In repetitious dopamine;
In staring at a blinking screen;
In visions of the low and mean;
In desklamplight; in Parsons Green;
He leaves his mind behind.
His window shows the pub below,
The Golden Goose, whose Georgian glow
He once had tried to get to know,
But now he lingers - will not go -
For he has chanced to find
A new way to unwind.
His books lie on the shelf, unread
Above his unencumbered bed.
The radiator moans, unbled,
As synapses across his head
Explode, and tear, and blind
The fabric of his mind.
Not in lust or irritation,
Nor in anger nor elation,
Had he hastened from the station,
But in pink intoxication -
If only to unwind.
Resuming the adventurings
That ape the Asiatic kings,
His ventilated hard drive sings;
The hours pass like paltry things,
And yet he does not mind:
For he has crossed the narrow sea,
Through Europe and to Italy,
To Cervia and Trapani,
Again to find the fantasy
That taught him to unwind
Among the much-maligned.
Maligned they are, and rightly so,
For all that he admires would go
Cavorting to its overthrow,
Should overmany people know
Abandonment of mind
To be so easy and so near,
So ripe and full, so fresh and clear -
And cheaper than a pint of beer.
Log on, sign in, and disappear: The fabric we unwind,
They say, was once refined.
The overheating hard drive hums,
When suddenly a message comes,
Offering darker deliriums.
He rubs his temples with his thumbs
As thoughts of every kind
Career across his mind.
The message is precise and keen;
The woman waits at Golders Green;
This world is wider than the screen
And fouller than he had foreseen -
But thus do men unwind.
A student of theology
Should understand duality
Of vision and carnality.
'Leisure,' he thinks, 'has wasted me
And unemployed my mind.'
His iPhone trills; it is his friend,
Outside the Goose; does he descend
And drink to nescience, or else wend
His way to its erotic end?
The fabric's quick to bind
But awful to unwind.
