playboy, collapsed and weeping in his bent furrow.
Let’s fix a bright planet from a parallel universe
unto his dead starre skyless recovery agenda.
Let’s leave him in the auburn pools of piss in his
frozen kingdom cubicle with Santa’s reindeers revved.
Let’s poke out his kindly eyes of purest borage blue
so as not to shirk a Guernsey tomato face lying deep
in the frozen lake of the mirror.
Let’s not brush but switch & broom his quivering
lids with tail feathers of garrotted larks, pollen of larkspur,
let’s elect him chief celebrant and Mr Big Advisor
at the amazing red ant hoolie; aconite posies in his rotten head.
Let’s book him into the spineyellow pages of forgetfulness,
under Giant Guzzle Unlimited Forever & White Knuckle Rides
To Nowhere Fast – Spectacular Passing Out Our Speciality.
Let’s hit the digit snap arrival button so he cannot wipe the sick away.
Let’s for auld lang syne and weird kindness’ sake, hush our
bee-sting lips with fingers upright, tiptoe in the snow we go
and leave the slurry-loving, slurry sleeping lad alone.
Stripes on your shoulders, stripes on your back & on your hands.
Strips & stripes & little books & daddy’s tearing flaring point of view.
Like it son, or cry bruised and fearing for the rest of your solemn.
Solo days away from the palace of portion plenty & peace. Exeunt smiles.
Snow on my forehead, snow in the lock. Snowfall tick-tock slowly
winding downwind arms adrift inside it like a clock.
Demons tongue-stalking, mouth-walking: they’re talking
East Berlin, talking Grunewald, looking
at their Dalí watches on stiff drink wrists.
Crazy in capitals, dark star ferment: no thee at the go place.
Clap hands, here they come. Clapped bellhead, angel boyhood
to scarred bottledom, British West Hartlepool to Benidorm.
Snowblindness cover me, smother my waxy wiggle tongue.
Snow blow me. All the snow-wind’s a berserk bugle
here in my closet kingdom on the rim of mad Noel.
Sober up tomorrow, clean shirt, shakefinger tieknot,
well-ironed, iron the drink out of my face, unbolt my self:
avoiding the Lost Chance Saloon in favour of Maybe
One More Choice To Make in the Department Store of Sighs.
Pick up a bargain, stride home with purpose through
the jigsaw snow and the ghost of all demon daddies
to sit feet up and watch It’s A Wonderful Life on the telly.
Oh, yes. Certainly. No fulminations or bare excuses.
Yours soberly your favourite son miserable ever after.
Sweeno, Sweeno
Sweeno is two people – at least. Sweeno the night crawling homme man,
soaked sapien, gutter treasurer & curled up counter of cobblestones
in twitch vision. Nightjar Sweeno – bliss buster supremo Sweeno.
Sweeno the long cry rising like missile fins from the fans’ end.
Eyeless child blind on the grim uphill road to courthouse
compensation claims and the blindness of eternal non-recovery.
Sweeno lathed and lathered with port-soaked Baudelaire gingercake
alone as nitrates usher from the gargoyle’s twisted seizure face.
It is hundreds of feet in the air but it is a black mirror of Sweeno’s
collapsed kitten lover’s pansypetal printwheel pout. Swooney
Sweeno’s beano, born on a booze cruise, Sweeno at the entrance marked
Out. Go go Sweeno the demons said as they dunked his fairy brain
and fried his head. Earn your bread like Barrymore before
you’re dead, trashed the tuneful trolls in unparalleled register
& roguish misdemeanour. That’s showbiz, Sweeno, you drunk Dan Leno.
Between foot and wing, Sweeno learned one vital thing: You cannot
be wolf or stag alone in taiga treeline forever, peltcrested
& snowhorned, harpstrung highly-strung up Swoonatic,
haunt of hard-nosed hornets underneath your bonny steelbonnet.
Learn early skinstrip and sell it by the rotten mile. Learn unsmile.
Sweeno the Olympian champ diver down 20 stairs half an inch
from a broken neck. Seaweed Sweeno the man on the rocks a wreck.
Yet there’s another side to Sweeno, the man with eyes of borage blue,
the man high up in the heather hills with his Grace Darling, plover’s
wingbeat driving his brain and snipe drums beating his heart.
The upright Sweeno whose streaming becks are a life’s fuel. This
is not King Fool, prisoner in toilets armed with caustic cognac,
this is the prince of the northern air, with his tough tender love.
Feldspar finder, tickler of wild brown trout, bridger of burns,
man alive in love his heart in the skyblue sky, o heather o, Sweeno!
But really the truth is less poetic and palatable. This is the acid
bath boy, the angel with hissing meat right off the bone. Strong
tongued with viper juice, bamboo snake in jungle of his own
green many-fingered making. Mocker and mucker-up of true
love which dwells in a strong house. In perverse poise and perfect pose
he draws upon cynical strength of four Betty winds to see it down
into the grinding tumblestone quartz which splinters and thrills
in atomic smash-up as the devil grins inside his skull tornado.
This is the big riff: look out, look out, but don’t beware for
you cannot step aside. Sweeno’s black guitar’s on fire in
the human cathedrals of sense. The strings used for garrotting
moths before fireflames can ever reach their secret wing dust.
Sweeno the freak born a year early 1947 and kept for questioning
in Area 51. Then Sweeno’s far-out mind went underground into
every ravaged corner he could find that no one else had touched.
Window-eyed and shutters down, fury festered in his fists
that execution plans for kings and queens and Tories had been
shelved. Greenwood tree over his stupid centuries skeletoned
into failed jigsaw of parched twigs and boughs. Failed opportunity
flailed his heart, Sweeno sick and resentful as brighteous righteous sin.
Yonder stalk the trance monsters dancing through the dark
distressing dew at dawn, demons holding babies, Sweeno’s
Siobhan, leaving them upon the cold and open heartless
ground alive in itching gravel and grass with Betty blasts
of four winds to the heart. Sweeno’s queeno in weep mode
when the ox-bow river of beauty busts its bushy banks
and all the riveted bridges Sweeno built can turn to mere rust.
Sweeno lying Lazarus in reverse on sick bed singing sickly:
Come down fleet rain and rinse my filthy dirty Betty soul.
Marry me to the chainlink fencing which like wild roses
extend their pricky pushy Jesus crowns into my vowbox bullet
tongue until strangled I&I like realo Sweeno me-o shall never rise again.
Sweeno sweating in the night, feeling the demon daddies his
flimflam framboise on ice cutting crew quiz his seizure bouncing
bedhead bonce raising the ratroof of his profane wordpush pillswallow
dickhead announcement zone, rawling on brain’s hardbone basilica:
I AM THE NIGHTMARE. The blue tattoo legend bound to your Betty
sick soul forever. Kill that wasp. Beat it to death. O daddy demons, pin
its marigol
d and charcoal waistcoat stripes onto my Sweeno earholes,
lace together all its stricken wings for spectacles so I may read
again the many words of shattered vows, now I hear them struggle
into a storm of syntax once more as deadly distances which get
longer rise as steam from swamps here in the death-enclosing
night. No more for me the rising of a pink punk sun, black’s
the colourway for Sweeno the Uncleano this very very day.
All separations yes, haul them in in blood-scrubbed bucketloads.
Fragments and distressed alphabets or arithmetic of misery
bound in distrust thrusts of gruesome guise laughingly we call
honour friendship and the universe. No rules now no greenwood
tree. The guillotines sent to Paris and none so near Sweeno’s
hover handle hands. Not enough Ludlunatic posters pinned.
O please, Messrs Demon and Sons, vintage vintners and plyers
of slurtalk trade, pour Sweeno just one more before the heart
fails to grow and goes. Hear meano Sweeno: See what they did
to Elvis. Delilah haircut meets loss of power. Demon drink-up
death dribbles, absolutely, do take notes. No Samson Victor Manure
pillar push-downs. No push-ups but freely as the vomit streams
yanked by demon digits belly to basin. One day choke on it, tongue
jammed backward down throat’s clogged highway. No noose good
news for those old escaping Tories. Enclosed meadows and one
executed king. Dreams so fierce, desert storms of ABC, all
fall down. One head enough. Not enough work done. Sweeno’s
thin historical hysterical schedule in a spin. Sweeno in a mean
lean-to for Hurricane Betty: I’ve seen one hundred hungry dogs
crawl across their loved ones. I saw the skin fall from me
in steady strips and felt the sandpaper of so-called love
in eye of the very bone storm. I heard the wind say: I’m
blowing a mad and magic mojo horn and in the whipsong
of its Betty burned-out beauty – you call it filthy hatred and
betrayal for sad and solo Sweeno you are truly and completely
insane-o – I heard faintly from across the mountains far:
I’m going to lay down a thousand spells upon this unholy
disavowed ground until each writhing wily smiley wizard
downs his divining rods and realises finally at last at least
that they face a mixed trip back to Demon Town, and that
Demon Town is dead and Sweeno too will walk the line.
I’m afraid it is not possible, Sweeno in white strapjacket,
pilled to the nines, the nine winds, flung down the stairs
half inch from a noose-drop neckbreak in wake of Bettygate.
These are the lies, the footpad fingering falsehoods which
cannot nor will not, will not, will not, fall away rapidly
expiring. Falsehoods dark as my meadows are darkly dark
as the river and the roaring weir are dark & always dark.
When did you last see your father the insane interrogative
bells boomingly in his echoing bentneck at stairfoot as
another bottlebung pulled pop! right out and bolted down.
O chief stockholders in future equities of a rising thirst,
Sweeno is achieving major results in a shaky flaky market.
Sweeno cleans up and swallows down in dead of night
when others have gone home. He’s a winning wino alright.
Don’t doubt, deadly debt collectors all, look at the dividends
diving towards the rising expectations of a life in the sun
alliance, Sweeno’s dalliance dance with death is legend now.
Sweeno’s right there on the job. Pour him another and be grateful.
Anti-Lazarus Ludlunatic lolltongue Lollard, wine pourer
down his neck of night purrings, reports say Sweeno’s
on the mend or round the bloody Beaujolais bend. Exit Rex.
No glory on the bottlefield overdrawn at the bottle bank.
Must have carpet experience. Presumably to roll king’s
heads down the corridors of flexed power surge control.
The very trim, very slim experience of the twisted days;
days of yes I’m damned again and dimmed again by demons.
Days of bile man, slime man, vomit on his Texas shoes.
Glass glints purchase sunlight as birds and long-haul
planes fly through. Awful day, bad as any government.
Turkey plucker wanted – Norfolk. Head down the pan again.
What does it mean: to spew your ring? Sweeno, Sweeno,
you have vast experience of sickness – do you know, Sweeno?
No, no, no, hands up against any human requests at decency,
Sweeno’s on his own-io, lone striker on his flat back four.
Ten years in the same team Going Nowhere Albion sponsored
not just match days Cellar 5, Victoria Wine, Threshers, Red
Wine Rovers, Plonk Park Disunited, The Old Dysfunctionals,
Soused Spartans, Inter Chianti’s chanting demons’ unflagging
fandom: Sweeno, Sweeno, give him a bottle he scores a goal.
Own goals mostly, catalogue of lost memory matches & scores.
Hands on knees and puffing hard I’ve had enough of this.
Ankle-tapping, broken bones, demonic shirt-pulling, the
beautiful game on the emerald field of dreams now turf
churned, filthy, white line I shimmy down impossible to see.
Chants, rants for Sweeno, zero hero. Come on ref, blow that whistle.
Rockets, fires and flags on trouble-free terraces. Ferocity
like mine. No-score draw. No extra time. No penalty shoot-out. No
golden-goal finale, no golden boot. Down the tunnel into nightlight. Endgame.
Up A Height And Raining
I
O just to vex me inside the bottle the wind stayed still,
and left correct my cheap Woolworth accoutrements.
Look at the sheep fleece from tumbler base, so finely
doused by rain from Garrigill, as I dance my demon tarantella
in the misty mire.
I stood on the hill with drenched face and soaking nerves,
ankle deep leaving the word sober at home, gobsmacked.
The upstream heather says more than I do, whispering
its purple blues.
I wanted it to blow tonight, to put it right,
to put my G-force twisted face back in place.
Brown leaves now on the beryl lawn
and the magpies are gone.
The golden rowan an ascending beam.
Arctic white roses from the Himalayas
white as the whites of my eyes used to be
before the demons held my lapels.
It is dawn and soon I will have a fit,
a seizure, a gagthroat convulsion,
a demon convention with furtongue
pressed hard against the roof of my mouth.
Mouth an estuary for the love of drink,
and I know I stink of it darling
and no amount of mints or garlic can hide it
from the houndsniff now that’s built into your mind.
There will be blood, dearest, and horrid venom,
and black demon matter we’ll never clean off.
I won’t go again onto the drip. Not to the hospital
or the lock-away ward with its tightly kept key.
I’m going solo with capsules and the strength of your love.
Yes, love, they come: shiny shoes oddly enough,
the very nature of poetry erased from their report books,
tight black leather gloves to grip the bottles. Those
ugly gloved h
ands which search your soul.
You must guzzle aloud and let them do it
for every demon has to have its day.
My silence endless except for the swallowing.
O look at the golden leaves retrieved from the pink-sleeved trees
by the very act of the earth and its seasons.
They are bronze and gold, how very precious and horizontal
they are this regal collapsed November.
Look how they fall from the trees, quite drunk
with an unknown dream of renewal.
No stopping them and no stopping me
parallel to the horizon: my licence laws very strict –
I go from glass to glass, bottle to offy and back.
There’s one thing you can say: I never slack
from TV cornflake zone until Big Ben’s a post epilogue memory.
Except I can’t remember it or anything
unless the mind-piranhas begin to swarm
and I know I am not Cromwell or Milton
Wolf Tongue Page 21