My faint hope, brain: you will keep your head, which is also mine, above water at the end of days, a fist of jelly in a hard case, holding the fort in your bony keep, with absolute power, absolute whimsy, our high pedestal of meat under your single thick white thumb, urged on by the snap and electric crack of whip-thin fingers, your slave castes fighting to the last cell: those as oaken as heart, those as naïve as lung, and those of no fixed abode, sleepless in the wet, rushing streets until the great Reich of the flesh falls, and it's just the two of us, locked in the jail-cell of the skull, less eagle’s nest than Fuhrerbunker. Or is it just me alone by then, brainless at last, mindful at last that my short sweet leg in the billion year relay-race is run, still vainly gripping my slippery little baton of consciousness, desperately trying not to drop it, stupidly hoping for a waiting hand, an open palm.
This poem, and another original poem by Peter Goldsworthy, appears in Volume III of Agony.