’Open your eyes,’ they tell me, ‘if you want to sleep.
It will anchor you in a Somewhere and a Now.’
I try to. I imagine I see a ceiling
and curtains – not deep space and unicorns.
I tire. I close my eyes. All hell breaks loose
contaminating Earth like humans do.
Alone on the shore of a beautiful, dead sea,
on a beach where plastic trash hides tar-smeared sand,
I stand in a crowd just like me and we scream.
There’s no life but us to hear us. Scream. Again.
The mad minister pulls the wings off glued-down flies.
‘It relaxes me,’ he says. ‘It always has.’
He smiles at the frightened people stood before him.
They’re glued down too, he thinks. He looks for eyes
that stay averted from the wingless flies.
He beckons to those with averted eyes.
‘Come here,’ he orders. ‘Here! Stick out your tongue.’
Cheddar sharp enough to bite
my tongue off helps me in the night.
When the bitter wears off and the hours
awake alone take on such power,
I give up sleep, get out of bed
imagining if my devil’s fed
a sandwich he will let me sleep
(or take my soul he wants to keep).
I stumble down the servant stairs.
Once in the kitchen, my knife pares
the cheddar’s rind. It slices toast
before I toast it from the most
mould-free bread I can unearth.
A steady cutting hand is worth
two fingers easy in the dark.
(Ave, a V then, midnight lark.)
Saluting, I turn the oven on,
admiring how the bread gets drawn
up at the corners by the weight
of centred cheddar slices laid
thick to make my devil fat
and draw his claws in like a cat
and somnolent.
I watch cheese slide
around in the oven. I make fried
eggs and eat them with grilled cheese.
I drink pints of milk, hope they appease
the wake-up devil till he dreams
and lets me too, or so it seems.
Attention to dimension makes her diet,
eschew the chewing of so many snacks.
Infernal genes design internal riots
that lard largesse licked up in Spare Ribs shacks.
As denims tear and Danskins go unquiet,
she dreads demobbing into Forties slacks
and takes control and Life Force and spa water
resolving to get thinner than her daughter.
His ‘GUT’ this spring has naught to do with physics.
No unified ideas but belly weight
strains fulcrum forces pressing back his coccyx
and makes him cogitate: not forty-eight
in waist as well as age! He fears his fornix
will soon prolapse. Must equiponderate!
He leaves his lab to flog his lattice, lope
for miles each morning. Spring, eternal hope.
With minds in sync and sinking into Low,
they race like mad along the empty beach
for meters, then they stop to heave and blow
and dream of Bronze and Fit. They almost reach
the chilly surf, but turn instead and go
back to the boardwalk. Donuts! They beseech
the gods who made both them and Fashion Rules
for smaller appetites and fewer drools.
When our gunny sacks filled up with passing glances
we stopped digging. We reshirted, wiped our hands
on conversations we heard as romances
in a language no one living understands.
The setting sun lured shadows into dances.
Smiling strangers in our mirrors mimed the bands
that played our favourite songs, until the sight
of everything grew dim, and it was night.
There is a large, fur-covered backpack on the spare bed.
When I sit up to look at it, it shakes and growls.
Is this happening in the real world or my head?
It is speaking now, a language without vowels
that I do not understand. This means I’m sane,
I hope. It really pains me to encounter
a backpack bouncing on a counterpane.
I’m reminded of Medusa when she found her
self skiing down a glacier without poles,
or helmet, obviously, or even skis.
She closed her eyes and slung her snakes like stoles
around her throat and screamed, ‘No fantasies!’
It is dangerous to dismiss as silly fear
the evidence that this president is crazy
and that his desire that drives him is to end the world
in what he offhandedly calls nuclear holocaust.
‘There were squirrels the size of squirrels, and a rock-like rock.
I ran through a glade in the forest
like someone running through a forest glade.
The sun shone through wintry leave-stripped branches
the way light shines through tree limbs that have lost their leaves.
On the leaf-choked forest floor a burrowing squirrel
burrowed like…’ Enough. I get the message.
Earth Tourist 