Skull X-Ray Poem by Laurence de B Anderson

Against black oblong light,
anxious patient, held,
then with the doctor steps cautious into celluloid night:
into the smoke mirror hall.
To quest this ghostly henge, block molars, calcined roots
unsprung from circle to Baron Samedi chorus line,
this knowing grin's decay, will it answer yes or no?
No, to possess this vault, this night, we must go down
with moonless Baron Samedi into flat dimension,
into his plastic sea, and so,
we came by night to the blood-red shore,
and wandered amid the glittering trees,
searching, searching for,
the golden apples of the Hesperides.

No light showed behind the dark wood
where the leopard paced fixedly round
‘I am lost, ' he said and showed the image of a running man
briefly in his eye.
Then between his soft, steel paws
a flaming hare leaps from the ground
and runs off, singing of the golden city.
‘Chase it down yourselves, ' said the cat, ‘I am too old.'
We bowed, retreated to what we were sure of - not much,
but of some comfort - what we could not go back to likewise,
down in the bay, that blue yacht resembling our childhood home
(though smaller) , her anchor now was not our stone.

So we went up the rearing clouds, the orbit rims,
treading the unfurling lilies lighting our way uphill
along the nasal bones.
We recalled our pilot, leather-scrapped old mummy
asleep in his pew.
Baron Samedi and never a word!
The gully creek that once held a tongue
sheds water from its eyes.
Ahead the shrouded city wakes like a dream.
The walls will glare with the cries of bread sellers.
Today a tower will fall
rotted by dry worms acting as they must.
2 children and their mother die
beneath the fall - don't ask why -
just troll deep water with a lure,
control the curly questions with your sweeping rod
(called God)
- catch nothing as usual.

Unsure of a welcome in the ash dome, the cranium,
stumbling, we prepare for rejection while grateful.
(as refugees back in their former home
step over dried blood on the doorstep) .
Luckily the mind is an exit
though suited for battle,
the heart grating bone and leaking wine
at every mesh, avoiding the inspectors,
the militias!
‘There are no tumours, no fluid levels.'
Relief, but what then is the source of pain?
?
Doctor and patient, two faint glowing things,
companions, ‘Us! ' look, see each other in the labyrinthine grey.
We are the gold, not to be plucked
and just sufficient, though destined for
the winding sheet and the worm.