Literature His penis hanging between his legs like a vandalised telephone, or some deep-sea creature that cannot bear solitude, so it hangs on, this naked man is what I am - and yet how unlike me he seems, surprised in this mirror I was dashing past on my way through the house at 4 a.m. And when a light comes on somewhere, quick as a flash he turns away like a man who would keep his truth concealed, this Rosebud, this Jekyll, this Dorian Gray.   The Wheel I found a wheel. That is my sorrow. It cannot sit still and be itself. It wants to lift, shift, roll things, be the centre of change. I give it change. I take it to the theatre; it squeaks. I play it the most wonderful classical music; it lies there and groans. I give it drink, an obvious mistake; it loses its former good humour, roars like a bull with a lance in its throat, totals the room. Then this afternoon, coming home from a match (where it leaned like a surreal headstone), what did we pass? The car plant: cogs, rivets, those white conveyor belt wheels by the score, wheels like a line of gleaming Os, in continuous surprise. And, no surprise, the wheel went into a spin, a whirr, a positive - what was Yeats's word? - gyre! It took me everything I had to get us both back home and settled down. And now, it's late, now I'm tired. The grate has given up the last memory of heat. Sheets of icy rain are drawing in from the North-West, the North-East, and it's clear why the Romans took one look at us out here in Winterland and said, no way. The kind of night when there's nothing better than the promise of rest, of sleep, of Hibernation Once Again as they used to say; when all I want is just to sit like this and listen to the sound of nothing much, there's the wheel. The wheel cries now like a child for my touch. (for Theo Dorgan)   Hall of Mirrors 'I'd like...' says the stranger standing before me, 'that!' He points to something over my shoulder and waits. It's a Travel Agency, though my father calls it The Shop, and brochures that glisten with pictures of girls in all states of undress, stretched on white sands or by pools, cover the walls and counters behind me. I know without looking round. But when I reluctantly do (awkward teenage), it's something I've not seen before: he's pointing to a small gold mirror containing a fish-eye microcosm of the room we're in. It's like the room in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding except, of course, I'm in V-neck and flares, and, thin as a rake though I am, sport a Bruce Lee medallion. It's important to face the world with an iron will. So, to this strangely familiar stranger's reflection I say, 'Sorry, that mirror is not for sale.' Before I can explain this is a Travel Agency, a place you go when you want to go some place, and not some newsagent's or hall of mirrors, my father comes out and says, 'Good man, you're there.' And in an instant it's just the two of us alone. The stranger has vanished, as in Abracadabra. It's the 1970s still, and all I know begins with Abbey Road and ends with Abba.     Flesh The spirit, despite bad press, loves the flesh. It enjoys nothing more than body odour, the warmth of a crotch or the electric touch of lips. Those dark religions which have banned the nether regions to the netherworld, to hell, can cast all the spells they like, can single out for blame those who refuse to feel shame about their bodies - children, the old, the savage inhabitants of the Third World, but most of all those women of loose morals whose torture is somehow part of the quarrel about sanctity and sin and the vessels the soul is to be found in. Enough idols and bones! Enough gleaming chalices and altar stones! I say it again: the spirit loves the flesh, as the hand the glove. And if you doubt me, ask my dying father which he would rather: to be done at last with love and pain, or to leave, but then come back to flesh again. © copyright Pat Boran