The state I’m in, another fugue somewhere
south of north, not far off by the sexagesimal reckoning,
though all that is just another pair of trousers
in another order of events, and this where I am now
is already the other side of that. Here is where I’ll be,
living near Barking wherever Barking is, at midnight
on the moment as the arbitrary settings of time
tip us out with a bad hangover into the next thousand years,
a device designed to get us to forget ourselves again,
waking in a new dawn with a new minted identity.
In the last words of the sailor king bugger Bognor,
let me die in bloody peace. Are you sure it’s safe?
the last utterance of Will Palmer, hanged for murder
in 1856. On the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
It’s true much of the time it is very boring,
sitting in some place nursing a gutsache
so yes I’ll have another drink, and think
of all the pretty bottles behind the bar
I’ll never taste, all the bars in all the world
I’ll never visit, all the blue skies, all the women.
You know it’s funny how you forget heatwaves,
and what was the name of that distant country
of which we knew little, whatever went on there
is a fictionalised account by now, the answer
to all these dusty answers is just dusty.
So let the last night begin, in the deepening blue
the blackbird and the evening star, the other stars
winking on, their messages across the distances that say
here, I’m here, still here, out here, over here
in all this enormity, that is to say nowhere
in particular, this speck among the tides of vast dust
spread out across the time it makes up as it travels.
Whether the machines cease or no on the midnight
I’ll be here, no doubt as usual engaged
in my inconclusive experiment with alcohol,
speculating this red ten takes that black jack,
this black pawn that white bishop, muttering
aloud these words I’ve made to be the last words
delivered at the last minute, ending in a dream of flying.