Pain man and fear man and shock man and death man,
The crumbling mind.
There was this astronaut
And one day he found
He couldn’t talk
Any more to the ground.
The instruments said
He was stuck for eighty years,
His helmet began
To fill up with tears –
And it was his BIRTHDAY.
I’m talking about
Pain man and fear man and shock man and death man,
Not the Hollywood kind.
I’m talking about
Man made of bone made of wood made of stone
By some Frankenstein.
Talking about
Pain man and fear man and shock man and death man
The crumbling mind.
The Only Electrical Crystal Ball I Ever Saw
Flickering Behind a Bar
What colour?
O the colour of an apple in love,
A tomfool tomato,
Changing its soft electric moods each second –
Intimate maps, galactic anatomical charts
Never to be repeated.
Well one moment it exploded with every brand of crimson,
The next it was awash with the blue of peace –
Ocean, pacific ocean –
Or became a green place swarmed over by dark canals.
I said to the man behind the bar:
Where does it come from?
He said: I made it myself.
I was so glad I laughed.
I said: Where is it going to?
He laughed.
Sunset over Venus in a goldfish bowl.
Silent jukebox with no money-slot
But pulsing with molten rainbows.
Belisha beacon drunkenly standing,
Head back, mouth open,
Under a hundred-foot-high colourfall
Of brandy soda crème de menthe
Sherry-spiked wine of the country
(Plus a secret formula)
Flowing from a vat with a fuller draught
Than the Tuscarora Deep.
This is no magic melon to solve all our dandruff
But a small machine for giving.
It added some light to my happiness.
It is a good planet.
I call it the earth.
My Dog Eats Nuts Too
(CHEKHOV: The Cherry Orchard)
The sperm bank manager shoved me up against the rail
he levelled his gamma ray at my adventure tail
he said I’ve followed you through fire and flood and firkin
And you’d better explain just what you think you’re working
I said:
I’m not a motivational expert you’d better suppose
but the trouble is my brain is a long way behind my nose
I believe in saluting the animals, my motto is dig and have done
but I spend all my problemofleisure grabbing lots of chinese fun
having chinese fun
having chinese fun
you don’t need a mantelpiece
when you’re having chinese fun
He said:
you’re chewing something terrible, show us your expectoration
so I banged the spittoon with western civilisation
he clamped me with his grabbers and shook me till my steeple rung
tell me what’s so special he said about chinese fun
having chinese fun
having chinese fun
happy as the hebrides
when I’m having chinese fun
I said:
it moves like a leopard on ice cubes
glows like hot molasses
its a shady bank by the old gulf stream
and there’s masses and masses and masses for the masses
giggles every time that it tries to be sensible
striped with sex well it’s highly reprehensible
but I’ll bring you a cut of it only costs a dollar a ton
and you’ll feel like a Zen Gun once you’ve tasted chinese fun
having chinese fun
having chinese fun
take the moon and rub it all over the surface of the sun
and you’ll turn in your badge
when you’ve had some chinese fun
He tried it.
He liked it.
He said: thank you.
A Spell to Make a Good Time Last
Walk with your lover through a doorway
Walk with your lover through the maytime sunlight
Walk with your lover by a lake
The past is a stone for playing ducks and drakes
The stone is lying at your feet
Skim the stone away across the lake
The future is a stone for playing ducks and drakes
The stone is lying at your feet
Skim the stone away across the lake
Lie down beside the water
Lie down beside your lover
Lie down beside the water
Lie down beside your lover
A Spell to Make a Bad Hour Pass
Unfold your hand
Place all of the bad minutes in a circle
In the palm of your hand
Close your fingers slowly
To form a gentle fist
Slowly turn your fist around
And let your eyes pass slowly
Over all the surface of your fist
Slowly turn your fist around
And let your lips pass slowly
Over all the surface of your fist
Slowly
Tighten your fingers
Slowly
Tighten your fist
The fist is clenched
All the bad minutes are inside it
The fist is clenched
This evil hour is vanishing
Slowly slowly
Unfold the fingers of your hand
The palm of your hand is empty
Rest the back of your hand
Upon your other hand
Look into the palm of your hand
Look deep into your hand
Your hand is full
Your hand is full
Your hand is full of life
A Curse on My Former Bank Manager
May your computer twitch every time it remembers money
until the twitches mount and become a mechanical ache
and may the ache increase until the tapes begin to scream
and may the pus of data burst from its metal skin
and just before the downpour of molten aluminium
may you be preening in front of your computer
and may you be saying to your favourite millionaire
yes it cost nine hundred thousand but it repays every penny
and may the hundred-mile tape which records my debts spring out
like a supersonic two-dimensional boa-constrictor
and may it slip under your faultless collar and surround your hairless neck
and may it tighten and tighten until it has repaid everything I owe you
A Song for Jerry Slattery and His Family
Here’s your life, Jerry, they said, go out and spend it –
So he lumbered out into the world and saw that it was good
But could be a darn sight better, but he began to enjoy himself
After first making sure that everyone between him and the horizon
Had a drink in their hand and somebody to talk to…
Surgery: fifty monologues a day, nervous, desperate.
Listen. Advise. Listen. Refer. Listen. Sign a little note.
The troubles of others cascaded through his mind
While his round eyes said I understand yes I understand
As he cared, and comforted, and cured.
Then home to throw the same old wonderful party,
Greeting you by hallooing your name twice t
hen what are you having,
Drawing you into the corner between fireplace and window
To let you in on a joke against the Tories
Or declare his worship for The Balkan Trilogy or the Cameron column.
A one-man scrum shoving boredom off the pitch and out through the turnstile.
A one-man Ireland swallowing his sorrows and sharing out his joys.
A one-man summertime for friends among whom he was famous,
He lives in all who loved him, and may we spend our lives
As generously as Jerry, as generously as Johnnie.
Funnyhouse of a Negro
(for Adrienne Kennedy)
A head
beating against a wall
A beautiful head
beating against a wall
The beautiful head of a woman
beating against a wall
The beautiful head of a woman with her wrists and ankles chained
beating against a wall
A million beautiful heads
beating against a wall
And the first brick is shaken loose
topples
and begins to fall
A Curse Against Intruders
(Written after the house of Cicely Smith, the poet, and Ian Herbert, the clarinettist, was robbed by a knife-wielding thug)
Burglar-bungler
Ransom-ransacker
Thug-unhugged-mugger
Orchestra attacker
You who tread maliciously
Into this good Herbertry
Your nerves shall be torn into raffia,
Done most debilitating, grievous harm
And this not through some magic Mafia
Roused by this spell’s clanging alarm
But through a slow, gyrating, spiral curse
The which shall corkscrew up you, verse by verse,
Till you’ll wish you rode your own hearse –
(I’ll soon be hoarse, so I’ll be terse) –
A mumping thumping curse and worse
Fall on your heart, that bulged-with-poison purse.
You, Scowler with the Knife, may gulp
Before you slash a clarinettist’s hands.
Behind you a rock-wielding poet stands
Ready to crush you into dismal pulp.
Piss off! Piss off you fart-filled fool!
Your arteries I’ll use for wool
And when I’ve plained them and I’ve purled
You’ll be right knitted up, then hurled
Into the Dustbin of the Universe.
These are the best people in the world
And you had better never ever trouble them
Or I’ll take your worst scares and double them
And I’ll take your best hopes and rubble them.
For Gordon Snell – My Best, First and Finest Friend – on His Fiftieth Birthday
‘By and by they all are dead’ – stage direction at the end of an early play by Gordon Snell, writer for grown-ups and children. ‘By and by is easily said’ – Hamlet in Hamlet, a part once played by Gordon Snell.
By and by they all are dead –
The people, animals, earth and sky.
By and by is easily said.
Any child who has ever read
Knows that Book People cannot die.
By and by they all are dead?
Peter Rabbit’s still raiding the potting shed
Under Long John Silver’s laser eye.
By and by is easily said,
But Alice and the Golux tread
Emerald Oz where the Jumblies fly.
By and by they all are dead?
Lorna Doone and Just William wed
Where The Wild Things Are with Harriet the Spy.
By and by is easily said…
Gordon – the creatures your fancy has bred
Shall live with them – that’s the sweet By-and-By!
By and by they all are dead?
By and by is easily said!
My Parents
My father died the other day and I would like to write about him. Because I think of them together, this means also writing about my mother, who died several years ago.
About a thousand people called her Kay, most of them people she helped at some time, for she was what chintzy villains call a ‘do-gooder’. Nobody ever called her that to her face or in my family’s hearing; if they had, she’d have felt sorry for them. Both her brothers were killed in the First World War. She wore two poppies on Remembrance Day. She divided her life between loving her family, bullying or laughing innumerable committees into action rather than talk, giving, plotting happiness for other people, and keeping up an exuberant correspondence with several hundred friends.
She was not afraid of anyone. She was right. A Fabian near-pacifist, she encouraged me to argue, assuming right-wing positions sometimes so that I was forced to fight and win the discussion.
She tried to hoist the whole world on her shoulders. After each of her first two cancer operations, on her breasts, she seemed to clench her fists and double the energy with which she gave. She wasn’t interested in unshared pleasure.
After the second operation she answered the door one day to a poor woman whom she didn’t know. The woman asked where ‘the wise woman’ lived. My mother knew who she meant – a rich clairvoyant who lived down the road. Not trusting that particular witch, my mother asked what was wrong. The poor woman’s doctor had told her that she must have a breast removed, and she was very scared. My mother said, but there’s nothing to that, look – and she took out the two rolled socks which she kept in her empty brassière and threw them up into the sunlight and then caught them again. So the poor woman came in, drank tea, talked, forgot many fears, and went away knowing that she had seen the wise woman.
People called my father Jock. Face tanned from working in his garden, he survived the trenches of the First World War. He spoke very little. When he talked it was either very funny or very important. He only spoke to me about his war twice, and then briefly. In my teens I wrote a short, Owen-influenced poem about that war. My father read it, then told me of a friend who, during the lull between bombardments, fell to all fours, howled like an animal and was never cured.
Usually he avoided company. There was something in other people which frightened him. He was right. At the seaside he would sit on the farthest-out rock and fish peacefully. When visitors called at our house he would generally disappear into his jungle of raspberry canes and lurk.
Maybe there were twenty or thirty people in the world whose company he really enjoyed. They were lucky; he was a lovely man. Like Edward Lear, he was most at his ease with children, who instantly read, in the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes, that this was a man who understood their games and jokes.
He was short and lean and had fantastic sprouting Scottish eyebrows. He was a research chemist, but that didn’t mean he only took an interest and pride in my elder brother’s scientific work. He let me see how glad he was that I wrote, and I still remember the stories he used to write for me and my brother.
A year or so before he died he was in London for the day. My father sometimes voted Tory, sometimes Liberal, but when he began to talk about Vietnam that day, his face became first red and then white with anger about the cruelty and stupidity of the war. I seldom saw him angry and never so angry as at that moment, a man of seventy, not much interested in politics, all the grief of 1914-18 marching back into his mind.
People sometimes talk as if the ideological conflicts between generations have to be fought out bloodily, as if it is inevitable that children should grow to hate their parents. I don’t believe this. Our family was lucky: my brother and I were always free to choose for ourselves – knowing that, however odd our decisions, we were trusted and loved. We all loved one another and this love was never shadowed.
Taming a Wild Garden
(for Celia, 5 April 1978)
I peck away with my pick-axe beak
And let the ground of our garden breathe.
I rake away cream-coloured crumbs
And there’s the brown earth
I never spend long enough learning from.
There’s the brown earth
I never spent long enough loving.
My brown-faced tabby cruises by.
I bend to stroke her as she goes.
My chest warms.
My brown-faced father
Who loved his garden and several cats,
Smiles inside my heart.
One More Customer Satisfied
He staggered through the cities moaning for melons:
‘Green melons streaked with yellow!
Yellow melons tinged with green!
Don’t try to fool me. They fooled me before
With tie-dyed green-and-yellow footballs
And the breasts of yellow women, green-tinted nipples…’
In his yellow rage and his green longing
He rolled himself into a melon-shaped heap of hopelessness
Crying out: ‘Melons! Bring out your melons!’
So they took a million melons to Cape Kennedy,
Scooped them out, filled them with green and yellow paint
And splattered them all over the bright side of the moon.
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