Goes the dust-coloured girl with a child on her back.
Veteran with a Head Wound
Nothing to show for it at first
But dreams and shivering, a few mistakes,
Shapes lounged around his mind chatting of murder,
Telling interminable jokes,
Watching like tourists for Vesuvius to burst.
He started listening. Too engrossed to think,
He let his body move in jerks,
Talked just to prove himself alive, grew thin,
Lost five jobs in eleven weeks,
Then started drinking, blamed it on the drink.
He’d seen a woman, belly tattered, run
Her last yards. He had seen a fat
Friend roll in flames, as if his blood were paraffin,
And herded enemies waiting to be shot
Stand looking straight into the sun.
They couldn’t let him rot in the heat
In the corner of England like a garden chair.
A handy-man will take a weathered chair.
Smooth it, lay on a glowing layer
Of pain and tie a cushion to the seat.
They did all anyone could do –
Tried to grate off the colour of his trouble,
Brighten him up a bit. His rare
Visitors found him still uncomfortable.
The old crimson paint showed through.
Each night he heard from the back of his head,
As he was learning to sleep again,
Funny or terrible voices tell
Or ask him how their deaths began.
These are the broadcasts of the dead.
One voice became a plaintive bore.
It could only remember the grain and shine
Of a wooden floor, the forest smell
Of its fine surface. The voice rasped on
For hours about that pretty floor…
‘If I could make that floor again,’
The voice insisted, over and over,
‘The floor on which I died,’ it said,
‘Then I could stand on it for ever
Letting the scent of polish lap my brain.’
He became Boswell to the dead.
In cruel script their deaths are written.
Generously they are fed
In that compound for the forgotten,
His crowded, welcoming head.
The doctors had seen grimmer cases.
They found his eyes were one-way mirrors,
So they could easily look in
While he could only see his terrors,
Reflections of those shuttered faces.
Stepping as far back as I dare
(For the man may stagger and be broken
Like a bombed factory or hospital),
I see his uniform is woven
Of blood, bone, flesh and hair.
Populated by the simple dead,
This soldier, in his happy dreams,
Is killed before he kills at all.
Bad tenant that he is, I give him room;
He is the weeper in my head.
Since London’s next bomb will tear
Her body in its final rape,
New York and Moscow’s ashes look the same
And Europe go down like a battleship,
Why should one soldier make me care?
Ignore him or grant him a moment’s sadness.
He walks the burning tarmac road
To the asylum built with bricks of flame.
Abandon him and you must make your own
House of incinerating madness.
The horizon is only paces away.
We walk an alley through a dark,
Criminal city. None can pass.
We would have to make love, fight or speak
If we met someone travelling the other way.
A tree finds its proportions without aid.
Dogs are not tutored to be fond.
Penny-size frogs traverse the grass
To the civilisation of a pond.
Grass withers yearly, is re-made.
Trees become crosses because man is born.
Dogs may be taught to shrink from any hand.
Dead frogs instruct the scientist;
Spread clouds of poison in the pond –
You kill their floating globes of spawn.
In London, where the trees are lean,
The banners of the grass are raised.
Grass feeds the butcher and the beast,
But we could conjure down a blaze
Would scour the world of the colour green.
For look, though the human soul is tough,
Our state scratches itself in bed
And a thousand are pierced by its fingernails.
It combs its hair, a thousand good and bad
Fall away like discs of dandruff.
For a moment it closes its careful fist
And, keening for the world of streets,
More sons of god whisper in jails
Where the unloved the unloved meet.
The days close round them like a dirty mist.
When death covers England with a sheet
Of red and silver fire, who’ll mourn the state,
Though some will live and some bear children
And some of the children born in hate
May be both lovely and complete?
Try to distract this soldier’s mind
From his distraction. Under the powdered buildings
He lies alive, still shouting,
With his brothers and sisters and perhaps his children,
While we bury all the dead people we can find.
Life on the Overkill Escalator
Dogs must be carried because they do not understand.
You examine the shoulders of the man ahead without understanding.
You pass foreign-faced women. They pass you.
They are cardboard, behind glass. They wear lead corsets anyway.
The vibration becomes part of you
Or you become part of the vibration.
The penalty for stopping the escalator is five pounds.
Five pounds is a lot of money.
You Get Used to It
‘Am I in Alabama or am I in hell?’
A MINISTER, MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, MARCH 1965
Begging-bowl eyes, begging-bowl eyes,
skin round hoops of wire.
They do not eat, they are being eaten,
saw them in the papers.
But it’s only bad if you know it’s bad,
fish don’t want the sky.
If you’ve spent all your life in hell or Alabama
you get used to it.
Ignorant husband, ignorant wife,
each afraid of the other one’s bomb.
He spends all he has in the Gentlemen’s
on a fifty p book of nudes.
But it’s only bad if you know it’s bad,
fish don’t want the sky.
If you’ve spent all your life in hell or Alabama
you get used to it.
Beautiful blossom of napalm
sprouting from the jungle,
bloom full of shrivelling things,
might be mosquitoes, might be men.
But it’s only bad if you know it’s bad,
fish don’t want the sky.
If you’ve spent all your life in hell or Alabama
you get used to it.
I hurt, you hurt, he hurts, she hurts,
we hurt, you hurt, they hurt.
What can’t be cured must go to jail,
what can’t be jailed must die.
But it’s only bad if you know it’s bad,
fish don’t want the sky.
If you’ve spent all your life in hell or Alabama
you get used to it.
Good Question
How can the rich hate the poor?
They never see them.
&nb
sp; Their chauffeurs swerve well clear of slums.
Accountants keep them out of jail.
Poor people do not run the BBC
So the rich never see the poor.
How can the poor hate the rich
When the rich are so pretty?
A chained man knows the weight of his chains.
A woman in jail has a strong sense of time.
Hunger is a wonderful schoolmaster.
The poor crouch. The poor watch. The poor wait.
The poor get ready. The poor will stand up.
How do the poor hate the rich?
Like a bullet.
Byron Is One of the Dancers
His poems – they were glad with jokes, trumpets, arguments and flying crockery
Rejoice
He shook hearts with his lust and nonsense, he was independent as the weather
Rejoice
Alive, alive, fully as alive as us, he used his life and let life use him
Rejoice
He loved freedom, he loved Greece, and yes of course, he died for the freedom of Greece
Rejoice
And yes, this is a dance,
and yes, beyond the glum farrago
of TV cops after TV crooks
in the blockheaded prison of TV –
I hear the naked feet of Byron
which skated once, powered by fascination
over the cheerful skin of women’s legs,
I hear those two bare feet –
One delicate and one shaped horribly –
slap and thud, slap, thud, slap, thud,
across the cracked-up earth of Greece,
and yes, I hear the music which drives those feet
and feel the arm of Byron round my shoulder
or maybe it is round your shoulder
Oh I feel your arm around my shoulder
and yes, I know the line of dancers
across the cracked-up earth of Greece
stretches from sea to sea
as the shrivelled mountains erupt into music
and Byron and all the million dancers
yes brothers and sisters, lovers and lovers,
some lucky in life and delicately-skinned,
some shaped horribly by want or torture,
dance out the dance which must be danced
for the freedom of Greece
for the freedom of Greece
Dance
Rejoice
Dance
Rejoice
One Question About Amsterdam
Of course it all looked good in the good light.
(Even the grandmother prostitute
Who leaned too far over her window-sill
As she picked her nose and ate it
And only stopped, with the guiltiest
Guilty start I’ve ever seen,
When she saw I was looking.)
Of course it all looked good,
But, since I was suspicious even in the womb,
And, as it turns out, rightly suspicious,
Forgive me, Hans, one miniature complaint.
I didn’t see a single Eskimo in Amsterdam.
Everything else, yes, but no Eskimos.
Not one candle-chewing, wife-lending,
Blubber-loving igloo freak
Of an ice-hole fishing, polar bear-clobbering Nanook.
Throughout the tranquillising waterways,
Throughout the bumping wet of the harbour –
Not one bloody kayak.
Where are the eskimos of Amsterdam?
Where are the eskimos of Amsterdam?
Where are the eskimos of Amsterdam?
To the Silent Majority
ashamed to be white,
ashamed not to be in jail,
why do i keep howling about:
sky overcast with the colour of hunger,
liars who kiss like arsenic sandpaper,
white power gas, the torture game
and the one-eyed glare of that final global flame?
because they are here.
The Dichotomy Between the Collapse
of Civilisation and Making Money
(to my students at Dartington)
No such thing as Western
civilisation
No such thing as Eastern
civilisation
The brand name for a tribe of killer apes
is civilisation
The killer apes do some little good things
So let’s all do the little good things
good things good and not many of them –
Coconuts in the pacific ocean
of bad things bad things calling themselves
civilisation
What the hell if the tribe collapses
Look out look out for another tribe
of apes who do no killing but do big good things
Meanwhile look up
up above your head
only the rain is collapsing on you
Of course there’s not much bread
in doing little good things
but do do do
altogether all the do do day
Because, speaking as a brother-speck
among the galaxies,
Little is the biggest we can call ourselves
Night Lines in a Peaceful Farmhouse
truth is
exactly the same size as the universe
and my eyes are narrow
i stare at one of my fingernails
its mass is pink
its edge is blue with coke-dust
it grows on a warm well-nourished hand
i look up and suck smoke
the windows are black
people are being killed
the first time I met a girl called Helen
she told me
‘money is the basis of life’
the second time i met her she said
‘money is the basis of life’
people are being killed
i stare at those four words
typed in black
they are true words
but they do not bleed
and die and rot
commonplace cruelty
timetable cruelty
i haven’t seen much of the world
but i’ve seen enough
i have known more horror in half an hour
than i shall ever have the skill to tell
my right hand soothes my left hand
i have known more beauty in half a minute
than i shall ever have the skill to tell
i make a fond small smile
remembering gentleness in many cities
so many good people
and people are being killed
How to Kill Cuba
You must burn the people first,
Then the grass and trees, then the stones.
You must cut the island out of all the maps,
The history books, out of the old newspapers,
Even the newspapers which hated Cuba,
And burn all these, and burn
The paintings, poems and photographs and films
And when you have burnt all these
You must bury the ashes
You must guard the grave
And even then
Cuba will only be dead like Che Guevara –
Technically dead, that’s all,
Technically dead.
Family Planning
Why do the Spanish have so many children?
Our first child was a priest.
Then we had a nun.
The next three were all policemen.
You’ve got to have one child you can talk to.
Open Day at Porton
These bottles are being filled with madness,
A kind of liquid madness concentrate
Which can be drooled across the land
Leaving behind a shuddering human highway…
A welder trying to eat his arm.
Children pushing stale food into their eyes
To try to stop the chemical spectaculars
Pulsating inside their hardening skulls.
A health visitor throwing herself downstairs,
Climbing the stairs, throwing herself down again
Shouting: Take the nails out of my head.
There is no damage to property.
Now, nobody likes manufacturing madness,
But if we didn’t make madness in bottles
We wouldn’t know how to deal with bottled madness.
We don’t know how to deal with bottled madness.
We all really hate manufacturing madness
But if we didn’t make madness in bottles
We wouldn’t know how to be sane.
Responsible madness experts assure us
Britain would never be the first
To uncork such a global brainquake.
But suppose some foreign nut sprayed Kent
With his insanity aerosol…
Well, there’s only one answer to madness.
Norman Morrison
On November 2nd 1965
in the multi-coloured multi-minded
United beautiful States of terrible America
Norman Morrison set himself on fire
outside the Pentagon.
He was thirty-one, he was a Quaker,
and his wife (seen weeping in the newsreels)
and his three children
survive him as best they can.
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