| 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.
