Message in a bottle

Message in a bottle

When inner voices claim they’ve glimpsed a seam 
his psyche would prefer were not exposed,
he tells them “Fuck you Freud, hands off my dreams:  
a tree is just a tree, a rose, a rose.”

But one can almost know a thing for years
(and meanwhile know it too, of course) and so
he leaves himself small clues he catches here
and there – joins up the dots – until he knows: 

describing every day as “wet” or “dry”,
a traveller passed out in a park, from “stress”,
champagne for breakfast by the riverside,
sipped whisky standing for reflectiveness,

the journalist whose soul’s too numb to mourn,
Judas and Jesus drinking through the night,
the drunken farmers dancing in a storm,
self-portraits with a glass just out of sight,

long games of poker in the airport bar
then incoherent flights through jagged time
and waking unsure where or who you are
to scratch away the null with wine, with wine, with wine…

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This poem appeared in Watching The Moon Landing.