There was a friend of mine,
used to offer me a cigarette.
On a Tuesday. John was talking.
He was saying what he hears, his ear
pressed along the wall along the wing.
Time’s all there is he says, flat,
to one side, every second word
what he’ll never do again with women.
He’ll take a light off me though.
He’s the man that ate boiled ham raw.
He’ll take on a sliced loaf single handed.
Time is the crease in his pants I think,
pressed as in the army under the mattress.
John keeps himself neat. He knows
how quick they’ll spirit him away
in a bodybag along the stairs before unlock.
He says he heard the screw say One Off Sir.
It’s time.
Time he looks back from morning after morning,
his face changing in the same mirror.
Time is the razorblade, the comb’s teeth
and the measure of the toothpaste. Time he eats,
shits, drinks, is sometimes merry in,
the fallen grey he lifts off his shoulder.
Time scuffs the shoe and blunts all the nails.
If there were no nights there’d be no fear.
Time I could handle but all this dark stuff
either side between the light and the light.
Time is what.
Time is.
He tells me what he hears in the night whispers
through pipework and brickwork, bars and the hard gloss,
and he writes down the messages: Oddy’s on the roof.
The nurses are having a party. It’s in.
All it costs are little pictures of the Queen.
Oh and love he says. Love Love Love’s
faint echo on the landings, through the masonry
on a thin late airwave Love running down the batteries,
singing on a bent guitar
Lost in the saddle again.
Ah, John.
Lost in time both of us talking about love,
a word born over again and again in the prison house
where so many with their hands killed love,
and then the dark came down forever. So now
behind the yellow wall and the yellow fence
where the wind in a scatter of old leaves
beats the wire to security, the dogs howl
moonward and the champion dopesniffer Duke
sleeps on but John when he sleeps never dreams.
Time is what it is. The protagonist is mad again,
lost in some mean southern border town
all barber shops and bars and far too many shoes.
I’ve been out again beating my heart on the wind,
and maybe this time John we never get home
and the journey ends here and time’s all there is.
The idea is don’t die in prison John,
in this part of the nightmare.
My brother calls me from the world’s other side
and never said which city. He’s been robbed,
he’s broke, homeless, out of a job and 48,
he’s drunk in the wrong house and whose phone is it
and I fear my brother will die in the wind.
He says he’s glad dirty money from a dirty job
went to a dirty place to buy a dirty girl junk.
Wherever morning is I hope he’ll still be glad.
So now you know the plot. Fox is away
in Australasia waiting for the cops,
and when he called I was thinking about John
and what he tells me: many things
will never happen. As for me
I’ve been too close too long to the damned
and can’t leave, lost as they are in time,
on my wordtrack covering the territory,
always in the dark thinking I’ve a lucifer
when I’m far too near the wire when the lights go up
and I’m lost in the saddle again.
Take me home, love, my scars and all my alibis
and my bad manners and whatever wounds we die of.
If you can find me. My name is John.
Maybe you can love what will be left of me.
Take me out of this prison.