1984

For weeks as the sharp cold tightens his skin
he hunches over the lexicographical machine.
Each typed sheet is laced with streams of graphite
like a desiccated spider. Tap tap tap. Cough.
More blood. Likely his death sentence: a haemorrhage.

He ventures out only to watch the slate sea and the white fulmars'
graceful economy. This strange world – an infinity of grey.
Hunchbacked, in the cold kitchen
he puffs on his hand-rolled muse like a true proletarian.
On the white page he can engrave
the gold of Valencia, the crimson banners of the dead.
 
With coloured plates he illustrates
sadistic commissars, the idiocy of ideologies.
To make them mean more, a novel.
His eyes peer down a wrong-way telescope
on slogans, burial pits and victory parades.
A whole century was betrayed.

He sees the overflowing sink. He touches his bullet wound.
Puff puff puff. Tap tap tap. Wrong-way telescope. Century betrayed.
Should he smoke? Of course.
He will finish this cigarette and thousands  more.
Smoke in, blood out.
And the book? He chipped it out from granite
with his bare hands. He could do no more.

The pages go to proofs then plates.
His stained fingers are as orange as cinnamon.
They run off the first books when he is in hospital
in his wedding bed, shortly before his funeral.
His melancholy face smiles faintly, greeting them
Like lost children. Cough.
He did not stop. He finished it.

From each small death he built a larger one.
He did not stop. From Jura granite he chipped it out
from stone to paper, paper to stone.
The final book his adamantine memorial.