2pm

Post morning, pre-mortem
 I promised the ghost of Meleager
 I would marry Deianira
 So I went to Calydon where Oeneus was king
 Stopping to fight the river god Achelous on the way
 I won when I broke his horn
 In the pyramid at Giza
 I become lost in a succession of chambers
 I am blind like Homer yet strangely I still see
 Screenprinted cows and silver foil
 Gigantic ants scuttling on a motherboard
 While I sew with Ariadne, the white rabbit
 Scurries away down next door's burrow
 Two in the afternoon
 In an ephemeral hospital
 The radio therapy ward is filled with tiny lights
 A pile of dim barely perceptible earth in a heap
 And spiritual distant music
 At two in the afternoon
 I wander in Venice with Von Aschenbach
 Seeking a lost child in a red cape
 Coughing blood
 And the swine of Circe come running to their deaths
 Maddened by the singing of the sirens
 Winter fog rolling in off the lido
 Sometimes a god crosses your path here unannounced
 In the pyramid the mummy grows mouldy at the last
 At two in the afternoon
 Haile Selassi orders a stamp collection to be brought
 Lifts the stamps with tweezers and places them back
 I leave him to his pastime
 For time will probably pass regardless
 I strike out from Alexandria to the Athenian apartment
 Of my ninth year
 Lycabetus blasted in monastic rock
 The hot mountains snow capped with marble
 Dust storms over Psychico
 Lime Cordial on Eucalyptus Square
 Where is it now?
 And where also my Parisian child bride?
 Into the sea they flow
 With Villon's medieval snow
 Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
 Three at evening,
 Flat on our backs by dawn
 Two in the afternoon
 Gracchus the hunter joins me now
 He offers me the oars and I row
 From one Greek island to the next
 While Gracchus writes, if it be possible so deep in death to write
 The secrets of the world
 In the margins of a little girl's spidery pencilled Spice Girls scrapbook
 Picked up from the ground in Hackney
 The crows of Tokyo are sombre umbrellas
 Flapping atop telegraph poles in the rainy season
 A writer hurries by dressed in a restrained check pattern
 Composing in his head the 31st syllable of a tanka
 Leigh Bowery is sitting at his sewing machine
 Corpulent, pale eyed
 Flash forward: he is stammering "a few more days"
 As they threaten to turn off his life support machine
 And the ECG bleep goes spastic
 Slavic women decorate their anguish with ullulations
 The mongolian terror is fresh in their memories
 Grim dawn comes from the east bringing carrion
 Over the grass of the highlands
 Gulls girn, denouncing all culprits
 The skull prickles, the hairs rise
 Poe indulges in voluptuous melancholia, polysyllabic
 Like the grass the horsemen know
 We perish
 For me it's 2PM
 For the moment life goes on
 And the Minotaur plays Nintendo
 Basho squats before the emperor
 The former thirteen and a half year old genius
 Exposes himself in a subway passage
 To a halfwit girl he scares half out of her wits
 As Brahms completes his Requiem
 Shakespeare and the Bishop Of Winchester
 Are teasing the fraus in the stews of Southwark
 They are baiting bears in the nearby pit
 The arena has been flooded
 Shakespeare and the Bishop take their seats for the re-enactment of
 The sea battle between the Genji and Haike
 The imperial boat is already on fire
 The battle was lost centuries before
 Deianira agrees to be my wife
 We purchase an ivy green Lexus, flagship of the range
 And live, discreetly luxurious, in a premier shell loft conversion in the Hollywood hills
 The converted observatory at Palo Alto
 Three at evening,
 Flat on our backs by dawn
 For me it's 2PM
 For the moment life goes on
 Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
 Three at evening
 Flat on our backs by dawn ...