Revive a version of me
On quiet pages written,
Within a work I’ll never read,
Upon a different Britain.
For though the bandits won,
Those scoundrels and the bigots,
And all our lovers, woebegone,
Drowned on foreign frigates;
When all’s accounted, more or less,
Our xenophobes decanted,
Abusers too, then eat their mess,
And feed MPs replanted,
Then perhaps, the maps I find
Will chart more coloured places,
Less partisan, this paradigm,
With free and hopeful faces.
I have never felt so alone
Than when I am with you,
My self.
I believe my own myths,
Myths within myths;
How clear the sea,
How far from me,
Roaming endlessly,
Tumbling luminosity.
I made myself a mist;
Waves are falling within.
I boxed up my life
And saved it for later,
Makes the sea no more fear
Than to be my own traitor.
I boxed up my life
Midst turnips and taters,
Stowed deep in the hold
Of a cold alligator.
To effect great personal change
All the tools I will ever need
Are stored somewhere deep in me;
Through a door, over the sea,
Buddha silently spoke in a dream.
Yet on this short day long
I feel so tired from searching,
I will settle instead,
With every respect,
For a cup of fresh Darjeeling.
In these Ages of Self
Sandstone houses of Selflessness
Are penury to this Age of Wealth;
We no more brewed an ego
On a pilgrimage to Portofino,
Nor hosted our ego’s health.
Yet we are shelterless now,
Palms open to the same rains
Which once drowned out
Our fathers in the filling fields.
Transubstantiation’s efforts
Require more than a little help.
This strange, unusual place,
How will I ever reconcile
Or indeed escape
From stories they have painted
On the walls of my four caves.
Great tales of sabotage,
I trace a sodden lineage along
Dark ribs in the cobwebby palace
Of a bloated, long-dead whale.
I miss any such season
I am not within;
Endless losses to ego,
I can wage war on myself
Yet hide from my own shadows.
I thought about you briefly
As I washed up clean plates again.
Not so much a memory now,
More electrolytes and impulses,
I slalom life’s whitening streams
And dream of reaching a pool
Or a lake of immeasurable peace.
I know that you want me to be like you.
It would satisfy you, to see me fail again.
You pushed me from your soul-belfry,
Then pealed the burnishing bells
In something akin to horror.
When I have finally conquered my self
Belatedly, too late a Pyrrhic victory,
Will my body arraigned be laid to rest
On that old man’s dusty shelf,
Just until the next unknowable rain.
Wanting to wallow
In the wrongfulness of me,
I found a form of failing
Became my artistry.
My anuran tongue swallowed
In their final masterpiece;
The eight great lies in my life
Found at last assemblances
And momentary pangenesis
Like lizards in a creek,
Initially protozoic,
Then a simple slow unfurling
Inwardly, of tails and brains,
Until such time as galaxies
And all their hypothesised junkets
Unplugged and drained,
Seen through a
Telescopic lens
From beyond the maddening planets.
I've been painting the toenails
Of my soul again.
The dead have this tendency
To disregard boundaries,
To interrupt, to mishear,
And so I misappropriate myself
With many colours brushed,
To stay their ways
From being near.
How many parts
Might contribute
To the entirety
Of me,
Made on production lines
Might I say
Like automata,
Might I say like
Serendipity,
How many nuts and bolts:
206 bones,
32 teeth,
1 brain or maybe two
Or three,
Or ten to the power of
Fourteen synapses;
Add ligaments,
Add damages,
Add follicles,
Add freckles,
Add moles,
Add imperfections
In their millions,
Add my eyeballs,
Add my feet;
Add my nerves,
Add my ancient pleas,
What numbers then
Do we reach?
Only one,
Less fallacies.
The sad irony being
Unencumbered,
I did not ever really believe
In numbers.
This shortening life,
This thickening life,
This blink of an eye
Left on a continental shelf
Life, (devoid of the I
Which ego contrived
And relies upon having hatched
Like a blind hag-matriarch,
And who underneath our
Inexplicable surfaces
Survives and thrives
While my egg-timer soul
Is turned over again),
I felt my sense of self
Not to reside inside me
But externally derived –
Fermented and distilled
Across our guarded borders,
Lifelong out-of-body experiences
And my many other disorders,
Then the near-death experiences,
Lifelong too, (my witness,
Who is a pawnbroker
Of disasters and also
Fathers, who sold
Ink perpetually
To stain my sinking skin,
Told me this is so),
It is well-written
With strange hieroglyphs
Throughout, ever present,
Every sallow thanklessly
Tantalising day
Behind my harrowing eyelids,
That clear and imprinted
Rendition of my deep,
Impending gallows.
