Bath

What is this place he’s landed in

a thousand miles from home?

his white tin box, his Holloway cot,

his hermit’s cell, a coffin’s length,

in his sister’s flat, where he lies down at night,

a guest of the dead, gathering

all the secrets of this house,

from belching pipes and gurgling drains,

from scuttling mice and the boiler’s ticks,

from dripping taps and the babies whelps,

unwinding in draughts flowing under the door

to the muffled groans of a thousand ghosts.

His bath-bed, his rack, his cage of knit tusks,

a shark’s jaw-bone, skeleton’s eye-hole,

white as a surgical sheet, where he wakes,

if he wakes, his limbs clamped with aches,

a numbness etched into his flesh,

no sense in his fingers or feet.

Where all through the night

the seeds of his fear bloom abortions

that like claws in his throat won’t let him talk,

like glass in his gut won’t let him eat,

like bricks on his back won’t let him rise.

His bath-raft, his bone-boat, shuttle,

his moon-cone where he, like Major Tom,

drifts far from the needle points of stars

in utter darkness a thousand years from home,

and dreams, if he dreams, of coasting down

the arches of the nebulae back to his time’s beginning

in a parish saved from lightning

where rainbows bud from open palms

and his mother drones her only air

I’m riding along in a free train

bound for nobody knows where.

*

a mans eyes cry a boy’s tears

a thousand miles a thousand years

a thousand ghosts from home

what he needs so he won’t dream the miles

he won’t fear the years

he won’t feel the ghosts he won’t  hear

of home what he needs so at last

he will sleep what he needs

is a drink is a drink is a drink