Robert Verdon, #163, I Have Disturbed Dreams, Doctor

in a warm Indian accent

passing through the Canberra Centre,

the melting narwhal tusk lingers,

doing a lightspeed samba at the end of night

in a bubbling mandolin wind

and a beautiful pea-green boat

as time and Diogenes needle me

into esemplastic bags,

launching a stale trifle into a green wave,

lobbing a storm halfway across the ocean

(truly tennis without the net),

forking memories of

daggeurotype panoramas of Paris and London

with osprey pie and heated quarrels

between Marx and Engels,

over Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution

and the polar co-ordinates of Euler,

onto my name-dropping melamine plate;

spavined nightmares like this are easily-grown as a fig-tree

in the heaving suburbs,

or shreds of guttering children,

or songs of queasy weavers weeping

by the spokeshaven, nebulised chimneys of dawn

(I’m with you in Rockland):

yes the couch is warm and comfortable,

I’m sure Francis Bacon would have loved it

after his experience with the frozen chicken —

now, tossing off the filth of centuries,

let me rise and greet the miserable day,

flooded with the horse-brown light of the nineteenth century,

aping the apocalypse,

let me draw out Leviathan with an hook,

fret again with a flagon of tokay about

ageing and dying and failing in sepia,

normal things, not the filigreed iron feelings

of reel-to-reel cities recycling their poor

and peddling only their neap peak experiences;

dear angelic doctor, I glare

like a bicycle ganglion on the summer,

dishwasher-safe on a blasted heath,

obtruding from owlish oblong American obbligati,

Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?,

knocking my knees and nostrums over the Brindabellas,

burbling icily about a glimmer of retrogravity,

checking in with semantically-bleached surfies

and rainbow cake to a ground glass hotel

(what mean ye that ye beat my people into packet mix?),

imperial stink-bombs, Mantovani and his kaleidoscopic You-Tube

xylophones notwithstanding.