Comfort Me Room

I

Comfort me room, with music and red curtains.
I tell of a fiasco
(encourage me with bright domestic patterns)
of loneliness in Glasgow.

I am too cold to say much.
I need a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

I trust this room. A summerful of colours
fresh and warm as newmade bricks
is here. But in my head a king is callous
and something breaks and breaks.

Comfort me room, with music and red curtains.
I need your patterns.

II

Something is taking over
as though there were a new world to discover,
the secrets of the sewer and the dustbin.
I need an aspirin.

The king swats insects at his ease,
they claim no trial.
And something breaks and breaks behind my eyes,
as egg-shell frail.

But I’m hard-boiled. You’ll get no crumbling noise
of friendless days.
But cold and jelled I wish to blaze,
I wish to blaze.

III

I wish to blazes I could blaze. Enough!
I need to fall in love.
Dammit!
I want to climb the mountain, not reach the summit.

IV

Glasgow at night is full of glowing insects,
well-trained, more or less.
They scatter at my steps.
I need to creep down south, to stretch and laze…

somewhere like Oceania, where I could doze
with birds of paradise…
I could bomb and skewer
the hollow cheeriness of St George’s Square,

smash in derision
the senile knobbliness of St Enoch Station,
call out the hearses
and burn these black pretentious houses…

I tell you, if you’re dreaming in self-pity,
Glasgow’s the city.
Yes, I’m “spittin’ ma bibful”.
I need a pep-pill.

Dismal as Glasgow, then, and out of luck,
having one need only, a not unusual case,
dismal as Glasgow and as ludicrous,
to talk and talk and talk and talk…

Comfort me room, with music and red curtains,
while something breaks to form new patterns…

It was a difficult time for me. I had begun postgraduate work in Glasgow, but family issues on the one hand and a struggle with my own intellectual development on the other made for hard going. Life began to boil up somewhat.