by Jeremy Reed
COME ALIVE AND BURN
Around the World
A poem does it, like ratatouille,
travels the world in Sandra’s head
as a weightless neural bullet
the compacted hit
on slow release, she’s been to St Petersburg,
to Santa Monica CA,
the sunset there like an exploded
pomegranate impacting on violet,
some whooshy lines of mine tracking her thoughts
in Laurel canyon having sex
in a lipstick red Cadillac.
In Beijing too in steamy rain
picking at dim sum like a jeweller’s tray
she’s been reminded of a part
fitting her mood like crispy duck
and bitten on a chewy word
like a pop hook, the street outside
rippling with umbrellas like lily pads.
In London now she talks to me
about the edgewalker poetry
of mine she keeps in her back brain
and how it comes up like a drug
as an accessible reward
she’ll get through customs anywhere
or use combatively against lovers
as something she resistantly won’t share.
I have this little space in her
at work or in her black Toyota
or in a cramped plane to Vancouver
where my image-clusters shine
upbeat orange, downbeat blue,
an intangible anthology
of private moments turned over in bed
alone or with a lover incited
by her distracted state to jealousy.
Superglue
I’m cruising William Gibson’s Spook Country:
a cuboid slab of central London facing in,
the sky lavender orange green and pink
my interest cyanoacrylate monomer
molar mass 111.1 g/mol
as polymer–themed inspiration for poetry
that never sticks—the clear liquid bonding
as much in sutureless surgery
as re-hardening shanks of pointe shoes
to help rehabilitate a dancer’s
fig coloured bruised toes.
I’ve got another Pinot Grigio
mortuaried in the fridge, a frosted tower
that’s tinted green but pours yellow,
and rehabilitates my chemistry.
I shift from Gibson to free-floating imagery
and thinking I’ll buy a Russian military coat
and badge it for resistance to the cold,
an edgy slab of corporate banditry
lit up opposite like an app-buttoned iPhone
blocked on the skyline as a mirrored pop
of commerce smooched by blue invasive fog.
Diadem Court
A Soho alley—it’s the purple door
so ultra-violet a saturated stand out
on St Anne’s House, the red and blue
dissolved into purple assault,
throws shapes at me like confrontational art.
I’d chanced into the space from Carlisle Street,
a fuzzy, pixelated, grainy day
itchy with thundery humidity
my head still tracking angles—how she walked
this Malaysian on red killer heels,
skinny jeans fitted like a blue paint tube,
compact, pressurised, oscillating swing—
she’d disappeared into a block,
my ear-buds feeding me alternatives
to our shared parallel realities,
the time 5.34 p.m., a left
taking me into a repurposed court,
the door theoretically magenta,
a street-art rectangular explosive shock—
a Dulux Pamplona purple emulsified
into slick gloss that stared me down
like the idea of walking through the violet band
of the rainbow into a hall,
too dazed, stunned and amazed to do a thing
but have the colour open out in me
like morning glories chasing up the sun.
Reported Sightings
An orange poppy with a frilled saucer
holds its duration for a day
a wiry self-seeded outtake
I only find by accident
optimally important in its way
as sex or the black voodoo doll
I bought at Camden, black wool thing
I fastened to a scarlet string
and left hanging on the back door
as hoodoo to monitor
the underside of what I see.
I do poetry on the 24 bus
churning in from NW3
sighting image-hits accidentally
like ufo or logo-spotting
or pulling signage on a transit van
to fire a poem up
random and spontaneously
like inspiration that I find
on the ridged label of your ruffled string
in pink sans serif lettering
on black, the lettered code you keep
as closest ID to your skin
like instructive poetry:
it sits on you like a haiku.
The things I see I make my own
inventively, the city bleeds
accidental visuals into my chemistry
an orange poppy and purple T-bar
feeding my exhaustive needs
to bring me neurally alive
upbeat and focused on my kill—
the image as particular
to how I function lifting everything
as little bits just for the thrill.
A Day in the Life
Laurent and Brigitte? The photographer
anonymously pulled them from the crowd
in Paris 1957,
a random voyeuristic tracking eye
beside the river, sticky heat
coating the Seine in gelatine:
the sunglassed girl, skirt hitched to a mini,
sits typing on the river bank,
blonde highlights, halter top, a Gitanes pack,
sexy, cerebral, her futures ideas
brushed into poetry, like the red paint
articulated on her finger nails.
She’s so focused she doesn’t feel the lens
making intrusive dialogue,
but only thinks of the tangy iced beer
she’ll sip at later as frothy reward.
The other’s viewed through her bedroom window,
black bra, black satin slip, her eye attends
a coffee cup placed on the floor,
books and record sleeves racked, windows open
on vectored heat, she’s low beside a lamp
that lights the photo. It’s midsummer dark,
a grainy inky blue that holds up late.
The blow-up by her bed: he’s a singer
the man she’ll never meet. Her blonde hair’s waved,
an empty coat-hanger’s synonymous
with how she’ll sleep alone in twitchy heat.
She doesn’t know that he lives opposite,
the one who freezes time to recreate
her image, cryopreserve it on film,
a small man, out early, scouting the streets,
stopping to buy papers and cigarettes
and a russet snouty hot-baked baguette.
Soho Kids in Retro—(pop song)
In the sixties orange sunshine
saturated Ham Yard;
pill-heads on Vespas
and two-tone Lambrettas
in tonic suits and desert boots
danced to Motown and Ska.
It’s the 21st century
and Iraq’s in the sky;
it’s a World War Three catastrophe
from a political lie,
but Soho kids in retro
won’t ever let mod
die.
In the sixties orange sunshine
was like a lysergic halo
a rainbow in a blue sky
windowed over Soho
and outside Bar Italia
speed dealers sold Smith French & Kline.
In the 21st century
the black gold Gulf blows up
and the hedge fund politicians
just grin at the rip
but Soho kids in retro
won’t ever let mod slip.
In the sixties orange sunshine
broke into Ham Yard;
cool kids in tonic suits
hung out looking hard
blocked on speed and jittery
dancing to bluebeat and ska.
In the sixties orange sunshine
was like vitamin C;
the stylist on Wardour Street
had it down to a T.
faces danced right through the night
in the club’s white heat.
It’s the 21st century
and the oligarchs drive on
in their bullet-proof limos;
they don’t care what they’ve done
but Soho kids in retro
catch the hazy orange sun.
ET Conference
The two white iron-lines as parallels
track dead centre the inside thigh
of her rainy-sky blue Lee jeans,
a black sequin heart-shape sewn as a patch
back left pocket, a spiral swirl
visible as a snake tattoo,
the tail extended like a green corkscrew.
She feeds him noodles, sitting on his lap;
an earring, a gold tooth, a flash
signalling a flurry of swishy hair
shaken out like a slinky tabby cat.
He’s got Philip K Dick in a pocket,
the fuzzy lecture over, and we heard
of teleport networks spanning
the dusty violent highways between stars,
the data readable, intelligence
transmitted back coded in dark matter.
The lecturer claimed contact with ETs,
and spoke of a blue orbiter—
the astronaut memorial
rotating with names of dead astronauts
etched on a slab of gritty lunar rock
lined up in a solar gateway.
I’d sat in and retrieved the martian bits
about alien colonists in the stars
and UFO contrails from reaction mass
burning across intergalactic space
tracked by grainy orbiter photographs.
I’d lived it neurally, neuron clusters
compact as enzymes in ayahuasca,
or corridored space in my quantum dreams,
SF as a purple rainbow
arching over the dark side of the Moon.
She fed him stringy noodles like a bunch
of tangled bootlaces, her snake tattoo
venomously sensual,
cactus-green streaked with indigo,
the tail disappearing in her buttocks,
the fantasy optimal, like the stripes
doing black and white zebras on her socks.
Harold Robbins
Deserves a poem, like naming a star:
a porno-mule pulp-thriller czar,
his fiction full of bra-poppers—
a prose junky mapping the line
with formula: his plots have torque and keep
alignment like a Jaguar.
A lawyer’s haircut, foyer-sized glasses,
he’s readable unlike real literature
that never goes that far, he thinks dollars
like reading online stock prices;
his book jackets the selling-point,
the Playboy blonde in an ice cream cone skirt
is back cover in black panties,
the theme an accelerated hard-on
burn-up on a global gangster heist
750 million copies richer:
Harry talking to a feisty parrot,
a mango-coloured impresario
querulous at tropical siesta
impersonating Chinese orgasm,
his wife’s stormy delirium.
A Wall Street skyscraper talent
Harry’s the narrative mogul
winning it with The Carpetbaggers
every book written in neon
the storyline flashing red, blue and green
like a foil of coloured condoms.
Peppering Strawberries
The books I’ve written stack like air traffic,
Boeing rumble in a white toxic sky,
a carbon smear to Ibiza
or Istanbul. My ear-buds bleed Moby’s
Last Night for dancey, mixed up clarity,
like peppering a heart-shaped strawberry.
I never care about the books I do,
they’re like plane noise, atomised kerosene
tracked to let go as parallel event
in the churning skyways. I’m on the street,
image 043 on my phone,
at 1.53 a.m., black bobbed Japanese,
red floral scarf, a silver beaded top,
lips like a candy-pink poppy,
and Moby integrating a soundtrack
into the moment, like a squirt
of dopamine, and I sit out
by a geranium tub on Woburn Walk,
fixing a poem’s accessorised bits
quantified like a drug’s ingredients,
the light on me so complex it’s star-mapped
with molecular info, dusty speed,
and I write for no advance, but my own
perverse, transiently sensational need.
Recorded Music
Her ear-buds filled with iPod compression
like condensing a star to a sand grain.
It’s Thursday, and an intermission day,
the hiatus I knew at school,
time out like missing time, or a 737
dematerialised in a whiteout fog.
These bluesmen disappeared into the hills
for a bunchy insiders’ convention,
Dylan their guru rumoured there
dusting the concourse with his pile-drive chords
like shattering. The empty space filled in
with cloud confection by late afternoon.
The pop though, covers half a century,
Bessie Smith, Lady Day, Lou, indie, grime,
the quotient expanding by the hour’s
updated technology: and we’re two
as the comfort of strangers, listening in
to our preferential downloads
and how it happens like an east and west
city crossover—the blues in the lot
like primitive, or blue Himalayan poppies
taking the colour over from the sky.
Bonus Tracks
6 street-smart
incremental Lou Reed outtakes
on Coney Island Baby: vault-
lifted, original masters
scorching with speed-freak imagery
optimal amphetamine cool
the ah-ha ah-ha
inflected attitude
ah-ha
a danger signal, vocal swipe,
half cosh, half drawlish tease,
half gangster, ah-
ha, half striptease.
The music’s wired by the Down-Trodden-Three,
the vicious decibel attack
frying the studio: ‘Nowhere At All’
sounding like sonic tachycardia:
‘Downtown Dirt’ is a bourbon slurred
ace piece of misogyny—
the gay outlaw reviewing uptown wives
brutally laid
on the Lower East Side, face-lifts collapsed,
dirt in their pores, like grain in bark.
‘Leave Me Alone’ comes motherfucker taunt,
and ‘Crazy Feel
ing’ burns the rush
of sighting Rachel in a bar,
‘She’s My Best Friend’ accelerates
the rip into delirious stutter,
and ‘Coney Island Baby’ slows it all
to four-four doo-wap narrative,
the voice no warmer, the casual
incentive
on January 6 1975
at Electric Lady Studios NYC
to demo life, gun tracks down and survive.
Jumping the Queue
Our pink camellias flop wasted brown
go flat
like a bullet of pink champagne
left standing all night in a glass.
March and April get egg-whisked in a froth
like the disparity between tube time
and real time—Ruislip 1 min
that’s really 5—the train’s that close
but brought to an unscheduled stop.
I run the day inside my veins
like arterial track before it starts.
Things anticipated happen that way
in predictable bits, I met you babe
by converting accidental misses
into a chancy actuality,
the edgy sightings, broken eye contact
cohering into quick uptake.
I bit your lip the second day
like pulping a plump raspberry.
Time’s edited, the tube’s immobilised
between stations—5 minutes stuck,
1 minute in proximity away.
Astronauts sighting Earth above the Moon