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THE HEALING PROCESS

Purple Patch: an exotic plot, a royal flower-bed, a strange plaster, a remarkably rich tranche of prose or, more likely, a hardy poem-plant that I – not a poet, really – have managed to tangle round with my dark weeds for many a turning season. Yet, now, here is another multi-leaved clover, pricking out amid the many stapled blooms that have cloistered me with more welcome fulsomeness than simply the words their petals grew. I'm glad, then, to have added to the texture. Today, ready painfully for unsticking the plaster patch to see if I'm healed or not.

(published 'Purple Patch' 2001)
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WAITING

The world waits for its call. Why everybody thinks their time is well spent in waiting, I do not know, and may God forgive them for using their life up in such a fashion.

I was one of them once. I had great yearnings to stand in bus queues, sit in dentists' or doctors' waiting-rooms, lining up for ticket returns at the smash hit performance, forming part of an endless snake as it winds round the London streets for yet another Tutankhamen exhibition....

Now I've grown out of all that, my deepest relish is making others wait. Now I'm famous (shot to fame in fact because I went on all the TV chat shows claiming that I was the one who had waited longest for most things which, when all added up on Balancing Day, would be tantamount to more than the average lifetime). I give everybody the runaround: my agent, my live-in lover, my publisher, my private doctor, even the buses on occasion stay at the request stop longer than they should until I arrive, cohorts in tow.

I wish I had made them wait longer! It would have given some modicum of fairness to the end of time accounts.

I died yesterday and I'm still waiting for death to put me out of my misery. That's why I've got the time to doodle with words. Even the undertaker is getting fed up, still in his black top hat, kicking his heels, his hearse idling....

(published 'Tuba' 1988)