Come on Everybody

by Adrian Mitchell

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<
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  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