My friends and I were always being chased
out of farmland and parkland and private estates.
Boys Keep out. Trespassers Will Be Executed.
Till we found a free place, Rainbow Woods.
Rainbow Woods, as bright as a paint-box,
Packed with steep hills and curving pathways,
A switchback speedway
Buzzing with kids on bikes,
Scooting over the roots,
Whirring and whirling through the air
To crash-land in bushes.
Running kids, climbing kids,
Kids crawling under heaps of autumn leaves,
Kids with dogs and calapults
Totally ignored by the grown-up world.
Rainbow Woods
With a thousand trees
And a hundred hills.
Rainbow Woods
With its mysterious ruin
Like a palace for ghosts…
The Bully
His head was a helmet
His muscles sprung steel
Each finger was
An electric eel
He was merciless
As the Bloody Tower
I was eight years old
And I was in his power
To the Sadists of My Childhood
old fear
old fear
got it up to here
boiling white
through my guts
old fear
old fear
old fear
screaming in my ear
holding tight
to my balls
old fear
eight year
seven year
six year
five year old terrors
tearing me apart
they ripped my arsehole
sewed up my lips
and they froze my heart
old fear
old fear
took my mother away
left me in the grip
of old fear
old fear
After Reading Hans Christian Andersen
(to my brother Jimmy, with love)
our father and mother
were kind and good
but they have left us
in this wood
As for the Fear of Going Mad
As for the fear of going mad –
It’s like the fear of a teddy bear
That he may be left out in the rain
That the blackbird’s beak
Will peck away his growler
That his forgotten fur will melt
Into the squelchness and the undermulch
Below greenshining skyscrapers of grass.
As for the fear of going mad –
Though night hide you away
And a blizzard blow
There are so many lanterns of love around
You’ll be surely and gladly and tearfully found.
Grandfather’s Footsteps
There’s a guy going round so I been told
And his hands are clammy and his breath is cold
And he bothers the women and he messes up the men
Yeah Old Age hanging round again
Day after day Old Age comes creeping
Crawls on your chest while you lay sleeping
He dims your eye and he slows your pace
And scribbles his graffiti all over your face
He cuts the phone between your brain and your tongue
Kicks holes in the walls of stomach and lung
If you try to fight back he gives you the axe
With all kinds of cancer and heart attacks
He crumbles your teeth and he withers your belly
He laughs off monkey glands and Royal Jelly
He mugs the beggar and he busts the king
And he even slackens off your yo-yo string
Last night I caught Old Age in the act
Tobogganing down my digestive tract
He played my liver like a fruit machine
And used my poor heart for a trampoline
I was flying off into a terrified rage
Bubbling with insults against Old Age
Then I saw his brother Death driving into town –
Please Old Age, won’t you hang around?
The Sound of Someone Walking
Why won’t he stop walking
In those steady-pacing shoes
Why won’t he sit and rest his feet
Listen to the news
Why won’t he stop walking
With that quiet beat
Whatever the traffic I can always hear him
Moving down my street
And I think about him
Every day it seems
And I hear those footsteps
On the soundtrack of my dreams
Make him stop that walking –
At least till the day
When he walks up shakes my hand
And whispers: Time to pay.
Just a Little Bit Older
Feels like something’s been happening to my skeleton
Seems like something’s giving in my scaffolding
Not exactly seizing up but crackling at the corners
Spinal column fuzzing up with clusters of rust-flakes
Toe-bone joints making miniature explosions
I always thought of bones as something you could count on
Build up your framework with calcium deposits
That’s what my mother sang to me but what do I do now
Now that my mother’s vanished and my scaffolding is creaking
And it feels like something’s been happening to my skeleton
Keep Right on to the End of the Bottle
Death is a chilly old sloucher,
His staring face as blue
As a North Pole bug.
When he shuffles, nervously,
To your bedside –
Give him a hug.
Ode to the Skull
for the glimmering eyes
two sockets
the size
of snooker-table pockets
for the nose
a sneeze of bone
to repose
itself upon
underneath
a cliff that’s cleft
where perch the teeth
the few that’s left
over all this
a helmet for
motor-cycling,
rain or war
you’re the belfry
in which is hung
that singer of the self
the tongue
you are the scaffolding
that keeps in place
that beautiful baffled thing
the human face
without your aid
we would not know
Lew Grade
from Marilyn Monroe
and every head
would soon become
like a dead
jellyfish’s bum
Skull, you’re a true
protective friend
I’ll stick with you
right to the end
That last quatrain?
banal and dull,
but thanks, says the brain,
to my good old skull.
My Orchard
I have a fine orchard
Where skeletons stand
In shining and
Orderly rows
And this one stands
Like a military man
And that one has
A mannequin’s pose
When the night wind rises
It whistles through their sockets
With a music
Like misery
But when morning arrives
I step out of my house
And the skeletons are all
Facing me
And I choose one figure
From their bony ranks
And I pick
one bone
From its frame
And I sit on the bench
And I chew that bone
And at first you know
They all taste much the same
But as I chew on
The taste of the marrow
Is always different
On my tongue
And I see the owner
Of that skeleton
When that skeleton
Was brave and young
And I smile at its beauty
And it smiles on me
Till the vision
Gradually goes
And the orchard darkens
And the skeletons stand
In shining and
Orderly rows
Poem in Portugal
Sixty years old and he’s left by himself,
Strapped in the car while the shopping’s done.
He watches the squat brown foreigners
Suspiciously loitering in the sun.
He sighs with relief to be missing the shops
For he can avoid the colly-wobbles
By letting the coils of his bowels settle down
Instead of bumping them over the cobbles.
He watches the tourists outsmart each other
And concludes it is much more fun
To be sixty years old and be left by himself,
Strapped in the car while the shopping’s done.
An Ode to Dust
I know the ways of words,
Their weights and how they click together,
How they expand in summer moods, contract in winter,
The deep kind lines on the faces of some,
Others with damp and blank expressions.
Yes, I know how to talk with words
Like I know how to talk with dogs.
We get along, we can be silly together
Or weep or bop or howsyourfather…
Different with clouds.
From down here they march past with giant shoulders,
Building grandiose cathedrals,
Breaking into Turner avalanches
According to their dealings with the winds.
From a plane looking down they form cream landscapes
Gilded by the sun, silver-plated by the moon.
Slow-dancing landcapes, I often wish
William Blake could have seen them.
I can do nothing with clouds but enjoy them.
I spend more time with words and dogs,
And, though I love clouds, love them less
Than words or dogs. But more than dust.
Because dust is visible and invisible,
It bloweth where it listeth not where I list.
And dust, with no particular place to go,
Goes floating, settling, shifting, settling,
Anyoldwhere and dust consists,
Scientists tell us, of bazillions
Of flitty bits of metal, ash, cloth, grass,
Paper, wood, leather, hair and human skin
Riding the thunderstorm, surfing on the draughts.
Constellations of dust
Glitter and spin
Around the room
I’m typing in,
Falling like miniscule dry rain
Upon the floor, my desk and me.
Every word has a soul.
Every dog has a soul.
When soul rubs soul
It makes a kind of love.
But dust is the dandruff of the soul,
Dust is for philosophers –
A terrifying generalisation –
Dust is everything.
Mid-air
Once I looked out the window of a school
And saw a flying bird stop and fall dead out of the sky
Once I looked out the window of a car
And saw a flying bird stop and fall dead out of the sky
The third time I look out of a window and see this thing
Will be the moment that I die
Give Me Time – Autumn Is at the Gates
(Pushkin in a letter to M.P. Pogodin, 1st July 1828, St Petersburg)
Brown slices spread with the golden mush butter of August
And then scarlet minutes and hours from the jampot that ticks.
Time sandwiches – that’s all I have time to eat.
So many words to kiss, so many sentences to massage into life,
So much verbal fondling and tumbling to be done
But the dictionary pages flicker into a blur.
Writing. Rewriting.
Mind-gliding. Day-sliding.
Cloud-drifting. Microscope-sucking.
Random sleuthing and espionage.
Searching through mountains of mud and dust.
Placing the chess-pieces on the crossword grid.
Waking with my sweaty stubble
On the bosom of my typewriter.
A child of words is born.
The child is taken to the market-place,
Held naked overhead and judged,
Acclaimed, spat at, stoned and ignored.
But by this time I’m pregnant again,
Working on the next baby.
I’d like a holiday between these exciting births,
A wordless vacation on a sea of music
So that the muscles round my eyes could relax enough
For me to gaze at the world and its people
With love but without desire
For my eyes to become as round as marbles.
Oh give me time – autumn is at the gates.
The USA is talking of a new dark age.
Iraq talks about a holy war against the forces of darkness.
Darkness screams at darkness in darkening language
About gas that nibbles up the nervous system in seconds
About bombs that swallow down whole cities.
My family, my friends, my animals,
My writing, my books, my country
And new unknown people and planets
To be gently discovered and understood.
There is so much love to be done –
Give me time – autumn is at the gates.
WAY OUT YONDER
Two Anti-Environmental Poems by Volcano Jones
Underarm Squirter
I hate the bloody cold I do
I hate the bloody cold
It makes me feel all blue it do
It makes me feel all old
And so I purchase aerosols
And aim them at the sky
And squirt them at the ozone layer
And here’s the reason why
The more the ozone disappears
The more the sun shines through
Why? As you know, stupid, I hate the cold
I hate the bloody cold I do
Chop em Down Chop em up Burn the Lot
Don’t give me trees
They throw spooky shadows on my bed
Don’t give me trees
They keep nearly falling on me head
Tripping you up
With stupid great roots
Pelting you in autumn
With mushy great fruits
Talk about rain forests
You go in a rain forest
You’ll be lucky if you escape
Without a fatal snakebite
In your glove compartment
Or your head torn off by a killer ape
Tall green buggers
Get in everyone’s way
Crashed into my car
Just the other day
Don’t give me trees
Give me a deadly disease
But beam me up Scottie
Don’t give me fuckin trees
Criminal Justice for Crying Out Loud – A Rant
Hello people, gather round turn up the sound and forget about your personal pain
Here we are stuck on an island full of traffic jams in the rain
My poetry’s a rough old towel going to rub you dry
again
You’ll be glowing
And I’ll be going
Now don’t try slipping out the back door, zooming off down the road
They got heavies on your front and back, roadblocks every inch of your road
If you look like a traveller – Criminal Justice going to squash you like a toad
Now you heard about Criminal Justice, his honour the dreaded Judge
Cause of my disgust is Criminal Justice, that famous killing serial Judge
He takes mothers fathers children and he chews them up like Women’s Institute fudge
Now you can’t dodge the raindrops when the clouds decide to pour
You get soaked the rich stay dry – that’s the nature of the law
Don’t you know law has always been a weapon in the war between the rich and the poor
Long ago I heard about a goddess and Justice was her name
A famous shining naked goddess Justice was her lovely name
Now they inside outed Justice and they covered her with shame
They steal your freedom to speak
And your freedom to sing
They steal your freedom to boogie
And everything
They steal your freedom to travel
And live where you like
They steal your freedom to raise your kids
And your freedom to go on strike
Criminal Justice oh don’t you dare stay out too late
Criminal Justice it’s getting heavier just you wait
It’s coming down like a rain of molten lead
molten lead pouring down
on the country and the town
Come on Everybody Page 23