Blue

You say to the boy open your eyes

When he opens his eyes and sees the light

You make him cry out.

Saying O Blue come forth

O Blue arise

O Blue ascend

O Blue come in

I am sitting with some friends in this café

drinking coffee

served by young refugees from Bosnia.

The war rages across the newspapers

and through the ruined streets of Sarajevo.

Tania said:

"Your clothes are on back to front and inside out."

Since there were only two of us here I took them off and put them right

then and there.

I am always here before the doors open.

What need of so much news from abroad

while all that concerns either life or death

is all transacting and at work within me.

I step off the kerb and a cyclist nearly knocks me down.

Flying in from the dark

he nearly parted my hair.

I step into a blue funk.

The doctor in St Bartholomew's Hospital thought

he could detect lesions in my retina

the pupils dilated with belladonna

the torch shone into them with a terrible blinding light.

Look left Look down

Look up Look right

Blue flashes in my eyes.

Blue Bottle buzzing

Lazy days

The sky blue butterfly Sways on a cornflower

Lost in the warmth Of the blue heat haze

Singing the blues

Quiet and slowly Blue of my heart

Blue of my dreams Slow blue love

Of delphinium days

Blue is the universal love

in which man bathes it is the terrestrial paradise.

I'm walking along the beach in a howling gale

Another year is passing

In the roaring waters I hear the voices of dead friends

Love is life that lasts forever.

My heart's memory turns to you

David.

Howard.

Graham.

Terry.

PauI.

David.

Howard.

Graham.

Terry.

PauI.

David.

Howard.

Graham.

Terry.

PauI.

But what if this present Were the world's last night

In the setting sun your love fades

Dies in the moonlight Fails to rise

Thrice denied by cock crow

In the dawn's first light

Look left Look down

Look up Look right

The camera flash Atomic bright Photos

The CMV a green moon then the world turns magenta

My retina Is a distant planet

A red Mars From a Boy's Own comic

With yellow infection Bubbling at the corner

I said this looks like a planet

The doctor says:

" Oh, I think It looks like a pizza "

The worst of the illness is the uncertainty.

I've played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six years.

Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.

I am home with the blinds drawn

H.B. is back from Newcastle But gone out

The washing Machine is roaring away And the fridge is defrosting

These are his favourite sounds

I've been given the option of being an in-patient at the hospital

or coming in twice a day to be hooked to a drip.

My vision will never come back.

The retina is destroyed,

though when the bleeding stops

what is left of my sight might improve.

I have to come to terms with sightlessness.

If I lose half my sight will my vision be halved?

The virus rages fierce.

I have no friends now who are not dead or dying.

Like a blue frost it caught them.

At work, at the cinema,

on marches and beaches.

In churches on their knees, running,

flying, silent or shouting protest.

It started with sweats in the night

and swollen glands.

Then the black cancers spread across their faces

as they fought for breath

TB and pneumonia hammered at the lungs

and Toxo at the brain.

Reflexes scrambled

sweat poured through hair

matted like lianas in the tropical forest.

Voices slurred

and then were lost forever.

My pen chased this story across the page

tossed this way and that in the storm.

The blood of sensibility is blue

I consecrate myself To fìnd its most perfect expression

My sight failed a little more in the night

H.B. offers me his blood

It will kill everything he says

The drip of DHPG Trills like a canary

I am accompanied by a shadow into which H.B. appears and disappears.

I have lost the sight on the periphery of my right eye.

I hold out my hands before me

and slowly part them.

At a certain moment they disappear out of the corner of my eyes.

This is how I used to see.

Now if I repeat the motion, this is all I see.

I shall not win the battle against the virus

in spite of the slogans like `Living with AIDS'.

The virus was appropriated by the well

so we have to live with AIDS

while they spread the quilt

for the moths of Ithaca across the wine dark sea.

Awareness is heightened by this, but something else is lost.

A sense of reality drowned in theatre.

Thinking blind, becoming blind.

In the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb.

The nurse fights to find a vein in my right arm.

We give up after five attempts.

Would you faint if someone stuck a needle into your arm?

I've got used to it but I still shut my eyes.

The Gautama Buddha instructs me

to walk away from illness.

But he wasn't attached to a drip.

Fate is the strongest

Fate

Fated

Fatal

I resign myself to Fate

Blind Fate

The drip stings

A lump swells up in my arm

Out comes the drip

An electric shock sparks up my arm

How can I walk away with a drip attached to me?

How am I going to walk away from this?

I fìll this room with the echo of many voices

Who passed time here

Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint

The sun comes and floods this empty room

I call it my room My room

has welcomed many summers

Embraced laughter and tears

Can it fìll itself with your laughter

Each word a sunbeam Glancing in the light

This is the song of My Room

Blue stretches

yawns

and is awake.

PauI.

Howard.

There is a photo in the newspaper this morning of refugees leaving Bosnia.

They look out of time.

Peasant women with scarves and black dresses

stepped from the pages of an older Europe.

One of them has lost her three children.

Lightning flickers through the hospital window

at the door an elderly woman stands waiting for the rain to clear.

I ask her if I can give her a lift

I've hailed a taxi.

"Can you take me to Holborn tube?"

On the way she breaks down in tears.

She has come from Edinburgh.

Her son is in the ward

he has meningitis and has lost the use of his legs

I'm helpless as the tears flow.

I can't see her.

Just the sound of her sobbing.

One can know the whole world

Without stirring abroad

Without looking out of the window

One can see the way of heaven

The further one goes The less one knows

In the pandemonium of image

I present you with the universal Blue

Blue an open door to soul

An infinite possibility

Becoming tangible

Here I am again in the waiting room.

Hell on Earth is a waiting room.

Here you know you are not in control of yourself,

waiting for your name to be called:

"712213"