The Shuttle

That swollen winter lying glandular
in my half-hallucinated rain-forest
of a bedroom, I watched myself drifting
to the window on a tide of perspiration.
Pyjamas like cling film, eyelids in flames,
I tuned in and out of the fever they thought
would take me - where I never knew,
nobody said, I was just the passenger
and this the tropical winter of my brush with
(low whispers) what comes after , something dim
I knew I touched but could not see.

Alone for hours I watched the shuttle graze
its night-acres, padding the black obsidian
fields of space to the echoes of long gone,
...