I

Flicker in darkness,
stumble on pavement, 
bump on cobble, 
abrupt knock of head,
or oddly oriented nod,
or, then, maybe, later,
I'm sorry to have
to tell you but ...

Map me the soul
in the brain's neurons ...
not what moves eye flicker
or movement of limb
or even speech ...

What year is it?
Where do you live?
When were you born?
Where are you now?
How many fingers do you see?

I don't know.

Questions relevant
only, possibly,
to fixables,
answered
so I can walk again
as I did before,
as ignorantly,
in the same
darkness.

To walk on
we may say,
ignorantly,
in the darkness,
unquestioning
as before,
sufficing with
the here-and-now
as always, 
dyspeptic, euphoric,
depending on circumstance,
avoiding always.
 
 

II

I watched
the old lady.

The neighbours laid her
out on her bed
in her own room, cleansed
of excrement,
not smelling sweetly
but fragrant
in the candle's odour,
and the uncustomary silence
of the slum street.

Touch her
touch her.
She is cold 
as winter stone,
and as unanswerable.

Tell me, please, tell me.

Daringly
I touched her flesh:
cardboard.
 

Easter Sunday, 2005
 
 
 

Tell Me Your Story

 
for George

'Tell me your story,'
said the crow to the owl. 
'You who have wisdom
and know all the answers.'

And the owl just hooted,
blinked and hooted.

'Why do you sing?' 
asked the crow of the blackbird.

And the blackbird alighted
on a branch and simply sang.

And so it went on:
sparrow and wagtail,
thrush and finch,
linnet and redpoll:
all were interrogated.

But all went about their business
and met the crow's questions
in their own way.

And the crow, despondent,
went back to the roadway
to scavenge 
as he had always done.
 
 
 

The Troubled Soul
 

 
We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
                                             William Wordsworth

He walked the streets of the undead. 
Before his eyes drunks fell into their graves.
Merchants in pinstripe dealt in rags and bones.

Beyond the city, cemeteries dominated the landscape.
Nightingales croaked above leprous willows.
The bells of empty churches tolled sadly.

Blue shadows on limed walls stalked him.
One was his sister's, whose endearments
abated his loneliness but pained him to the quick.

Where was he going? Beyond an imposed self
no longer himself, to create a new self.
But who and out of what to create a new self?

Delving into the depths of the dead
in vain he sought answers to his distress.
Then back to a dark sky and flashes of lightning.

In his madness 
he traversed plains in search of redemption
for himself and all his kind.

Demons not angels 
danced on the needle point of his mind.