A no-bar airport hotel room: bed, mirror, Brueghel print,
toothbrush lonely on its only in the bathroom,
shoes two weary open mouths, nothing to do with each other.
A strange business, to be anywhere, to be anyone.
Today I shall be Ludwig of Bavaria, eating leftover cabbage.
Water, cup, table, evidence of the world’s unlikely existence,
tangible. Take the one and pour into the other. Drink,
sitting to the third. Drink, drink the water. A place called here,
some vague other country, bedazzled by too many air miles.
Suddenly I remember my black dog, his shadow fading into autumn,
thirty years gone by. Spiro his name was.
It is a room big enough and small enough to write a suicide note
on the little table provided for the purpose, in the little chair
at the little desk where you take the little pencil
and blow your last thoughts all over the fake red flock.
You had nothing to declare. You never had.
As ever too many ifs too many buts. Imaginary conversations
in imaginary English. A narrowing margin.
The parallel lines of rail tracks and jet trails meeting at last,
the distance from here to there closing rapidly.
Objects in the mirror may be closer than you think.
Days weeks months years being invisible, same old tale
the sorry self tells itself, the machinery ticking away
into oblivion, everything designed for the scrapyard,
all the world a theme park, every one a game show.
You can go to bed now you’ve had your photograph taken.
Here comes a man through the anonymous crowd,
his face bearing his look of permanent urgent enquiry,
eyes staring into everyone, mouth moving into the gift of speech
born in the mouths of distant hunter gatherers, long ago:
have you got ten pence, have you got ten pence?
Incidents along the way. And this is the pretty route,
meandering, roundabout, more interesting for that.
For instance at the Accident & Emergency a man, confused,
an open Stanley knife in his back pocket:
What am I doing here. Where am I anyway?
And in the supermarket suddenly a security alert
will a member of management go to the security panel
over and over, again and again, sometimes this is a secu
this is a secu a secu a secu secu secu. No one pays any attention.
Anyway it’s not my gun. I was never there.
All the whiskers blown suddenly from the dandelion.
Gone over the hills and then some. The book
open to the last words fading in the brain,
the last image a child drinking from a paper cup.