Jeremy Reed

Allowance of Suffering

Months of withdrawal, and your reclusion

was so extreme we'd code to disbelieve

in thinking that we'd find you visible

should an emergency arise. You seemed

to be a locus of meditation,

but that your silence was not thinking free,

but one of contraction! a hermit crab

that can't retract, because Ite legs are bleeding,

and the shall would coagulate with blood.

And with unvarying regularity,

we'd place a bowl of food outside your door,

and a carafe of water. The food would

come back untouched; the water black as ink

as though yoir hair colouring had run out,

You'd taken In five hundred vallum;

and asked for morphine, and a clean syringe.

That nervous jotting on paper was our

sole knowledge you were atill alive, and yet

It didn't match your own graphology.

You'd boarded up the window to the street

before that last day we saw you return,

white-faced, and walking three feet from the floor,

your whole nervous system externalized;

blood streaming from a nostril, and loud prayer

Issuing unconsciously from your mouth.

We didn't know nor expected to now...

nothing would ever induce you to talk.

We didn't care enough to break down the door.

Jeremy Reed's Outtakes from the Black Russian Airman's Club - poems from 1978-79 - will be published by Waterloo in 2009.