HUNGOVER
To drink is to borrow
Joy from tomorrow.
Now who’ll repay
My great loan to yesterday?
CENTRAL RESERVATION
Most nights,
In the glare of oncoming lights,
A thing I refuse to feel
Tugs my hand on the wheel.
Some rage or loss
Perhaps, and I think to cross.
MY
Where
the autumn wind whips round
Four
floors above ground
I’m
an old man upside down.
Storms
in the far north
Gather
for their going forth,
And
since such beasts can slip
A
blade through the least nick
No
mere measuring will do
To
make my windows tight and true.
Therefore
I hang
And
shape and shave and smooth and sand –
Quickly,
quickly, since I race
The
planet’s winter-turning face.
Yes
its old face turns winterward
But
still my darling shall be warm
If
I’m away, and can’t get home.
WINTER
January –
But a blue sky
Wakens this fly
From some narrow winter sanctuary
And black, fat, out of season
It tups our windows with a warty snout.
Oh put the horror out –
Let the rasping demon
Die
Adoring the flawless winter sky.
AT RING O’ BELLS
This is the English light, I like to think,
That showed our fathers’ fathers when they made
Canals lacquered with sky, rails that
gripped
Distance in cutlery – and cast their grain,
For the
green splash patient. At their bucket’s brim,
The gleaming
mirror reeled but did not spill.
Shadowless light! Here, where their furrows rolled
Over like swimmers its straight-edge lay;
Their file found it under rust; it rode
The new nail hammered home; and blazed
Spat in the
ditcher’s hand. Pacing his map,
Bright
dividers mocked the sailor’s step.
But look: mum is coming from the cancer wing.
On this canal bridge her neighbour says,
“Crows crossed your roof today. I think
Your man can’t live.” And the x-ray stain,
Black birds,
and wicked old poisoner of light
Were right,
were right.
FOR HIS
YOUNG WIFE
Written in her
Christmas card
She buys these flimsy clothes and shoes,
Unsuited to our northern
skies.
She has a secret dream to use
These follies where her future
lies.
She’ll taste a hanging wreath of vine
And sniff the hidden truffle place
And tread her meadow’s boundary line
In floating silk and trailing lace.
She’ll sleep till
With easy tears or heathen joy.
She’ll be the postman’s sly delight
And terrify the baker’s
boy.
Her crazy sisterhood will tell
Tales from the whole world wide
Of faithless men they loved too well
And kindly men they cast aside.
“Alas, les dames
folles come once more,”
The town will cry to see them call,
And lock the church and close the store –
And she’ll be the maddest dame of all.
Shake out this lace and shout, “Ah oui!”
Put on these foolish shoes and dance.
Oh but I love to think of thee
Glad in the golden fields of
A LANCASTRIAN’S TERROR OF TODMORDEN
God
keep us out of Todmorden
Where
folk will stand you drinks and then
A
pickled egg – excepting when
They’re
Yorkshiremen.
For Tod, astride the Calder’s banks,
Is half in
Oh Todmorden, oh lord, no thanks.
In
Todders folk will say, “Well met!
How’s
t’gout? Are’t courting yet?
They’re
open: shall us have a wet?”
Or
sell their kids on th’internet.
They’ll greet you with “Ey up! Grand
morning!”
Or kick your shins with zero warning
Depending on which bit they’re born in.
Oh
Todmorden, oh fearsome spot
Where
folk will give you all they’ve got
To
ease your lot
Or
maybe not –
For even when they’re worth a mint
Yorkshiremen will say they’re skint
Then scurry off to skin a flint.
Oh
Todmorden, oh fearsome site,
Where
folk are breezy, blythe and bright
Or
else prefer their roses white
And
wads shut tight.
They’ll say “God bless you” when you
sneeze,
Or else forget their “Ta” and “Please”
Then creep away to pare a cheese.
For
Todmorden’s two-faced like Janus:
One
bloke does owt to entertain us
The
next along need not detain us,
The
anus.
So Lanky Todders, grab your bikes
And flee this tribe that no one likes,
The Tykes:
Whose scowls inspect us
And
then reject us;
From
Todmorden, oh lord protect us;
Whose smiles unnerve us,
Who don’t deserve us;
From
Todmorden, dear god preserve us!
THE POET’S PRAYER
Let the bitch Success
In her red dress
With a glass and a laugh and a smeared kiss
Briefly a friend for life
Out-shout my wife
Who says, “We can’t go on living like this.”
AN
ENGLISH SPINSTER, 1928
“Having lost
their men, Englishwomen busy
themselves with mankind” – Benito Mussolini
We are the patient sisterhood
Of church bazaar and village hall.
We spend our lives in doing good.
We sweep the nave. We tend a stall
With penny
scones and ha’penny teas
For the poor
heathens overseas.
We are the ones who knit and bake,
Who calm the old and soothe the sick.
Down every lane for Jesus’ sake
Our bicycles go tick, tick, tick.
And
willingly we lend a hand
For orphans
in some distant land.
So when the squire or vicar says,
“I knew we
might rely on you,”
Unruffled at that fearsome phrase
We bow the head, we pledge to do
All that
Englishwomen can
To ease the
cruel trials of
Thus engaged we do not miss
The comforts of the married state.
Girls in so-called wedded bliss
With husbands plainly second-rate
Will come in
time like us to learn
The best of
men did not return –
But thought of “
And marched to meet the wicked Hun.
Each unflinching to his duty
Faced the fatal gas or gun,
And dreamed,
perhaps, that there might be
A girl, in
ILFRACOMBE
(Burying a coffin displaces a coffin-sized volume of
earth, which must
be wheelbarrowed away. At Ilfracombe cemetery, this
was a long
haul. When we buried someone in their spouse’s grave,
we
smashed in the old coffin to fill it with earth)
It must have seemed like Judgment Day, the din,
When me and Charlie stamped their coffins in –
But yet they
did not stir, despite
Torrents of the long-lost
light.
Now I am old. I see these sleepers will
Keep their council underground until
Charlie, me
and worlds are gone.
Undeceived,
they’ll slumber on.
TIGER, TIGER, NOT SO BRIGHT
Gorillas
Understand mirrors,
And brush off grass
Stuck to the cheek of their ass.
Less clever
The tiger, however,
Overlooks little
Bits of stuff unless they tickle.
Unreflective, he’s
Inseparable from what he sees:
Today he ate
His hate;
Tomorrow he’ll feed
On greed.
Below
His red paws come and go.
His ear is which
Breeds an occasional itch.
And fleas attack
What he does not know is his back.
But his idiot head
By divine right strikes us dead.
MY WIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Written in her birthday card:
You
say that beauty lasts a day.
I
say a day’s what we inhabit.
The
fact that beauty wears away
Confirms
how wise I was to grab it.
So
though her looks are merely mortal
I’ll
frolic like a love-struck lad
And
seize the fleeting joy and chortle:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
You
say I mustn’t judge her worth
By
chance genetics. But you see,
I
merely like her lucky birth:
I
love the way she married me.
And
though this disconcerting kindness
Makes
you shout, “She must be mad,”
I
celebrate selective blindness:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
It’s
true we make a funny twosome,
She
all loveliness and I
An ancient wrinkled wart, so gruesome
You
declare, “In god’s name why?”
But
I reply: This silly spite,
Resenting
what you’ve never had,
Promptly
doubles my delight:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
I’m
glad, though mortal flesh is sinful
And
outer grace defers to inner.
Of
beauty’s balm I’ll sink a skinful
And
reel around, a blissful sinner.
I’m
sorry if your wife is ugly.
I’m
sorry if my boasting’s bad.
I’m
sorry but I’m sorry smugly:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
(With a hat-tip to Clive James’s “The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered”)
SONG IN
SUMMER
Well, for an old man on a summer afternoon
To sleep is
sweet.
Full as skirts, the curtains lift and swoon.
Beside me on the bed a brazen slab
Of kindly sun. The clock stares; from the street
Cars, the cries of children, and a passing cab,
But every interruption comes too soon,
For with a
sigh
I’ve vowed to let this rowdy world go by.
Lord let this resolve for once hold true.
Reconciled
I’d drift unthinking through a world made new,
Instead of baffled, disbelieving, bitter
That I never roared, dear god, ran wild,
Maimed a neighbour, shagged his babysitter,
Cried ‘We’re dying!’ at the bus-stop queue –
Too scared
to see
Death is an absolute, so life must be.
Good luck to all such nutters in the gutter
Declaring
woe.
Not for me their hopeless furies, but a
Life-long, smirking, cowardly parade,
Choked with politeness till at last I go
Apologetic to the butcher’s blade,
Considerately lift my chin, and mutter
Last
beg-pardons
For my birth, breath, blood, heartbeat, hard-ons.
Therefore this dozing says, “The world has won.
Now let me
hide.”
This is age. This is what days have done –
While all those frightened heroes who can smell
Death in obscurity, and suicide
In self-restraint, rage in some prison cell,
Punch their children, snivel, steal a gun,
While
passion roars
Through the house of the heart, slamming doors.
No thanks. I’ll wake, sleep and wake once more,
To savour
sleep.
The clock is twitching through its semaphore,
The sunlit curtain curtseys, flirts and sways,
But once again I’m diving deep, oh deep.
Indifference like hatred in the clock’s blank gaze
But my answer to its staring is a snore.
Asleep, half
waking,
Lord let me yawn through the great leave-taking.
SONNETS
I
Remember how we met. Didn’t we each
Laugh at the light in our animal eyes
And smile and pose and see no need for speech,
Both in our pride convinced, “I am the prize –
An accomplished lover, this my small sport.”
So we laughed, and for fancy pleased the beast
Without risk: how could a giver go short;
How could the host not be fed at a feast.
So what brought on this viciousness and glee?
I know: your double-dealing was the start;
Then came the clever cruelties from me,
Till each perceived we held a hostage heart.
Now with
what vigour, what alarms love lives:
Each day,
new ways of killing the captives.
II
Such a bitter delicious wit – except
We grieved a bit that he sneered at his wife,
And she so kindly, smiling, not adept
At spearing with satire a squirming life
As he was. A catlike playing, saying
She was martyred and glad, she stroked the spur;
Laughing, laughing at her more for staying,
Until we grieved, who had not seen like her
This big man, blubbering, down on his knees,
His arms out, follow her down the hall –
His tears, and the hatstand falling, his pleas,
And seen his humour’s finest stroke of all:
Self-haters
disrespect us till we show
A proper
judgment and decide to go.
Written in
his Christmas card, 2009
Cousin Dave, your cheeky wit
Is wasted on a prostate tumour.
The growth that grips your wedding bit
Ignores all pawky northern humour.
For cancer’s
dull – a fool that fills
Our lives
with boredom, pain and pills.
In fact the thing itself’s a bore
With cells that replicate and then
Repeat the thing they did before
Then re-enact it all again.
A
carcinoma’s only mission’s
To grind us
down with repetitions.
A bore of bores that furthermore,
Settled like a dreaded guest,
Hopes to provoke an endless snore,
To bore us all to boundless rest,
And feels
defeated till it’s drawn
Our jaw to
one eternal yawn.
And in the end, when thee and me
Decline in time as dead men must
To grey anonymous non-entity,
Homogenised to nameless dust,
Then cancer
knows it’s done its bit
Since we’ve
become as dull as it.
So lad, no waggish chat diverts
The blob your knob is nobbled by.
The lump that thumps you where it squirts
Is stumped by that ironic eye.
Old friend,
they’ll mend your end, meanwhile
We’ve missed
that wink, that pirate guile:
Forget the
fool that cramps your style –
It’s us that need your rascal smile.
ON THE PROPOSITION THAT ‘PAIN IS
TRUTH’
I
stubbed my toe.
The world said, “Told you so.”
MOON
MADNESS
Out of the racing clouds the moon broke free
And she
Tearing her clothes followed me there
Through the black streets with her mad hair
Till I turned again home –
Where I have known
My heart’s safekeeping
But now the woman weeping.
FOR HIS NIECE
Cruel!
To send little
Let her run about in
Her red hat, laughin, shoutin.
**
Metre, I suppose, is just the French for yard,
Which is how I walk you to school.
But centipedes and millipedes are hard –
All those little black legs down the edge of my rule.
**
“My
daddy can whistle”
With
crimson cheek and bulging eye
Your
daddy stuns each passer-by.
His
Schubert song and Mozart air
Make
double-decker drivers stare.
And
braking hard on
Ten-ton
lorries shed their load.
Indeed,
so cunningly your dad employs
This
ancient skill of butcher boys
And
farmers in a turnip cart,
The
ploughman and the thatcher’s art,
That
most of all his talent stills
The
local birdlife’s tweets and trills
With
soaring talent that equates
Their
artistry with squeaky gates –
For
walking you in
His
music mutes the tuneful lark,
And
under shrubs on Tulketh Brow
The
rowdy wrens are silent now.
Oh
see that sulking sparrow turn
Resentfully
to chew a worm!
**
Here come the winds of the world
To your lips to be woven to words,
And stars of the sky
Swarm to your eyes
To be looked upon:
Let it be done.
Here: these boxes of light
In a line are the days of your life
To be opened on trust:
Yes, and you must.
Out on the slope of the globe
Now you will go –
To walk, outwalk, this world, these limbs
Till you are nothing else but movement like the winds
And would cease if you stood
Like the winds would.
W.H.S. 1914-1950
Father, I might call you son –
You, dead so young,
And I grown old. I picture you
In cap and clogs and boiler suit
Tending the great eight-wheeler,
And me, some hale old wheezer,
Lonely perhaps,
Who stops a while and asks
About the road you’ll shortly take –
With a baffling paternal gaze.
But, fond of the young,
Doubtless I’d talk too long –
And might advise,
Being so very old and wise,
The proper, careful course
For some young fellow setting forth.
Eager to go,
You’d only think, “I know. Aye, I know.”
So I cannot delay,
Even in dreams, your hasty going away –
Handsome and young –
That made in time a father of your son.
ON THE
HUBBLE DEEP FIELD IMAGE
All gone, those all-wise fools
Who said
that souls
Cavort on
coals
Down in the Devil’s dancing schools.
And imps will pinch and twist, they said,
To entertain
With witty
pain
Endlessly the yelping dead.
But might those folk have argued thus:
“Such
tireless toil
With boiling
oil –
Oh see Eternity’s concern for us!”
Now, drowned and dispersed,
Lost in the vault this light traversed,
We are the
first
To know
death’s worst.
Cold and bored on the graveyard
wall, I sit
Watching till the wheezing sexton
says: “Maybe…”
And passes the ledger. Yes, this is
it:
Dad; a stray great aunt; some baby
–
Getting a stone at last. And – as I thought –
Mum, climbing the sharp hill, brought
Grief to the wrong grave for forty
years.
Lord what a joke! Her on her knees
(my god),
The scissors, kitchen spoon, and
doubtless tears,
Titivating that other poor sod
Also with no stone. Two rows down the hill,
Dad was thinking: “Gormless. Gormless still.”
She needn’t know, I think – she’ll make the climb
Up that sharp hill only one last time.
THE
LIZARD
Over again this tale is told:
An ancient lizard’s coils enfold
The flawless maiden bright as gold.
Handsome heroes once so bold
Lie about him, torn and cold,
For what he cannot use he’ll hold.
Alas for the maiden unconsoled.
Pity the lizard grown so old.
Tony Blair
Says it’s unfair
That people ask about
They should look forward not back.
George W Bush
Hot from “clearing brush”
Sits in his Crawford orchard
And thinks of the men he tortured.
Tony and W
Said, “Lord, does war trouble you?”
Jesus had no issues
With the tearing of human tissues.
Richard Cheney
Has angina again. He
Says, “For a start,
Don’t say I’ve got no heart.”
Barack Obama
Couldn’t be calmer
About
“What the hell,” he thinks. “Let it stay.”
**
Warmongers
“Our neighbours stink,” my dog declares.
Our neighbours’ dog repeats the line.
I leave my dog to shout like theirs
Because they leave their dog like mine.
And if they leave their dog thuswise
It proves their dog and they agree.
I’m glad therefore my dog replies.
I’ll let my dog speak out for me.
But oh this shouting night and day
Day and night inflames my head
To hear a dog insanely say
The thing another dog has said.
But still my dog must speak since he
With doggy loyalty defies
By day and night so doggedly
My neighbours’ dog’s relentless lies.
I hate my dog for shouting so
But hate my neighbours’ dog the worst.
I’d love to kick my dog although
My neighbours have to kick theirs first.
But oh this shouting night and day
Day and night is never done
And drives my dizzy brain astray
And can’t go on and can’t go on.
**
Cheney Limbaugh
George John Dick Rush,
Long ago were called to war –
And swiftly hid behind the door.
But soon they grew too old to fight
And promptly altered overnight:
“We must endure. Just one last push,”
Say Cheney Limbaugh
In
His comrades cried, “Where’s Double-you?
Oh see behind the door he stands
With Bush and
With current wars they huff and puff
And boldly cry, “We must hang tough.”
But long ago they said, “No no,
And thus they hid while others died
And in a final vision cried,
“Oh see behind the door, oh see
Says Bush, “Once settled on the use of force
We’ll see it through, we’ll stay the course.”
The dead rise up demanding, “Who
Is this ‘we’ who’ll see it through?”
Cheney Limbaugh
George, Dick, John, Rush;
When the bugles blew for war
Swiftly hid behind the door.
**
On the nine Afghan children machinegunned by
a NATO helicopter while gathering firewood, March 2011
What brought
This bit of lead to the child’s throat?
Here’s what an exile dreamed, a pundit thought;
This is a letter, this what a scholar taught;
Here’s what the statesman said, the expert wrote;
Here they made the gun, here loaded the boat;
Here’s where a general planned, a soldier fought;
And here’s what poisons everything they sought –
This bit of lead in a child’s throat.
**
Sick with rage I did not speak
Of Blair’s wars against the weak.
Only now I voice this hate –
Too late, too late.
THERE IS NO BETTER
I’m an utter
Genius at spreading butter.
No one but me
Knows how best to turn a key.
There is no better
Way than mine to don a sweater.
Not for toffee
Can you lot make coffee.
And when I take a tap apart
With my particular secret art
Lord what pleasure fills my heart!
I will not show you what
Way I tie a granny knot,
Or how I do
That little thing to wipe my shoe
Or drive a screw
And then to have the screw run true.
I’ll take my secrets where
Others wait who did not share
Their sly delighted private tricks
For cleaning wigs or swinging picks
Or knapping flints or killing ticks
Or shining swords or laying bricks
Or trimming smoky candle-wicks,
And hid their skill
And hide it still.
CLEARING HEADSTONES, BANKSIDE
Against the black, cracked, Jack The Ripper bricks
Prop these worn
Milestones on the
The Londoners crumbling under them are dumb
With the boss
Of Cockney glottal stops.
If any soared to the Lord’s front doors
From their nest of bones,
They’ve long since flown.
Licked biscuit-thin in the river wind,
With names
The river rain has wept away,
Like well-oiled old bow-legged boatmen sloping home,
Their shoulders roll
As they rock to the rotten wall.
And if the Resurrection robes of those below
Were stopped by a stone toe,
Now they can go.
Life
is too long
Oh
it goes on and on
I
was young but that’s gone
And
all day the sun
Shows
what I haven’t done.
LOVE
She’s in love with Hate and wants to be alone.
She’s drawing the curtains and locking the door.
When Hate loves her up with a dry old thigh bone,
“Yes!” she instructs him, and “More, darling, more!”
Her friends sniff keyholes and rattle the cat-flap.
They listen at drainpipes and climb the wisteria.
Why are two bony footprints pressed in her bath-mat?
What’s that xylophone smile in the dim interior?
But she turns from their words with a deaf and a dumb
shrug.
This “friendship” garbage they’re shouting fools no
one.
With x-ray eyes for humanity’s humbug
She takes Hate to bed for a fast then a slow one.
“Oh Hate, my bone idol, you’re past all improving,
Your kisses as cool as a bone china chalice!”
And she begs him incessantly, “Darling, do move in
Your doggie called Danger and moggie called Malice!”
And she’s squeezing his hand like a handful of dice.
She’s softly locking her boudoir door.
Her nipples get stiff in his whispers like ice,
And she’s not coming out, no never no more.
FOR MY FATHER, WHO DIED YOUNG
What
should I reply –
Lost
between living and dead,
Meeting
his kindly eye –
If
he, insistent, said:
“How do you fill, my lad,
Years I never had?”
“Oh,
sleep and eat,” I’d say.
“And
work, too, alas.
Travel
in the modern way
Helps
the years pass.
Much like, it’s true,
A million others do.”
But
what then if he
In
the dim daybreak
There
by the grey sea
That
slides between sleep and awake,
Seemed with his quiet air
Doubtful, watching there?
I’d
say: “Look what I made:
Roads,
that railway track;
Seven
years with spade,
Sweat,
and bent back;
And books, god knows –
Though there’s never a shortage of those.
“And
it might be that I
Briefly
chanced to see
Once
with a washed eye
What
my place here might be –
Yet doubtless nothing more
Than you, long before.”
But
then, feeling my days
Of
thin stuff dismissed
Under
his troubled gaze,
At
last I might resist:
“Born provincial, poor and plain,
I built a life with back and brain –
“What
more could I give,
What
could any man do,
That
your old bones might live?
Could
I fill the years for two?
Rejoice how far I came
With neither money nor name.”
But
the dawn is silent now.
And
I wake to that same task –
To
wonder again how
I’d
answer what he cannot ask,
Feeling still that I
Somehow should reply.
UNCLE
My child, for once I’m feeling kind,
So
now you’re washed and dried and goodnight-kissed
And tucked-up snug
With one last hug,
I’ll soothe your anxious infant mind
With
this good news: monsters don’t exist.
Yes, in the night-time children think
Armies
of hungry dark come hunting you,
And smell your fear
And creeping near
Will rip your heart, and eat, and drink.
Now,
now, don’t cry: these nightmares just aren’t true.
And if for all your fearful screaming
Dad
just stirs and swears and stays asleep;
And even mum
Forgets to come;
And granny thinks, ‘She’s only dreaming;”
And
Uncle Sidney smiles to hear you weep,
Keep calm, my dear, be good.
No
scaly horrors come on leather wings,
No dripping jaw
Will eat you raw,
No ghouls with tubes remove your blood.
So
stop your sobbing, child: there’s no such things –
Nothing with hooks in either fist
And
gloves of blood to either hairy wrist
Has come to kill you
And splash and spill you,
And stab and bite and rip and twist.
Good
night! Sleep tight! Remember: monsters don’t exist.
I
I
see a gourmet eat his lips,
A
waitress carve her fingertips.
The
butcher’s window makes me come,
Above
a plate I bare my bum,
And all distinctions stretch like skin
And thin and thin
Across the horrors coiled within.
But
more and more is best forgot:
My
hopes erode, my parents rot.
The killing years
Demand
more scabs between the ears,
So let me, mounted well astride
My turdish tide,
Be
once again self-stupified.
For
though the surgeon’s screwing on,
While
knowing what he lies upon,
For
all his lust it’s certain if he
Thought
at all would lose his stiffie –
Yet how I always picture this
Cask of piss
While sucking up a hungry kiss.
So
let me then at least be good
To
other blinded bags of blood,
And try to think
Sick
with the stinging charnel stink,
And swear my love grows deeper, truer
Though through and through her
Drains the dismal double sewer.
I
see we cannot lift our chin
Above
the filth we’re buried in.
I
see our brains must marinate
In
bloody soups of dread and hate.
I see the warning
Dropped
from bottoms every morning.
I
see it all through frightened eyes
Whose
gormless orbs like bubbles rise
To briefly flit
Adrift
across a latrine pit.
With fear ahead and grief behind,
Pray god becloud this raddled mind,
Half deaf, half blind,
To walk with filthy humankind.
HITTING THE WIFE
That’s not it.
Never a hit.
No kind of blow so much
As a flick or tap or pat or some such –
Though it came
From what I can’t recall or name:
A black roar
Bursting the door.
All this on a day
When the woman drives her mate away
With “Old goat.
Bald, thin legs, old turkey throat.”
And I
Wretched, a thorn in her side.
We sit now
And hope for peace somehow,
Having known those roaring places
Where the lonely claw their faces.
But flick or tap or hit
Yet I admit
The blackness behind it.
O Lord preserve
The savour of sea on her undercurve –
Anchovy, oyster, ambergris:
And Lord
deliver
My lips to
her nether
Kiss.
Thine was the care
That numbered (like me) her maidenhair
As salt as Sinbad’s beard, and fell
Through
buxom waves
Down to her
sea-cave
Smell.
Thou art the Lord.
Thy finger has folded her firth or fjord
Or foamflecked loch. Oh let me be
Leviathan
Drinking her
inland
Sea,
And my devotions,
Sure as the loom of Thy woven oceans,
For this be thus: securely glued
Here on my
knees
Adoring her
own sea
Food.
BURSCOUGH
What
Adam of our family found this place;
Laboured
around its cage of lanes; abed,
Stretched
across its fields; became
All
of the local clay that made his bread;
And
then was old, with rain for miles, and days
With
no one in the lane except the breeze
That
bared his bones at last like winter trees?
How
he would dream – but in the end
Was
frittered into
**
You
were our Adam and Eve – all foretold,
The
water droplets numbered, dust motes known,
Gestures
weighted when you poured
Light
from the water jug. Such years in store
To
fill with naming of a world.
Now
one lorryload
Carries
us kids, the broken home,
And
you to fifty years of widowhood
Through
flat Fylde pasturelands that show
How
far you came, and now must go.
BRIEF
Stale, passionless and
grey
Ageing flesh rehearses clay.
Tamed thereby I make my way
Uncomplainingly towards decay.
**
Whatever thrills your body brought you
In the end it turns to torture.
Joints dissolve and hearts attack,
Our bones our own relentless rack.
But no
disease
Stings like
these
Lacerating
memories.
**
I feel the fate of things I hold,
This plate in bits, this table sold;
The falling curtains, broken chair;
These socks are lost, these trousers tear;
My rancid underpants a wreck;
This hat in rags around my neck.
And then one day
A soiled mattress dragged away.
**
It leaves the bladder
Slides down a ladder
Stops for a smoke
Laughs at a joke
A donkey-back ride
The see-saw and slide
Watches TV
Swings on a tree
Never thinks about me
Oh hurry up pee.
**
If a man is snatched away,
Back into yesterday,
And then yesterday flies back
Like a lit window by a railway track
With the small figure lost within,
How is it for him
And all the glad loud folk,
Gone like smoke?
**
Goodbye, goodbye,
Scar on my left thigh.
Hail and farewell,
Armpit smell.
And faithful legs and pigeon toes
Weak eyes and pointy nose –
Goodbye all those.
And bye-bye likewise gob and knob
And every hidden inner blob
That mostly (thank you) did its job.
Farewell flesh that did okay
At giving me a place to stay
But starts to whisper, “On your way,
I’m tired of hauling you around all day,
Let me be clay.”
**
Dead, that bastard master who
Suspended me from grammar school.
Dead the railway gaffer pea-brain
Who nearly crushed us with the steam crane.
Dead or daft the magistrate
Who fined my ass for ABH.
And all those girls who turned me down –
Grey and fat and dowdy now.
Thus consoled
I grow old, grow old.
**
He’s a
Sad old geezer,
Past lust or praise –
But how chatter fills his days!
How he chatters, clatters,
Flesh in tatters
Just a yellow old jaw bone
Dropped by his headstone,
But clackety-clack without pause
On the pit’s rim his nasty old jaws
And yellow teeth and pointy chin.
Let’s kick the thing in!
ON A BIRTHDAY
I
Now, like a classic Chinese sage,
I’ll turn to verses to defy old age,
Scorning the raw disordered city
For the true poet’s envy, spite, self-pity.
And this is fitting for a sad old fart
Since art itself’s a dying art.
For soon the maker’s role will be
Killed by the Singularity –
When supermarket checkout tills
Outdo Rubens on our baked bean bills,
And any bar-room stool ad libs
Dirty jokes to crack your ribs;
The lonely hotel guest’s beguiled
By wardrobes wittier than Oscar Wilde,
While every lift’s a soloist
With better melodies than Brahms and Listz.
Yet let our younger art creators
Lose their livelihood to elevators –
I’ll cruise through these final days
Of history’s temporary literary phase
In which inflamed
imagination
Strong from pre-Web masturbation
Served a readership who’d never seen
Pixels flit across a
screen.
For nowadays who feels at home
Hugging alone some droning tome
All in immobile monochrome?
Given the choice,
Who but losers toil through Joyce?
What wilderness of empty days
Drives a man to Auden’s plays?
No one good at outdoor games
Endures the gruesome Henry James.
Only folk that love forgets
Wrestle the dreadful Four Quartets.
Of those who groan through Wordsworth’s Prelude
High proportions look like hell nude.
Already see the world forsake
Verse like a turbid ox-bow lake –
A place of mayflies, gadflies, fly-by-nights
And intestinal parasites,
Where we, with self-inflicted futile duty,
Fish the infected pit for truth and beauty.
And this is why: beauty and truth
One day slapped us through the gloom of youth;
Amid hormonal uproar, dead men’s verses
Eased our adolescent ache like curses;
Leaving our griefs we’d briefly dwell
In walls of words where all is well,
Where love and lust and the world’s wrongs
Are vented outward into songs,
And secret teenage dreams and doubt
On legs of lines can stride about.
So come with me, you sorry crew
Bereft of better things to do,
Your lives and loves so much amiss
You’re sitting here and reading this.
Unkillable, the need to speak
Drives our tireless treks that seek
Through sumps of dullness undeterred
These machines for being heard –
Poetry, the perfect word.
II
I’ve rhymed for lust, for praise, for gain
But scribble nowadays to check my brain,
Penning each sonnet, song or saga
For reassurance that I’m not yet gaga.
I might repeat myself, or else instead
Say again what’s just been said,
Or all unknowingly conclude a line
With some deluded not-quite rhyme,
Or reach for rhymes I can’t quite hold
Like William
McGonagall pursuing his hat in a strong breeze that is also cold,
Or like McGonagall
in a
Or like some would-be humorous versifier who pictures McGonagall drowning in
the silvery
thereby hopelessly over-eggs it.
For though composing through our charmless youth
Clammy voidings we confuse with truth,
The notions trite, the rhyming hackneyed,
Comforts us for being acnied;
And though through deserts of our middle years
We pump our output into Beauty’s ears
(Our hair departs, our bellies sag
But handsome stanzas might secure a shag);
Yet how much more old age
Demands a recompense across the page –
Here where a whip of wit confines
Our disappointments in a cage of lines;
The rabble multitudes of rage and woe
Kicked into regimented row on row;
Compressed, condensed, our pain so terse is
Crystallised at last to verses.
So let the fact I’m balder, sadder, fatter
Tame itself to subject matter.
A wasted life – ill-begun,
Bungled, fearful, left undone –
Shaped until a grace appears
That lays an absolution on these sixty years.
from … SEX CHANGE AT THE
Who
All those years had the use of you?
On a train of
Through suburbs of rooms, and beds like meadows,
How you galloped bareback both astride
Love’s curly-haired hide!
**
As the pre-med pulled me under.
Rain,
Along gutters, down drains
Clattered like an anchor chain
As I soared
Over the roar of the
Treading water
Above the Ripper’s favourite quarter
(Whose murders
They say betokened a surgeon’s),
And thought I saw
Far below –
**
Down in the morgue the Doctor leaning
Over the ladies softly breathing:
“What is the meaning, the meaning, the meaning
Of gash and ass?
Her one and zero, semi-colon, exclamation mark, vowel
and consonant, dot and dash?
And who dared brave
Alive this binocular gaze?”
**
Who’s he
Shook this shape from your belly tree?
Around, carnivorous eyes of rivals, but
He plucked you from those hooks.
Bared like a butcher’s parcel,
Seeing his hard-on
All you wondered was
Oh, oh, is this what I have to want?
**
In fish-skin slippers
She skips across the river glitter,
Splashes snapping at
Her ankles like a shark attack,
A man-trap or hang-man’s hatch.
Later,
Insoucantly as one might take a
London Transport escalator,
Under loins of
(Whiffier than Oxfam britches),
Passing black Embankment steps
(Water lifting like a dress),
She sees her lovers fall
Through petticoats of spreading foam,
Submerging there
To choke on a rope of woven air.
**
On my belly something like the words ‘I am’
Consisting of two little roundy bits and one long one,
Which is a sort of tap or spout
For venting madness out.
**
Virginally shy,
I tried to hide my wet insides
(Full as an egg,
Frail as a Safeways plastic bag)
That multi-coloured
Fell out like a full cupboard,
The cut
Smelling of love.
**
The old go slower and slower
And here like bicycles at last fall over.
But bright-eyed,
Under the high tide of his hair line,
When searchlights found
Zeppelins swelling over
And the bulging truncheon
Of some constable on point duty at a busy junction,
And bursting from earth the Tube between
Aldgate East and Stepney Green,
Girls' flanks
Were tauter than motorbike petrol tanks,
Their lovely lack astride
Like the missing bit on women's bikes.
The dick is homeless now
That he fought for once with the sweet girls of
**
It’s where her curves
Tighten to a spiral, where her limbs merge.
It’s a home’s heart,
New loaf, gold bar, warm hearth;
Is floating like a frisby where
Her lovely lack, propped on nothing, surfs on air.
It’s the stair
That isn’t there;
Is hidden as the new moon
That nevertheless rules;
Gathers the world like an eye
Then looks away.
Among her limbs like loaves
It’s a caper or clove.
Her smile glitters,
Where she circles it in ripples.
It’s lipped like a splash:
They will rock in its outwash;
And read between
Its nested parentheses;
And let it fly,
From limbs they hope to untie;
And revive
Her sleepy middle eye.
Or did a
doctor
Cut Cupid’s
wound across her?
**
The tide was down like trousers
So we crossed the rocks like razors
To poke in raggy pools that smelled of pee.
Then the moon silvered the sea
So the pools were mirrors
With polyps, oysters, blind devourers –
So I woke,
The sheets foaming over our throats.
**
I dreamed I waked
As lovers on my counterpane,
Little as fingers, in single file,
Fell to their fate from my inner thigh,
Then from my window saw
The
Appear an empty trench because
Its all-enfolding waters were
Our common element like air.
A wind of water lifted flags,
Bubbles like balloons flew past,
And over neighbour buildings swirled
Migrating men instead of birds.
**
In the hospital garden, weak and slow,
Roses cold as crystals grow.
For thirst
They suck dirt.
Their food
Sun, that pale soup.
Thin, in rags,
They shiver by the path
Where I run to my love
Sick with our rich blood.
A VERY
HIPPY CHRISTMAS
Written on a
Christmas card, 1972
Here’s hoping, Clive, they’ve stopped your dope and
dole,
And scrumpy’s what there’s awful lack of, Annie.
If not, I’m sending from this northern hole
To the land of clotted cream and black Afghani,
Of jam and acid tabs and skinny
dips,
GREETINGS AT CHRISTMASTIME
begrudged through twisted lips.
“Sid,” you say, “so tell us, how’s the weather?
Raw we suppose, all icicles and sleet,
And the snow, down here a swan’s shed feather,
Is ready-blackened when it meets the street.
Ice cracks the cobbles and the
sunrise stalls,
And dogs with lifted legs are
welded to workhouse walls.”
True. And clearer means colder. Rivers freeze,
Running in a tunnel under dull glass
Round bicycle bones. We’ve teeth on the eaves
And spikey like a bed of nails the grass.
A low sun in a corner of the day,
As weak as watercolour yellow,
turns away.
Today I nipped outside to grab a nice
Shovelful of coke and nutty slack.
Instead, with contact lenses formed of ice
And stalactites of snot, I staggered back
To hug the empty hearth and curse
in vain
(Through windows double-glazed with
panes of frozen rain)
The tribes of fearsome folk who crowd the town,
Who toil upstream against the level gales,
Coughing creatures with a barbed wire frown
And faces like places where April fails,
Who spring and summer through will
still complain
For the lead necklace of December
days again.
Tonight I risked my life and had a jar.
The landlord’s wife was cheering on a fight.
Her husband hadn’t time to tend the bar
With helping someone set a cat alight.
It was a girl trying to get it lit:
One of the posher sort, the type
that doesn’t spit.
I blushed: she laughed. I shook: she bit my ear.
With football forwards’ thighs she pressed my knee
Till I ejaculated thus: My dear,
Your weight is wealth, it’s like gold, like rich fee,
And heavy as treasure your precious
head.
“Are you trying to say I’m fucking
fat?” she said.
I said, Oh tell me how to serve you best,
What track to take till Time’s tread shall tire;
What foe to fight, what golden fleece to fetch;
Tell me, tell me, I’d win you your desire
Though bought with crimson coins my
dead head bled.
“All right. I’ll have a pint of
bitter then,” she said.
I said, Oh party of my life and soul
Remove the ticking apple of my heart
And bite. We are one of a kind, a whole,
A part of a heart that is never apart.
“The only thing we have in common,
Is you’re a man and I’m a woman.”
So I left, wheezing through the freezing night
Where winds will whittle you to the white bone;
Where the streams and the smiles are locked up tight
And cold enchants whole bus queues into stone.
A skull-like moon leaned over with
a grin
On suffering Sid, alone at the cold
world’s rim.
But stop: through all this summer only hides,
Waiting where May-blooms clutch their roots and hold
And keep the secret – Life – that still abides
Though mean mid-winter grips, vice-cold.
I too will clutch my root and hold
and stay
And be daft with the daffodils,
dreaming of May.
It’s a dream of how
Bursting the doors of dawn on the first day,
His whiskers filled with lightning-bolts and grins
On green scene, flower bower, hoe-high hay,
The lord of
Where I lie, smiling at last,
asleep in the sun.
