The Kazakhstani got Silver
What are those things he stands on?
Wide ungreek pillars with sculpted organicist
knees figured straight as he dies figuratively
in bolstered peltplacing puckering situations.
There is a man with a family somewhere in there
behind those veins
wrapped in pan-applied cordura and canvas,
greased and pummelled with sports supports
for his boneburdened overdevelopment.
We have the slightly flaky thrusts
of his shovels in a bucket of white powder,
a smear on each shoulder
a whisper over the tousled
tough head broken many times
and healed like a tree’s bark
takes itself in welds of comfort
growing into a flow of hard flesh like lava.
Home-made bombs reverberate in the hush
that is his obscurely whiteskinned
ancient Central Asian walk
to the bar
to the bells
to the tense guttural mutter
instantly translated into American
of asking
for 227 Kilos!
227 Kilos!
Thats many maunds
of grist to the mill,
about a day’s supply
lifted by one back to the wall
one nose to the grindstone
one sniff
one snort
one sudden silence
one blood clenched quiver
and a primaeval moan
as the leadlined torture gear
tears at the lines
in his loins
trying to bust his bullied gut,
he loses it
from the pasted
paleolithic shoulder,
it crashes
and he thunders aside
his curly,
suddenly aging head thrust down
into huge breasts.
He made gold in ’88
a cold war funded him
when there was still iron in his curtain,
then he worked a mill 8 years,
got a nation
and lost it
somewhere in the middle of everything
there ever was.
His name was Anatoly
and he was almost rolypoly
but at least
The Kazakhstani got silver.
What have you got?
The Greek came on with a strangely Kazakh sounding name,
must have picked it up in some Alexandrian scourge
across the plain plains of the old flatworld.
He was all massed thigh, welded at the top
to a terylene sheen where his sex lurks
in black hairs and brows
beetling over into benign
corporal, bloody and invasive punishment.
He had a younger, better cared for, urbane countenance
with a 2 o’clock shadow on the sallow
straight from the gym skin.
The heart of the floor shook fee fi fo fum
(pity the waif of Pyrraeus giving birth to him
Athenian grit and large forceps needed)
and The Greek on another daunting pair of pins
casually asked for 235 Kilos!
235 Kilos!
Forget Asian wheat mountains,
plain loads of grain
that’s 6 bags of brown Anatolian coal,
(sorry to add fuel to an inflammation),
3 sacks in each hand
and a bird in his bushel
he raised it and held it in a drunken 10 second
stagger of sweat
then dropped it as if nothing
and strutted a ring
of world supremacy.
He is truly something
of a Sisyphus practising
with his new balls!
The Kazakhstani had a vodka
(though of course he shouldn’t)
and sloped home
with his slightly suspect silver.
Melted down at the old state foundry
in Almaty
it’ll fetch
2000 tenges..
