When you got married when you are obsessional

I want to make a timetable for everything and not on your phone.

So what time  to get up in the morning

Which days you will have sex with your partner

What day is you have sex with somebody else

You won’t have sex

What time you allow for sex

President Kennedy had 10 minutes

So he could sleep with many women 6 per hour.

it was different with his wife

We hope so

Prthaps he spent 10 minutes talking to to the Soviet leader

We hope so

I think so

There was the Cuban missile crisis

Coming around again somewhere else in the east of Europe

0I kept hearing it on the radio in 1962

I was terrified but nobody in the house mentioned it

I was taking the Cambridge entrance exam

That didn’t help.

We had the Hungarians on the radio in 1956 begging for help

Noone ever talked about that either.

Their advisors said that if we saw a nuclear bomb falling we should lie down in the hedgerows

We didn’t have any being industrial town

And to take some tampax into the air raid shelter

But the Bishop of Salford did not allow women to wear tampax

They must save their virginity for a man.

The nuns did not look in our knickers to see that little string.

But they might have done and nobody would have protested because we had to do what we were told.

Do you believe me?

I don’t tell lies at least not as many as Boris Johnson even if I did spend some time in Oxford

0n the Cherwell or the River Thames in Christ church meadow

I dated an Afrikaaner

He was nervous when my friends askedbquestions about the blacks and apartheid

I have never heard of it because in Lancashire women were not supposed to talk about politics or even know anything.

I did hear  MacMillan saying You never had It so good.

I was wondering what he meant and it wasn’t that long since we had the Hungarians on the radio screaming

So I thought maybe he’s right

Whatever was on the radio

We never talked about it amongst ourselves

When I was 15 I went to Manchester.

I saw a book shop.

You can guess the rest

Well you better get on with the timetable

Sex on 4 days even in February

4 days a week that is

16 times in February

And mayhe a 17 times in March.

This would help you understand

It’s getting late but no one brought my dinner

I’m not hungry I shan’t bother to eat

Some people like anything but I don’t

I want butter beans flour cakes or teacakes

I want chips fried in beef dripping

Yeah I don’t like just anything

To make your own dinner requires work

But you can choose what you want

You don’t care

Then that’s alright

if I didn’t eat I would die eventually

but it would be painful

My reptile brain is still switched on.

The crocodile wants to eat maybe a human being

The mammal has my orders to go to a restaurant and get some French food

The human is wondering how much money I’ve got left and trying to to make sense of this life

But that ruins my appetite. Lose weight

The animal in me is anxious but I can see a lion but no one else could see

I will escape this because my adrenaline is pumping

but those relaxed people will die.

It’s a simple as that

They are like some other beings altogether

the cry more animal than human

The wordless pathos,

musical,disturbing

They have gone back to a troubled and unimagined infancy

but no mother responds to such a nightmare of overgrown voice boxes

the cry of a rabbit wolf in a trap

it’s the shriek in the wall cry of a baby in a psychotic nightmare.

Nicholas haunts Sylvia in the evocative memory of Ariel

And so it will end for you and me

Trapped in this old body with its old brain

on and on they cry

help me, help me,help me

nurse nurse

I want the manager I want the manager

I don’t want to be here I don’t want to be here

I want to go home

Help me

we don’t listen because they have dementia

what they say has no meaning.

that’s our defence

I am the norm

You are abnormal

but you smiled when I asked you if you would like your hair dyed pink

and I know you love the music therapist.

Your smell repels

Alas

Is this where Jesus dwells

If you did this to the least of my little ones, you did it to me. We

you haven’t forgotten about Eros

you are still hoping to find love

you are not dead yet but you can’ wait to go home