Parade
Have you ever been in Memphis
At midnight Halloween
I been there dad
And it druv me mad
When I saw whut I have seen
There’s no city ever was haunted
Like cursed Memphis is
I’d like to tell
About that blue flame hell
So I say with heavy emphasis
There’s
Fear in the streets
Fear in the malls
Fear that clutches you
By the balls
There’s
Gruesome in the gravy
Grisly in the lemonade
Look what’s coming –
Zombie Elvis Presleys on Parade
A million zombie Elvises at the witching hour
hey hey oom borooga boom
A million zombie Elvises twitching with power
hey hey oom borooga boom
Staggering and boogying and woggling their hips
Dropping ears and fingers and noses and lips
A million zombie Elvises
A million zombie Elvises
Edward Hopper
He found his thing
Cross-legged blondes
waiting quietly
Standing men with sharp grey faces
waiting by doors
People in deckchairs
waiting for the sun to set
And the sun in an empty room
waiting for nobody
He found his thing
he did it
Mayakovsky and the Sun
(to Little Richard)
It was the summit of summertime bang in the middle of July.
You could hear the rivers boiling, villages sizzle and fry.
It was that white-hot melting summer that I’ll never forget –
The cows came out in blisters and even my sweat had sweat.
The Sun lay in his hammock snoring fit to wake the dead
So I opened up my window and I shouted at him: ‘Goldenhead!
My name is Mayakovsky, I’m a poet and a painter too
And I’m doing all I can to make the Revolution come true.’
Mayakovsky and the Sun…Mayakovsky and the Sun…
‘I’ve been sitting up printing propaganda poems all night
And now it’s early morning and I need some poster-painting light
But you’re still kipping in your featherbed four-poster cloud!
Get up and get rolling! No layabouts allowed!’
Well the Sun gives a grin and he drags himself up by the roots
And comes marching towards me in his seven-league thumping boots
And he strides through my garden and he bursts into my room
And he opens up his jaws and his lion voice begins to boom:
‘Hi Mayakovsky, I turned down my burners for you.
I can see there’s a lot in common between us two.
I’d enjoy a conversation, that’s the kind of Sun I am –
So where’s my favourite glass of tea with cherry jam?’
Mayakovsky and the Sun…Mayakovsky and the Sun…
I stood there thinking Mayakovsky what the hell have you done?
I was sweating like a waterfall eyeball to eyeball with the Sun.
We shared a bucket of vodka ice cream to cut down the heat
And I said: ‘Cosmic Comrade, would you like to take a seat?’
The Sun relaxed back in a rocking chair looking benign
And he said: ‘You imagine it’s an easy thing for me to shine?
Have a shining competition, you bet I come an easy first.
But if you’re going to shine, man, better shine till you burst.’
Mayakovsky and the Sun…Mayakovsky and the Sun…
Well we talked on and on until the purple began to fall
But the Night didn’t dare to stick one toe inside my hall.
When I slapped him on the back the Sun gave a black hole of a yawn
And he said: ‘Hey, brother, it’s time to do a bit of dawn.
‘Let’s shine away the boredom of how the everyday world looks.
I’ll take care of the sky, Mayakovsky you can take the books.’
So the two of us are kicking down the prison walls built by the Night.
Yes it’s a double attack in boots of poetry and light.
So when the Sun shines down, that overworked mate of mine,
That’s when I jump up and with all of my spirit I shine.
Shine on! Shine on! Shine on for everyone!
That’s what Mayakovsky says, and so does his friend the Sun.
Mayakovsky and the Sun…Mayakovsky and the Sun…
The Perils of Reading Fiction
If you read too many books with made-up stories you go a bit mad
That’s what my Sergeant used to say every time he saw anyone reading
All those writers, most of them foreign and dead,
With their freaky ideas and nancy ways and gone with the how’syourfather
All those Swish Family Robinsons and Lorna Dooms and King Falstaffs
And The Great Fatsby and Virginia Beowulf and Kubla Khan-Khan
And Jane Austen and Jane Morris and Jane Volkswagen
All of em jumbled up and tripping over each other in your brainbox
Well it’s like letting a year’s worth of dreams out of a corrall
To stampede all over your real life, all those pretty lies and ugly lies,
Whirling about inside your skull, beating up storms of yellow dust
So soon you can’t see for the grit in the eyes, you can’t look out at all
And see the real world which is just the real world
And is real and not made up by somebody trying to be clever –
Listen – what I say is –
If you read too many books with made-up stories you go a bit mad.
COUNTRY LIFE & SOME ANIMALS
Dart River Bed
The mash of rotted-down oak leaves
of bark from drifting branches
the white flesh blackening of the salmon
who jumped the net and perished of old age
under her shadow-rock
the ragged robin chewed into shreds
the rich rust of a radiator
the bones of voles polished down to white specks
the dragged down muslin
robbed of its dye then mashed to filaments
and sweet Ophelia too –
all in the soft cool deeps of mud
under the mirror
all in the soft cool deeps of mud
all one in the soft cool deeps of mud
gradually dancing down to the ocean
That June
most days the sun was friendly
a few showers of fat warm raindrops
life was a hammock slung between the trees
of birth and death
poetry was a glass of iced tea
with a submerged seeping lemon slice
the silver condensation
singing in my palm
such easy days such easy days
I didn’t think all month
You gave me a perfect cherry
I bit it ate it and spat the stone
all the way to St Petersburg
where it hit Pushkin on the nose
and he began to laugh
that June
Winter Listening
Humble, crumbly song of the snails.
Pinecones rattling in a stormy tree.
The frosty voices of December stars.
Dragon-roaring of a factory.
Honking slapstick of seals at play.
The creak and slish of snow off a roof.
Crackle-whisper of Christmas paper.
The silver step of a unicorn’s hoof.
Winter Night in Aldeburgh
I stood beside the dark white tower
and fancied I hea
rd a train over in Holland
There was an old man keeping himself warm
by leaning against the fish and chip shop wall
out of the corner of my left eye –
a gang of grey cats pedalling miniature bicycles
an orange boiled sweet sat stuck to the pavement
it was the size and shape of a rugby ball
and was bleeding orange sugar
I looked into the boating pond
and the boating pond looked into me
enough – I saluted the enormous moon
and scuttled back into my room
every inch of this town is haunted I said to myself
but I don’t mind these ghosts
they have no business with me
at this moment a newsaper thrust itself through my letter-box
and fell on the mat with a sound like salt being poured
it was the ghosts’ gazette, the newspaper
which is published by the dead for the dead
at first it was like reading a gravestone
covered with silver moss
but then I started to make out the words
The headline read
OCEAN INVASION ALERT
and the story began:
A squadron of green-headed mermen is swimming shorewards
through the torn metal desert of the waves
towards the singing shingle.
Now I am lying in my bed
face down eyes shut
I am awaiting instructions from the dead
The Monster’s Dream
Under the shoulder of Mount Ferocity
The fugitive monster’s head hums itself to sleep
And he steps out of his head into a fresh dream –
And the air in his fresh dream is chilly-blue
Feathers falling flowers spiralling upwards
Brown tarns shouting as waterbirds skid on their waterskins
The dew on the grass is a moon of crystal frost
Tickling the dark soles of the monster’s feet
And the sun is mild and white and far away
It is early in the morning it is early in the world
All the bad warriors have sailed off to their hero fortresses
Or fallen over the edge of the world
It is early in the morning it is early in the heart
As the fugitive monster breaks through the bracken to find
The ghost of his mother sitting in the grass
Her monster face all gentle for love of him
A Living Monument
(for Peter, Cathy and Thom Kiddle)
Raised myself a monument – somewhere way back there.
Most people miss it. They move too fast.
It crouches in the little grass, snuffling the blue air,
A deep-eyed animal, bred to last.
I’ll die, but that much of me will keep on lurking,
Not rusting into mudweeds like Cleopatra’s barge,
But alive to the beat of the planet, songbark working
While there’s one rocker still at large.
My verses will afterburn, like a good curry,
Though Penguins turn their back on them and BBC TV
And Buckingham Palace and Esher, Surrey –
But some schoolkid’ll learn them, secretly.
Some children love some of my poems – and that’s enough!
That was why I bled all over the page.
In a smooth country my songs were a bit rough
Praising gentleness in a vicious age.
My poetry’s an old border collie who gets by
Performing tricks or rounding up the sheep
And it’ll keep digging as long as politicians lie
And mothers weep.
(after Horace, Derzhavin and Pushkin)
Bird Dreaming
(for Roger Woddis)
And in my dream a little shaking cloud
Of ten-eleven-twelve birds kept me company
As I ambled beside the chalky ploughed-up fields
And the clear frosty skies watched over me.
So I whistled a Hoagy Carmichael tune
And called the birds with outstretched arm.
One starling landed on my scarlet thumb,
Pressing its stars into my palm.
I kissed the feathers of its breast
And said: Some of them are beginning to know me.
And I felt the warmth of that bird’s heart
And my own heart was fiery.
Sausage Cat
Behold the cat
the cat full of sausage
his ears do slope backwards
his coat’s full of glossage
His whiskers extend
like happy antennae
he would count his blessings
but they are too many
He unfoldeth his limbs
he displayeth his fur
he narrows his eyes
and begins to purr
And his purring is smooth
as an old tree’s mossage
Behold the cat
who is full of sausage.
Epitaph for a Golden Retriever
It was my job
To be a dog
My master said
That I was good
Now I turn myself around
And lie down in the musky ground
For Golden Ella
At four in the morning
With furry tread
My good dog climbs
Aboard my bed
She lays her chin
In my open palm
Now neither of us
Can come to harm
In my open hand
Her long jaw seems
Like a shifting weight
As she chews at her dreams
From the coolness
Of her nose
The blessing of
Her breathing glows
And the bad night
Vampires disappear
As my wrist is tickled
By her ear
Elegy for Number Ten
(for Ella)
One out of ten, six gold, four black,
Born in a bulging transparent sack.
I eased him out, this holy gift.
His mother turned to him and sniffed
Then licked the blood and the sack away.
All small and golden, there he lay.
There are some insects and some flowers
Whose life is spent in twenty-four hours.
For twenty-four hours, beside his mother,
He fed and he slept with his sisters and brothers.
Good smells. Close warm. Then a crushing weight.
Then nothing at all. His head the wrong shape.
He was wrapped up and taken beyond the bounds
Of his mother’s familiar digging grounds
For she would have found him and known him too
And have wept as golden retrievers do.
So she kept all her love for the alive –
The black four and the golden five.
But I celebrate that golden pup
Whom I talked to and kissed as I wrapped him up
For he fed and he slept and was loved as he lay
In the dark where he spent one golden day.
Now his mother pursues an eccentric trail
With casual sweeps of her lavish gold tail
And when number ten stumbles into my mind
She consoles me and so do the other nine.
The Meaningtime
Bananas and bicycles are beautiful animals
Elephants and waterfalls are wonderful machines
Show me a bucket and I’ll bite you a biscuit –
Now you know what the universe means
Understanding the Rain
(for a horse called Elgin)
Top right-hand corner
Of a South Devon field
The great white hor
se
Stands under the warm rain
Slow-motion grass
Growing greener and greener
The great white horse
Stands under the warm rain
Like a shining cathedral
Under the centuries
The great white horse
Stands under the warm rain
Like a waiting messenger
Like the people
Like the planet
Like poetry
Like a great white horse
The great white horse
Stands under the warm rain
A Cheetah, Hunting
A herd of Thompson’s Gazelle
Like 43 bars of marzipan.
The great wheels of the cheetah’s shoulders.
The black tracks of her killer tears.
And now her teeth are in a throat.
Two huge lakelight eyes
Look upwards with such love.
Here Come the Bears
Clambering through the rocky torrents
Here come the bears
Quicksilver salmon flip into the light
to flop a little higher up
swerving past scooping claws
and underwater gaping muzzles
Come on Everybody Page 21