Wolf Tongue

by Barry MacSweeney

  but I am a Protestant heretic,

  a Leveller lunatic, filled and felled by wine,

  whose failed allotment is a museum of weeds,

  whose rainy medallions are mare’s tail and crowsfoot trefoil.

  I do remember a blue light turning, and turning

  to you and trying to speak and couldn’t. Just

  the bleeps on the machine trying to keep me alive.

  And after X-ray escaping the wheelchair, vodka-legged,

  felled face down by the drink in the street.

  Nervous pedestrians leaning over

  and a discerning passer-by: leave him he’s pissed.

  II

  Perhaps I will rise in the fronds of Bengal

  crushed and tormented but determined to live

  fantastically luxurious in the grandness of suffering

  searching for the lingering lips of her loveliness:

  today I hunted through the wide wild skies,

  not one finger to touch, not one sunshine dalliance alliance.

  Arm rodded cloudward, always wanting the lightning mine.

  I wanted to be the driver on the Leningrad train, screeching

  raptor of the whole northern air: sober groom with a bride.

  Beasts steam and clop by the wire where my bottle is hidden,

  secret menu for peace, rage and change.

  III

  Yes, alcoholic, get him out of my face.

  Gin in his nose he’s a Christmas reindeer

  every day he won’t keep in his diary.

  Holy mother, free him from my terrorised tree.

  Release him from the twines of the briar,

  see him flash to the cork in fen and fern.

  Collapse him in misery. Slap him away.

  Give him 45 per cent voltage and watch him go.

  I am Sweeney Furioso, fulled with hate.

  Hate for you, for me, hate for the world.

  I eat beasts nightly and chew on snakes.

  The blood of an invented heaven spills from my shoes.

  I rage with wrecked harp

  for I am not the silence of Pearl

  though she is inside me, like an argent moon.

  I am a beast myself and return to see the mint die.

  All that is left are drought-stricken stems.

  There is no doctor cure.

  There is no god and I believe it.

  Every capsule in every brown bottle

  is a pact of deceiving; the demons know.

  Every prescription is a contract of lies.

  I set my slurring lips against the stupid universe.

  I squeeze my mouth as best I can around a bottleneck and mean it.

  Daily I fix my redlight eyes against the raw law sunne

  shaking my detox fists at the rams and lambs.

  It will make me powerful if they flee from me.

  Sorry is the last word in the long lost dictionary.

  There was a man once, in a long thin box.

  I see his washed out face in the fellside chapel.

  We’ll put out flowers and drink to his memory.

  We’ll scatter his ashes and drink some more.

  The aim is victory over the sunne and to stand in a high place

  holding a red flag

  ready to lead unforgiven workers to righteous triumph.

  You must execute kings and adulterous princes

  and reserve the right to burn down Parliament.

  Fight for your rights for the rest of your days.

  IV

  At Sparty Lea, here is the breeze burn,

  at the bend in the bridge here is the stile squeak.

  Here at the west window is the speaking for Pearl.

  Here in the clouds is her eloquent silence

  before addiction overwhelmed me and

  made me silent myself. Her night cloud silence

  following the clouds. And the clouds following

  her and the light in her heart. She sails in

  galleons of light all the way to Dunbar.

  We seized the sky and made it ours, spelling

  out the vapour trails: our clouds exclusively

  before poetry was written, long before harm

  and its broods of violence. Before we knew

  the moon was cold and before men – real

  men – stood upon it for the very first time.

  But love, that moon, that moon is ours,

  always, cold as your distant tongue.

  V

  Smoked salmon and lemon juice for breakfast,

  brilliantly chosen brewed teas!

  The enticing slow lifting of garments, wearing

  and unwearing of black silk,

  and exchanging of black and blue silks, white

  lingerie chemise taken off as the mist rises

  to meet its handsome lover the sunne.

  Underneath sheet lightning

  with audible thunder,

  lightning down the rod and sceptre,

  kisses fuming in darkness,

  electric discharge between clouds,

  fecund trenches & moss cracks.

  Zig-zag bones and branching lines fully displayed,

  diffused brightness to cooling toes

  before unwinding unwounded stretches of sleep.

  Kissed slumber barely awake

  under the vast viaduct:

  sex combs, complete claspness,

  hairs locked and unlocked,

  special pet favours given and received

  on both sides.

  Defying gravity.

  Our passion, darling, is pure 1917. We ride

  the rods and rules and rails,

  and skies for us will always be huge and authentic:

  Northumberland Wyoming and Samarkand.

  Fierce not the word to use for our kisses.

  It is not fierce enough!

  There are no wounds

  and revenge and warfare will die in the mud

  of an otherwise poor world.

  Fireflies, conductors, heads limbs and hearts,

  wires fixed to the great wide skies:

  We diverted heaven’s light

  into sea or earth’s true bounty

  of our souls’ brilliant kisses and everlasting starres.

  Tom In The Market Square Outside Boots

  Tom you’re walking up & down the pill hill again.

  Tom you’re taking your moustache

  to the Ayatollah doctor with his severe case

  of personality drought.

  Tom I saw you in the Heart Foundation shop

  buying a cardigan five sizes too big.

  Tom you’re more bent over than when

  we sat together in the locked ward.

  Tom your coat is frayed like the edges of your mind.

  Tom they let you out to the chippy but you’re not free.

  Tom we’re falling in the wheat

  our feet betrayed by sticks and stones.

  Tom we’re in the laundry and it’s us spinning

  as they try to dry out our wet lettuce heads.

  Tom there’s a cloud on the broken horizon

  and it’s a doctor with a puncture kit.

  He’s got a mind like a sewer and a heart like a chain.

  Tom, who put the rat in the hat box?

  Who gave the snakes up the wall such scaly definition?

  Who plastered the universe with shreds of attempting?

  Who unleashed the foes to annex your head?

  Who greased the wheels of the Assyrians’ chariots?

  Tom the shadows of men are out on the river tonight

  reeling and creeling.

  Invaders from Mars have arrived at last

  and they’re working in the lock-up wards.

  They’re dodgy Tom, strictly non-kosher – just raise your hangdog

  blitzed out brain and look in the defenestrated alleyways

  which pass for their eyes.

&nb
sp; I suspected something in the fingerprint room

  & the sniggery way they dismissed our nightmares.

  Tom the door is opened

  and you lurch down the path

  past the parterre and the bragging begonias

  but listen Tom

  on the cat’s whisker CB

  listen Tom listen and look

  you’re still a dog on a lead a fish on a hook

  Tom you’re a page in the book of life

  but you’re not a book

  you’re not the Collected Works of Tom – yet

  there’s no preface but the one they give you

  there is no afterword because no one knows you

  there’s a photo on the cover but it doesn’t bear looking at

  there’s a hole where your family used to be

  an everlasting gap in the visitors’ index

  A SMILE FROM THE NURSES LIKE THE BLADE OF A KNIFE

  Tom – what happened to your wife?

  She used to visit – every Wednesday

  when buses were running before the cuts

  Now she’s a lonely bell in a distant village

  sacked by the Government

  Mr and Mrs Statistics

  and their gluey-faced children

  There’s only one job on offer

  in the whole of Front Street

  delivering pizzas to the hard-up hungry

  and a spanking new sign on the unused chapel

  Carpenter Wants Joiners

  Jesus Tom it isn’t a joke

  they crucified the miners

  with Pharisees and cavalry

  dressed up as friendly coppergrams

  it wasn’t Dixon of Dock Green Tom

  it was the Duke of Cumberland and Lord Londonderry

  rolled into one

  Dark today Tom and the city roofs argent with rain

  dark as a twisted heart Tom

  dark as a government without soul

  or responsible regard for its citizens

  trains’ rolling thunder north and south over the great redbrick viaduct

  is the only sense of freedom I have today Tom

  the high lonesome sound of the wheels on the track

  like Hank Williams Tom we’ll travel too far and never come back

  which is why they drug us to a stop Tom

  pillfingers over our fipples and flute holes

  we’re in a human zoo Tom and it’s a cruel place

  Tom you’re away from a haunt but furled in a toil

  Tom there’s a spoil heap in every village without a colliery

  there’s a gorse bush on top you can hide in naked

  but you can’t escape the molten golden rays of the sky

  bleaching the leukemia lonnens of ICI Bone Marrow City

  Tom out here on the A19 the long September shadows of England

  stretch from Wingate all the way to Station Town

  long and strong and dark as the heart of the Jesus Christ Almighty

  or the lash of the snakeskin whip he holds over us all

  Tom are you mad by north-north-west

  or do you know a hawk from a handsaw?

  Are your breezes southerly?

  All the fresh air is quite invalid Tom and all the peeping spirits

  have ascended to your brain

  like region kites

  and the gall of the world is mixed in a cup

  Tom there’s a silent flywheel on every horizon sequestered by law & severed from use

  O dear, Tom, our heels are kicking at the heavens

  sulphured eyebrows as we strike into the hazard universe

  of souls

  where angels on our shoulders stand tall to make assay

  for acid rain will fall and wash them white as snow

  the weather has turned Turk Tom and we are almost ruined

  all softly cooling bright Atlantic winds from Cork and Donegal

  are cancelled now

  and fever has us in its grippy flame

  ill-fit saddles have galled our wincing jades

  all that is left is the mousetrap of the devil

  but only if you give up on humans

  Tom invisible limers are fingering twigs in the groves

  Tom the twin sears of my hammered heart are set to be tickled by leather-sleeved index fingers itchy and raw

  Tom there’s a man in black with a lone silver star

  casting a shadow as long as his dreams

  Are your eyelids wagging Tom, so far from the burning zone?

  Have they fitted you out yet, did you have the bottle to object?

  Tom I can see you being folded like a linen tablecloth

  I can see the busy working hands working on you

  We’ve been driven from the prairies Tom

  to an isthmus of disappointment

  whose pinched becks can never sustain us

  Tom I frighted my friends

  by getting this way

  I sickled and scythed their garlands of wheat

  tongue a runaway bogie with broken brakes

  alone on the pavings written with rain I was a sacked village myself

  palings downed and all fat fields returned to pitiful scrub

  Station Town Quebec Shincliffe to No Place

  a network of underground ghosts

  bust at the seams

  Tom will our dear decorated hangers be responsive to the hilts on the swords of our days?

  Will a tigerish revival leap upon us

  from a leaf-locked lair?

  Will we be allowed another trample through mud?

  Tom I doubt it as the sunne doubts the starres.

  But starrelight is our single fire Tom, single

  and silver in the bed of the sky.

  Brown-bottled venom and its work

  a past prescription be

  and all folded warriors

  to gentle station grow.

  The glow-worm dims and the sea’s pearled crashy phosphorescence

  in matin mist.

  There’s a lark aloft in the morning Tom

  its breasty song our autograph

  embracing fortune

  in this out of focus world

  high and mighty

  and carried away on shields.

  John Bunyan To Johnny Rotten

  The long shadows of gold October stamped into the earth of England.

  Amber crowns of trees shredded in the wake of the wind

  whose invisible straps unwind allowing previously strapped grasses to become

  unfleeced in air and have echoes and tunes like chapel hymns along the arm of the law.

  It is our rim of the world. It is our Aztec finality and birds fly there.

  They are funny birds and bonny with aquamarine flashes down their pillowsoft

  beakbone nearness & not like peewits at all.

  It is our raining night & hoofing the wet lonnen. We are tearing down posters

  at Loaning Head

  pinned with one nail

  and on the posters badly-drawn faces

  for we are grey ghosts and silver surfers

  the Finnbars the MacSweeneys the Pookas the Toms

  the gun-carrying leadmineshaft knockabout nobodies

  swimming beer off Sundays in the ice-cold tarn

  never knocked down in Knock Down Town.

  Nothing left in England now.

  One king only not enough.

  When did you last see your father is a laugh for me Tom, he was a jellied-eel traitor

  to my poetic revolutionary heart

  for always I have the axe in my hand. 1917. I have the hood and the axe and the

  unsmilingness. I will do it as duty Tom, for waste must be punished.

  O Tom, what am I saying?

  I have wept before the shoals of shoes from Amsterdam, from Vienna, from

  Warsaw, the leather straps and rusted buckles,

  I wept before the Jewish mountain of shoes and sanda
ls and encasements

  purposefully stitched and modelled for feet whose feet-bringers were hoyed

  in the ovens and the gas.

  My axe alone Tom is against the oppressor & oppressors.

  Tom, I’m not a poker-hearted Pooka. In sober raindawn reality I’m a cress-

  hearted man.

  No Caroline Louise no Hazel the pills are wearing off

  I walk alive alone in Alston and lean against the menu of the Bluebell Inn

  because it is mine. Smoke from the little trains are the fumes in my brain.

  I walk there Tom, I run there Pearl. Rings to be made and vows to be said.

  Tom, you have rockfire. Tom you have a lordly head.

  Tom, can you hear the final slowing down spin of the flywheel

  as the last cage ascends?

  Tom, these are real men with faces like pandas

  carrying badgerbrocks of coal. It’s a memento now.

  This place, Tom, was a nation, making trains and ships and cranes,

  transporting unlikeables like us to the lands of boomerangs and redrock. Our

  chainbroken fingers & hands acquainted with hunger & slavering slavery

  kept together the hulks on the Thames, we were the true breath of the

  nightforest noosehang land.

  Tom, do you remember when lightly but enough to hear I knocked for you at

  midnight, starres our only light, if starres there were? God help us Tom

  we enjoyed it, one more Tory burned from his bed.

  We stood together with tightly-bridled panting steeds among pooked sheaves

  laughing until the sunne of togetherness warmed our roof-burning brand-

  throwing shoulders.

  How strong it was Tom, our amusement, as the red-coated militia arrived,

  long before they drove down the miners in the villages. We blessed Jesus

  the first Chartist for saving the bairns and the wife.