With one mighty bound I’m free, on the road
south and north, back from the border,
– skint again. I should be glad and am
yet each day I grow heavy, day by day
sinking closer to the earth’s core.
Evenings the lights come on in the bars
where I’m no longer in residence
among the sour faces of the whisky drinkers,
men married to their fists, always hungry,
staring after the heels of women,
living in the ventilation system,
in the tape’s hiss in the stereo.
That’s how it is at the border:
ours an insanity we barely control,
a life all one fit of bad temper.
I saw fiend grab tot says the SUN.
I shall consider the ambivalence of a hat.
Oh I know, I’m all over this story,
I’m in and out the mask of myself.
All these words have been twice lost,
once in prison and once at the border.
They came home like me hungry in the rain.
There’s where I met her: the drowned bride
in the bleak water, up from the country
from the deep freeze for the weekend’s
brief encounter with imaginary friends.
How she moves I think she’s the air
dressed in itself, she’s shaped
like good bread, like geography
I’m lost in with other men like me.