Fred Johnston

The sun always grabs us by surprise its yolky wash on a pub wall the clumsy spill round the black legs of café tables. it rains so frequently it’s like the sea trying to climb out of its skin. The beach is a runnelled grey, an old man’s face in cardiac arrest. we have stopped being pretty, all of us too many pills and pill-packs embarrass our pockets; the future served up three times daily after meals.

Perhaps like Superman I will see through walls now that I’ve tanked up on isotopes lighting bruise-blue veins and sparking neon from suspect bones the camera, smoochy as a lover will map out the secret places where little bumpy evils lurk jigsawing until I am like a find in a dig and there it is, the whole of me in middle-age nothing for a lover to caress a Hallowe’en thing with the ugly quiet of the dead. Give this clatter of razor-white calcium a name even as its anonymity claims its non-identity a figure polished up from a mass grave a chip in the skull where the bullet went in not a movement or the image will blur as if a spirit wrestled its way out of the frame call it a soul, if you will, it won’t matter I am my own atrocity, I know that now.

Forgive the figure curled like a question mark in the corner no one speaks his language He tried to read a newspaper and failed, print swimming like tadpoles in a jar At night he speaks to Napoléon of empires and dying horses in the day-room he recalls his wife She comes as ghosted as a footballer’s memoir, her face a jigsaw puzzle he can’t resolve In Occupational Therapy he’s made a basket, a crazy weave to hold his ashes; he doodles poems On toilet paper when no one’s around, the paper splits words sliced and snowing on the pissy tiles.

We went about in circles one hand on the next man’s shoulders something out of Gogol or Great War blind: we ate chicken soup, which gave one old man stomach cramps: he was taken away, snotting. A trustee, if such a thing is imaginable in a lunatic asylum, clicked around as part of a service-trolley, selling cigarettes and bars of chocolate but never newspapers; no telling what bad news could do to the mind. My wife arrived to say she had custody of our children; we wept dutifully and she left, a slim woman keying expertly the buttons on the door’s security pad — some, receiving similar news, screamed.