the lingering anxiety the hand crawled on, following its own pointing fingernail, second star to the right and straight on till morning.
Disclaimer
Given the highly publicised separation and bitter divorce wranglings between the contesting parties, the doubling down of victimhood, the unprofessional and mutually malicious character assassinations, and the resultant speculation over the hand’s involvement in previous unsavoury incidents The Hand of Glory™ firmly and legally assert that the hand, despite its supposed, although unsubstantiated longevity, was not connected in any way to The Black Hand (Serbian: Crna ruka), the covert military society formed in 1901 by officers in the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia, which gained global notoriety for its alleged involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the start of World War I. Nor was our friend and principle client in any way connected to the Black Hand Society (Italian: La Mano Nera), and its heinous methods of extortion in major US cities during the early years of the 20th century, including Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Detroit. There is no provable association between our client and the formation of the original Black Hand Society in the Kingdom of Naples in the 1750s. Nor does there exist any evidence of involvement with The Society of the Black Hand (Spanish: La Mano Negra), the secret, organization based in Andalusia during the 1880s, best known as perpetrators of murders, arson, and crop fires amidst the period of class struggle, and the spread of anarcho-communism, with its differences from collectivist-anarchism, and the conflict between’ legalists’ and ‘illegalists’ in The Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region; and which quickly transformed into a network of desperadoes involved in the black market. While it became an extensive and numerous society, especially in the provinces, each having its own centre and out branches with a total of affiliated members exceeding 40,000, The Hand of Glory™ once again vehemently asserts no affiliation whatsoever with this or with any of the other historic organisations listed above. Any slur, slander or libel against the good name of our patron will be met by immediate legal action.
The Legend of the Hand
The living room was the centre of mourning, the place where grief hung thickest like a cloying scud of smoke from a slice of toast left under the grill. There, among the cast-off nearest and dearest staring hollow at the carpet pile, the woodchip, the shadow of the pendulum-swinging grandfather clock as if it were an open grave, it was difficult to breathe. The back room was where the spread was laid-out on the table: pickled onions and Red Leicester cubes on cocktail sticks, truffle flavoured crisps, pizza slices, ham sandwiches, vegan vol-au-vents; where friends and close colleagues stood like awkwardly auditioned extras armed with plates and drinks. Then the kitchen, where conversations rolled this way and that, over the larger-than-life adventures, expeditions and exploits, exaggerated retellings of the many marvellous things the departed had nailed and smashed: titles achieved, jobs jobbed, people touched, lives changed, inspirations given, the duty served. The conservatory was peppered by personal anecdotes about this or that time, winks, sly nods by those in the know, fondly muffled chuckles over the crazy shit that went down like that one time when… The garden, with smokers and vapers clustering under the awning out of the mizzle, where curses are muttered, insults sniggered, the underside of each tale snorted and scoffed over, laying them all bare and spat on for good riddance. The graffitied street beyond the creosoted fence, where, over years, need knits the myth of a king asleep under the mountain, who will one day awake.
Bob Beagrie (PhD)
lives in Middlesbrough and has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023), When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, journals and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He also writes short stories and plays.
I really enjoyed these poems, Bob, thank you xx
Fabulous pieces from Bob. For more Bob Beagrie, head over to The Fig Tree on Substack where he has a poem in our first issue.