THE PRIORY

The houses in this country are not as simple as they seem.

Manners make them smile out with a pleasing aspect.

When the sun shines it catches them on their unclouded brows,

And it would be easy to fall for the age-old fiction

That they enlose the inheritance of nothing but easy and plenty.

The fact is, it takes the enactment of your worse-than-imagining dream

To get a purchase on their passages, and appreciate their proper function.

Come inside this one and notice the high class of the haunting,

The thick quiet of the carpets and the numb lithium air,

The men and women moving like insects down the hall,

The stairs curving from view with an undeniable elegance,

The visiting older sister, fresh from the serious world,

The dormant rooms in the roof, blinking out from the ivy.

Night comes blindly like a lichen of no light.

Something dying on the common sees the moon through an elm-root claw,

Feels the black blood heave down in its bag of being.

At the nursing station in the mouth of the observation ward

An orderly dozes on his forearms. The screen is blank with snow.

Somewhere in the sky, half a hemisphere away,

Some vice-president or other is approaching rapidly,

Drawn by the address and its sheer old-countryness,

Still coke-fuelled and pinned in through the pupils,

All crazed up with acquisition, and the abolition of No,

Heading for the hideous dawn and the obscene red-eye sun,

Coming down hard and ready to tell anyone in the world

Yer don’t know nothing about nothing, ain’t no-one can tell

Me what’s going on in this here head of mine.