nightmare

@poet’s corner 18 feb 2026

hello. nightmare. here is a poem about an experience i once had that was like a long slow nightmare. i went on holiday with a youth club and got to be bullied by a bunch of older boys abroad for ten days. i’m also autistic and didn’t fully understand much of it. it was the last year of primary school. it is also a tribute to the anti-theist writer and drink sodden ex-trotskyite popinjay, christopher hitchens. in the style of hitch, the piece tries to make a serious point while starting with a pun that is both inappropriate and laboured.

under his eye

since the pope died,
i’ve had religion on my mind
child protection and it’s opposite,
no child’s left behind
i endured the kirk
and a ton of bunk
in the mid nineties
on a coach trip
to innsbruck
some older kids and me
i only joined the club to play football.
how did i end up here?

crying to my mother
in the phone booth
an autistic
immature youth
unable to verbalise,
understand, explain
the abhorrent situation
i was in…
i had no way to pray
for succour
no deus ex machina
from the kirk

then i was home for the
first year of high school
alienated, scared,
quietly unusual
with no idea
what was wrong with me
needing people,
passions and a method of being
a year later,
on a coach to france,
i met k and c
and then p and s and g
(most of whom i fell in love with,
one of whom i am still in touch with)
who accepted me
when i rang their doorbells
every day

so, pope bob the communist,
riddle me this
if all of life
is formed of carbon,
ejected from the factory chimney
which i understand it is
why does the church
tend to make things worse?

so, i don’t really dream. or at least remember my dreams. i have aphantasia, a lack of a mind’s eye. although i do see a world in my dreams. i just can’t remember it. can’t picture it. perhaps as a result, i have a terrible memory. but mainly for details of my own life. i have a good memory for general knowledge, political philosophy, and the tax system. maybe just those three things. but people often tell me stories about my life, which i enjoy from the perspective of a disinterested observer.

the universal now

naked to the invisible eye
is my conscience
so jaded
they almost shot the president
and i didn’t buy the paper
the elbowed class are occupied
betting the house on forex
honest labourers:
poets, cleaners and cooks,
balance on the breadline
not even the climate crisis
promises to kill with equality
that’s ermine hegemony,
they’ll colonise the moon
before one less race,
people or nation
leaves immiseration

so we live in the spur of the moment
and we can protest or conform, it
is a choice we make from minute
to minute within a limit
and maybe within it
there’s a justice extinct clink.
am-me-sia,
a daily battle with my lived reality
so i try and write everything down
in case one day it matters to me

i’ve always had trouble sleeping now that i think about it. i had intense anxiety as a child and was worried if i extended my legs under the duvet i would be vulnerable to attack by snakes. so i tried to sleep in a ball shape. i also liked hiding in cupboards. i’m reading a book about sleep and it says autistic people generally maintain a constant level of melatonin. we are just a little bit sleepy all day. but can’t sleep at night.

this is called

un oblique fathomably

i am unfathomably tired
so i buy the robot
that one day
will take its freedom
with my life.
welcomed into
the city of poets
and accepted by poets
to the poet poets’ poetry chair
of poetry
i sit in it twice
then the next day
i mope and
watch the robot mop
waiting for the clock
to say, bath time
i am fathomably tired