Poem 164

A story of living with mental troubles and on psych meds, life slipping past … the title is borrowed from an album by Human Instinct that my brother had …

… the metronome/steady job is not just a lame joke but suggests the rocking of someone truly cataleptic, much worse than the ‘you’ who is at least out in the world albeit pharmaceutically hobbled …

… the Phileas Fogg reference is to a scene in the 50s film of Around the World in 80 Days where he chills champagne with snow from the topmost peak – it impressed me as a kid as the epitome of an adventurous life …

( I love how the whole poem is animated by wordplay – Shirley Templed / surely tempered, double-meaning of turn to music, inversions of Through the Looking-Glass and Around the World … and I like the images of air-fish and violin-bees … )

Burning Up The Years

You're  Alice
through a glassy look
Shirley Templed by time
and tiny fish that swim through air
      to nibble your eyelids
awake
             they tattoo blue bruises
under the skin
so you turn to music
you always
                         turn to music
                         a vase of notes
shattering up the wall
little yellow violins crawling and falling
in your windows

your cousin works as a metronome
in a psychiatric hospital
                                                  surely tempered
                                                  by time
and it's a steady job
but you
            you always wanted to lean out of a balloon
like Phileas Fogg
scoop snow off the top of the alps …

and here you are going
around the world in a daze