My brain is a fool
Mark Waldron

Sitting in the plush lounge with the dim lighting,
it doesn’t know what’s happening.

It’s an ingénue, a yokel, ordering drinks shyly,
eating peanuts, licking its fat fingers.

It’s a Rubenesque shepherdess my brain, all adrift in
the big city, its sheep lost long ago.

Poor brain, you don’t know who you are, whistling
the tunes you wrote for another age.

My dumb brain it can’t even scrawl its own name on
the wall because the pen keeps falling out.

In order to stave off the dark my stupid brain is hiding
in an alleyway twiddling the labyrinthine

crevices that it has. My brain don’t know if it’s coming
or going. I know though: It’s going.

Mark Waldron was born in New York in 1960 and grew up in London. He works in the advertising business and lives in East London with his wife and son. He began writing poetry in his early 40s. He published two collections with Salt, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), and his third collection, Meanwhile, Trees, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016.

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