The Next Day

I return from Nice, staked with fear.
All the terrors of every b-movie?
My scientist friend must be crazy.
Is the train hot? The train is hot.
Sunlight is doing a bombing run
on the London of my eyes. Flashes,
but I can't lay my hands on any Blitz Spirit.
I read the papers tossed down by others,
but there is little news.
Hear that clicking?
Like the key turning on a wind-up tin toy?
That is either my jaw, or the dipole field
that surrounds me. I am an electric fish.
Any object that trips my ticking radar
is subject to the snapping teeth
of an eye or ear. I'm so on edge
it's not even theatre.
The accent of girls from Leicester
is sweet enough to slow my pulse a little,
but the track rattles like a suspicious package,
and the wires churr like violins trembling
and the silhouetted tops of trees
go by like the line on a heart monitor.