The frazzled dragoons wattle-whip
the whole whorlhouse
of albino morphos who slurp
savannahs gerrymandered
by scatterbrained whippersnappers
Each catnaps in my eyrie
of neon smithereens
like a voluted hatchet
of waterfalling wheelchairs
My third deathwish is to be
rubbed out by a lobster
on a sleet-sheeted fire-escape
to the Quark epoch
when potbellied straitjackets
spelunked the brick bra
of a slattern frisbeeing
a swatch of Kansas
into a loblolly to spatter
the Jagger-lipped nostrils
the laundromat-hatted vampyres
the stairway-stringed violins
suffused with the violence
of the starwhale
flashing my eyelids back
to a rooftop tattooed
by bat-splinters
on the pitrises of Jesusfreaks
caroming off the fog
when isolate gryphons dissolve
their drainpipes in the deathmask
which slips through slots
only faceless coins fit
and which rides a mechanical
glowworm
stiff as a stiletto
stuck in a lizard
Like it I lie down
with the ocean-floored skyscrapers
a carpet for the scarecrow
sleeprunning to the airport
to catch a horse



Neurotics

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it's said, is free:
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now. For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defence against the non-existent.

--Philip Larkin