Brain love

Stopping the leak

waiting for her melodies
strung with fine steel
thoughts fell backward
where what they feel
with frictional feet
for music shod
scraped tenor from bass
tore even from odd.
Lay wires and words
with the infirm and old
stretched on the table
both lucid and cold
stiffened conversing
for needles and thread
suturing those feelings
that leak from the head.

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..