Wolf Tongue
Page 18
as the swollen argent river sweeps across the tumblestones.
Grog demon biceps leaving me moan groggy, foggy-bonced,
pouring lunarstruck salt, sel de mer, coarse white pellets
scuttle-funnelled on MacSweeney’s stuck-out begging tongue:
Tongue stuck out like raw begging hand in the mall, sticking
out straight, single digit filthy message signal up yours tongue,
in the air bloated for booze upright needle Cenotaph tongue,
grovelling, whining, soliciting, pleading, eyes imploring,
thirst, thirst, thirst, craveache, pinecovet, itchneedlust,
but on comes the salinating, saliva-droughting insult, Sahara
mouth an agony O, my Lot’s wife tongue, rough orange fur tongue,
tongue examined by Dr Guo in needle room number two,
bladderwrack tongue late of the ebbingtide pools, salt on the rocks,
tongue of the deep sea trawler lick hull clean department,
tongue out on rent as a dog’s public park hard-on, for
artists to paint in glory of its pinky stiffness and quality
as blotting paper for anything as long as it’s a double on the rocks.
Blot, blot, blot, blotting me out: moan, moan, take me
from the slake tide to lake or snaky clean river, before
the endless chained pails of salt end me, tireless demons
happy in their work: a regular seven dwarfs scenario,
whistling darkly all the way to the daily saltbeds as
they pour, pour, pour, and the demons’ capped gaffer,
fancy Dan Demon Man, who shall always be known as
the one with the Mouth of Rustling and Relentless Blades,
swaggers barely into focus from my throne in the gutter,
one hand filled with bottles and the other with scran.
Just one more, sir, for the road?
Demons In My Pocket
Arrest me asleep, crashed out
under the eye of the borage: So what? I’m
just pissed as a primrose posy
beneath an April shower. I’ll do.
At least I’m speaking in cogent sentences
from the back of nowhere below an argent moon.
At least I’m not a replicant Labour Party goon.
I sold my fancy suits for vodka and a copy
of The Russian Experiment in Art.
It was the only way I could get near
Kazimir. I stood proud alone
in the Stalingrad rain and read
the legend headlines: Fiend Poet
Shot Dead With Broken Hat. Scald
Of The Steppes Before Firing Squad
Accused Of Dawdling On Lithic Tuff
With Shattered Socialist Heart – Gun
Seized. Friend Of Few Flees Not So
Lengthy Life With Unpunished Book.
But they were all too long or badly
bust and the typeface choice at least
debatable. So much in my oddly spring-
like foreign guises – Swanne, Ludlunatic,
MoonySwooney, Madstag, Lenin Wolfboy or
swiftly skilful terrace tantalising
push and run teaser fan pleaser Sweeno –
I yearned for 200-point Cyrillic caps
across seven cols or in cirrus strands
and to be a bloodred flower too, guts &
heart upon my sleeves and not a pinko posy!
Not to be out in rainy Nevsky Prospekt
but here I am at the back of nowhere
under a fickle sickle harvest five-year
plan pearly Shirley shiny moon, dreaming
in my railway sidings way of tiny toes
and teeming tumblestones twined without
torment in greeny locks and coronets
of cushy crushed footfall meadow cowslips. In
the dimmed and dimming day when it
will be dark along the river and always
dark and Othello will pad freely demented
a panther in my sickened heart, I feel
the gutter twisting, hard-fortuned
carrier of water and nitrates to the
unholy earth, and it all, all, yes, all
of it, howls in the basement bowels as
the gale gets up its fatal goat. Starlings
thrash the sky at dawn in feathered
shoals, quitting nightrest rooftop
cat-free safety of the city centre Odeon.
Truly, I do have 20/20 Vision: She’s
gone, she’s gone, but what can I do? What
drives me to you is what drives me
insane. Mental rental idiots in hatred
uniform pursue me through fire
escapes to arrest once and forever
before the racing sails of my heart
can capture her eyes of borage blue.
They’ll drag me away from B&Q the
gall and spite and malice crew, to
filthy demon paperwork and drinkwork,
to slurword work, collapse hardwork,
to tonguebite drudgery grand mal jerkwork
and far away, my fingerfast, from you.
All my rotten reeking shrieking shreds
are speaking fast now, sledging off my
funnybone tongue. The very last words
sung, they’re exploding and expanding
as they hit the croaking creaking rhizome
rats’ tail ground. Outbreak! Outbreak!
Thousands dying and thousands dead! It’s
more an incurable curse than a human
tempest clashing in the midnight blue
of the outer outskirts of Murmansk.
All human malevolence planned, sewerage,
invade my hair and lips and lovely
blue far horizon cloud cotton-soft eyes.
Killer virus in my brain bane, this liquid
poison potion passion pestilence for which
I have shown so little prayerful penitence
coughs its infection into my lovely kitten
drunken face. Spikes, brads, studs and welds
bussed up the bombed-out road from Nixville
to empty eager waiting bottle-holding hands.
Nailbite squall-stirring helicopter gunships
of darkest green – it is dark now along the
moonless river and dark and always dark –
descend to drop the flogging hammers in.
Tell Anne she can have her wildest pills
again tonight and the devil be on look-out.
My rattlechain hands go out unshaking now
in feverfew frenzy, big Russian tarragon
twister tornado as it whips its Monroe hips,
in the hostile thunder bellow days alone away
from you my lovegun, my bullet to the heart.
The violence universal of all you warders,
white coats or blue: needle room number two,
Chinese doctor grinning at me Manchurian
Candidate with her needles and punctures,
bars or no bars, mashed spuds or no spuds.
In single mode I speak out clearly astride
the argent turquoise starre system which
beams in your eyes. No log-in further
sequence needed. To log-out now means to die.
And the terrible gutters move again aching
with gargoyle gushing rain above the graves
dug by those who will lie in them horizontal.
The moon’s awesome gaping craters lean in
and the lurid savage cranberry sunne muscles
up inside its squadron of burning over and above
the iceblue rims of the fabulous fjords. Is that
Kazimir, John or Percy in the railway sidings
astride or in or beneath or moving through
the water? It is the streaming dark water,
for the water is dark and it is alway
s dark
and the night is dark and cold is the very ground.
The emerging lanceheads of the chives are so
beautiful tonight, by offshore rigs, mainland
bridges and cranes, and humans walk beneath
the stars by the streaming dark water where
in the land of tumblestones it is dark and always
dark. Hear the roots of the flowers stress even
the mighty earth and cry. Feel the mad planet
buckle at the soul and knees. This memo to all:
I am 72-inches tall, yet when I go to meet John
and Percy and Kazimir and Pearl, stick me in
an oven and burn me just the same. Then I will
be a true Jew, a poet through and through.
The Horror
The horror of the hospital for us both.
Demolished eager hopes and trudges up the bad
steep hill in your dun winter clothes: to be
refused information. Not your bright red
party jacket not your guitar badge and
funny pinned on chrome figure. Just
petitions and pleas – how’s that man
of mine? That badly displaced fellow
on 50 mils a day and what, what for
god’s sake, is he eating, and I don’t even
believe in gods – or that one from
Cecil B. De Mille. For when the Wall,
and I don’t mean the tourist attraction
touted in China, when the Wall was
chipped to bits it broke my stern heart
and it broke his, my man, and I know
you are breaking his and mine now.
And you are breaking me to uphill
trudge bits and episodes – like poor
hammered toffee – and I cannot eat
myself and I am being distracted
my heart itself once an oven of love
turned into a rainy asylum alone
in the bleak upland rains. How
much better it might be in summer,
recovering our seasons released
upon sensational sun-peeled skin,
boats and oars and oarlocks and
handlocks and kisslocks locked
right in place, pure juice from
Spanish oranges, Miró suns pouring
endless light over grief of my walk
across the spated river, touching
the black painted bridge lamp after
dark, made in Brum, near where
Nazi airmen torched my childhood
cathedral; me in a shelter, afraid
of flames and fire, as you are now,
flames in your heart, O darling
don’t let them be extinguished now,
it is the smashed cathedral of your
life sweeping up in utter flames
to the frozen ground: torched and
charged with terrible destruction.
For many days, my man, you were
a man with a many-layered mask.
You did not want to know me and
again as I arrived and arrived you
bent your head and heart away and
did not want to know me. My own
heart a haunted husk without you.
But always I put my hand out and
want to and always did and do. We
have been driven to distractions
by a long revelation of deprivation
madness which triggered me to
trudging, loving you, pursed lips
grim in every worried step back
to your haloed bed in wardlight.
Your northern arms around me
not browned by Miró’s molten suns,
and you held me strong and lovingly,
northern hands, tight, tight, tight,
forearms around my ribs and spine,
making me shudder in happiness
and unbroken realms of loving safety,
so paleness of spirit left me undaunted;
a queen of hearts and a warrior of love!
Yet once more I am at the hospital door.
Once more you will be completely
off-centre and pilled up, caustic tongue
not lazy. Once more betraying my heart
your illness clinging like oak-roots.
I pray the trees will lend you strength.
The time has come to palm aside all
images of lost sheep and willows weeping.
In my bad dream you climbed to the wet
roof of the lunatic asylum, through barred
windows, determined to be demon free.
You said you were a magpie and would
fly to me. But your flight ended in a fatal
swan-dive into the Yorkstone yard. O
mendacious reel of bad fortune, let
sun’s pollen-gold wake me to a saner world
so fleet already without this torment too.
Demons Swarm Upon Our Man
And Tell The World He’s Lost
Smartism seems to be the best deal
in these broken-fire days, honed up
with barely held apologies, not the
Suprematism of monumental Kazimir.
He’d weep seven broken plates at its
purity of abjectness, lack of muscle
tone. Not for us now to stand upon
the steps in a revolution’s moment,
with Miró’s crown of sun and stars.
All the demonic graffiti is quite certain:
I’m the abjuring man.
I’m the abdicating man.
I’m the strangely dislocated
disconnecting disconnected man.
I’m the storm-tossed tosser
on Earthquake Street, mindblown
dead on arrival sprawled on
Richter Scale Prospekt, found
crying wolf beside the troikas.
I alone in detox itch and fury
test the temper of sunbeams
and angels. I flee across the shiny
floor – believe me, it is shiny –
headbackward pursued by flying
animals and objects each
with forktail cocktail blazing. Endless anger
only is my recompense for
first-rate pistolage now she’s
fled these shores for sanity.
O my wires keep dropping out.
Let loose my stumble in the darkness.
Fling my face into brooding earth.
Trample forward onto footloose ground.
Watch the devil’s tarpit veil smother me.
Who today will fetch my idle drinkless
hands a king whose neck wants wringing?
Who will set me free from strapdown
to deliver Sexton’s necessary utmosts?
It will be the last house-call after all.
No, no, it is all drinkless dole and drollery,
regime of hysterical tomfoolery.
Why can’t you get helium on the National Health?
Because the Tory Government has taken it all.
It is dispensed every day to Cabinet ministers.
Now they are gone completely myxomatosis bunny funny.
May the demons track them down
as they tracked me. Relentless pursuit
and capture their family’s fantastic method
code and motto. O, SAS where are you now?
Gone to an alcohol oasis every one.
Blackhand gangs through every window
leapt craving my wit from ice-wagons – every day
was Drink More Pour More Day.
May they sting their heads and hearts
and sap their very strength and breath.
Am I alone in my symmetrical vision
of this unequivocal stupidity? Look
at the Labour Party too & roar with laughter.
All, all, all, clowns of conceit.
S
hafted & driven intolerant on spewground
wearing only an orange Cuba baseball cap
say then this: Lift one much exercised
right arm more used to shifting Russian
vodka, drunkenly saluting naked and badly
bruised Albion and that failure St George,
declaring in soaking mattress rawness –
that’s the ugly nation you have made.
And that’s the nation of me too: each of us
in very separate parts brought to our knees.
Hooray Demons Salute The Forever Lost
Parliament Of Barry And Jacqueline
Now it is time to put aside and forget
the decadent period of fast red cars &
slothful attitudes towards boldness
and moral mettle except in entering
the National Lottery, the greatest
con yet wrought by the Tory Party –
worse than cheap gin for quelling
here in the Great United Quelldom
where tomorrow never comes fast
enough for win ticket announcement.
I have been admiring the caked
menstruation blood you left
on a pillow before we parted.
It was the most tender
moments of our days.
We laved and laved the blood away
and you helped me with my broken leg.
It’s amazing what we did considering.
Nothing remains now.
World in smithereens.
4:56, sun rising after me,
swoon alone in the garden
at lilac and azalea fumes
thanking heaven inside
the utter madness for
nasturtium you planted
before fleeing from
my darkriver drinking.
Rain, alone in the rain,
rain and the train and
the river darkly summoning
towards its source my heart.
All the buttercoppes
flush like forests ankle-high.
I am so glad to live at the