Michael Conley

5ml

Whenever the stranger in camo gear appears at the door
offering brightly-coloured medicine on a shiny teaspoon,
what do you do? Are you not supposed to just slurp it up?

The stranger never speaks and there’s no bottle or label,
just the naked spoon, held out neutrally at mouthlevel.
The colour of the medicine is variable: sometimes neon pink,

sometimes yellow, sometimes opalescent, but the taste
is always the same, bitter and comforting, like a childhood sick day.
Seventeen times after you’ve taken it, you’ve had powerful diarrhoea,

but you are a reckless cook and cannot prove beyond doubt
post hoc ergo propter hoc. Sixteen times it has marginally
improved your ability to function at work past Wednesday lunchtime.

Once, you had hi-def visions of the chittering minions of Satan,
who weren’t so bad once you got to know them. Also,
you’re in love with the stranger in camo gear. There’s nothing

inherently intimate about the arrangement, but equally
it’s not not the most erotic thing you’ve ever experienced,
that clack of teeth on metal, the smooth cold curve

on the tongue, the little flick of the stranger’s wrist, a Zorro flourish,
the immediate dizzy feeling. What you’re doing is messy as hell.

The Tremendous Legislator Has Discovered An Ancient Law Still On The Statute Books

from time to time the Monarch shall discharge his Musket into the Torso
of any chosen Serf of marriageable age & furthermore
this may occur up to a maximum of three times daily
(excluding the Sabbath & other public Holidays)

Who showed him this? It’ll be a real
administrative headache for us but of course nobody thinks of that.
Our lawyers are already interpreting Serf, Musket and Monarch creatively
and He’s added His personal amendments in red crayon:

& furthermore the Shooting will take place on the Palace Roof
with the Monarch by the Helipad & the Serf on the edge of the Roof
& a pile of fresh Horse Manure at the bottom for the dead Serf to fall headfirst into
& furthermore this event will be livestreamed to the Monarch’s many loyal Fans

with one Camera pointed at the monarch
& another pointed at the Serf
& another pointed at the horseshit
& another pointed at the Musket

He wants to start tomorrow
with everyone who’s insulted Him online.
Of course this is exactly what they mean
when they accuse Him of conduct unbecoming of the office

but what else can we do? Tell Him no?
For now, we’ve hired three stuntmen lookalikes
with exploding blood packs in their torsos
and replaced His gun with one that fires blanks.

On video, it all looks pretty cool.

Michael Conley is a poet from Manchester, UK. His poetry has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize and he won the 2022 Peggy Poole Award. His latest pamphlet, ‘These Are Not My Dreams And Anyway Nothing Here Is Purple’ was published by Nine Pens. 

Michael wrote the following about his poems:

With these two poems, and with a lot of my work, I tend to start with a single idea that strikes me as odd or makes me feel intrigued.  For it to work for me, the idea can’t be too ordinary, because that would be boring, but it also can’t be too absurd or disconnected from meaning, because that wouldn’t give me anywhere satisfying to take it.  With ‘5ml’, the ordinariness was in the idea around the awkward jolt of opening the door to an unsolicited salesman, and the weirdness was in removing the idea of him selling something normal.  Then, it seemed to me, the energy of the poem needed to come from not whether ‘you’ would take the medicine — obviously you would not, in real life — but an investigation of the type of person for whom doing so was already a given.