What were the events of my semester symbiosis I might tell you?
how vacancy tasted like a whiskey chaser
I sat supping on a summer's evening one fragmented afternoon
waiting for the sun and sickle come chattering over
umpteen graveward sedges beside a spring-looned river
before the heavens above had even started to dissolve.

How I happened to run into a policeman with a truncheon
whose seamless cycle went shambling
over the scatalogical skyline
without even a by-nor-leave for the wastelands of a smile.
Or on the bus on those featherbound country lanes,
where my head went spinstering into infinitude
and even the season treason behind my broken mind
couldn't summon up a homemade glass of ale
for me or my place in the chalky tutor halls;
those halls whose abandonment is always.

A billion aeons of eating and sleeping letters whose wicked eyes lay closed
forever and ever, even when wondering just how
to escape the galleon spectacles of the cut-and-thrust
whirlwind of academe. Ruminating over the dust and wondering just now
who the hell it is makes me proclaim this madness and why?
Yes, all the while the mind-piece sucks blood and flails.
Every morning, when it seems perhaps yesterday,
without even hoping to certify embryology, I ponder on destruction

A time when time was out of time - then was my semester symbiosis;
a time when ancient acritudes could only just begin
to conceive babied verses in the centrepoint of love's heated veracities

Spending eternity in the launderette, smoking a Craven A and
speculating on the nicotine stains above the driers
with one hand turned, the other burned out, sensing and sensing again
the menopausal sweats of our futurescapes
whistering into the phantasmal bloat-strings of our most nickel hearts

Christ, the dreaming spires of rectitude seem to swim on and on and on,
swaddling as they smuggle versification
deep into their slumsy size tens...O yes, what a season of sickness, what a
sickle-cell of somnambulance this semester of symbiotics has been,
waiting for you, hoping for you, imprisoned in the key-hole ellipse of you,
implacable in my wire-eyed logic of faece thesis and poem ramble,
knocking on the principle doors forever, waiting for the winter of your coming.

© James David Bellamy 1998.