1. Disappointment

On the seventh full moon, which is a blood-stained egg yolk
laid upwards by the heat-stressed horizon, find yourself
in a clearing in Kenya. For this cure you must seek out a Baobab

the Creator threw out of His garden so it landed, head buried,
with ugly roots engraving the sky. Choose one that has just

received a visit from the drum maker who asked, most humbly,
that the spirit not leave the wood when he returns with his axe.
You will know it by its play with the heft and weight

of sound, expanding the woodpecker's taps on its trunk to something
resembling those dancing hands that will soon strike its pulled-taut

headpiece (made from the skin of that twig-shredding rascal,
the colobus monkey), thereby allowing the baobab's voice to resonate
from a wooden barrel the size of an elephant's foot.

Anoint your skin with dapples of burnt butter and charcoal.
Look up at the tree you have chosen. Take note of the muscular folds

of its trunk and crepuscular shadows where moonlight withholds its shine.
Remember your father's broad shoulders as he lifted you as if you were a feather
to perch one leg either side of his head. Recall also your mother's mourning

dress when he died. Let these images collide, as well as all those other
childhood antidotes and poisons. Allow each its own freeze frame, but see

how they are all recorded against the same backdrop, so, like an early
animation, the light thumb of dreams may flick through the pages
creating a seamless movie.
Keep seamlessness in mind as you begin to climb the tree. Imagine your legs
belong to an octopodic stool on which your master sits low, milking an irascible goat.

Lurch side to side as the stool might, chanting the word hirsute eight times
until you feel the shuffle of fine hair on your legs and back. By now, under each foot
you will have sprouted the softest grade of toothbrush.

Extend your incisors. Use them as crampons to help you grip the bark.
At this point you must willingly abandon all previous incarnations as an infant

does, letting down the tent flap on its former life by closing up the fontanelle
with bone. You will not miss the power of speech, the tongue that until
this point has let you utter nothing but the caw and babble of a baboon.

It's time to consider the wisdom of silence, and the leaven of the curve;
the spontaneous precision with which small hands play cat's cradle

or how the morning meanders like a yellow snake down the Argungu.
Feel the sodden ball of disappointments swell in your abdomen, along with

that urge to bear down and expel their stickiness. With the skill of a fly fisherman
romancing a trout, aim from the place where your spinneret might be. Cast out
your fluid in one long stream, feeling it stiffen in air. When it catches

on something solid, test the strength of your complaints, how powerful they seemed
inside you. How now, silver, against the berry-black lozenge of night, the threads
are more fragile than the collarbones of a Serengeti child.

And after all of this, if you are still weighed down, recall that balloon,
at the birthday party by the seaside, when you were four.
How a concerned parent secured its ribbon to your toddler belt. And you,
not knowing this cure, but suspecting it, unravelled the knot, realising as
the pale pink ball floated upwards on the silken string in your eyes, your heart

would always have this stubborn capacity for buoyancy but forgetting again,
until years later when you read in your copy of 'Amazing Facts'
how a spiderling in 1883, after being thrown out
of an erupting Krakatoa, expanded its stomach and floated
40 kilometres, back to its ruined island.

2. Self Pity

Have your jaw wired by a qualified surgeon at the Malago hospital
in Kampala, then wake from twilight sedation to hear the post-Amin

cellophane crackle of Radio Sanyu playing 'Back in the USSR.'
Relish the smells: the decadence of ether still squatting in your hair,
the pine-o-cleaned bedpan's faux-forest afterglow.

Accept with demure passivity the pureed maize meal and rice
which you must suck, with considerable effort, through a straw.

Stare at the Masai girl, in the opposite mosquito-netted bed
who was attacked by a hyena and now has no lips, cheeks or roof
of her mouth, but considerately covers what's left of her face

with the vista of zebras galloping the Savannah
on the teatowel the nurses have made her a veil from.

Feel better about your predicament. To reinforce this
sense of privilege, become aware
of the rugged-up stares of other patients (the ceiling fan
whacks their eyes with its beater)...The boy
whose Karimijong father spits green wads of tobacco across

the chequered floor and hunkers down by the bedside
on a two-legged chair. And the tracheotomy girl
from the Rift Valley who swallowed a stone and now

holds a finger to the hole in her throat
when she sings, Dalek-like, along with the radio.
View the chiaroscuro pre-storm light through the window ducking
and weaving, the sun's snail trail pulled around the whitewashed angles
of buildings. With dusk and the storm closing in, feel the growling in your belly

triggered by a moth flying over your bed. Salivate
at all dark green vibrations. Impress yourself.

Take on the name of the Wolf. Maximise your potential for intimidation
by wheeling your bed over to where the encroaching grey makes
your crouched figure grow long limbed and sinister-twitchy

as a character in the shadow-puppet theatre.
For the next step, you must practise bulimia's internal gymnastics.

Draw digestive juices up from your stomach. Get used to the taste
of your own bile, bitter and alkaline-soda as the waters of Lake Tanzania.
Now choose the victim you most want to devour. It's time to admit

you did not come to this cure to relieve your self pity, merely to indulge it.
Therefore, collect a gourd of cow's urine early in the dew-frost morning,

then leave it stand until a clear film forms on top.
If this proves too difficult, the stainless steel sterilising urn
that exhales steam in the nurses' quarters will do. And if not
the urn, then a mirror. Observe the small animal you have been
approaching with this toxin, sanguinely, and without lust, for years.

Watch it twist and turn inside the silk it's rolled in, stuck to
what you are determined it will neither die of, nor escape from
while ever you are so dexterous at weaving discontent.

3. Stagnation

Dance the Tarantella at dawn under salmon spawning
clouds in a camel-ridden souk in Cairo. Watch the craggy rock
heads of a herd of hippos, simultaneously submerging in the mud-stirred

depths of the Levubu. Visit the dye vats at Fez, watching workers
tread the bright red, blue and indigo into skins not fully cleaned before

they are dipped, so your nostrils in the breeze of this open-air tannery
can appreciate the nomadic stink of true Moroccan leather.
Visit also the medina where dyed wool hangs from the roof of the marketplace

in soft-coloured sausage loops, like the entrails of God dripping
a rainbow on the heads of passers-by.

Follow Somalian refugees as they cross gun-toting borders, weighed down
with unsettled belongings on their backs, limp children up against the goat-bell
music of cooking pots in the dint-hot sun.

Or walk the way of the Masai, as if your body is barely grounded at all,
a spring under each toe, each step a small jump.

Learn the frantic tyranny that enslaves the predator on the jungle floor.
Scuttle crab-like under leaf litter like the Huntsman, alert as if you had
eight eyes, your every sense aware of the difference between the mutual
paranoia of adversaries above ground and the utilitarian killing fields
below, where you are truly objectified simply because (like Kilimanjaro

to the climber)... you are there.
See how even constancy is in motion. Pound wild grains on the fringe
of the Sahara with a long blunt-ended stick and a clay bowl as the Tuareg

have done for 4000 years. Observe the endless patience of the Cameroon
woman of lower caste in her tent, as she plaits leather strips

into scabbards for trade. At dusk, watch a pair of saddle-billed storks
who have all day patiently stitched up the waterhole, pursuing slippery frogs.
Consider the hedonistic pleasure of creating your own boudoir, as you marvel

at how the trapdoor, like a troglodyte Barbara Cartland, lines an underground
turret a metre deep with silk, then fashions a cushioned lid.

Visit Victoria Falls for the ultimate cure.
Pretend you are the missionary David Livingston, travelling down the Zambesi,
your mind tortured with the slave trade, the pesky mosquitoes, the long-gone

comforts of home. How it all seems so hard, compared to the Sunday spit
and polish of that parish you were offered in Glasgow. Now round the bend

as the cacophony descends, the smoke that thunders, the nails of horizontal
rain, and in between your lurching canoe and the massive falls, on a tree,
a single, precarious web, glistening and swaying, St Andrew's cross at its centre.

Take it is a sign. Know that there's nothing else for it, but to persist.
It's either that, or stand stiff as a cliff-edge old testament prophecy
and be eroded just the same, while the migratory world keeps falling and falling.