My love could not be greater for those three.
But that love should have made me strong.
Where Are They Now?
My mother lives inside my heart.
I live inside my mother’s heart.
My father lives inside my heart.
I live inside my father’s heart.
That About Sums It Up
women feel too much
too many feelings
that’s what I feel about that
woman’s heart is like a bottle of milk
man’s heart is like a box of paperclips
shake that milk
rattle those paperclips
let your love roll on
Swiss Kissing
It is done so:
The two lovers commence
At opposite ends
Of a Toblerone
And munch their way towards
A climax
Of chocolate tongue fondue
Safe Sex Swiss Kissing
This is performed like Swiss Kissing
But you do not remove the cardboard cover
Or the silver paper.
My Friend the Talking Elevator of Tokyo
The Hotel Elevator speaks to me.
She is a National Otis lift.
The elevator speaks in a friendly voice
You may come in, I think she says – in Japanese –
But most of her words are a bright blur
Of possible-impossible half-meanings.
Her voice is velvet, just too soft for clarity.
Sometimes I have to restrain myself
From asking other passengers
To stop talking, shuffling their feet
Or rustling their infernal back-to-front newspapers
So I can hear all the words which drop
Like diamonds from the metal lips
Of the Oracle of the Roynet Hotel,
Musashino, Tokyo.
(The Roynet is attached to
A restaurant called Sizzler.)
I write down what I think she might be saying
My Musashino muse:
‘Today will not be lucky for you
But the rest of your life will all be sweet potatoes’
And once: ‘You look so tired today,
Why not lay down and rest your head?’
And once: ‘Read two chapters of a thriller,
Phone home and have a drink.’
Or she makes statements about life
Like: ‘Clouds are the messages of dead philosophers’
Or ‘It’s gooder with the Buddha’.
She often says something like:
‘You timed it!’ as you step on to her carpet,
Then ‘Meet the Merry Men!’
(As if I’m Robin Hood).
Sometimes I travel up and down for hours
Crouched in one corner listening to her words
This language like a little rocky river
Swerving so coolly through my mind’s hot meadows
Today the lift greets me inaccurately:
‘Hello, Jimmy Baker’. (A code name?)
Then she adds, with casual warmth,
‘Call me Betty-Betty.’
Her name, at last I have the power of her name.
When I emerge at the seventh floor she says
‘Better get out’ or maybe ‘Betty get out’
I am talking back to her
As a man brushes by me on his way into the lift.
I can’t hear what Betty-Betty says to him.
‘Betty get out’? ‘Betty-Betty get out’!
The soul of this silver woman is trapped
In the steel frame of an elevator.
‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper to the wall, ‘I’m going to free you.’
That night I return with a set of screwdrivers
I occupy the lift and jam the buttons.
With rubber gloves I unscrew everything unscrewable
But her voice continues saying something about
Being stuck and not to panic about not being stuck
Or not being unstuck.
There is a steel mesh over the aperture
From which her voice floats in faint balloons.
I lever and wrench the mask away.
From the void comes the voice of the prophetess
Very clear and very still:
‘I am with you, Adrian,
I am always with you.’
And I am with you, Betty-Betty,
I am always with you.
Love in Flames
Midnight: a dark and passionate scene.
You whispered: Come into me, quick.
My hand reached out for the Vaseline
But it closed on a jar of Vick.
Hospitality
She stands beside my sickbed
Her breastplate starchy white
Only six inches from my face
Like a ship’s sail in full flight
But when she turns in profile
Small stripes of pink and whiteness
Move up and down and over
Her left breast shaped like kindness
She wheels the screens around my bed
After the doctors call
And then she takes my temperature –
And that’s not all
Oh nurse nurse nurse nurse
Show me your nursey things
Your crystalline thermometer
Shake it till your skeleton swings
Oh you look so nursey
With your savage little fringe
And your watch upon your bosom
And your magic syringe
Yes nurse nurse I think I feel worse
Do me those nursey things
Place your healing hand on my swollen gland
And nurse it till the patient sings
I wasn’t going to fall but you caught me wrong-footed
You took my pulse and god knows where you put it
With your sharkskin panties and your alligator purse
Cleopatra Nightingale my favourite nurse
Oh nursey nursey mercy to percy
You’re an angel on fluttering wings
Yes thank you
Bless you and your nursey things
ON THE ARTSAPELAGO
Poetry Is Not a Beauty Contest
Bob Keats is better than John Dylan
But worse than Emily Shakespeare
Chocolate omelettes are better than burnt tapioca
But worse than crystallised parsnips
Michael Owen is fitter than Enoch Powell
Tony Blair is fatter than Mahatma Gandhi
The Independent is more fun than The Sun
But less fun than the Beatles or the Goon Show
Daisy, my six-month-old Golden Retriever,
is more beautiful than all of them rolled into one
If Digest
If you live to the age of twenty-one
You will almost certainly be a man, my son.
[Rudyard Kipling and Adrian Mitchell]
Desiderata Digest
Go placidly, think floppily,
Live boringly, die soppily.
If I Dare You, If I Double-Dare You
(the Leslie Crowther Memorial Poem)
At the poetry recital
Or literary prize-giving
The audience should always answer back.
If a speaker mentions
The word Faber
Everyone should shout out – CRACKERJACK!
But if Faber and Faber are named, please attack
With the cry of CRACKERJACK AND CRACKERJACK!
(But if Bloodaxe Books are spoken of, we’ll expect
The reverent murmur of – Respect……Respect……)
To a Helpful Critic
Perhaps I wasn’t writing for people like you
I can’t be always working for the precious few
Maybe I was writing for a child of t
wo
I can’t write every thing I do
With one eye on the paper and the other on you
This Be the Worst
(after hearing that some sweet innocent
thought that Philip Larkin must have written:
‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad’)
They tuck you up, your mum and dad,
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.
They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.
Man hands on happiness to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.
from Nine Ways of Looking at Ted Hughes
Poet at Work
There he stands
a grizzly bear in a waterfall
catching the leaping salmon
in his scoopy paws
Full Moon and Little Frieda
little Frieda’s life
will always be lit by that poem
and so will the life of the moon
Footwear Notes
bloody great clogs
carved out of logs
are the indoor shoes
of Ted Hughes
Not Cricket
Ted backsomersaulted to catch the meteorite left-handed,
Rubbed it thoughtfully on the green groin of his flannels
And spun it through the ribcage of the Reaper,
Whose bails caught fire
And jumped around the pitch like fire-crackers.
Said the commentator:
Yes Fred, it might have been a meteor –
Could have been a metaphor.
Rugby News
When Ted played front row forward
for Mytholmroyd Legendary RFC
his scrum strolled right through the walls
of Sellafleld and out again the other side
like a luminous lava-flow
Out of Focus
When you take a photograph of Ted
it’s a job to get him all in –
like taking a snapshot of Mount Everest
Gastronomica
A large Mayakovsky
Or Ginsberg and tonic before the meal
Dry white Stevie Smith with the mousse of moose
Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with a deep red Ted
Vintage Keats with the trifle
A glass of Baudelaire goes well with cheese
But afterwards
A bottomless goblet of Shakespeare’s port
Or the blazing brandy of Blake
Fish-eye
Said the Shark at the Sub-Aquatic Angling Contest
I caught an enormous Elizabeth Bishop the other day.
That’s nothing, said the Whale,
I hooked a Ted Hughes, but he got away.
Cool/Hip
cool is a pose
hip is a gift
cool is a mask
hip is perfect pitch
cool is closed twenty-two hours a day
hip is open all round the clock
cool is the suit of armour made of ice
hip strolls naked on the bay of the dock
cool pretends it doesn’t go to an analyst
hip is Just William at Prince Charming’s Ball
cool is the super-sarcastic panelist
hip’s the green lizard on the workhouse wall
cool is a sniper on the hills
keeping going on those mean green pills
hip is a joke
as weightless as smoke
or Hamlet stalking
in his Spiderman cloak
New Movie Regulations
In all new movies
revolvers must be replaced by retrievers
punches by paunches
kicks by cooks
explosions by lotions
shots by spots.
The Terroriser draws his retriever
(in pastels)
but fails to spot the hero
who counter-attacks
with cooks and paunches
until the Terroriser
by pulling a secret lever
releases a flood of calamine lotion.
AUTOBICYCLE
All Shook Up
(Adrian Mitchell has left the building)
I catch I fetch
As best I can
I sit I stay
half-dog
half-man
when bad rains fall
I crouch and wail
I sniff the world
and wag my tail
half-man
half-dog
if a poem
should whistle
my ears
stick up
my haunches
bristle
In My Two Small Fists
in that bright blue summer
I used to gather
daisies for my father
speedwell for my mother
with buttercups
and prickly heather
cowrie shells
and a seagull’s feather
treasures in each fist
all squashed together
daisies for my father
speedwell for my mother
(that’s how I see it
but I don’t know
if it really happened
sixty years ago
but my memories shine
and their light seems true
and so do the daisies
and speedwell too)
The Mitchellesque Lineman
Walking from telegraph pole to telegraph pole
Along the sagging singing swinging wires
That’s how I travel from town to town
I stand a moment on the top cross-piece
Of a creosoted if splintered pole
I look down, spit for luck on the soft verge below
I count, for luck, the small ceramic
Bee-cones, as we call them,
Which perch, like the ivory helmets
Of warriors hidden in a tree,
On the crown of every pole.
I breathe massively, taking in the deep zen of the air,
Flex my toes in their spangled satin sneakers
Then right foot on to the right of centre wire
Then give, bounce, rise, descend,
Then left foot on to the left of centre wire
Give, bounce, rise, descend
And stand there only one beat before
My right foot takes its first sure forward step
Along the curving wireway
Which leads away and over the horizon.
But the pole ahead, for now that’s all I care about,
All I look at, all that exists in the universe,
The pole ahead occupies my mind and soul.
My feet feel their own way
As my fingers hold
Gently enough to sense the slightest breeze or rabbit sneeze
My peacock-feather balancing pole,
My one-blue-eyed pole which stares me on my way
As I ghost my way from pole to pole to pole.
Where am I going to yonder?
What does this journey portend?
Wherefore disturb from the wires the swallowbirds?
Where will my pilgrimage end?
As a matter of funk, for such molehill questions
I don’t give a monkey’s thump
You only ask because your own trainers
Are stuck two feet down in the logical mud
While I’m a cloudhead sailing through the thermals
Stately, I hope, as a Spanish galleon,
Travelling for the sake of the whirlpool excitements
Swirlin
g around my intestines.
Come rain come shine I walk the line
From pole to pole to pole
Walking high thigh passing thigh
With the rain in my heart
And sun in my soul
And the Mitchellesque Lineman
Is still on the line
So still
The Mitchellesque Lineman
Is still on the line.
If Not, Sniff Not
‘2502786 Aircraftsman Mitchell,’
Said the Group Captain, surrounded by his green glass desk,
‘The day before yesterday I found you Guilty
Of losing Through Neglect
Another Airman’s laundry.
I fined you and sentenced you to
Five days confined to camp.
‘But yesterday the Airman in question
Returned from Sick Leave with his laundry.
So it was not lost after all.’
I risked a smirk.
The Group Captain continued:
‘I will therefore rescind your fine
And scrub out your offence.
You will however continue to be confined to camp.’
I looked above his head.
On the wall – a framed copy of Kipling’s fucking ‘If’.
Age 65 Bus Pass
a little card
in a plastic case
Come on Everybody Page 27