There are ginger snaps, and an end game, and a shroud.
We are meant to choose but hesitate, hang back.
You reappear. A stage bow. Thin applause.
The tide continues ebbing. The mud smells.
A gondolier in a lurid, mud-splashed robe
lies on the pier-end, fishhooks in his ears
and above his eyes. We work hard not to notice
the dreadnaught heeling over in the bay.

It is so like a livid dream. In the beginning, words.
Then come the vivid colours. Then the screams.
Our noses press the arena’s hardwood floor.
Birds fly in where concussions blew off roof tiles,
go blind and fall, air-light but still they fall,
air-light as they stack broken on our backs.

I must be practical you say. We need to sleep.
The sun rescinds sea’s power and we stand.
The dried mud leaves our dressing gowns, and dusts
the disappearing slurried hardwood floor
as we brush feathers from each other’s backs.

There are seventeen me’s inside my head this morning:
Three invited, eleven once-friends, nine unknown.
The Venn diagrams of how this works defeat us,
All us me’s, we I’s. We divert ourselves with grammar
In the hopes some of us have of never thinking
About anything momentous. Belfries belch
Black clouds of bats that turn out, on reflection,
To be thoughts thought shredded when we put them down.

Put down to raw experience, or wry
Assumptions on the state or states of things,
These thoughts bat all us wee me’s on the head
Until some think epiphany is nigh
But others claim it’s Stephanie, or films
We’ve seen so often we feel they’re real life.
We are a quorum of disorganised, a choir
Of heebie-jeebies hormones hunkering down

In a hamlet we’ve created from the husks
Of relationships we had once, or imagined.
Some of us leave, their body doubles bound back
Into my head (our head?) and offer wisdom
In the form of bromides we I’s have heard so often
We think it’s us who’re saying them, and nod
In affirmation until, nodding off,
We startle, take strong measures, blink, and scoff.

The dirty girl in the surgically clean bed
reads for news the views the powers promulgate.
She wonders: Are the truth and honour dead?
Are they silenced by the modern state’s dictate?

In the bed next to hers, a mute Phi Beta Kappa
kept catatonic, intravenous tubes
suffusing him with state-mandated grappa,
tries again to die, and failing, mutters cubes

of all the primes from three to five and back
until the girl starts screaming for a nurse.
The minders pour warm ashes on her back
and warn her what will happen should she curse

the powers that protect her from the scares
that they, the powers, make up to convince
the population that their leader cares
for them in spite of all the evidence.

They warn her not to slag the one percent
who own everything and want to have it all
their way, not hers. They tell her she is meant
to be grateful for this bed where she can’t fall

afoul of the cops who hunt rebellious girls.
‘I am not a rebel,’ she says, but she knows,
as the ashes settle and her memory whirls,
that she will be. Her desire for freedom grows.

It was a wafting summer morning
A day when I was magic
So it must have had an ‘R’
Maybe Thursday

And the sailboat-decked horizon
Did not beckon
No, it glared
And an Alabama angel
So much like Susan T.

Sang up conjuring tricks
That minimised the pain

The jackdaw and the black rabbit
Shared a patch of brown-mown grass
With the corpse of something recent
And a sandwich dropped by bikers

I made music with a rock against a shell
The jackdaw imitated laryngitis
That blackbird suffered from
Last time we played.

We looked for closure
But the music rambled on

I listen while the headlines disabuse
my senses of how evil should have limit.
I seek (sad, giving up on reason) rhyme
which also hides its head at so much sorrow
leaving headless iambic lines mute, blank.

Until a jackdaw chortles. Springtime sun
casts shadows of old dragons in the bin
of banished, vanished nightmares, which, though real,
are balanced by the living season’s thrill.