The Bell For None Poem by Mark. A Heathcote

How do I validate my thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs?
Why did I see the ghost of a monk running out of my bedroom,
backlit in the doorway, the sun behind him,
age six, in the seventies, on two or three occasions,
during well-lit afternoons — the landing level
on ground once steep, what folklore calls
Withington and Didsbury Priory, feudal manor land in fact.

Was it because at school I was frog-marched to the nit nurse,
handling a metal fine-tooth comb,
and was humiliatingly examined,
and declared to have nits,
and given an odious brown liquid shampooing
back at home in Hill Street —
a land that had been levelled for housing
some eleven or twelve feet, or more.

A shampoo that contained Lindane,
with a toxicity that can cause sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations —
I believe not.
Maybe it was a tripwire
that worked loose the cork held down too long
on a child who only wanted to fizz.

But the poor monk himself, the one I saw,
looked just as astonished as I did,
before darting the length of the L-shaped landing
to the last room, my mother's room —
back to his monastic history,
passing by Yew Tree Farm no doubt,
heading maybe towards the moated hall,
when the bell for None rang out.

Was it a rupture —
a hairline crack in the plaster of the landing,
letting a silence older than the house through,
leeched in like the shampoo,
running cold down the back of my neck.

Medieval Manchester was running
straight through my upstairs landing —
not grey like the pigeons on the windowsill,
not blue like my mother's dinner lady uniform
at Old Moat School,
just brown, like the shampoo,
like the mud left when they levelled Hill Street.

Was it acute pesticide neurotoxicity poisoning,
a bad trip from a banned substance?
Unlikely.

He is running, shadowless still,
reciting his medieval prayers,
remembering a boy with nits in his hair,
and a flair for seeing things that are not even there.

The Latin threads of his paternosters held in breathless silence,
till I was the one whispering amen.