Wolf Tongue
Page 19
northern end of the earth!
The south would suffocate
and humiliate me. Once more
the blossoms and birds. Even
aconite and horehound
bloom and bloom. I&I
myself am in a poisoned
corner, Chatterton-style,
entirely deconstructed.
Toe pressing the mad earth.
Stiff bottom lip turned out
against the rules and rest
of it, all in despotic shame.
Said: should do, but I won’t.
And she said: that’s the story
of your life. Almost man.
When The Candles Were Lit
Rain, rain, rain again and bonerolling bloodthunder,
lampblack clouds from the Pennines
towards fjords in the east
releasing their load
soaking the tied-back crown of Russian tarragon, swaying
so high in the herb garden
– reminding me
of the cast-back hair of Anne de Bretagne in 1514
commemorated in marble: full-length along the sealed
casket
eyes closed by human hand, lips half-parted for a last kiss,
O please, O please beloved,
and those frontal bones and ribs pushed up
made more emphatic in her exit exhalations
in the Cathedrale Basilique Saint-Denis
as the young beauty
longed to find her breath.
Yes, Paris, you have everything,
the fastest nitrate in the best Laforgue rain,
the best gutters and downpipes and poets
and the marble hightide hair swept back in death pose
like wind-whipped tarragon.
Pearl Against The Barbed Wire
How sweet today the scents and air perfumes
down the overgrown flags, binding stems
cling to my fair descending legs
which never saw a proper dance
in the arms of another – at village gatherings
I could only nod, neither saying
yes or no. So charmless harmless me!
Yet the true blue cranesbill like heaven’s light, invading
our brilliant path at Sipton Shield, crowning
the riverbed of tumblestones, is my
queenly ankletwine today, and the Michaelmas
which will be for my hair, washed
in the white water, crown of hair
lashed back from my supple neck, O yes
I hoy it back, defiant almost, if I knew
the word defiant and I wished I did know,
for it is a gunmetal word with a hard ‘t’
all should be acquainted with, with which all
should be in talking agreement: talking, what’s that
my sky-blue eyed Bar?
You speak the petals off the trees
each day and I in wonder
watch you draw them down. You’re like a bird
with fluting beak, while the silence
of the Nenthead shafts populate
with lack of noisesomeness my full
disabled cleft and tongue.
To call me idiot, brand me nobody,
is bestowing lustrous ermine qualities
upon my nowhere frame. There are no proper words for me.
Pearl: now our secret paths above the tumblestones
are pierced by yellow arrow marks
for all of those who would walk there too.
Everybody’s tortured, everyone’s in chains
I hate them and loathe them with strengthening abundance,
forehead-strong, and when my abundance, my overflowing
emotion, my abundance of the heart, my
moorland affluence and wealth which others call poverty,
when it streams like a fire seam,
I loathe them for binding my pearly toes.
I hate them because I am among their
other refugees. They put up the wire, wire, wire,
along my way,
which no one should do, for wire
is an industry, a containment, made in
Leeds or Wakefield Bar said, brought by 12-wheeled lorries
in unrolled bales like silver hay
from some industrial graveskin graveyard
completely contrary to the wings of my spirit.
Fraught I am with poor lip service,
destroyed and betrayed
and the river flows from me, my molten white water,
1500 to 1400 to 1300
past hawhips and sloes
and so to the sea.
I will wash myself in it forever.
Darling, reader and writer with azure eyes,
eyes the colour of the sea’s horizon,
I will wash myself in it forever.
In umber spate it ripped my breastbuttons, like your eager hands.
It broke apart my loving heart, like your cruel talking lips.
It stopped my sense.
O love, in a world of shuffled papers
and cheap haircuts, your honeysuckle-
scented locks, your locked and gripped
tongue will always be delight to me. In
an alien world of distant characters,
you’ll always be inside the dangerous
part of my forever welling willing heart.
Bar, Bar, barbed wire. Bar, the barbs
and staples and hooks and eyes. Did
you see the photographs? Did you see
the charred skin, the gravedigging
ceremony with gleaming boots,
spectacles and sneery smiles?
Did you take note my angel poet
of the complete famine due to
circumstances beyond control
of let’s grin and bear it?
Did you see the bushels of knees
and other thinly-appointed limbs
and the gaps of extracted – there’s
a word, my Bar, I know you’d love –
teeth, did you wonder where the world
was, where the world went, my honeysuckle love?
Blonde but a Jewess just the same.
No one had our words in those days.
When we stared and wandered
and stored and wondered
in each others’ far-reaching eyes
beneath the croaking creaking tumblestones
where our trout leapt mad for midge and mayfly
pollen puffed in gold explosions by sucking bees,
our ankles smoothed to Oriental beauty, before
either of us knew where was the Orient, before
Jeremy travelled there, before you read me
Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril, O dimmer
of my heavy lids, dizzy with pollen and sunlit
prose, O stunning quiet reader, seducer
of pathside petals and birdy wings, bringer
of betony, pointer out of fairies’ chimneys,
runner of rings in the rinsing rain.
I stood in any light there was, in
every light, dark and almost dark,
fiercely black, like a dark heart torment,
strangely grey all the way all day
from the storm-shaken ferry jetties of Ireland,
and I stood there, arms, heart and mouth open,
ready to be annoyed and poorly-addressed
by the sudden sun over the longing of the law,
and ready to be addressed by my loving love.
Medici? Three syllables, my honeysuckle
tumblestone rosehip love, but I did not
feel like an Italian court princess, for
my vowels were uncut marble then.
Even writing the words rose and garment
broke my heart; their real variousnesses
pricked me awake when I expected it least.
O my love, my rosehip pluck
ing love, my love,
kiss the bandage from my face and haul me from the wire.
All the mam-made hems, the man-made hymns,
none of the blood-filled truths, none, I say none,
none of them can move or call me as you can.
O my love, my harping, high fell honeysuckle
tumblestone molten white water love, haul me
from the terrible terror of the wristblood wire.
Nothing Are These Times
I am gnawing jawface, furman, odd cove
alone in the tree-line, pawpoison back
of the track pack, blood beneath the rolling
mills of sense, MC for this mad filthy earth
whose prancing demon gaffers have me
straight between the shoulder blades
and down the garglevomit hole they call
a throat. I am the bloatstoat, floating
volevoter at the collapse pollstation.
Each bouncer’s waistcoat gemstarred
with fragments of Bunting Betelgeuse.
Utterly I say in the dark and demon cup:
was it not brokenwing swanlove on
the rocks which left us forlornly grieving?
Do parts of your brain go guavapulp?
Or do you just become another child-
belting father and repeat the mistake?
Does hand-wringing become a new habit?
Fierce broken light arrives in the sky
shaded by a linen shawl of Irish winds:
beating demon daddies for once seem far away.
All gulpdragons have me by the breath
& my broken heart a wretched drumbeat
now you have swanned aloft in his arms.
Sleepless nights, stalk fever in my shoes.
Bad crack, smack, nerve gas and Tarzanjuice.
Pharoah’s army nurses come right in
smiling like the greetings card Jesus
in the fairytales. We’re their broken bread,
their human weeds, not flowers on
the pearly path to Jerusalem. If it isn’t
up the nose, it’s down the head-drain
or in the skin. Anyway it’s death & death’s
delay button with shaky finger on it.
And we’re here in the eternal land
of sensible branflake breakfasts
with UHT crap semi-skimmed clarts
from France. We hated it even more
than we loathed ourselves, each nailed
to the fantastic frantic demon tree.
Yes, it’s the best the council can manage
and it’s a bright hole and nothing at all.
Friends, fellow non-members of the
black sun anarchist nada addict group:
we’re in for a lousy final chapter.
No end in sight in starry bruisy night.
Bad bus one way to Snowville.
Forgiveness sold out no longer available.
Dead Man’s Handle
(after a word by Mayakovsky)
Comb the crawling morning chill chilling sky in search for vodkafire.
Forgive me my combing, forgive me my crawling, forgive me my fire.
The blue sky, the blue cold sky.
Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, my kisses now lost opportunity.
Forgive me for the cold blue sky painted in your eyes.
Forgive my knee-bending
when I pleaded with you to forgive me, forgive me,
transforming your face into a planet for kisses, forgive me my lipkeen leaning.
The spangled sky with no gods in it, forgive me for not giving you gods
and the very moon a humble eye reflecting our folly, forgive me my folly
as we walk here in the windstrewn gravity defence league posture department
destroying all that is dearest
all that is best to already broken hearts. Forgive me my heart,
my clownhearted tidal wave heart, forgive me my heart.
Picasso’s peace dove just a pullet with broken craw,
dead olive twigs choking its throat. Not even worth eating, forgive me its breaking.
The whole world a cubist disaster waiting to happen.
That cracker Jack crept in and killed the begonias with his winter switchblade,
forgive me his knife-edge.
Christmas is here and there’ll be no summer.
Tomorrow really has arrived already and there’ll be no today.
We walk apart in the night
and it may as well be continents
disproving history
that swannes mate for life.
It’s no life but a blank sheet again, all watercolours washed out in the rain
which was our growing season. Rainbow even
& soup by a lake.
Now it’s dreadful and filled with dread.
Forgive me the black city which burns in my heart.
Listen to the crashing windows from the burning black cathedral,
the blazing jetblack cathedral of my broken heart.
Here comes the dazzling darza drinks-at-the ready
DEMONSPIEL:
the trophy is poisoned
electric blue
all manners gone from the window
Go then, go back, go back to the halls of hell
go back to the single toll of the bell
go back, return, turn back to the empty bed
or the bed a linen scrapheap shaken by illusory sex for one miserable night only
then the deft departure at dawn, sly handsome fish through the net, the weeping,
the illusion
of coherence
the dream of integration
all the tables in the halls of hell
alive with broken jigsaws,
fragments, pieces, worse than Paddy’s Market, heart ripped out again
sad in its bowing, alone in its screaming & dreaming
driven from heaven, screwed down and abandoned
in the windswept yawning tunnels within the halls of hell
go then, to your pillow of nails,
go then, to your coldfeet unmatched boats
go then, no ruddy waterfall of leaves on our tree
go then, sober & seeing everything so damned Warwickshire clearly
go then, to the solo crystal vision of yourself
These 252 mile an hour headlong thoughts towards the station and platform
at the final appearance of the jammed dead man’s handle:
Always
gutterbright
to sky’s light
the eternal gift
of starres
last train to Demonville right on time.
Himself Bright Starre Northern Within
(for J.H. Prynne)
There is absolutely no record
of goodness in the history of my soul.
I say delete world delete her dollypops,
delete great gulp Adam’s apple Eveorange
delete all fancy her fingers throat-gripping
delete four winds sixteen windows
delete all the sad memories the torn books daddy
delete he with belt and Charlie Dickens
in his own privately-owned bad big Bleak House.
My house in the great city, my heart, my single solo
overture, over to the lightning-begging trees.
Delete memories, no memory for them
scattered, only one execution, not enough:
we did not cleanse
we did not feed the greenwood tree.
We flew aloft naked, one second only
not trusting the present: delete
the whole future dolldoodle dollywobble,
breastbabe delete dalliance Sun Alliance.
Dance dancing in the street delete
delete mugshots handcuffs social work aftercare
all known germs in cell fungus caught on spider carcase –
delete persons unknown teeth taken
spectacles and shoes piled high to the sky
delete all bank records of Nazi gold
delete the Swiss
and Zurich accountants
delete client confidentiality: we won’t tell you who went
to the ovens
who sank beneath the brainbullet, the pointed Luger
at wrist’s interface delete delete
the JUDEN window the smashed starre
delete the flogged animal
alone in byre’s blackness
delete the gas through ten shower holes
delete the savaged champion horse
delete the wordstation forgiveness
to be logged in by a nobody person not one
delete
I say delete midnight, midnight lawstarres, Pearlwords,
the mojo moon, no executed kings tonight, never enough,
delete kisses, poutlips, fast breasts, all the once-couple talk.
Ban delete all big skies Northumberland Texas to Samarkand.
All soft mouths, no salmon facedown in the pools, poisoned wraps
& wrappettes, down my legs in the tumbledown lone stones.
Forever. Delete all stolen slate from Nichol’s byre nail fingers,
no fashion book available, no delete kisses button. Press it.
Delete all beautiful hand-made stone walls. All wonderful swanne quillpens.
Jibesneers, delete, citric fake mouths, sad eyes masking
erection false pledges and bounced vows, refer to drawer.
Extracted teeth with no anaesthetic. Then to the ovens,