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I liked that poem, Dom. This is not a new poem, but it's kind of concerned with the same questions: sometimes pain seems to be the truest thing there is it sits behind your eyes like a shivering animal whose vision is a foil wretched with reflections even skins are razors luminous with unshed blood and you understand anew the fragility of touch how real and clumsy it is, a derailed train where corpses burst and shudder and collide discourteously, as the worm wakes in the brainpan sniffing the stench of tears - pain is excess of course and thus shrugged and deadened - there is no time for its midnight pollen drifting through your veins rooting and flowering into hallucinatory lymphomata for shuttered lids and tongues tasting of metal for the impotence of a half formed gesture which gutters out and leaves a trail of rust inside the stilled hand for the clarities which ripple in its silence Best A >It bothered me as a child that general >anaesthetic relieved not only pain, but also >consciousness of pain; or else not pain >at all, but only consciousness - the nerves > >shrieking into deaf ears, so that later >the body is withdrawn, mistrustful, like >the boy who whinged about his broken wrist >all afternoon and was ignored till bathtime > >revealed the swelling. I feared interruption, >though: not disconnection from the body's irks >but some derailing of the train of thought >that ran through even sleep's eventful tunnel - > >not knowing if the me who came back round >would be the me I left there when I went >wherever the injections send you. This at eight >or nine, threatened with treatment for a squint > >that righted itself in time (at eighteen, boozing >blew hours straight off my memory's dandelion >clock, and waking to the body's held-back >grudges was a midday ritual). > >Dominic -- Alison Croggon Editor, Masthead http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/ Home page http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/