Wolf Tongue
Page 24
She has signed a contract with relentless punishment.
Inside the rim of the silver ring I always wear its legend says:
Don’t leave me in this lonely empty world without thee.
I blink aloft for once at the total madness, hawkeye,
listening to your scorn in the harsh proving grounds.
This is government truly dark, don’t believe the headlines
so freakish glandular. Beneath the rainy viaduct I stand
well-pressed fully-bagged and weep alone for want for want
of you. Stupidly I worry about your lack of extra virgin olive oil.
Your chest, my chest. You’d think I was a strutting Nazi
with an acorn crest. What’s lost is probably best, but please
don’t leave me in this viciously stupid world without you.
I need your elbows in my ribs, I need your snores. I need
to make you tea as the magpies puffbelly the hospital hill.
I need your attentive attention at my continual pills and sores.
Now that the workmen are sandblasting our Malevich bridge
and I am not a one-night bum from the halls of hell I can only
say please don’t leave me in this loveless world without you.
She came wet-haired O delete her fargone farflung lips!
There was a cranny there was a niche there was a feather.
There was the most important date in history it was 1966.
I alone singular bombed Coventry she would not spare me.
Who am I at last, the final One Eyed Jack? Ace heart man.
She came fret-laired, rivet-lipped. I flew a Junkers 88.
And as the bombs threw up their little distant powder puffs
to which I had no allegiance in the night sky I said into the
intercom please don’t leave me in this lonely world without you.
There was the most important date in history it was 1968 it
was the Citroën workers it was the Sorbonne it was cobblestones.
All the time assaulting policemen and being assaulted I was
looking for thee from dawn till dusk from start to finish I wrote
please don’t desert me in this vile forsaken world without you.
Notebook entrance: here in Derbyshire in the high hills her
with the finest legs I glanced at. We were firmfurious together.
She had and has a line in language I love a lot. Fulled with abstracts.
Saw Blake saw Wallace Stevens saw no things but in ideas.
She had a poetry fullwritten and a beautiful face to match.
Monsieur Bleak, Black, Noir, Personne Spared, Homme Of The Moone.
Homme walking tall, homme particulier de l’alientation mentale.
I cannot walk this earth unless you take on board the message
that I cannot live in this unaccompanied vastness without thee.
I punch, I fist, I turn your faces around my wrist. My heartache
is a long river – there’s a handled gunne & spangled fingernails
will see it drawn in horizontal spitfire. O love I love you
and I cannot live in this lonely world without you. The blitzblack
BirminghamCoventry merle sharpens its cornyellow on the shedend.
Except for us it is the mating time. Delicious peach at the start
of my life, don’t leave me in this wildweed world without you.
The wild grass sings and the herb flowers under a frantic sky.
Chouchou flechette, j’arrive bien sur, alors je suis pliant, et tu:
Ne me quitte pas au univers solitaire sans tu. Je t’aime, je t’aime.
If your distress is not quite ready I have my own. Think of me
if you have time between Barnard Castle and Darlingtown. Turn
your loving heart in my terrible direction. Don’t be cold impossible.
Don’t leave me bleakblokefaced in this sad and lonely world
without you. I don’t want my genocide peak to call the world Pauline.
Once more the grievance deep, larks&laughs killed despairingly;
once more the two doors opened for the demons: welcome, boys!
They are setting them right up at the bar in their midnight overcoats.
Darling, I am attracted by them, but I am more attracted to you.
Sweetheart, today the bullion sunshine rays down unshared.
DucktoedDoucement, peafinger, lapjuice, cannylass, stalkwalker,
the light begins to twinkle on the rocks. How right you are to hate me.
But please don’t leave me in this lonely empty world without you.
Spit drooling down splashes on left wrist. I will detox now.
It will take two days and then I will be alright. Borage blue again.
Petal poet, soft as the very earthe, against all damned enclosures,
poetess, don’t ever leave me in this hardened world without you.
The brazen sky is a hardened screwdriver. I will not bend. War
between ourselves, despite creamteas, you keep abandoning me.
Standing on the rained-upon steps we are reduced to verbal beggary,
flakes & tatters of verbs and adjectival despair. Only the tangerine
sage grows. I turn my back in hope it will not hurt, but all I want to
say is please don’t leave me in this wet and lonely world without you.
My blood is high and I am fierce with love for you. It will not end.
I’ll feed the information keys forever but it won’t make a difference.
There is nothing between us now but the four o’clock starres.
O
they are making up a tattered sky as I walk the night and elsewhere
you sleep. Eel body. Slippy skin I can’t catch you or have you in my net.
Don’t blame me for Coventry, I was not even born; this is not you
middle-England, but harsh England, fatherly teatime headblows,
those of a kind which deafened Beethoven as a lad. Excuse this
cablegram: Don’t leave me in this rotten filthy universe without you.
Monday, slumday is a wipeout. I palm away those thrusting beasts
in skinny pinstriped suits and badly-ironed shirts. Prettyboys
useless! Sleep with them Ireland and Germany one night only.
Darlingest, I want you for more than one night. Fells and streams.
Wild, wet, without conventional wisdom. 3.26 a.m. Beast in rain.
Me.
What kind of deformed chicken thighs are these?
What kind of very un-Irish potatoes we sailed off from?
to this sad and sorry land? Is that, my love, my deepest love,
why I love rain so much, because I was born beneath it?
We executed only one king. It was not enough. Please don’t
please don’t leave me in this lonely universe without you.
I lie beneath the greenwood tree and weep my very heart away.
Claw tthroat [correct], sink ticket, produit, elle est belle, tres.
Now it is a day of fallen cooking apples and reluctant mist,
webbed among the shaking limbs of the Williams pear tree;
& sage – thus flowered – and thyme, so brill blue, so fragrant,
so Litherland we have been beckoned to the bleakest moments,
dearest, & I wish I could wash you in them and them in you.
But I cannot, for all soft soap moments are a thing of the past.
Once upon a time we were tremendously civilised: Just look at the gleaming
washed & dried up dishes from the happy night before.
We rose one or the other to take our croissants from the
freezer. I went downstairs and wrote in jam: Don’t leave me
in this highly unfortunate world upside down without you.
We kissed repeatedly. We kissed repeatedly and kissed again.
O darling Litherland, my love from
middle England, now we are
in a war of raging bad misfortune and Shakespcare and Donne
are upon your shiny lips and I am not, Litherland. It is hopeless
and terrible utterly. This zestful union delegate now my beloved
but the harvest moone has waned and the horrible cycle refuses to be busted.
Thus my untumbled Soviet, strong and female to the utmost
all of my inherited pathetic Western sores and scarres & trials.
Our minor portion of spring’s brilliant wake-up, our fiery delight
as the herb garden goes wild. Our one flower-fuming summer only.
And there are those around us who will talk and they will will say:
I laugh at your lemon balm, your chocolate mint, I am laughter
itself! Fleece she said nothing. Broken tongues and broken wings.
Broken swannes. No longer the lakeland laughter. Grim death comes.
And there would be those around us who would talk, and they
would say: not even half a year, it is nothing. They shattered
as the first frosts ironed out the very earth. They cracked as Jack
moved in like a saw and sawed the garden down. Autumn a stranger
to their love, winter beyond. I write alone with index finger dipped in deepest
snow: Please, love of my life, forever love of my life,
don’t leave me in this harmful loveless world without you.
Not for them in ceaseless chatter the firelight & twinned & twined
limbs & toes. Boats. In a snowy world of imagined troikas &
tundras. Not for them the wonders of a huggable December. We
fell apart like charred and flaky Christmas wrapping paper.
I never meant to hurt you Shirley I can’t go in the car it’s impossible.
Even all of their whiteknuckle clinches dissolved in lakes of
alcohol I could never say goodbye to. Soviet sister, comrade,
tight as a freemason in my arms: I knew you would not, would not
relish the falling of the wall. If only together at the Finland Station.
But, darling, let’s no longer smoothe no more. Let’s go disgust.
And let me leave this strongly-written leaf from the destructed tree:
please dollypops don’t leave me in this completely empty world without you.
Those cold fingers grasping winter grass. Frost seizing the heart.
All the fallow worldlings can hold their tongues now. All the fallow
wordlings can wait their late bus. My love welded into the air like
Lenin said as if I had a million hands with mighty sweep, as if if you were Lily
Brik, as if you were at the barricades, fighting the terrible
brokers of newspaper employees. And after a year you won!
That
winter
your determined boots and feet.
Fawning into the wide-brimmed glasses of endless alcohol & gapingly
swallowing, you finally reach the darkest sideness. You put up with
the physical. Fight her lovely iris blue face in your red one. Ignore
her pouring tears filling every cup I know & say that’s that, twat.
If only the rain would arrive finally and cool things down.
There is nothing left in the heather but death, death, death.
They have been here, they have killed the miners, they have
killed the swannemerchants. At dawn I scratch a plea upon
an appletree: don’t leave me in this.
I wander, wonder, through the frozen roots, like JH Prynne, it is nothing,
it is nowt, I slay the slugs, I kiss the ends of the black earthe.
So near to the frozen treeline. Gunmen hiding there will have me
sooner than. Debris of misfortune & delay lies array around about us.
Lapus hearts we have destroyed, now that we have destroyed our
contract. Now that we have frozen the ghylls & utterly beautiful
becks & streams.
Don’t despair don’t leave me in this disunited universe without you.
No more the Durham train timetable, no more the loving departure
in Flass Vale or the twinning and twining of fast-moving limbs. Lambs
together cuddled in a huddle. In the shady shadow of the great viaduct
beneath the marigolds’ sunlit vast spread, the luminous ones, bottercoppes.
Beneath the cowslips’ shadows. And Pearl’s a-a-a-a-a-a’s.
No more steamed trainwindow wetrain fingertouching pale departures,
I am excused in the twilit world of hastily-summoned Paddy’s Taxis,
I am in Paris, France, not Texas,
no more the palm-touching departure, steamed window of late trains.
No more the twilight world of midnight taxis, flinging me back
into the drunkenworld, from the tipsy rim of impossible places.
My staring starring contest with eyeless demons known only as
Knivesinne The Mouth and the rest of the block-booted mob
in the alcohol Stasi social work witch-hunt gang. Give me your babies!
I am here with the police and they have their sledgehammers!
It is 3 a.m! I am dressed in finest tweed and what will you do about
it, you stupid working class Kent scum? I’m a poet once & after all.
All the M20 and M2 Hell’s Angel’s are gone by the byre like my Bar
on his MotoGuzzi California. Frantic soup meets the mind, I lean into the
trees, blind. I have every opportunity to cancel the sunne! TO marry their
children. I revved there but I did not want it, only Paris, not even in the attic, I
did not, only seven, beaten to the floor
know Mayakovsky, Malevich, Shelley, Blake, Litherland, Notley.
I was alone with silent her in the fierce place of upland streams.
I was alone with her hazel brown eyes as the heavy rain sheeted down.
Then the Stalin KGB overcoats stamped on our wondrous faces &
turned their awesome mouthgaps upon us in the vivid tremor of a not-
drinking moment. O they stand against us like a really proper version,
like the perverted Christians who came in black to try and sort out your
tongue. They hurt you only and I wept alone in the sunlit marigold beds.
They have returned & are burning the shadows in movie
Expressionist fervour: all of those bats – pipistrelles – rustling
between their overcoated breastblades moving their huge coats
in terrifying unison. They have a demand in their hands. They
want me to be part of the torture along the blood-riven waveband.
They want me me to play a part in their play of the actually dead.
They now want my liver to explode in a shower of hot bloody starres.
They want me to die in vain, they want me to fax my useless expiration
to the head demon at the top of the stairs. O useless Jesus Christ
Almighty where now upon the hill is your broken working-class tree?
They came upon me in a herd of horror. Don’t sting! Don’t sting!
From the wet revs of the hospital car park over the road, from the
mumbles and grumbles of the released, flung into the West Road.
I return there, patient also, my hidden bottles, stuffed away corks.
They want me to come back they want me to come back they want me.
But in this terrible scary ghastly frightful world of endless nada
of the hearte please don’t leave me in this lonely world without you.
1994-98
When The Lights Went Out A Cheer Rose in the Air
(for Steve Earle)
I had endless injections myself
and the drawing out of blood for tests
the endless withdrawing of blood for tests
&nb
sp; the coming-to and then more tests
the crystal pipettes gleamed in the morning
and the tenderly professionally applied swab lint
I glanced through letter-box eyes at 6 o’clock
thinking the slightly waving drip an Armstrong strut
wind hammering through it or sweetly whistled
with a bed-end owl carved out of Canadian maple
yet the road sweeping from the end of the bed
was semi-coloned with frost-fringed dawheads
they – black as the brain of Ezra in St Elizabeth –
hung their beaks in the doll of my flung away dung
I shook like a broken Elswick rivet, a shattered
magnet in the coil of a brilliant engine, my very
Northern spirit. Maleable as a tarte au poivre
I leaned broken and speechless into the sister’s hands
& I was alone in my single toll in my single iron bed
alone in my bed with the lungvictims hacking
I was alone at three in the morning, all the hymns
almost lost to history, the asbestosis lads on the
final run towards heaven and glory, down the
eternal slipways, down the vibration white finger funworld
from Swan Hunter to spirted out saliva kingdom.
I walk from bed to bed, a dawnmilk ghost myself,
fitted out, fitted in, fitting, unfitting, bruised busted
& broken, no more Billy Pigg pipes, I cannot remember
the heatherberry tunes in my skullshattered head:
Only ask the blackgrouse – he knows where I am
tonight – up a height alone in my trust bed, iron
rungs handy to loop my limbs, stop me from stalking
stop me from talking, my broken tongue forking
towards the argent moone, the sunne will betray me
the oxygen exhaling & inhaling wards – 6, 7, 8, & 9,
closing their prayer books and bibles, not the King