Collected Poems
Page 4
Unsure of heaven, unconvinced of hell:
‘He’s a good fellow, and ’twill all be well.’
Pragmatic England, working underground,
Contrived a creed doctrinally unsound
But geared to toleration’s mental sleep,
A creed of ‘Gently dip, but not too deep.’
Sick at the rantings of the Moloch-mouth
Of Muslim East and Baptist-bigot South,
I learn to look at faith with the mild eyes
Of tolerance and tepid compromise.
The mariner learned love of the albatross
And, we assume, the man upon the cross,
With passion bubbling from the self-same spring,
But how could anyone sincerely bring
The loving torrent of a human heart
To enigmatic God, who sits apart,
Permits his bigots to show pledges of
A dire vindictiveness, but not of love?
{That God’s removed, that God remains unknown,
{Exacts a lesser love than can be shown
{To larks, to lizards sunning on the stone,
{Our co-inheritors of blood and bone,
{The greater love reserved to man alone.
With humour, modesty, and some good will
Also much tolerance, our life can still
Invite a certain measure of content,
Provided we don’t wreck the tenement.
Give praise for pleasure, and to pain submit,
But, for God’s sake, let’s keep God out of it.
Easier said than done, you will reply,
For Blake’s old Nobodaddy in the sky,
Grown tired of spinning his self-spinning globes,
Is all too ready to endue the robes
Of the almighty State (he surely knows
His Hegel, and perhaps inspired his prose).
As ultimate authority is God,
Even the atheist sees nothing odd
In man-made structures growing numinous.
This throws our primal missile back to us –
The leader coughs; the myrmidons cry: ‘Hark,
He speaks, Lord Oracle. Let no dog bark.’
The writer’s the most canine of the lot,
Though doggedly he digs away at ‘What
True logic can exist when party’s so
Identified with State, we wish to know.
For party is, by definition, part.
A portion of the total beating heart
Which is the social whole. Through its intent
To be the polity’s embodiment,
It naturally lies and, more, denies
The right of speech to those who say it lies.’
And so the final glacial music grips
Each island that forgets its dream of ships,
With censorship the one ship in the bay,
Lies and half-lies unladed every day.
We, in a freer State, may pity those
Who wear an iron muzzle on the nose,
But, seeing man is never satisfied,
The happy censorless revolve inside
A vague nostalgia for the unhappy time
When free expression was a social crime.
In the great age of Queen Elizabeth,
Before rebellious Essex met his death,
His sad revolt was signalled by a play –
Richard the Second. ‘Now no playwright may,’
The Council thundered, ‘borrow for his plot
A phase of English history.’ So what
The cunning artists did was turn to Rome,
To Greece, and shun the chronicles of home,
Able, in fancy clothing, to display
All the preoccupations of their day.
The ingenuity the Russians showed
When Czarist hellhounds blocked the freer road
Let them say more in allegory than
Was audible to forcers of the ban.
In Britain, where a milder writ once ran,
Swift could excoriate his fellow-man
Through the bland gestures of a fairy tale,
And Orwell, his successor, could assail
A monstrous revolution with a tongue
Tuned to the blameless accents of the young.
Loss of plain speaking that decorum cut
Bred cunning. But the door of cunning shut
When the permissive portals opened wide,
And periphrastic skills were set aside.
It is not censorship we deprecate,
Only the axe and scissors of the State.
No artist is compelled to strip things bare
Because the moral right to nakedness is there.
The moral and aesthetic merge to one
In certain areas, and their union
Is given a new name – fastidiousness.
This moans a near-articulate distress
But scorns to call the policeman or the priest
To chain or else to exorcise the beast
Which bears no fangs, only a gamy stink,
A snout for the stopped privy or clogged sink
And, for the voyeur’s cash, a hungry maw.
Discretion is a virtue which no law
Enforces. An unforced consensus can
Alone sustain the dignity of man,
A dignity that artists must deride
At times lest he become too dignified.
For men in general do not spend their lives
In copulating with each other’s wives,
Crawling in crapulous vomit, plotting rape,
All mindlessly unable to escape
The engine rhythm of the dog and bitch
Or else the tumid thrill of growing rich.
The prosperous low fiction of our time
Stands charged with one unpardonable crime –
That of presenting man all shorn of his
Irreconcilable complexities,
Reduced to simple structure – a machine,
Homo politicus or sexualis, clean
Or filthy but not both. We may deplore,
May even weep, but can do nothing more.
Let indiscretion be the major sin.
The state our hidden novelist is in
He can ascribe to indiscretion, to
Not fully weighing what he had to do.
The murder of the faceless who cried out
On something they were ill-informed about,
The raving of a theocratic state
Which cried ‘Assassinate the apostate’
Were all, we think, foreseeable by a man
Raised on the Prophet, fed with the Koran,
Quick to revile the Prophet though, if so,
Sequestered, he could watch his profit grow.
Braving the threatened bomb, the ready knife,
We guard his profits, as we guard his life.
For, deaf to the incendiary sect,
It’s hard-won liberty that we protect,
Mindful of Milton and his thunderous plea
That truth and falsehood must alike be free,
For only in the war between the two
Can we learn what is false, and what is true.
‘Protect the faith,’ the furious Muslims cry,
‘Extend the law of blasphemy.’ But why?
For Christ’s divinity offends the Jew
And this explains the split between the two
Creeds bother propounded once in Palestine,
But where’s the British Jew who will malign
The tepid or the fervid faith of those
With whom his wanderings have found repose?
‘I vomit out the lukewarm,’ Jesus cried,
Yet heat is but a mode of homicide.
Let be, let be – you tepid souls, advance
And please the tepid cause of tolerance.
I write in Twickenham, with little hope
Of inspiration from the ghost of Pope.
Our literature is barbarous at heart,
Our palate’s coarse, our cooks are all unskilled.
The neat heroic cutlets that he grilled
And seasoned sharply with a seasoned hand
Do not appeal to votaries of the canned,
The frozen, the exotic takeaway.
Untempted to confront an April day,
I skulk beneath a duvet, and I eye
Parabolas of aircraft in the sky
Descending at ten-second intervals
To seek their nests in western terminals,
And wonder which will blossom into fire
To gratify the terrorist’s desire.
A book is perilous, a book can slay:
That is the text I ponder on each day,
And, smoking, restless, wonder why I chose
To sell my soul for thirty years of prose.
Banned in Malaysia, burned in Arkansas,
Offensive to the Afrikaaner’s law,
Padrino of the punk, a swine who gave
A dialect to the nitwit and the knave,
‘Whom did I kill? Whom did I hurt?’ I ask,
Reflecting that the writer’s only task
Is not to preach or prophecy but please.
But pleasure’s fraught with ambiguities,
And who am I to plead pure innocence?
Still, I can mildly murmur in defence,
Surveying gloomily my loaded shelf,
At least I played the censor in myself.
Custodiet costodes quis? We know:
We guard the guardian in our souls, although,
Accepting shame and blame, we also call
To vague account the father of our fall,
For books are Adam’s children, after all.
April 10, 1989
BELLI’S BLASPHEMOUS BIBLE
1. THE CREATION OF THE WORLD
One day the bakers God & Son set to
And baked, to show their pasta-master’s skill,
This loaf the world, though the odd imbecile
Swears it’s a melon, and the thing just grew.
They made a sun, a moon, a green and blue
Atlas, chucked stars like money from a till,
Set birds high, beasts low, fishes lower still,
Planted their plants, and said: ‘Aye, that’ll do.’
No, wait. The old man baked two bits of bread
Called Folk – I quite forgot to mention it –
So he could shout: ‘Don’t bite that round ripe red
Pie-filling there.’ Of course, the buggers bit.
Though mad at them, he turned on us instead
And said, ‘Posterity, you’re in the shit.’
2. THE EARTHLY PARADISE OF THE BEASTS
Animals led a sort of landlord’s life
And did not give a fuck for anyone
Till man fucked up their social union
With gun and trap and farm and butcher’s knife.
Freedom was frolic, and rough fun was rife
And as for talk, they just went on and on,
Yakking as good as any dean or don,
While Adam stood there dumb, with a dumb wife.
This was the boss who came to teach them what
Was what, with harness, hatchet, stick and shot,
Bashing them to red gravy, thick and hot.
He stole their speech too, making sure he’d got
Dumb servitude – the plough; if not, the pot.
He had the last word. Nay, he had the lot.
3. PRIDE BEFORE A FALL
This furred and feathered boss of bird and brute
Assumed the god, all bloody airs and graces,
Nor deigned to look down in his subjects’ faces,
Treating each creature like a mildewed boot.
He swilled, he gorged, but his preferred pursuit
Mixed sticking pigs and whipping hounds on chases,
Marches through arches, blown brass and tossed maces,
With decking Eve, that bitch, in hunter’s loot.
The beasts had hunted looks, being forced to make,
Poor wretches, the bad best of a bad job
And put up with that swine – all save the snake
Who, spitting like a kettle on a hob,
Weaved at the foul shapes tyranny can take
And hissed: ‘I’ll get you yet, you fucking snob.’
4. BACK TO THE ROOTS
A sort of interlude. Let’s look at dogs.
At mastiff, Great Dane, greyhound, poodle, beagle,
The sausage hound, that yelps like a sick seagull,
Asthmatic bullpups honking hard as hogs.
Now men. Irish in bogs and Dutch in clogs,
Swarthy as turds, sharp-conked as any eagle,
The Jew and Turk. Then, trying to look regal,
Tea-slurping English, and French eating frogs.
Compare some doggy that leaps on to laps
With a prize wolfhound. Different as cheese and chalk.
In spite of this, our parish ballocks yaps
About us springing from a single stalk:
One primal bitch for pups, and one for chaps.
Did you ever hear such stupid fucking talk?
5. MAN
If God made man, we’ve no call to regret
Man’s love of blood and lack of bloody sense.
God, who’s all what they call om ni po tence,
(Meaning he’ll piss the bed and prove it’s sweat)
Pissed on some clay and sweated cobs to get
A statue from it, sparing no expense.
Then he took breath and blew – Ha Hadam. Hence
Man’s sometimes called the Puffed Up Marionette.
In just one minute he could spout out history
And write and read great tomes as tough as Plato’s.
He knew it all when first he tottered bedwards.
The names of beasts and birds – no bloody mystery.
Like a greengrocer sorting out potatoes:
‘This lot is whiteboys and these here King Edwards.’
6. HIS OWN IMAGE AND LIKENESS
Now, Brother Trustgod, Godtrust (never knew
God had a rupture. Sorry), please let me
Shove in a word. I just won’t have it, see.
God made us all in his own image, did he? You
Are mad. If Paul himself, yes Saint Paul, flew
Down to agree with you, I’d tell him he
Was mad. (He was mad.) Why don’t you decree
Satan was made in God’s own image too?
O bleeding Christ and Christ’s own bleeding mother,
Even if the sanctified three-hatted sod
Says what you say, it’s still, my half-arsed brother,
Mad. Is God’s image in greengrocers’ shops
Then, in greengrocers? God, he must be a God
Of cabbages and turnip bloody tops.
7. ALL ABOUT EVE
Give me a woman bare as a boiled egg,
Who’d think a brush and comb came from the divil,
Who owns no handkerchief to entrap her snivel,
Or towel or dishcloth hanging from a peg,
Who has no shoe on foot or hose on leg
Nor any of the Amenities of Civil-
Ised Life, to use the advertiser’s drivel.
No jakes to thrutch in and no pot to deg,
She will sup water but not sit in it
Nor on a chair nor underneath a roof,
She’ll never see the muckman do his duty.
Picture this little lady decked in shit
From hair to heel, then try to give me proof
That Mother Eve, Christ help us, was a beauty.
8. A REPLY
Scorn not our mother Eve. Remember: she,
When Adam took her, did not turn her face
But drank the dreadful fire of his embrace.
; Dirty or not, without her where would we
Be? She merits homage. So, with me:
‘O ave Eva, though full of disgrace,
We love thee as the root of all our race;
Thy sap runs in us, leaves of thy living tree.’
Dirty? How do we know? Perhaps her skin
Was laved in a miraculous hygiene,
Just as the second Eve was laved within.
Not that it matters. For myself, I lean
To lauding both her sordor and her sin.
Without those to wash off, who could be clean?
9. THE FIRST MOUTHFUL
Which of the seven deadly sins is worst?
Pride sneering skyward, avarice shrieking More,
Liplicking lust, or anger, one red roar?
No, gluttony, the fifth sin, is the first.
From Adam burst a famine and a thirst
For a wormy apple offered by a whore,
A penny pippin. God has rammed its core
Down all our throats, a canker of the cursed.
That bitch, that blackguard. God, I gape aghast as
I contemplate the greed that could have cast us
Into the outer darkness – fed us, rather,
To final fire. But our ingenious master’s
As quick to cancel as to cause disasters,
And to this end kindly became a father.
10. ADAM’S SIN
The sceptic beats his brain till dawn’s first dapple
Lights him and all his books to slumber’s amity.
Though he’s read all from Moses to Mohamet, he
Rejects the truth of temple, mosque and chapel:
That man brought sin and death and hell to grapple
His soul in irons, condemning God to damn it. He
Set up an aboriginal calamity
Or, if you like, munched a forbidden apple.
Why why why? One song, too many singers.
Why why? Why won’t unwrite the bloody book.
So let them write a new one if they must.
Why why? We want an answer. They can look
In Milo Aphrodite’s clutching fingers
Or up the arsehole of Pasquino’s bust.
11. THE FIRST CLOTHES
Before they yielded to the devil’s urging
And crunched the good-bad apple to the core,
Bare innocence was all our parents wore,
Like Jesus Christ got ready for the scourging.
After their second gorge they felt emerging
A thing called shame. So rapidly they tore