molten lead
on your head
From the overflowing murdering mouth of the Criminal Justice State
Full English Breakfast
(my alternative national anthem)
Full English Breakfast
Sent from above
Butter and toast and beans
Chunky old marmalade
That’s what we love
That is what England means
Full English Breakfast
Doing its best
Marching as if to war
Full English Breakfast
Standing the test
Two eggs and bacon
If I’m not mistaken
That is what England’s for
Black pudding
Plum jam
Pass the cornflakes
To Pam
Grilled mushrooms
Fried bread
How’s your gumboil
Uncle Fred?
Full English Breakfast
Flowing and free
Pride of the Seven Seas
Full English Breakfast
Strong English tea
Sadie likes three lumps please
Full English Breakfast
Doing its bit
Filling the English tum
England was made for Man
As God’s own Frying Pan
It’s the Full Monty, Mum!
Moving Poem
I’ll call my new house ‘REALITY’
Or maybe ‘BOURGEOIS STATE’.
Its name will be burned on a slice of wood
And screwed to my garden gate.
When they say ‘Hey, sticking a name on your house
Is a very suburban trait!’
I’ll look up from the corpse I am eating
And say: ‘This is the suburbs, mate.’
Stuck Together Song
I was standing in a cake shop
In this awful little town
I looked for a waitress
There was no one around
I picked myself a kind of coconut item
And a chocolate eclair but when I came to bite em
They were
Stuck Together
Well I walked out of the cakeshop
With a sack and a guitar
And a wickerwork dogbasket
And was looking for my car
I bumped into a pair of gentlemen in suits
With pinchy white faces and waterproof boots
They were
Stuck Together
Stuck together
For the rest of their life
Like the blade and handle
Of a butcher’s knife
Like a handmade shoe
Made of patent leather –
Stuck Together
Me I was born on the British Isles
Like sixty million other suckers
Half of me Scottish half of me English
Half of my friends are foreign fuckers
Scotland England Northern Ireland Wales
Four different breeds of dog with droopy tails
All of us
Stuck Together
O Captain! My Captain! Our Fearful Trip Is Done
Your white hands tight upon the wheel,
You sold the ship off bit by bit,
Auctioned the masts, the decks, the keel
And left us sinking in the shit.
Icarus Talking to His Dad
since I first dreadfully fitted my fingers
into the tipless gloves under the angle of the wings
and you criss-crossed my body with the straps
which would draw me close under and into the wings
and closer till they reacted with my shoulder blades
as if they had grown there
you always told me babies are born with wings
but on the seventh day a visitor comes
and clips them off and anoints the stubs
with anti-feather growing ointment
only the wing stubs the shoulder blades still sometimes
dream about flying
and on this dream we will build our freedom
it is about freedom, you said, you insisted,
remember always flying is about freedom
it is about wheeling and tumbling and falling through clouds
it is about laughing and exploring the possibilities of the body
it is about playing tag with swallows
and the attempt to become as free as air
it is not about conquest or achievement or record-breaking
it is not just for you
it is freedom and it is for everyone
that is why I have worked day and night
and when I became blind worked on blindly
because my intelligent fingers longed
to complete the great task –
the first pair of working human wings
just the first pair, I’ve made them so that
if they work,
any fool can make a thousand pairs
they had to be simple
there had to be a simple way, a best way
and there was and I found it
as a village finds a path down through rocks to the sea
and you also said, not too near the sun, son,
that was your joke, always with a blind man’s wink –
not too near the sun, son
If You’re Lookin’ for Trouble
You’ve Come to the Wrong Place
(for the CND Rally, Trafalgar Square, 1994)
This is a rally in the cause of Peace.
You’d rather have Conflict? Then I suggest
You join the Army or the Police –
(If you can pass the intelligence test).
FOR LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
My Father’s Land
1
Sand-dunes
And sand-dunes
And St Andrews
A blueboard sky
Scribbled all over with seagulls
Who spell out chemical formulae
Sand-dunes
And sand-dunes
And St Andrews students
Scarlet-gowned
Against the grey and glittering town
Jock Mitchell, the young scientist
Sand-dunes
And sand-dunes
And the bottle dungeon in St Andrews
There was a bottle dungeon
Let into the ground
They lowered its one prisoner
Down the neck
Into the depths of the bottle
Down in the bottle
The darkness was total
Waves smashed against the walls outside
First the prisoner went mad,
Said the guide, later he went blind
Sand-dunes
And sand-dunes
And the North Sea
And France
2
1914-1918
He descended into Hell
Which is a labyrinth of trenches
Slashed out of chilling, killing mud.
All his old friends died there
And he crouched with his new comrades –
Obscene diseases, shells and rats,
Madness and blindness.
Down in the bottle
The darkness was total –
Sent, by the King,
To Hell in a kilt –
My gentle young father.
3
Sand-dunes
And sand-dunes
And Woolacombe
And on the farthest wave-slapped rock
Towards the end of Baggy Point
Alone in a salty zone of his own
Face brown as his shoes
Body white as his teeth
Fishing all day and catching nothing,
And happy that nothing was to be caught –
My father.
4
My mother’s laughter<
br />
And the laughter of her friends
Tumbling out of the french windows and beyond them
I’m on the patio paving stones
Exterminating a city of Ants
I am Bomber Command
With a seething kettle.
And beyond me
The warm-swarming lawn is sloping
Under the weight of three apple trees,
Their ancient trunks bulging,
Leaning to one side,
Each bearing a deadly, sticky circle.
Beside that lawn
My bright-haired brother’s head
Level with the cabbages
As he excavates
A system of trenches
Which he will fit with a sliding roof
And electric light and a drainage pump,
Putting my primitive
Hole in the ground for hiding in
To simple, muddy shame.
And way beyond and behind all this,
Past the experimental asparagus,
Hidden from family, friends and Germans,
In his bamboo city streets of raspberry canes
Stands my middle-aged father, Jock.
He is five foot six.
You look at his strong brown eyes and say:
He must have laughed a lot.
You look at his strong brown eyes and say:
He must have lost a lot.
He squashes up his mouth
As he kicks the blade of his spade
Down into the rich earth of Surrey.
When he rests
He reaches into his salty old sports jacket,
Into the pocket he keeps full of bread-crumbs
And rewards the robin who follows him everywhere,
Like a small boy with sticky-up hair.
And he is still there, in the raspberry canes,
And soon my mother will bring him his tea
So he doesn’t have to come into the house
And be polite to her friends.
A Late Elegy for Jock Mitchell
The Imperial Tobacco Company
Tore my father from his family
After much terror and agony.
Four years in the trenches could not break
His body. He died for the sake
Of sucking Players and Gold Flake.
He looked like an old child that day.
‘We love you,’ was all that I could say.
He said: ‘It’s awful,’ then turned away.
Goodnight, Stevie
Over an ocean of silvery froth,
Past mammoths in forests of moonlit myth
Flies a zig-zagging, incandescent moth –
The poetry of Stevie Smith.
Brightness of Brightness
(for Trix Craig on her seventeenth birthday, 3rd July 1992)
Brightness of an estuary –
Glittering seabirds in spirals of light
Over the molten bars of golden mud.
Brightness of a forest glade –
A sun-pool waiting the arrival
Of a shy, gliding family of deer.
Brightness of a midnight river
Playing like Jack B. Yeats
With the harlequin lights of the city.
Brightness of a black and white dog
Bouncing above and below the bracken.
Brightness of those eyes
Brightness of that hair
Brightness of memory
Brightness of the good times
Brightness of that palace in Carlton Hill
With its tumbling tower and fantasy plumbing
Where all the troubles of the world
Dissolved in Irish laughter.
Brightness of the house in Snape
With furious Scrabble by a furious fire
And Christmas feasts the whole year round
With butterlight and creamlight,
Meringue-light and dreamlight
And the light of blue bubble fountains
In a deep goblet of gin and tonic.
O brightness of gravy, brightness of wine,
Brightness of Trix’s voice
And the best company in the world.
For her eyes look on the no-good human race
With endless forgiveness, endless affection,
And her heart dances around
Catherine of the deep wild eyes
Michael of the laughing waterfall
Fergus the fine young tree
Blanche the new whirling little moon
And her two shadows
Those finest of dogs
Meggie and Tashy
And uncountable friends
Some alive here and loving her
Some gone but still alive in her heart
In the brightness of that heart
As all-embracing as the sunlight
Brightness of brightness
Light of a thousand lives
Brightness of brightness
Beloved Trix.
Maybe Maytime
(for Celia)
There was a moment in a garden.
There was a moment in a garden –
Small green spiders trapezing down through
Yellow spotlights in that great green tent.
Something was singing with the voice of apples.
A breeze touched my cheekbone, or perhaps it was a fingertip.
There was a moment, there was a sandpath,
Pine-cone-scattered and swerving its way
Among the red-bark trees with their polished roots.
There was a snub-nosed rowing boat
Stuck forever among hissing rushes –
On the water’s surface, a famous insect city.
There was a moment, there was a voice,
Wild as your hair and gentle as your breasts.
And a raucous old train rattled its way around the rim of the valley.
I might have been five, perhaps fifty-five,
Could have been October, maybe Maytime,
But I know it was you, my love,
I know it was you
Because look, here’s the mark, right over my heart.
Sometimes Awake
deep in the centre of her breasts
two nameless flowers grow
their small leaves furled
their petals curling
with porcelain blueness
like the morning skies
on the fifth of april
sometimes awake
and sometimes asleep
and sometimes both at once
I’ve gazed so often on those two blue flowers
to see them gazing back at me
with all the love I ever thirsted for
Thank You for All the Years We’ve Had,
Thank You for All the Years to Come
My blue hand stretched out of sight in the blizzard’s white
For one rose among the snows of Everest
And my chest and mouth ached for the touching of your breast
For I loved to be loved by your love more than anyone knows
In Sweetmeat Street I lay in the guttering muck
The crowd laughed aloud at me the Semi-Human Dungheap
But you jumped from the hump of your camel, lifted me up
And saved me, sunned me and lay me beside you to sleep
I was scared by the stare of the white-masked moon
For I knew those two cold Os were the cratery eyes of Death
But pink morning dawned as you rose over me
And I cried golden molten tears of happiness…
An Open Window
Love is an open window and the breeze
Breathing into the bedroom from that window
And love is the towering, tearful tree
Seen in the frame of an open window
And love is the hot-blooded sky beyond
Longing to tear its clouds off for the sun
And love is h
ow we lie here, looking and longing,
Under the gaze of an open window.
C’an Torrent, Deya.
Happy Breakfast, Hannah, on Your Eighteenth Birthday
Today you sit down to a proper breakfast.
Yesterday you were seventeen
On the Sunny Side of the Century
Arranged for ukulele and spotty pyjamas.
The day before yesterday you were twelve
All woolly hat, armsful of homework,
The largest eyes in the known world
And sudden laughter beside a lake.
The day before that you were six and a bit
In enormous boots and a housewife hat
Chasing the vicar with your deadly gamp.
And the day before that, eighteen years ago,
The midwife said:
‘This one’s been here before’
As you came up really bright into the light.
And I wish you a house in a wood
Within the sighing of the sea
Animals around your feet
And the music of peacetime to dance your own dance
And all the love in the world, lovely Hannah,
As you come up bright into the light.
A Flying Song
(for Caitlin Georgia Isabel Stubbs, born 18th April 1993)
Last night I saw the sword Excalibur
It flew above the cloudy palaces
And as it passed I clearly read the words
Which were engraven on its blade
And one side of the sword said Take Me
The other side said Cast Me Away
I met my lover in a field of thorns
We walked together in the April air
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