Mind And Body

Skeleton Faith

“What is faith, Tober?”
“It's life...one man had it.”
- Odd Man Out, F. L. Green (novel and film 1947)

Now that Faith has gone,
There is nothing to mediate
Deathly realms of Flesh
And the bare bones of Thought.

Skeleton is the hardest part of Body,
Not the organs within, those
Trembling blobs of liver glistening on the slab.

Mind also has its hard parts and soft.
Psychic rigidity in old men
Freezes faces to Faragean masks of self assurance,
The world now shrunk to property, fags and ale,
Bent-kneed pursuit of wooden thoughts on
Slow bowling green consciousness.

More brittle realms in sleep deep caverns
Trouble ageing generations
With long subway tunnels and empty waiting rooms,
Squinting at hieroglyph time-tables and
Waking to broken hips and
Helicopter rides from Saga ships
To surgery on foreign slabs.

Psyche has its skeletons too -
Guilts and griefs barnacling
Sunken hulks of relationship-wrecks,
A coral crust now mimicking the shapes
Of vessels long decayed.

Once in youth the Andalusian bull escaped its dusty arena,
Smashed through market stalls of bone china,
And in its innocent life-crazed way
Caused more harm than good.

And when they find one day its Minotaur bones
Will the Divine Archaeologist finally publish
The results of His great experiment?