Serendipity
Can change the way your mind works.
You chance on a sign:
“PRIVATE SIGN: DO NOT READ”
It doesn’t make any sense –
Or perhaps it does?
You wonder all day
About who could have put it up.
Another, above it,
Reads “WARNING”. It says
“UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL
BE SOLD AS SLAVES.”
A dreadful thought –
Not really very funny,
And yet you’re laughing.
You see a road-sign which depicts
A fire-breathing, flying lizard. It suggests that
You BEWARE OF THE DRAGON.
THERE AND BACK AGAIN LANE
Is a T-junction in Bristol 8.
It takes you nowhere.
These random bits
Of street furniture can be savoured.
No one seems to be selling anything.
Perhaps we’re being visited
By entities bored of their lives in some
Parallel universe?
Perhaps the unfamiliar
Is being strewn about like lifebelts
On the surface of normality
By a maverick meta-programmer
Of the human bio-computer hoping to open up
Man’s mind to radical change?
Why does the word ‘bed’
Look like a bed? Why ever
Would that be? Are we in flux?
Why do clouds take the form
Of angels, or elephants, or benign hands
With long, wispy fingers?
Someone has scrawled on an Oxford Street shop-front
In thick black felt pen:
“You are a ghost,
Driving a meat-covered skeleton
Made of stardust.
What are you afraid of?”
The only possible response
Surges up inside your head
And you impetuously retort, ‘Nothing!”
Someone is giving your cerebellum
Some acupuncture to make sure
That you don’t give up the daydream –
To remove your clothes, for example,
And to ride your inner unicorn
Through the gates of utopia,
Should you be inclined.
Eris, the goddess
Of chance and chaos, has to be
Lurking hereabouts –
Sowing fruitful confusion,
And devising unexpected plot twists
For the unwary,
Especially for those
With the rigid belief that the world
Is governed by reason.
Heathcote Williams