Heavy Dread

A vengeful spirit, besuited and balding, wanders Oxford Street
Granted an hour to gather his broken pieces

Heavy dread
Relentless as monolithic slabs of sub-bass dub
I saw the shadowed doom cloud descending
On all the scurrying homo sapiens

Flashed forwards one hundred years
Saw nothing but absence of life here

Heavy dread overawed, my heavy dread

Weight of numbers
Fellow human faces in painful sharpened focus
Their minds, their lives
Their ease and comfort with themselves
Smile at themselves in the morning's mirror

Fellow human bodies
Japanese woman in denim shorts and long socks
My uncivilised urge just to touch her
Just to touch like a feather's caress
Nothing more than an innocent touch

Heavy dread frightened, my heavy dread

My feelings of constraint, of acceptable behaviour
Are attached to me like a helium balloon held by a fraying thread
Worry dread doom that the thread will part
And I shall lose all restraint and understanding forever
And I shall steal
And I shall weep amongst my peers
And I shall stand exposed
And I shall curl foetal in doorways without number
And I shall shout and rant oblivious
And I shall drive or walk or disappear to somewhere anywhere
And I shall take to my bed and never emerge
And I shall surrender my tomorrows
I shall be lost

Better run, from this, boy: you must run
Run, boy, you can't run
You know you can't
You have a role to play, an act to maintain
And you just don't have the balls

Overwhelming need to be alone in the dark
Under the covers and far from them all

But you know, don't you boy
Your body can run but your spirit never can
There is nowhere far enough away
There is no place of comfort
No sojourn or retreat or blessed reward

Heavy dread of diseased thoughts
Self-hatred or a surfeit of self-love?
I just don't know
Can't tell one from the other.

A hungry ghost prowls Oxford Street
An hour passed in agonising clarity left him giddy

Part of this throng but without point of contact
He failed to find healing

Just built panic upon panic

Pete Folly


If you have any comments on this poem, Pete Folly would be pleased to hear them.

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