by Alan Moore
He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent
To shelter in this all but disused church,
A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves,
This sentry-box in lieu of an address.
Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men
With targets, goals to which they must adhere,
Themselves regretting the proffered career
That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den
Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness
In this, his latest of unfixed abodes.
Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing,
Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out,
A student loan he dare not think about
Here in his hutch, its corners harbouring
Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes
When all he’s ever craved is poetry,
The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had.
To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear
Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair
Nor the reproof of hard-up Mum and Dad
Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee.
Thus one door closes, while another shuts
Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup.
To doss in Saxon palaces and forts
Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts
So with a sigh he stands and gathers up
His bag as though it were his spilling guts,
Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night
With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:
Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,
Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.
An unaccustomed surge of urgency
Propels Den out into a tired rose light
From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,
Across worn flags that vandal time deletes
Where names and mortal numbers disappear,
Erasing status, sentiment, and year.
Dead information sulks beneath these streets
And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld
Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,
The war memorial’s black memo-spike,
Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls
When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,
Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like
Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate
Then over Marefair, observed with disdain
By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;
White hair and beard, officious little sod.
A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,
He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally
As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane
Towards a new low and a legal high.
Why did he come here to pursue his goal?
These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,
Here to a town that nutted off John Clare
Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.
These are the yards where sonnets come to die
As with the local poet he’d been shown,
The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze
He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.
Rousing from reverie barely in time
Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays
Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,
To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end
Between the shabby flats where it cuts through
To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he
Must brave declining visibility
Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into
The shadowed valley of the psalm descend
Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,
The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.
He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom
Only to misstep in the gathering gloom
And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp
The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.
He calls himself by an unflattering name
Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,
Making for where the high-rise windows glow
From sombre violet altitudes and so
Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,
Scraping one foot behind him as though lame
And, too late, suffering anxiety
About his bald host, whom he barely knows,
Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound
Like the most selfless altruist around.
Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,
Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,
But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass
Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense
From brief illusion, a great cog of night
That smoulders and revolves then fades from sight.
He frowns and, finding the right residence,
Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass,
Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane,
His benefactor shimmers into form.
“Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died?
Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.”
While Den complies, allowed into the warm,
His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain
Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall
Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?”
Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee
Where books on psychopharmacology
Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point
On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball
Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red
Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds
In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug
Into an origami doodlebug
Then lights the stout white paper fuse which leads
To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head
That explodes into giggle, gab and cough.
Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood,
Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke
And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke,
If in return for lodgings, dope and food
Dennis might be prepared to suck him off.
“Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity.
I’m offering pizza and me special stash.
This hooker wanted some. Said I could do
Her up the arse, but no. I’d promised you.”
Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash
Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity,
All the hard bargains that it will entail
Keeping on the right side of a front door.
He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save
Time done while waiting for the microwave
To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor
Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail
And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead
On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest
Such poetry as might be had among
The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue,
Attempting to maintain an interest
In De Profundis while he’s giving head
But failing to recall a useful quote.
Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things
Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme
Save chance events acted at the same time:
Just as the heartless oven-timer pings
Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat.
They eat in silence. Den discovers he
Can still taste his aperitif and hence
Does not enjoy his entrée. When they�
��re done
The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one
Announces that it’s now time to commence
With their ethno-botanic odyssey
And shows Den the datura he has grown,
Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page,
With the Salvia Divinorum which
Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch
That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage
The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone.
“I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see.
I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke
The other later.” They both masticate
The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.”
So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak,
Den gulps and swallows apprehensively.
He pales, as if at the approach of some
Fierce, underlying pandemonium.
Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall
So that how long he’s sat he does not know.
The dismal room has undergone no change
Save that its cluttered details now seem strange
To him, and meanwhile simmering below
His tongue the bitter vegetable ball
Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run
Into his belly, past the teeth and gums
To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone.
Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan
As he by subtle increment becomes
Uncomfortable in his own skeleton
And catapults up from his seat to pace
The room, thus to assuage his restlessness
While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk
Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk
At the delay, this possible to guess
Through study of his well-upholstered face
Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue.
“Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz
I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares,
Circling an endless rug between the chairs
As, barely knowing where or who he is
He wades in a dissociative fog
Alone, the lights on but nobody home,
Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid
The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat
Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that,
Some little tramp on crackling celluloid
Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome,
All colour fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den
In antique garb now waddles through the gloom
Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk,
Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk
While in the upper corners of the room
Are gruff, gesticulating little men
In similar attire, homunculi
Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace
The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call
Their taunts, where dirty grey light seems to fall
As from some higher mathematic space
Or proletarian eternity
Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow
Seizes them both. Perspective is askew,
The jeering imps made large as, by degree,
Den and his colleague rise towards them. He
Has the sensation as he passes through
Of fusing with the drab planks from below,
Emerging on their far side in insane
Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor
To nightmare. He discovers that his skin,
Now naked, is that on a manikin
Grown from this attic of the charnel poor
With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain,
Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum
Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled,
As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he
In floor, is seized by the fraternity
Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled
Up to inebriate Elysium:
“The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch
Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut,
Enjoy that good night out without the wife
Pursue an after-hours afterlife
And want for nothing save a head to butt
Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.”
Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell
Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy
The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate,
Its touted goodness decades out of date,
Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye
Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele
Of smouldering reprobates who swirl and curse
About him as he struggles there beneath
Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat
Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat
While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth,
Though some of his confederates are worse.
There’s one whose features crawl about his face,
Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be.
Another, a raw-knuckled harridan
With smile as threatening as any man
Sways to an air that falls conspicuously
Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space,
Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives
To find its source, soon managing to spot
The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums,
Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs
Disconsolately, yet perk up as what
Appears to be their ringleader arrives
To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who
With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes
Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view
Him, if but briefly, noticing that two
Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs,
One memorably fair though lacking hue
And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out
But draws the mob’s attention with his cry
That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown,
Jesting as they attempt to tread him down,
His careful lyric ear affronted by
Their hateful voices everywhere about.
“He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg,
Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.”
Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit,
Is held down by the leering female brute
Who’s carving her initials on his arm
Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg
Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet,
Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout
As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire,
Resurfacing to hear the bard enquire
If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about,
Told in reply that he’s just down the street,
At which the children leave. The cackling throng
Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways.
They kick Den harder as the band begin,
They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin
And as the joyous, tumbling music plays
These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song:
“Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we,
Up here near fifty year now, man and boy!
Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale,
So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail!
Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy
Our pie-eyed paralysed posterity!”
And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some
Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes,
Target for every last ethereal thug.
Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug.
Not even memory of his name remains
Nor life prior to this warped delirium
Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal
Competes now with the music’s weave and wail
As the two writhe in what appears to be
A pissed-up paradise or purgatory
Where bygone barbarisms still prevail
And the perpetually present poor are real,
Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass
Before distraction having the semblance
Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums,
Frog-marching there before him as he comes
A mangled man whose babyish countenance
Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass;
Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime
And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?”
The vagrant phantom loudly now decries
His captive’s deeds and whimpered alibis
Though Den, just then pressed down beneath the floor,
Cannot discern the nature of the crime
Yet sees its punishment. For his offence
The prisoner, stripped of his torn attire,
Is made to kneel, unsure what to expect,
While Kenny, wooden phallus teased erect,
Learns that the roughneck revellers now require
An act unnatural in every sense.
As both performers start to moan and bleat
In their abrasive coitus they enthral
The spiteful, spectral spectators, who sing
“We’re jolly and we smoke, but here’s the thing.
There’s some stuff that we care for not at all
And serve rough justice here above the street
Where all the arseholes of the ages meet,
Thereby democratising Milton’s fall
With Satan overthrown and mob made king!”
Den feels as if he may be settling
Back to a real world almost past recall
Through spit and sawdust at the phantoms’ feet