Fox Dream in G

      Until, with a sharp hot stench of fox
      it enters the hole of the head.
      - Ted Hughes.

The corner of my molar is jagged.
Tongue plays tooth and swells rough with the pain of it.
All night I grind out the desire for nicoteine.
I dream St Elmo's fire, trickling across my dentistry.

My stomach gurgles woe.
Nerve paths lurch groggy - drunk with sickness, rememberance.
Seven years to recover. Seven years I won't have.
I dream ostracism, transmuting nausea.

Some blonde-haired fraternal cult controls the college.
One of them busts me on the mouth like a boxer.
I'm trying to talk through a jaw fused solid,
     bone beaten into one by reverberation.

The fox just stands and looks at me.
The fox as large as an Alsatian.
The fox with dark eyes, wet with concern.
The fox whose stink fills my lungs, my nose, my breathing and dreaming.

Lungs like scar tissue, peel and itch
and raven for something on which to gnaw.
Lungs, I give you the meat of this stink,
this heady funk of fox to be your chew toy.
Lungs I will fill you with this stench and hold it
till your cries are muffled like a child beneath a cat.

The dream and the body and the mind
are one inside the other, nestled like Chinese boxes, like Russian dolls.
In my dream the fox now assumes the body of a tiger,
howl and roar and set to flight the pricks against which I'm trying to kick,
the pricks of addiction's herbochemical trick.

And the fox - is he my trick?
Voice of some inner sutra, some immune system manifestation?
Or is he, as with his smell - sharp and alien and ancient -
borne in on the night from that primordial place that answers need?
The outwith, of which we can only dream.