Barefoot in the Head (33 page)

Arising one morning from her bed

Going across the room to open

Her casement window Of course he had

The tactical sense to leave it all unfinished

But he oversimplified

Has anyone ever opened

Or finished opening

The multidimensional stimuli

But time is a multitude and to

‘My’ mattress what we chose to think

Is ‘her’

The repetitive event of sex

Comes in eternal recurrence

Only the old data-reducers cut

The exposures down reducing all

To unity Put it this way

That ‘she’ is multitudinously among

The motes and lines and famine bowls and beds

Which punctuate that single node of time

For me and say that single node

Replicates

Endlessly to the last progressions Of a universal web

If there were roses or daylight in the bowl

If there was someone in the middle-distance

If the faint sounds that came to ‘me’

If I was there prepared to love

If we see anything but photographs

Torn from a neolithic eye

Put it this way

Time is a multitude
 

And ‘she’ far more than one

TOPHET

(‘Tophet: an ancient place of human sacrifice near Jerusalem; later a place of refuse disposal.’ Diet.)

I was prepared to sacrifice

Myself — or all else but myself.

Too harsh. I almost sacrificed

Myself. I would have done. One has

To be much surer time allows

Such liberty of gesture or

That the gesture is not just

In essence someone else’s. I

Saved myself to do some further good

I say some further good. The tide of faith

Dawdled. What did I do unto myself?

Acidhead mind and flesh corrode. Too harsh.

I am the refuse tip of all I was.

Boot of Revelations

Letting their origins down

with mooed music

The cattle milled and sledded

in the clapped out square

Boddihair buttressed

limbs rebuddied

Metamorphic sleep-awake-asleep

perception flickers

As he disintegrates

himself

into their programmed

Brainclumps with unbuckled words

Bending the ticked time-factory

Each circadian partment stuffed

with old writs

As words begin disimigrate

upripe postures fold

into a sea of herdivores

under the diss o’ loot ness

words began

What they heard they herded

churned through mass orifices

fossils mouth-vented

EIGHTY

Under the scoured thatch

Locked beams bar our disorder

Once maybe I had religion

Suffering had a future

Now I need only a shawl

I’m a crab’s claw

A broken wing blunted instrument

Won’t work or play

His veins are dried string

Not even knotted

His thoughts keep kicking

Every day further to the well

This place will never be home

Problems keep their old address

Now I’m just an old householder

And the house holds me.

TWENTY

The days burn like a hairdryer Rattle

Out loud as Friday’s money

Suddenly see problems like opening twots

Needing my thrust

Events make tyres strike concrete

Slicing me forward every direction

Negotiable Nights are jackpots

Giving back and front

Style does it all style

The city’s open to the nomad

Everywhere’s home and clear eyes

Never questioned

Friends wink like traffic lights

I can do more than yesterday

Motorcameleon-like

I’m change itself

DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER

Oh, no, he went well at last — more his old self,

And yet as if
sure
at last... Perhaps the Way smoothes

For the Gooduns... Cryptic as ever his last words were —

Surprised — ‘So

Soon

Sooth

Soothes...’

CHARTERIS

He was a self-imagined man

Old when still young

But there’s always

Time and everywhere

Recurrently eternally

A hive of selves

He left in the air

Skeleton structures

Of thought

And thoughtlessness

To some of us

They are unfinished

Palaces to some

Slums of nothingness

An ambiguity

Haunted him haunts

All men clarity

Has animal traits

The bombs were only

In his head

On his memorial tree

A joker wrote

KEEP THE VIOLENCE IN THE MIND

WHERE IT BELONGS