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Come on Everybody

Page 23

by Adrian Mitchell


  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

 

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