Wolf Tongue

by Barry MacSweeney

  And In Memory Of The Demons

  (for Jackie Litherland)

  1

  Forgive me for my almost unforgivable delay – I have been laying the world to waste

  beyond any faintest signal of former recognition. For a start, a very brief beginning

  on my relentless destruction trail, I made the dole queues longer for they did not

  circle the earth in the dire band of misery I had wished and hoped before my

  rise to power among the global demons.

  All my demons, my demonic hordes, reborn Stasi KGB neck-twisters

  and finger crushers, their overcoats the width of castles

  fashioned from the skins of Jews and poets, rustle with a fearful symphony

  within the plate-sized buttons, rustling pipistrelles

  and other lampshade bats. Some carry zipper body bags,

  black and gleaming in the acid rain, from the mouths of others

  words in Cyrillic Venusian torture chamber argot

  stream upwards red on banners backwards

  in a pullet neck-breaking snap in the final perversion

  of the greatest revolutionary poster that

  ever lived: the Suprematist Heart.

  And don’t forget, he will not let you forget, the man with the final

  beckon, the forefinger locked in deadly

  fearful invite. This demon, this gem-hard

  hearted agent of my worst nightmare, this MC with spuriously

  disguised gesture, this orchestrator of ultimate hatred,

  the man with no eyes, no cranium, no brow no hair.

  He will always be known as the Demon with the Mouth of Rustling

  Knives, and the meshing and unmeshing blades

  are right in your face. The blades say: there are your

  bags. Pack them and come with us. Bring your bottles

  and leave her. The contract is: you drink, we don’t. The

  rustling bats stay sober. When drunk enough they gather on your face

  and you stand upon the parapet. You sway here and she is utterly forgotten.

  All that matters are the sober bats and the lampshade overcoats, which

  press towards the edge above the swollen tide. You jump, weighed with

  empty bottles in a number of bags – some hidden as it happens of which

  you were ashamed inside your stupid sobering torment. And of course

  we jump, arms all linked, with you into the fatal tidal reach. We also

  pay a price. But the demon who shall always be known as the Mouth

  of Rustling and Restless Knives, he stands upon the parapet. Never dies.

  And all that can be heard beyond the wind are the relentless blades.

  2

  And then there is the pure transmission of kissing you, when

  solar winds seethe in amber wonder through the most invisible wisps

  and strands in a tender half-lit prairie sometimes, caught in

  light which is not quite light, but as if the entire world was drenched slate,

  or reflected thereof, in the soon to be handsome dawn of a reckless

  damp November, with the gunmetal heavens plated quite beautifully

  in goldleaf of fallen nature already so readily ready for the rising

  sap of a dearest darling spring when we will start again and the curtains

  will not be drawn at dawn beneath the monumental viaduct of the

  great engineer. The truly great span of the legs above the city, spread

  and wide, rodded north and south and electrified by power passing

  through beneath the novas and planets and starres. Magnetised!

  Free Pet With Every Cage

  Get out the shotgun put it in the gunrack.

  Here I am gargoyled and gargled out,

  foam then blood,

  Flatface to Nilsville. In the toe-tag toerag dark,

  siege upon his paling, wires berserk like cyborg fingers

  in the demon neon’s placid acid rain.

  All the faery cars are shattered, overparked.

  This is the hell time of the final testament,

  the ultimate booking, the whipped out ticket, little Hitler

  with Spitfire pencil on permanent jack-up; when he’s not red

  carding

  your fanned-out fucked-up Bournville chocolate cheekbones

  he’s planning an invasion down your throat.

  Big Jack with the bad crack,

  just so peak and gleaming visor, ferret eyes

  glinty like fresh poured Tizer – the seepage of the coleslaw,

  the duff mayonnaise.

  This is the season of firestorm lightning, torment time

  of hell is beautiful.

  Wide-awake hell, hell with fingers in a tightened vice,

  forget the armies of little white mice,

  hell beribboned with garotted larks and lice.

  Yes, hell is beautiful, the weirdest ABC ever spoken

  here in the dead letter box

  in Crap Future Lane.

  Wind clicks the metal leaves tonight.

  I speed alive in sequence deep,

  beast field rain

  throbbing to the lipless pulse of windwonder.

  O tormented landscape, handscape,

  deathbones hewed

  at my pouldrons and gorgets. Down

  in the tarred and feathered department

  of gutted souls the cry is so wimp: What’s in it for me

  but the Labour Party and geometric raisin bread?

  Chomp, chomp, go the pink bleat sheep,

  down to Walworth Road.

  I’m such a bad and drunken lad, a fiend fellow

  in the useless art of swallowing and wallowing,

  as to invite brazenly her puckerage, her mayoral

  addresses of correction, her buzzing network

  of helplines flashing down the gorge.

  Just look, I snarled my lute

  in waspish worsement, claggy gob

  clipped claptight shut.

  I sledged it fast off my funny bondage tongue

  but no one believed me above the cellar: I died

  every day since I gave up poetry

  and swapped it for a lake from the châteaux of France

  and all of the saints – Bede, Bob, Sexton, Messrs Rotten, Johnson,

  Presley and Cash – abandoned me.

  Perhaps the purple plush pansies have an answer today.

  Only my little yellow lanterns

  spring vinelike

  in their breezy Jerusalem

  aiming for victory over the ordinary sunne.

  Hell is the pavement against my shit face.

  And the devil has seen Robert off on the bus.

  The light of recovery is just a format.

  The light of recovery is just a lost fairy tale

  seeping with ferndamp

  in the bluebell vales of your childhood.

  The light of recovery is an ex-starre, furious with everlasting

  darkness.

  I am the addict, strapping on his monumental thirst.

  The sky is livid like jigsawed lace

  and there are no happy endings.

  Buying Christmas Wrapping Paper

  On January 12

  Let loose at morning from frost pockets the wind rips.

  Enough to snuff blue candles in a huff of sighs.

  Let’s use the sensational strong stuff hanging off the wall

  before we electrocute ourselves forever

  to a final gleam of love. We do it like a Miró or galvanised Matisse.

  Her name is Bijou, her sign The Snake.

  Three-storey monsters, whipcord Judas-faced accusers and sneaks, faking

  that the very sky is human

  filled with sham planets, nooses not yet minted

  from lunar shards

  at every broken tearful opportunity

  while in retarded zonesr />
  the tumblestone temple tables are turned.

  Heaven’s just an opened bottle

  in a demon’s argent mitts

  smuggled to my unholy lips

  from the squirrelled reservoir, the cached stash

  in Stasi lock-ups

  underneath the fallen arches

  in Legless Lonnen

  down Do-lalley Drive, Kerbcrawl Boulevard, Cirrhosis Street

  and Wrecked Head Road:

  I am leader of the beguiled and fear of straps across my chest

  cleave me to the haunted floorboard bed.

  Ruthless vanity will have its day (as you know worshipped ones)

  and the Stasi demons’ gin-soaked bat-packed overcoats

  are not different, my grave advocates, my angels, allies, brave backers and boosters,

  my eternal love donors,

  my decency guarantors, armpit clutch helpers

  jostling to seize me in my seizures

  from the cobbled gutter’s facedown drenched hell,

  you patrons and dauntless promoters, partners and pals,

  such confrères of confidence,

  my duplicate equals and ferocious friends.

  Vintage and grizzled each Satan’s wretch

  does purl, ooze, gurgle, spurt and twirl, gyrate,

  pirouette, spin, reel and swim

  in grim lashing bind, unswayable elbow grease

  applied to mindcrazy moonshine not hindered.

  Living daily rim to mouth, rev gun throttled, quelled and jammed,

  too late to stop now.

  Let the dead man walk to rise is sombre fiction

  my murderers will never calibrate.

  It and they are all upon me now

  and tenebrous squalid and ignoble night

  snaps its willing neck

  on every lurid aspect of my rotten scowling face.

  We Offer You One Third Off Plenitude

  O let me plunge my feverhands into his clotted throat. Let me free

  the devil’s briars and combinations, even down upon my worn-out

  woman’s honkers, fingers hinged to wrench out infection

  before it has him in the demon yard, the bad god shed, orangebox

  overcoat so thinly laid.

  There is more to his royal light than

  wings of demon pipistrelles can dim, or dreaded Stasi hats and coats

  undone to hide the starres and moon.

  Busy to the last

  with basin of detox vomit, I am black flag nurse, noose loosener,

  penitence ring wrecker, rupture lip annihilator extraordinaire,

  fierce defendress of flame faith, laver

  of eclipsed kiss champ.

  Revivor of the passed out poet in his pissed up plan.

  In fit wrath, Notre Dame gutterspouts spring up

  inside his fried lamb’s liver face.

  I am the woman accused: vulturefemme

  pecking, beak brushing

  Prometheus poisoned meat.

  I am the woman admonished

  with fitwords, spit bubbles

  and green bad movie slime.

  Yet wipe I do

  to lie against him sober

  when the fit has gone

  and each defashioned jigsaw piece

  back in place.

  Yes, it is true, Albion is distressed upon her hardened knees.

  The quality of mercy writ so large

  upon his broken angelface.

  So many darts

  and drunken hurts and harms.

  So many ill-formed hurtwords.

  Such forays of spitting spouting guntongue.

  Twelve per cent non-vintage gargoyle gurgle gobshite.

  The 999 call – again.

  My quivering man laid under a blue light

  empty bottles left behind.

  Daddy Wants To Murder Me

  I write poetry at the age of seven and daddy wants to murder me.

  He does a good imitation of it: beats me with a leather belt

  and tears my little book in strips.

  I wonder why my little poetry book, which is blue, is in strips,

  and falling to the carpet like rain.

  Strips and stripes, my daddy. An awesome man.

  I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad

  under a folding one-man tent and daddy wants to murder me.

  Daddy, I caught a trout. Honest I did dad.

  Daddy, I caught a dace away on holiday in Dorset

  and it was argent like the moon when I ran, ran, I ran away

  for fear of everything and you. It was argent like the moon.

  It was argent daddy, but daddy wants to murder me.

  Daddy, the wind murmurs and hoys against my shins

  and I am alone upon my little pins in dales and hills

  but my heart is chill: because daddy wants to murder me.

  Daddy, do you want me to stop using the word daddy

  and not write like Sylvia Plath at all?

  Do you want me to write about my shrub of bay

  which we can stroke on our way

  out to the bender to have a hoolie and a ball? Do you daddy?

  Normally, in recent literary history, daddy, it is women

  who write about their daddies, daddy. But now it’s me.

  Daddy, da, pa, everytime I hear your name I want to flee, flee, flee.

  Daddy, when the word failure fled into my dictionary

  one page after facetious, I thought of you.

  Words were my war weapon, no matter how much

  you loved Dickens. All the names and words of endearment

  I never called you, and you could never find in your dictionary

  to call me, daddy, all the names of dearness, daddy, when I spat

  at you in the street, and ridiculed you in public, joying at the response

  to the ridicule, and my way with words as war weapons.

  Daddy, when the word hatred sprang up in class or conversation,

  daddy, you were top of the league, you were right beside the word.

  And it rained.

  And I love the rain, daddy, but you were never part of it.

  I was out on the lawn, and it was rosy September.

  Mother was addicted to wobbly eggs, and she made herself that way,

  daddy, with your tremendous help. You were good at that, dad,

  I give you that. Daddy, when the word broken fled into the

  dictionary, daddy, your oleaginous self was there smiling

  to give it a helping hand. Only you would have been there.

  When ostentation fled to the hills into my upland notebook

  I flaunted it right back in your direction, daddy. You knew what

  it meant.

  O goodness, daddy, I’ve dropped my dictionary,

  and my knowledge of words and phrases, punctuation and properly-placed

  full-stops, but I know I’m alright daddy. I can steer clear

  of my stupid awfulness. You’ll be there, daddy,

  with a welter of words. With a punishment of punctuation.

  Daddy, you personally placed the sin in syntax.

  And I went to the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,

  and they were very kind and told me straight, for straight

  is what I need, dad, now that drink has twisted me.

  One day, daddy, and this is what they said from the

  bottom of their professional hearts. One day, with

  rain from Sligo sheeting in the poor street, or

  rain from the desolate areas of unkindly Strabane,

  or from Denton Burn for that matter, or Waddington

  Street, where my heart is in storage, in a furnace,

  oddly enough, not in a freezer, or an ice-cube

  tray (yellow, not transparent) – and don’t forget

  my dear da, don’t ever forget. The French verb

  is oublier, daddy – that when you sent
your devil letter

  your snide, sneering, you Demon With Knives In The Mouth,

  daddy, when you posted it at 14:15 in the beautiful city

  of Cambridge, a city that does not need your evil,

  there is the letter, daddy, in the grate, where we

  burned it, and when we did that, daddy, we burned you.

  And when I had been to the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,

  and it is housed in a marvellous building abutting the

  Western Hill, and I cock my head at it always, and

  when I had been to the vale, and all of the other hills

  which lie in my soul, and their souls, and the souls

  of all of those who have walked them and loved them

  and hoped their souls and soulsongs would be collected and loved

  by a poet who would always be scorned by his da, daddy.

  I stood in the street at four in the day, itch of matins

  and mitted palms over the river in the great cathedral.

  I pondered it seemed almost forever upon the kinds

  of factual annoyance you dislike, père, Mr Not Sit Him

  On Your Knee, so I deliver it to you in this poem,

  on my way back to the home of my great beloved, whom you

  will never meet, evil devil daddy, even in the waiting room of the handsome

  home of the Durham Family Practitioner Committee, who

  told me, without saying one word, one verb, one sentence,

  there were no subjunctive clauses or split infinitives

  lying on the patients’ area table, daddy, when they told me:

  the rains of Sparty flower all the way from the ferry landings of

  Ireland, from the land of spuds and stout, and pipes

  and the great glens of poetry, Eileen Aroon and the loughs of swans

  and swanning if you fancy on a very soft day, daddy. Let

  me tell you how it is now – all the press releases have

  been sent, and all those who received them in the world

  of poetry and demons upstairs have shredded them and their faxes.

  We are approaching the midday of the time of Nobody Zero, a time

  of failed locks and pushed back chairs in a hurry.