Knees For Kate

1. • Everywhere a wasteland of clapped out muscle,

2. • unhinged wheely-bins overflowing with trash;

3. • if you scope the comings and goings,

4. • you'll find a murky dive,

5. • where inarticulate jerks and low-lifes

6. • meet in an overcrowded space –

7. • a steamy room with loose bodies

8. • locked in unusual positions,

9. • caught on camera, moving slowly,

10. • if at all. A tenor sax bends Mood Indigo

11. • through its horn and behind the bar

12. • a notice tells you not to ask for credit

13. • as a refusal often offends. There are beds

14. • out the back and the floor's wet, where bits

15. • of ragged tissue have been left around since

16. • something went, after a night on the tiles.

17. • Who knows which gang's running the protection

18. • racket in those crooked joints, nothing like the bee's.

Stephen Wilson's first collection of poems, Fluttering Hands, was published by Greenwich Exchange in April 2008. He was born in London in 1944, trained at the Royal Free Hospital and qualified as a doctor in 1968. His early experience of psychiatry was at Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge. In the 1970's he moved to Oxford where he worked for many years at Littlemore and later as a consultant psychotherapist in the Warneford Hospital. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1985 and was formerly Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. During the period 1989–1994 he was an assistant editor for the British Journal of Psychiatry and founding editor of the BJP Review of Books. He retired from medical practice in April 2008.

His poems have appeared in the London Review of Books and other magazines and anthologies. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Book of the Mind, Introducing the Freud Wars, Sigmund Freud (A Pocket Biography) and The Cradle of Violence: Essays on Psychiatry, Psycho-analysis and Literature. He has contributed numerous reviews and articles to academic journals and newspapers including Encounter, TLS, The Guardian, The Independent and the New York Times.

Another of Stephen Wilson's poems was published in the December 2008 issue of the Journal. Reprinted with the permission of Greenwich Exchange.