Frankly, this is none of your concern
And anyway, I quite resent the notion
That this medium is just
A doorway in a ghetto,
Giving entrance to a cramped
Backstreet confessional.
But nonetheless, the fact that I’m adopted
Hums constantly, so constant
That almost always
I’m left blithely unaware.
But it’s like Lemn Sissay says,
Upbraided by his circle for
Obsessionally stalking
Any mention of himself
In any medium:
Without the third-hand evidence
How’s he meant to know
He’s even here?
Likewise, it’s often happened
That I’ve glanced at a shop window
Seen my own reflection
And, for a nanosecond,
Wondered:
Who’s that there?
It’s no big deal, and anyway
I choose not to repine
Straddling, like everyone,
The chasm between joy
And cataclysm
With the best part of the pleasure of it
Acknowledging
The fault’s all mine.
Still, whether due to careless lust
Or being overwhelmed by this whole world
Or browbeaten by
Respectability and
Pious eugenics dressed as
Good intentions, bathing babies by
The bucket load in great redemptive sploshes
Of embourgeoisement
I think a thread attaches us somehow,
A ghost-thin freemasonry
Of once-upon-a-time
Abandonment.
And I speculated just last night
That maybe, like the dead or yet unborn
At some Platonic level
We all were once outside of Time
Waiting to be wanted
In a place before the kindest people in the world
Tied their new knots.
And there we lay, in cots, in rows, in
Halls beyond any perspective sense
Me, two of my sisters,
My friends Andy, Luke and Nick
And further on
There’s Aristotle, the Emperor Augustus,
Mandela, Moses, Eartha Kitt, Ice T
And Edgar Allen Poe and millions more
Just rank on rank on rank
Beyond the Physical
Unconsciously anticipating an inspection
That might reboot our lives
Which somehow welds each one of us to all.
Then, twelve cots down,
Fuck me!
It’s Michael Gove!