Wallpaper

She began to go mad on a Tuesday.
It was the helicopters, she said;
the noise of their rotors
kept her up.
Spying, she winked,
that's their game. She'd caught
the twinkle twinkle
of a telephoto lens
in a black chopper cockpit
more than once.

Caffeine carried her
like a pterodactyl.
While she underscored words
in papers with a blue ballpoint
her prize-winning topiary turned
to burst misshapes
and crocuses drooped
like dysentery-stricken legionnaires.
She stopped up taps with rags.
Gas,
she whispered,
I can't talk about it
over the phone.

She missed Christmas
and three family weddings,
explaining
on headed notepaper
she had been called to Westminster
for an audience with the Prime Minister
and God.
She was quite
matter-of-fact about it.
Indignant,
almost.

At last,
a treatise
with marginal notes and diagrams
began feeding
from the letterbox
on a roll of wallpaper,
a long, tattooed tongue
that told tales about

how we are all born from eggs
and how the pterodactyls are coming back
and how truth is a kind of topiary
and how newspapers are rags
and how Christmas is a telephoto diagram
and how God has dysentery
and how crocuses have rotors and tongues
and how our hearts
are alien pilots in cockpits of bone,
working us with joysticks,
making us miss and long and twinkle
at weddings.