ANXIETY - MAGWITCH IN THE FOG ON ROMNEY MARSHES
 
 
I am a fugitive on the foggy marsh
Finding no path to follow.
Other forms move around me
But leave no tracks in the sludge.
The ground beneath me floods
With raw sewage of despair.
 
It is the hangover from far-off times
When naked men feared creatures of the night,
And still they panic in my neolithic mind.
 
What stillness is there to be found in life?
 
Half real ghosts of flesh,
We evaporate through time.
No moment stays,
No thing endures.
 
We can only hope for a benign force
To awaken in the deeps
And send us surfing through life,
A flash of sun on the wave’s curve.
 
If we could see ourselves with God’s eye,
Each a ray of crystal light refracted,
The soldiers might have nothing to hunt.
 
Who is making the laws round here?
 
Anxiety rules the misty no-man’s land
Between mind and body,
Bastard child of Reality and Dream.
 
Who can heal a transient mind -
End this blind assault on emptiness?
Who can stop an adrenalin gland
Firing like a deranged machine-gun?
 
Shafts of morning sunlight pierce the battleground.
We shiver in the churchyard but find no sanctuary here.
 
Whoever thought up this trial
Put too many flaws in the design,
Asked too much of us.
 
I could be a fossilised head,
Remnant of a dead forgotten hominid.
 
A cannon sounds from the hulks out at sea.
Once more shackled convicts
Blindly move through the fog
On the uncertain marshes.