People Poems

	Insane Membrane They said I was quite pathologically unhinged Waiting until some godly army of theirs would sweep Brushstrokes through the cat-calling crowds And carry forward the momentous nothingness That is otherwise me, him into ancient Arkansas Or some far, strange country of desert-blue skies They said the fire of life played tricks and wagered Self-belief at my expense, and that rancid water Dripped from the brilliantly painted ceiling inside My head. Long-dead cogs, I'm told, had rusted fast Like the bent skeletons of some volcanic fate Gaping-mouthed at the ashen joke of it all And I was made to swallow so much archived carrion To see the tentacles of a hundred misdiagnoses In their faces rapt with the fear of not knowing And that ceiling daubed thickly with institute white: "You are not here, this is not you. You visit The inside of your own skull like a murderess On some unknown odyssey of ganglionic space Taking with you a fragment of what is known as love" © David Incoll 2001
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