This week I have been mostly petrified,
and in between such periods I have been jelly.
Do you remember the action of freeze and thaw?
Surely you do, it’s the one clear spot
in the fogged grey landscape of your old school geography.
Well that is the state of me.
I am eroding.

When this process began I cannot tell,
I only know that it continues.

I like to think that the fragments of my self
are at least collecting somewhere,
perhaps in my socks.
If I had the will I might tip out the sediment nightly
and store it in a glass jar by the bed.

I am of course losing weight,
though not so much weight as gravitas.
Conventional scales won’t register the change
as I have tried to explain to my doctor,
but he smiles the smile of an indulgent uncle
then writes me another little green ticket
for little blue pills.

When the last essential ballast is crumbled and gone
Into that that jar, nicely striped,
my substance will rise
like a cheap balloon, leaving
something empty and indifferent
and insensitive.

Hooray is what I say!
I, or that thing that is I minus self,
might at last succeed by blundering on into money regardless,
by making the right decisions.
Judgement is right because there’s no backchat inside
to say otherwise.

Bring it on.

All the Barbies set adrift
in a dinghy small and pink,
smiling in that scary way
even when they start to sink,

“I just love sharks!” a Barbie said,
as one attacked and bit her head,
“Hey, wait for us, that looks like fun!”
said all the others, “Here we come!”
and pretty soon they all were dead.

Somewhere seabirds pipe and bleat,
gathered on a dark low tide.
Shapes and shadows line the fleet,
cold and calling.

In the shore hide facing north
I'm focussing black ten-by-forties,
hunched against the wall for warmth;
the tide still falling.

Looking out, I'm looking back,
thirty years have ebbed away;
the boy, his joy, his haversac,
his notebook scrawling;

I see him, tremulous, wild-eyed,
among the plovers, curlew, knot,
a loosed dog shakes them and he flies,
the seawall salt sting cuts and dries;
there's no recalling.

My job is to find the Higgs Boson
with experiments I hope might expose one,
and when asked, day to day,
to define it I say:
'a neutrino without any clothes on'.

The truck was full, its open back
heaped black, and there a leg, an eye;
daylight thickened on the sweating
stack and blurred the further sky.

Ten feet away I pulled the key
and let the engine jolt and choke,
the CD skipped, an old riff jarred,
a line of meaning stopped and broke

and something in that silence straightened,
left a splintered ****** mark,
I closed my eyes and felt it there,
hating in the blinded dark.