old navy rum

a latvian man, teenaged when his
young old country was ground
between moscow and berlin,
he went the german way, big and ignorant in
waffen ss colours and totenkopf

god only knows what he saw or did because he
never said in all the years he was just the drunk arsehole, sitting
in my grandmother's living room, always
repeating himself:
do you want a sandwich? do you want a sandwich? do you want a sandwich?
and never losing the hard-to-understand accent though
he spent longer here than back where he couldn't return
and longer on merchant ships than anywhere dry

he'd come back with piles of frozen meat and bags of bad
knickknacks and
no stories from any of those faraway hinterlands.
he doesn't make it past the bar in the port, my dad said

when he died my nan denied
he'd been more than her lodger and we thought
fuck me, I've heard everything now

he was like this:
her birthday, we're all eating in a place in whitstable and
his brain locks and all he can do is
say
old navy rum, eh?
old navy rum, eh?
old navy rum, eh?