1008
All roads lead to other roads
62
    metamorphoses of brain damage:
The man who mistook his wife for a truck

they had a similar stress gradient

she bore her load of life badly

he lacked all emotion; his frontal lobes

had worn away like a brain-shaped

eraser; he'd lost that pencil with which we write

out the chorus of everyone else's responses to life

and sing along. I can't love you anymore she wrote

to him while in hospital, ever grinning

it's like you're there and not there

I don't care, he told the camera of his accidentally caused

lack of empathy, and she cried

on camera, and no one lied
the doctor looked on kindly

the camera and film crew watched

and so did I – in whose shoes (dress,

fingers, accident, blank screen or eyes)?
    and another:
'Rate your sadness for me,' she said to the woman, who was

trussed in a plaster cocoon like a broken leg

sensors and receptacles suspended from her to the ceiling
('I want to make you sad,' said the scientist

in her white like-a-slightly-longer-dress lab coat

'and to measure your frontal lobes')
'About a six' came a voice

whose bruise was real, if practised

large eyes staring out of old fruit sockets at the screen above
her, her words hanging spiders of text, set pain

('I'm a monster.  I hate myself,'

the depressive wrote, with her fingers
typing out her saddest thoughts, quote unquote)

then while she was looking back at her thoughts

they radiographed the sadness of her brain
'I'm sad that you're sad,' the scientist then said

in her wordlessly-white, paper-white lab coat

'but I'm glad that you were sad for us';
like a child, the monster woman was still

sad but pleased to be pleasing, a little

healed, you could feel the plaster wearing lighter and
the power of science
385
Some God's elbow escarpment holds this town in to

its azure seascape, its fresh mown green back yards,

Hill's hoist, sea-saw waves and sky-blue time
a shivering pall over the death of our dead friend

whose loss we have gathered to forget, whose loss

to forget, bright eyes embrace me, you've arrived

238
Fishing for sharks

a ring of teeth

round your neck

their eyes like egg whites

boiled wider than fear

who are nicer than people

many more people

are injured each

year by their own

underwear

continues the professor

lecture theatre widening with laughter

like a maw

147	
    a quartet of curses
Dean wanted a cigarette.  I suggested

he watch The Curse of the Phantom Limbs instead:
They're interviewing a woman and her stump

which feels, which she feels, pain

in the fingers, though she lost it from the elbow
A hand typing in the distance, next door, on the computer
An artist interviews her too, takes photos, digital

images and then virtuals

the woman's imagined pain in, pixelling a massive swollen hand

the hand that grasped the wheel – this is imprinting

on a stick-thin arm coming out of the stump: a map of pain
the artist paints
Another is a man with no arm, but his phantom

body map has a huge thumb, a thumb for an arm
The typing stops

Dean didn't need a cigarette.  He wrote a letter instead

touch typed like us
*
A man lost all sensation in his right arm

from the motorcyke smash, but his phantom hand still gripped in pain.

The eyes.  Their phantom pain. The arm ungripped
(its ghostly impossible grasp.  What else are phantoms

but.  And so is art.  This is imprinting the scientist said print.  The homunculus in your brain is more you than you.  Which remaps)
when he placed the one left in the black mirror box.

In a mirror your right arm is your left

a reflection of the left.  So you see
                   both limbs, one virtual, one real, move perfectly now, as if the motorbicycle

had never cut the other off.  And patients start to cry

And to lose all phantoms float away pain
to where?
*
while the black mirror box has a video restorative effect

on me too, like a phantom picture of what's virtually real

or a T.V. set (you coffin box) up turning into a pathway

to Heaven, and all our lost souls idiots
*
a cigarette

paints phantom lungs

91	
There in Russia they keep their herds shut in stables, you'll see no grasses in the fields, no leaves on the trees appear.

But the land is mounds of snow, shapeless and deep

in cold, it rises as you walk all around you. It's always winter

the North-west wind is always breathing in frost.

From morning, the Sun, his horses reaching for the far skies,

never succeeds in scattering the paling shadows; his car rushes

to bathe in the red mirror of Ocean, and night the shadows revives.

Bridges of ice congeal, of a sudden, from flowing rivers. Whose waves

then carry wheels bound with iron on their backs. Having

once served ships, they now pave a way for open carts.

The cold causes bronze vessels to leap apart, clothing stiffens

when put on, they cut off blocks of frozen wine with an axe.

While pools, in their depths, turn solid ice, fierce icicles

make caves of uncombed beards, and the snow

all through the air, is all this time falling.
							Virgil, Georgics III

56	
The body of Bethesda: the tain of sky that floats overhead

and the walking tracks vein the land with life
inroads, humans, ring up in the mind

their binary codes, the lizard beside me, DNA-determined
he motes in the eye my silence of nature

as if the divorce I'm getting over meant as much to him
as the light at each tick of the clock of the sun

on the pool of Bethesda, silence settles, no one

was or ever will be at home

35	
Walking around a

corpse makes

the path of our

conversation

difficult, trippy, little

jumps in grammar

over – excuse me

21	    
Sydney postcard
that bleary-faced old faith of me supping on the sober

the podium dancers were podium dancing
and the night did away with all thought of the night

yet Daedalus found it easy to fall into the Sun
did his skies slip from knowing

did the soles of his feet come undone
Hyde park spreading out its dark rug of grass

to eternity
an eye enters the harbour smashes a mallet smashes down on her face

my hand touches your breast like the wheels of the train go round and

round
14	
Cleaning my teeth with a truck
7	
I ate the best minds of my generation, rot

dribbled down the sides of my chin

and not throwing up

To what sight

do you shut that eye off

do you dream it to death

do you drink it all down

to one black painting

that swallows the frame