Tag: head

“You can’t write the clear biography
of the aches and pains inside your skull”
Jim Harrison

You said I was a fabulous, talking head
espousing excitation in sparkling conversation
the way a fountain makes so much of things
with only stale, still waters to pump around in circles

How else could I have staged that one man curtain raiser?
cast as an ageing poster girl hanging out to dry
edgy and downtown from some soapy operetta
a Pygmalion perhaps with an off-stage phantom chiseler

Only later did I go down blind, a rush of blood and seeing stars
pasty on an upturned billboard- yet still I never swooned
preferring nightmare rides, sweating bareback
rat-a-tat tatting at all the eaves dropper’s doors

Abstemious now, it’s plain to see the topsy-turvy blood lines
how the vessels track polarity from heart to head in pain
pumping, throbbing, aching  – so it never was a lovesong after all
just a somewhat niggly migraine wrought by the jangle of June

And these few lines – not even enough for a billet doux
Phew! we’ve left no earth shattering volumes to misconstrue

[evidently Walter de la Mare galloped past here with ‘The Listeners’]

One that never quite made it to Jilly’s pick of Jim Harrison quotes but have revived it now without too much of a headache for Poetry Pantry