now and after all we can say
it’s a high night over Camelot
or Carcassonne
Wayne’s Brewery
stuck in the river
on twenty stilts two hundred years later
I’m not that old but I took the sideways road
past 30 into 82
fifty years is nothing if you’re talking about the mind
the body never catches up
the fantasy is the reality
and the reality is the fantasy
it’s not complicated
you’re not a retired school teacher
or a master gunnery sergeant
you’re a medieval knight
you don’t live in the suburbs
but in the palace
the blood-drinking presidents
and their kingmakers
are only a bad dream
and Arthur never met Genevieve
he’s asleep with his young wife in his chamber
you too are a minaret
just like the lady’s hats
and Merlin’s
the spine a trunk
of a great river
extending over every night
carrying the boys over the water into paradise
you can trust the body even when
everything else has gone mad
it knows where it’s at
it’s a radar locator
trying to contact HQ
but the interference has been bad these last 500 years
signal still choppy
management can’t agree
did you come down here to be reborn?
or to die?
it’s like that when you look down
at your own blood
and recognize the transmitters outside for what they are:
an inferior version of your own body
all men radiomen
every call sign recorded in akashic
Merlin, Merlin
Mordred is fallen
come home for bangers and mash
the repeater is a bronze age witch
cackling over cauldron
clothed in dirt
transmitting at 4000 watts
eye of newt
and dog of rain
where’s my boy?
where’s my body?
Mordred is fallen, repeat
bad boy come to bad end
repeat, all stations
come home for dinner
even if I loved you again it would be too late
the soul has its own timer
set against the horizon
730 megahertz
at 22 degrees north
and the men sing
how I wish I were at Carcassonne
where the ladies are electromagnets
curling round the pole
and the dogs are lashing round the Sampo
a thousand miles a second
each you is like a tic on the speaker
coming round the curve
rising over the bridge
a pink nipple radio knob
hard wired to the core
this is the deep desert
last watch
she’s bowing her head down to the earth
and I’m rising to meet her