If a dream can explain the toilet, what does it say about me?

This week, poet and artist Frieda Hughes has visions of lavatories on street corners, and wonders what meaning lies beneath its lid

THE TOILET

If a dream has meaning,

Gathering the nuts and bolts of metaphor from the actions of a day

To fix together some kind of message

Or desperate warning against the direction taken

Delivered while asleep before morning,

Then how shall I explain the toilet?

I am scouring emails and folders and notebooks

For names and addresses deleted

By a mirror drive backup computer meltdown and cloud failure

That erased you all from my database to leave a clean and shiny blank space.

I am searching for evidence of your existence - and when it met mine,

Usually in some dining room or other, when you asked for invitations

And I made a note of that moment in time.

Now my art show is imminent.

At night in my sleep I renovate a London house, the guest toilet of which

Is outside, up the road, on a street corner,

Protruding from the pavement like a post box

For human excrement. Before I wake

I check beneath the lid and see it is used by strangers in the night,

Under cover of darkness, keeping it tidy.