2Pm

Post-morning, pre-mortem
I promised the ghost of Meleager I would marry Deianeira
So I went to Calydon where Inys was king
Stopping to fight the river-god Achelous on the way
I won when I broke his horn
In the pyramid at Giza
I become lost in the succession of chambers
I am blind like Homer, yet strangely I still see
Screen-printed cows in silver foil
Gigantic ants scuttling on the motherboard
While I sew with Ariadne
The white rabbit scurries away down next door's burrow
At two in the afternoon in the femoral hospital
The radiotherapy ward is filled with tiny lights
A pile of dim barely perceptible earth in a heap
And spiritual distant music
At two in the afternoon
I wander in Venice with von Aschenbach
Seeking a lost child in a red cape, coughing blood
And the swine of Circe come running to their deaths
Mad by the singing of the sirens
Winterfog rolling in off the Lido
Sometimes a god crosses our paths here unannounced
In the pyramid the mummy grows mouldy at the last
At two in the afternoon
Haile Selassie orders a stamp collection to be brought
Lifts the stamps with tweezers and places them back
I leave him to his pastime
Time will probably pass regardless
I strike out from Alexandria to the
Athenian apartment of my ninth year
Nikabettus blasted in monastic rock
The hot mountains snow-capped with marble
Dust storms over Sikiko
Lime cordial on Eucalyptus Square
Where is it now? And where also
My Parisian child-bride?
Into the sea they flow
On Fionn's medieval snow

Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
Three at evening, flat on our backs by dawn

Two in the afternoon
Gracchus the hunter joins me now
He offers me the oars and I row from one Greek island to the next
While Gracchus writes, if it be possible so deep in death to write
The secrets of the world in the margins of a little
Girl's spidery-pencilled Spice Girls scrapbook
Picked up from the ground in Hackney
The crows of Tokyo wear sombre umbrellas
Flapping atop telegraph poles in the rainy season
A writer hurries by dressed in a restrained check pattern
Composing in his head the thirty-first syllable of a tanka
Le Bowery is sitting at his sewing machine
Corpulent, pale-eyed, flush-forward
He is stammering "a few more days"
As they threaten to turn off his life-support machine
And the ECG bleed goes spastic
Slavic women decorate their anguish with ululations
The Mongolian terror is fresh in their memories
Grim dawn comes from the east, bringing carrion
Over the grass of the highlands
Bells gurn, denouncing all comforts
The skull prickles, the hairs rise
Poe indulges in voluptuous melancholia
Polysyllabic, like the grass the horsemen know
We perish
(For me it's 2 p.m., for the moment life goes on)
And the Minotaur plays Nintendo
Basho squats before the Emperor
The former thirteen-and-a-half-year-old
Genius exposes himself in a subway passage
To a halfwit girl, he scares half out of her wits
As Brahms completes his Requiem
Shakespeare and the Bishop of Winchester are
Teasing the frows in the stews of Southwark
They are baiting bears in the nearby pit
The arena has been flooded
Shakespeare and the Bishop take their seats
For the re-enactment of the sea-battle between the Genji and Heike
The imperial boat is already on fire
The battle was lost centuries before
Deianeira agrees to be my wife
We purchase an ivy-green Lexus, flagship of the range
And live discreetly luxurious in a premier
Shell-loft conversion in the Hollywood Hills
The converted observatory at Palo Alto

Three at evening, flat on our backs by dawn
For me it's 2 p.m., for the moment life goes on
On
Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon
Three at evening, flat on our backs by dawn