HOPEFUL MONSTER

 

1.

 

Watching a podcast with Nick Lane

Biologist on the origin of life, threw

Up this memory. I’m taking a tablet

Called brain boost that helps focus.

 

Kent, England. Five years old in the back 

garden with Mum, playing with muck, she 

always let me be a child and get my hands dirty.

 

I cut up a worm with a lollypop stick 

on a saucer-like a gift to mum on a silver platter.

 The head was wiggling, and the torso.

Was this like a deep mind syndrome  

symmetry, the pattern of dark poetic beauty.

 

2.

Like that wriggling earth worm

In a disabled bed. My sinew was torn in stroke.

 I live with Cancer, Stroke, Heart attack.

 It’s all in my blood

Morphogenetic.

 

The binmen and road sweepers

Are out today after

Weeks of strikes.

 

WAR it seems the way forward. Swept up into

The bins. my old man is a dustman

Killer.

 

Are going down that road sweeping?

Are we just the refuse waste who can't find

A peace settlement.