Wolf Tongue
Page 23
But the port-soaked Tory was dead, Tom,
and we sang our hymns with clean hearts.
Tom, nothing has changed except everything.
All of these centuries and centurions.
Tom, last night Milton & Cromwell said I should speak to you.
Bunyan smuggled a note on ragged paper.
Five knocks on the water pipe, I knew it was coming.
Tom, now it’s us in the lock-up, in the spotty-face bathroom, in the lost
toothpaste universe,
in the argumentative wild Pearl honeysuckle wold unyielding unwielded world
of wrong-sized slippers, in the bad dressing-gowns
before harried relatives arrive to pull the armpits right, Tom, it’s us: the walking
sandbaghead wounded dead of poor lost England.
I met Cromwell & Milton & Blake yesterday and they were lost as us,
funny stout men and one blind looking for the dreams of Albion.
Pen-ready men with quill of swanne.
Tom, you put your right shoe on your right foot and the left on the left.
The laces need to be tied and in absence of your apple-pie wife I’ll do it
because bending down with firm fingers is so difficult
as pills plasticine your once-digitally correct hands and take the few straight
lines in your messed-up mind
and turn them into undriveable curves.
Even Blind Willie Milton even Cromwell even the Memphis Flash even
The Killer even Cash
is on a midnight Vincent Black Shadow.
From Huddie Ledbetter to de Kooning they’re in slave overalls.
There’s a pride in working for a living Tom, but it isn’t for us. We’re wasted
in wastelands before they were invented by Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Before Sylvia Plath paid her gas bill,
before Anne Sexton demanded blue disks from the doktor, before she
admitted an addiction to slavery & left us to be a spirit in the rainy trees.
Tom, King Arthur’s in his counting house, counting out the wastage,
finalising the blame,
And who would say it, Thomas, who would lift the gall from the cracked glass,
but to say: Arthur, you too were a croupier of blame, you too
swept the table clean with the other social model, Margaret of St Francis?
Tom I do miss your wife Alice because for one reason at least
she brought us cloudy pastry tarts filled with apples from your trees
and sweetened by sugar from the Co-op in Langley Park
eating moon slices before pills travelled us to sleep
and Alice left sprightly rightly perhaps a purposeful heart searching for sunshine
in the darkness of day. Heart a mixed posse of love and not love,
of drawn guns and pouched bullets.
And a hatred of the Stasi experiment doktors shared by us all.
Tom, I want to lock the lunar lunatic’s opal horns, I want to run before
the moon, I want to swing on my starres by Bunting, garlanded with squat,
I want to drink endless my Castrol to stop the stile squeak.
Tom, she’s a princess of the mosswalks, and she does not want you to leave
her alone. And the bairns are crying for their dad, dad, lost dad, man with
moustache & a bone in his head.
Hard as a Birmingham spanner and right as a River Tyne rivet.
We’re walking to the gay liberation centre, Tom, but we’re already dead.
Taxi, Tom, heartsore, we’re a pack Tom, infesting the age, thousands of thorns,
which may as well be pennies, someone to pay for it,
trainers for the bairns who know you’re a photo once in the Sundays borsik in
the madman’s paradise:
the club, Tom, the full-sized snooker table, where you can write in big chalk and
lay a fat man down: Tom, dear garlanded friend Tom, you’re not that strong.
And if anyone picked on you, they’d have to peck at my fiststance darkdance first,
burst from the feldspar heifer hoof fields.
I am Lenz, underground my natural home. Watch me, Tom,
bust from the cowslip shadow alone with Pearl.
My heart and anger a double-barrelled sawn-off gun. Axe on hold whipped
clean by the wind from Pearl’s mouth.
When did you last see your father, Tom can you help me?
Invisible he was forever when I was seven-years-old.
My canvas was clean but on it he put troubled colour.
Tom, the point is: I want that portion of him executed.
I know these hills so rest in my shadow.
I’ll talk to the jailer and tea at dawn will be the leastest.
3764 Highway 51 South, Robert already having PASSED BY TO TOES
TURNED-UP TIME.
SURLY STEEL, BOLD STEEL, TUNNELS THROUGH ENGLAND,
TOM YOUR MIND’S LIKE MINE: PEASE PUDDING.
We’re Navvies Tom. Straight up. Garlanded by bows of greenwood tree
and poem and lock-up ward and pill.
We are singing Milton today dreaming of Jerusalem
and the trains which never take us along the steel of the world.
Law with the wind in my face as I mince springingly princingly
on my wincing jade,
bit-jaw strapped in, fist-firm, fury in my heel spur and black frock coat
which can only bring death to the demons and the kings of frippery of England:
Law on the horizon and law in the lonnen at Loaning Head:
Stirrup-high I turn for the smell on the heather fellwind, still
on my mount, still but nostril light, honey of her thighs on Irish winds
before we gathered at night, building obelisks to Chartists
and we stroked goodnight the muzzles of upland high-hooved horses
because they reminded us of women lost in the dawn of the dew and dandelions
Tom I think I’ve gone turnip tuneless toes turned up frozen out from river
to rawness
on the rim of the law and the world
Tom a man came in a long black suit to saw off one of my limbs
before anaesthetic
Tom I pulled from my leather pouch – hole in its hiplength spout – a gun
with hammer of the finest steel, a curved knuckle-guard you’d wish to tell
your children about
if you lived beyond the rapes of the government
and Tom he didn’t get any further
to you for example Tom because your brain’s an oversteamed cauliflower
lolling in the Locomotive Arms
and my lover Tom my lover the poet is not a loader of rifles
a washer of signal cloths
she’s a leader Tom she’s a high-stepping jade herself
not one quick finger far from the pin
Tom, Pearl, I’m wedded to a theory from which I shall no doubt be soon divorced
in undainty circumstances
that disobedience
Disobedience, disavowal, the shredding of woofs and weaves,
the salivating of microphones
when all is denied, Bold steel low lot lacklevel.
I am these men and their lost women.
I am, spur-horsed, undenizened
Invisible twine plying merchants are unravelling the long grasses
and the plovering pull of the long windstrewngrasses pluck the prince
in his chest his heart his passion and love as if no tomorrow.
He caws, crows quietly, softly as a byre when beasts have departed
and rain on a shifted slate is like indescribable music which is
not music because the word is yet to be invented under the great heaven.
Let’s wait for the very day Pearl says it whipped by rain. Beautiful Pearl.
And
the leaves in the trees seem to whisper Louise because they’re nuts Tom.
But I sank shaftshining in her budding cressbed. She’s as wet as a 17-year-old.
They should be saying Michael Collins Bobby Sands and a litany a directory
in the wind from Sligo a stooked sheaf of telegrams of the dead the foolish
the aimless the aimed at the fallen and the framed Tom.
But they’re not they’re frozen like my angel in the fantastic magnet filings
of her boldly stirred heart.
So this is where you were in the he-boat the she-boat the he-she boast-come
together lover on the lake where the swans come in.
This is where the matin mount of your kisses wrestled with the oar-lock movings
for supremacy in the long mornings when the boat drifted into the reedbanks
This is where you rowed the he-boat and swam in the clear Irish water
and lay in his swanwings in the uncloaked unlocked dawn of padding
across the water
abandoned abandoned on the ferry landings of Ireland
pipes laid by for Marie’s Wedding and She Moved Through the Fair
this is where my heart was a black kesh by the forlorn waves of the clear water
where the swans come
my heart my wooing MacSwooning whistling heart love
nothing but a black kesh in charcoal shadow on a sunless hill
I was a monster in Munster swinging my green jealous sword and making you pay
There were no telegrams Michael no messages Tom no letters the Royal Mail
is dead today but a bullet in the head and an army led by Judas
I do not believe him a good man
Soldiers need paying but he was not a soldier for freedom
only my heart will fight for her love and want nothing in return
but a kiss like a flutesong a hug like a tressed harp
a fire in her eyes and a dance in her hair
Tom there will be applause from the gatherings for the pressing and raising of heels
but it won’t be for us
locked in the byre with the beasts and the winding gatepushing wind
Tom you know there’ll be a wind from the west
all my life I’ve been a leader and now like you it’s a lost soul department
nothing to say Tom but this poem
& the rare beautiful women of Doncaster beneath the High Street clock
Tom rarely sick
garlanded by sullen steel
Tom in the tunnel with the dynamite mob
and the jelly in his drainbrain
& mine
its gutters and flues of intelligence flowing away to a land filled with fairies
where Tom
rarely sick and rarely better
threw doll from his pram
on gallery 10
where the screw was hanged with piano wire
we dawdled in the bronze-leaved sullen golden sleeves of the sike paths
threads of earth in the matin mist above the toy cathedral
edgewater clouded with invisible natural matter the human eye will never see
so you say for something to define it the water is clear to the bottom
pebble gatherings clear as the tumbler base seen through gin and vodka
brought by demons from the piggery where my heart lay in ruins
as now it lies ruined Tom
altogether Minister of Mayhem to Myself the great bombardier the single swanne
for she is swooning for his harpstrum lips all the way from the ferry landings
to the grid systems of New York and the sunsets of boulevards Tom
we shall never know with our bed end hangdog
broken busted barely visible beatitude
waiting the bolt to the temple
we’re in a byre Tom it’s true
and the transience of love hammers us all
and no swan call no flashing nuthatch
no rain on the gravel or mist in the hair
can save us from the eternal prospekt of the knacker’s yard
red berries on the holly bushes Tom but we’ll never see Christmas
there’ll only be wreaths
not paid for by plastic
we’ll never see Christmas
except with the angels
pulling us towards the argent arcs of starres
elegies unwritten left for those alive below
to argue and fuss over lost blood bones and brains
!GOD SAVE THE
QUEEN!
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
[1983/1997–1998]
La Rage
(for Lesley)
Irish poets
call it rhosin dhu
but I call it
la rage.
The black rose rage
that argibargies
your heart.
Magic is la rage.
The shaman
knows la rage.
The throws
of the runes
& sticks
& stones,
the terrible tunes
& the terrible truth
of the scattered bones
are la rage.
The root of the word
for lemon and bird
and curlew and curd
is la rage.
When the French
get la rage
they sit
sur la plage
and watch la mer
go spare
with liquid
la rage.
Oompah oompah
stick it up your junta
I want to gorge
like Billy Bunter
because I’ve got
la rage.
I want to zoom across
your harbour
singing tora tora tora
then send you
bunches of love in a mist
via interflora
because I’ve got
la rage.
Chaucer calls it
mercyless beautie
Little Richard calls it
tutti frutti
Bill Haley calls it
Rock Around the Clock
and Elvis calls it
Jailhouse Rock
but to me it’s just
la rage.
And Shakespeare
whose vocabulary
is much larger
calls it
something else
but the arrow flies
like William Tell’s
to the apple
of your eyes
because you have
la rage
That strange ancient sting
abracadabra
makes me want to swing
like Errol Flynn
from any old candlebra.
I want to buckle
and swash
have a chuckle
and talk posh
steal Phyllis Marlowe’s
double-breasted
raincoat cosh
because I’ve got
la rage.
I want to wipe
pistachio
from my ripe
moustachio
and tinkle
ivories
till dawn.
When champagne
flows
we’ll go
and go
and draw
the curtains
when a star
is born.
When Ravi
Shankar
plays that
raga
I want to
bathe
in Holsten
lager
because I’ve got
la rage.
I want to ruin
Anello & Davide shoes
walking on peat bogs
with you.
Let’s put on
our Sunday
suits
raid the love bank
steal the loot
because we’ve got
LA RAGE.
1983
Don’t Leave Me
(for SJL)
Underneath the western starres, my heart is sore
& bruised. Soft rain on the elderflowers’ creamy upturned ladles.
You speak at me in silence like a lightning strike.
No bells chiming, but it is midnight of the soule.
Don’t leave me in this empty world without you.
Dear postmistress, kick the tilth right in my face,
wear longingly lovely charcoal black lace, fan into
the room like a silk torpedo, hang from the rafters
like a bird. Imitate an irritated bat from hell. But
please succumb to the final mad announcement:
Don’t leave me in this lonely world without you.
The great sunne dies, the argent moon strides
along its Pearly path. Our hearts and minds and
mouths fume and fix in a terrible acid bath. It
is awesome the way we meet and fight for love.
But fight we must – ring that bell, ring that bell.
Once aloft in heaven’s light, now in scarlet hell.
Don’t leave me in this lonely world without you.
Coinage of the word trust debased beyond belief,
all that’s left remaining is a broken whitebeam leaf.
Unique information on the history of solar winds
enters the busy avenues of the hive of my heart;
O yes the kestrel’s wings are not as lonely as me:
the argent dreamstreams, the places we undressed.
Clouds like crowns above the merry nodding cranesbill.
See the leadmine workings above the hill and the beck –
O Pearl, life has its middensmitten mittens around my neck.