Glances round the bar like a rector in church
Then she points one finger like a sensitive gun
And another guy topples to Sally Hit-and-Run.
Holiday Inn, Room three hundred and three,
Sally got him wrapped around the colour TV!
She shakes him and she bangs him like a tambourine,
Then she spreads him on the carpet like margarine.
Up comes the dawn – Sally’s gone like a dream
Riding Inter-City drinking coffee and cream
Guy’s left counting up the things he’s done
Trying to give his goodness to Sally Hit-and-Run.
Dear Sir
I have read your Manifesto with great interest but it
says nothing about singing.
English Scene
You sit at a table with two other men
Your left wrist slants in front of your throat
Your right incisors chew the nail on your left little finger
Your right index fingernail ploughs across the grain of the tabletop
You are nervous, obviously
You are right to be nervous, obviously
The man on one side of you has less money than you
He wants your money
The man on the other side of you has more money than you
He wants your money
Your left arm protects your throat
They usually go for the throat
Under Photographs of Two Party Leaders, Smiling
These two smiled so the photographer
Could record their smiles
FOR YOU
As they smiled these smiles
They were thinking all the time
OF YOU
They smile on the rich
They smile on the poor
They smile on the victim in his village
They smile on the killer in his cockpit
Yes, Mummy and Daddy
Are smiling, smiling
AT YOU
please try to smile back.
Saw It in the Papers
Her baby was two years old.
She left him, strapped in his pram, in the kitchen.
She went out.
She stayed with friends.
She went out drinking.
The baby was hungry.
Nobody came.
The baby cried.
Nobody came.
The baby tore at the upholstery of his pram.
Nobody came.
She told the police:
‘I thought the neighbours would hear him crying,
and report it to someone who would come
and take him away.’
Nobody came.
The baby died of hunger.
She said she’d arranged for a girl,
whose name she couldn’t remember,
to come and look after the baby
while she stayed with friends.
Nobody saw the girl.
Nobody came.
Her lawyer said there was no evidence
of mental instability.
But the man who promised to marry her
went off with another woman.
And when he went off, this mother changed
from a mother who cared for her two-year-old baby
into a mother who did not seem to care at all.
There was no evidence of mental instability.
The Welfare Department spokesman said:
‘I do not know of any plans for an inquiry.
We never become deeply involved.’
Nobody came.
There was no evidence of mental instability.
When she was given love
she gave love freely to her baby.
When love was torn away from her
she locked her love away.
It seemed that no one cared for her.
She seemed to stop caring.
Nobody came.
There was no evidence of mental instability.
Only love can unlock locked-up-love.
Manslaughter: She pleaded Guilty.
She was sentenced to be locked up
in prison for four years.
Is there any love in prisons?
She must have been in great pain.
There is love in prisons.
There is great love in prisons.
A man in Gloucester Prison told me:
‘Some of us care for each other.
Some of us don’t.
Some of us are gentle,
some are brutal.
All kinds.’
I said: ‘Just the same as people outside.’
He nodded twice,
and stared me in the eyes.
What she did to him was terrible.
There was no evidence of mental instability.
What was done to her was terrible.
There is no evidence of mental instability.
Millions of children starve, but not in England.
What we do not do for them is terrible.
Is England’s love locked up in England?
There is no evidence of mental instability.
Only love can unlock locked-up love.
Unlock all of your love.
You have enough for this woman.
Unlock all of your love.
You have enough to feed all those millions of children.
Cry if you like.
Do something if you can. You can.
Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow to Anybody
1 Patriotic
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
I didn’t lay down my life in World War II
so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow.
2 Snobbish
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
Unfortunately Samuel Beckett is using it.
3 Overweening
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
It is too mighty a conveyance to be wielded
by any mortal save myself.
4 Pious
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
My wheelbarrow is reserved for religious ceremonies.
5 Melodramatic
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
I would sooner be broken on its wheel
and buried in its barrow.
6 Pathetic
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
I am dying of schizophrenia
and all you can talk about is wheelbarrows.
7 Defensive
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
Do you think I’m made of wheelbarrows?
8 Sinister
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
It is full of blood.
9 Lecherous
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
Only if I can fuck your wife in it.
10 Philosophical
May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
What is a wheelbarrow?
Vroomph! or The Popular Elastic Waist
(A cut-up of sentences from the Sunday Times Colour Magazine of 9 December 1967, which featured Civil Defence, Famous Footballers, The Girls of Thailand, Gangsters, and several advertisements.)
Juliet sighs. Romeo speaks.
Deep shelters are out of most people’s reach.
The white tin is a simple gadget for pinpointing the size and position of nuclear bursts.
Simply push the needle in, pump the handle, and
You haven’t seen anything till you’ve seen the 200 pounds of beautiful Louise
Tucked away in the secret, hardened, national seat of government,
Or balanced on bicycles while removing 12 shirts.
Yet, even when we made love, at a time when most
women are feeling romantic, she would start to
prattle away about
The Royal State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry.
Stimulated by these breaks in the nuclear overcast,
the Sunday Times here offers what i
s probably the
first complete review of our Civil Defence
preparations,
A symbol of the virile, aggressive, muscular game which
one associates with a man who has twice broken the
same leg – and twice returned to the game.
This is the problem: whether to drink Cointreau neat
and slowly savour every warming sip,
Or hang from the tops of palm trees by our feet.
While we have the bomb it seems ridiculous not to be honest.
It works like this: the motor is powered by ordinary torch batteries.
The slightly wounded will be sent on their way, the severely wounded left to
The Marquis de Ferrara.
Fill out the Panic Sheet.
Neither the Sunday Times nor its agents accepts any liability for loss or
The gruesome electric chair.
You see, we are unashamedly devoted to the kind
of quiet courtesy
which gets rarer
every
day.
Leaflets
(for Brian Patten and my twelve students at Bradford)
Outside the plasma supermarket
I stretch out my arm to the shoppers and say:
‘Can I give you one of these?’
I give each of them a leaf from a tree.
The first shopper thanks me.
The second puts the leaf in his mack pocket where his wife won’t see.
The third says she is not interested in leaves. She looks like a mutilated willow.
The fourth says: ‘Is it art?’ I say that it is a leaf.
The fifth looks through his leaf and smiles at the light beyond.
The sixth hurls down his leaf and stamps it till dark purple mud oozes through.
The seventh says she will press it in her album.
The eighth complains that it is an oak leaf and says he would be on my side if
I were also handing out birch leaves, apple leaves, privet leaves and larch leaves.
I say that it is a leaf.
The ninth takes the leaf carefully and then, with a backhand fling, gives it its freedom.
It glides, following surprise curving alleys through the air.
It lands. I pick it up.
The tenth reads both sides of the leaf twice and then says: Yes, but it doesn’t say who we should kill.’
But you took your leaf like a kiss.
They tell me that, on Saturdays,
You can be seen in your own city centre
Giving away forests, orchards, jungles.
The Obliterating Prizes
A gruesome occurrence fell on me once
When I was a sammy at oxford
They chose me to be the college’s dunce
O I was the lubber of oxford
A conical hat they plunked on my head
Those grievous old gories in oxford
With a D for Dunce wrote upon it in red
Yes I was downderried at oxford
Now underbred dunderheads romp round the town
Through the blithering weather of oxford
Each wears a gold cap and a silvery gown
Each moocher but adrian in oxford
And I cautiously watch their regalia flap
As I stand in the corner in oxford
For now I’ve been wearing that overhead hat
For twenty dark blue years of oxford
Ode to Enoch Powell
The vulture is an honest man
He offers no apology
But snaps the fingers from the hand
And chews them with sincerity
Birmingham Council are bidding for the Berlin Wall.
There’s swastikas sprouting in the ground round Bradford Town Hall
Callaghan and Thatcher are dancing cheek to cheek –
Everybody getting ready for Kindness to Vultures Week
The vulture is a gentleman
He does not stoop to kill
But watches murders from a height
Then drops to eat his fill
The Press is so excited that the Press can hardly speak
There’s red stuff dripping from the corner of the Telegraph’s beak.
You can say that white is right but it looks like black is bleak
Everybody getting ready for Kindness to Vultures Week.
The vulture is a Christian man
Goes to church on Sunday
Prays to God to give him strength
To tear a corpse on Monday…
But when Mr Enoch Powell
Emigrates from this life
And the media forget to mention
That his tongue was a poison knife
When they lay him out in state
With a lipstick job
And an aura of after-shave
And twenty-one guns have farted Goodbye –
We’ll dance on the bugger’s grave
Dance on the earth that’s hotter than his life
His blood was chilled
Dance to the music of the human beings
That liar killed
We’ll stomp – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Stomp – 7, 8, 9, 10.
Yes we’ll stomp all night till the soil’s right tight
So Enoch never rises again.
The Blackboard
Five foot by five foot,
(The smalls have measured it.)
Smooth black surface,
(Wiped by a small after every class.)
Five different colours of chalk
And a class of thirty-five smalls,
One big.
Does the big break up the chalk
Into thirty-five or thirty-six
And invite the smalls to make
A firework show of colours
Shapes and words
Starting on the blackboard
But soon overflowing
All over the room
All over the school
All over the town
All over the country
All over the world?
No.
The big looks at the textbook
Which was written by a big
And published by a big.
The textbook says
The names and dates of Nelson’s battles.
So the big writes, in white,
Upon the black of the blackboard,
The names and dates of Nelson’s battles.
The smalls copy into their books
The names and dates of Nelson’s battles.
Nelson was a big
Who died fighting for freedom or something.
Question Time in Ireland
1. If the Devil had used all his ingenuity to damn Ireland, could he have invented a more devastating trinity than the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Church and the English Houses of Parliament?
2. Why is it possible to withdraw from India, Kenya and Aden – but impossible to withdraw from Ireland?
3. Did Jesus say: Blessed are the poor, for they shall tear each others’ throats out? Blessed are the rich, for they shall watch the tearing out of the throats and shall place bets upon the outcome?
4. What’s wrong with torture in a good cause so long as it’s not reported on television?
5. What is the answer to the English Question?
The Savage Average
I feel like a little girl of six
In a school built of two hundred thousand bricks
And every day, in the purple playground,
One child is chosen and killed by the other children.
Loose Leaf Poem
(This is a diary of good and bad things, mostly for friends and allies but with a few sections for enemies as well. It was written in a peaceful room with a view of the Yorkshire Dales. In reading it aloud, I often change the order of sections, talk in between sections and leave out any part which doesn’t seem relevant at the time.)
*
The music stopped
*
I stopped reading The Wretched of the Earth
Because you cannot read it all the time.
My stomach felt like outer space.
The sunday papers all sounded
Like bidders in a slave market.
I ate rapidly, alone,
Because I couldn’t sit and eat with anyone,
Or look at anyone.
I glanced into the television’s eye.
it was both bright and blind.
I was full of useless tears.
I did not use them
*
Who was the hooligan who ripped off all your skin, madam?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
*
Below my window, a stone wall begins,
swerves past a tree, drags its weight
upwards, almost collides with a second tree,
breaks for a gate, resumes,
and skitters over the horizon.
I watch the way it rides,
blonde stone in the blonde light of Yorkshire.
Come on Everybody Page 4