ANTIWORLDS
THE WOUND-HEALER
Wound-healing is my trade Healing of wounds ..
Robespierre himself that chopper-off of heads
one far-off night entrusted to me
that fruitless task of glueing the heads back on
It's thundery I'm getting sick and troubled
It is an effort now to lift those severed heads
a hand perhaps the wrist-joint of a child
or a fistful of hair
I can still manage to pick up and glue back to the dead body
The mud's a nuisance How many pairs of
boots
have I worn out - and how many ribbons
accepted gratefully as a reward for my service
And rightly so For surely it is not a matter of indifference
if
some dead person who adorns our history
is without a head or without nails or whether
his ribs are stove in for world without end
I'd say it matters And looking after the dead
is a more serious task than looking after the living
But as I've said before - I'm getting weak
and dazed so that
in
the mornings I scarcely lift
my
own head
from the gutter
where it falls There are dreams and non-dreams for a dream
is what I long for whether sleeping or waking
and what does not come true And in my non-dreams I see all the
things
which terrify me which depress me
waist-deep
in
clay All these are lifelike
only more real Thus I see myself
in fields thick with carnivorous grasses
and enormous cabbage-heads which groan
and howl with pain for they are half rotten
And phosphorescent fungi which at midday
raise heads of greying death
and rocking menacingly long in the rhythm
of some strange song that has dissolved like plasma
I'm below ground And sad damp clay
