Come on Everybody

by Adrian Mitchell

  Dreamed I was the lover

  Of a beautiful thief

  But when I woke up

  I was a shipwreck on a reef.

  Dreamed that I was happy

  Or so it seemed to seem.

  My lover smiled

  Like a clown in a dream.

  A clown in a dream

  A clown in a dream

  I had a dream

  We were clowns in a dream.

  Dreamed I was a husband

  Dreamed I was a wife

  But when I woke up

  I wanted vengeance with a knife.

  Dreamed I was the knife

  And blood began to stream

  But when I woke up

  I was a clown in a dream.

  A clown in a dream

  Failing upside down

  And when I woke up

  I was a dream in a clown.

  (from Calderon’s Life’s a Dream)

  The Knife-thrower’s Slender Daughter

  The Knife-thrower’s slender daughter

  Sent me a letter one day

  Meet me just above the forest

  Daddy’s going to be away

  All day

  Daddy’s going to be away

  I climbed up the path to the forest

  And – sitting astride a log –

  I saw the Knife-thrower feeding

  Egg and bacon to his one-eyed dog

  I did

  Egg and bacon to his one-eyed dog

  The first three knives he threw at me

  I dodged his every shot

  Then his one-eyed dog ran past me

  And retrieved the bloody lot

  He did

  Retrieved the bloody lot

  Well I started throwing bits of brick and stone

  Cos the blades fell around me like rain

  But they bounced off the Knife-thrower’s helmet

  And he started in to throw again

  Damn him

  And the dog retrieved the knives again

  I seemed to see him in close-up

  Intense and stony-eyed

  And the rocks I chucked didn’t reach him

  He was further up the mountainside

  With the dog

  Further up the mountain side

  Well the Knife-thrower’s slender daughter

  Looked down to the valley road

  And she saw a blue and white cop car

  Sitting there like a toad

  So she took a little hatchet from her hip

  She gave it a swing

  And she gave it a flip

  And the hatchet flew like a meteorite

  And smashed into the cop car’s revolving light

  The cops switched on their siren

  And I heard their engine roar

  And zooming up from the valley

  Came the forces of the Law

  With pistols

  Came the forces of the Law

  They locked up the Knife-thrower

  For six months and a day

  With his daughter and his one-eyed dog

  I made my getaway

  You know

  And here’s all I want to say

  Now I don’t blame the Knife-thrower or his dog

  For protecting his daughter from me

  And if you saw Knife-thrower’s slender daughter

  You sureashell wouldn’t blame me

  Oh no

  You sureashell wouldn’t blame me.

  Philosophical Agriculture

  The Cow of Friedrich Nietzsche

  was a recalcitrant creature

  who kicked Rainer Maria Rilke

  whenever he tried to milk her

  ON BOARD THE FRIENDSHIP

  For Dick and Dixie Peaslee

  my friends and I

  are trees in a wood

  we glory in autumn’s

  goldenhood

  on our branches sing

  the owl and the lark

  and the small deer trot

  through the mist for our bark

  and the river below

  runs silvery-grey

  with barges to carry

  the timber away

  and that voyage to the ocean

  seems happy and good

  to me and my friends

  as we dance in our wood

  How William Blake Dies a Good Death

  (for John McGrath)

  It was a summer evening.

  The window was wide open.

  I was sixty-nine

  And I’d been ill for months.

  I was sitting propped up in our bed and drawing.

  I said: Stay Kate, keep just as you are,

  I will draw you

  For you have ever been an angel to me.

  I drew her lovely face.

  Then I put down my pencil and said:

  Kate, I am a changing man.

  At night I often rose and wrote down my thoughts,

  Whether it rained or snowed or shone,

  And you arose and sat beside me

  And held my left hand as I wrote my poems.

  This can be no longer.

  And then I made up a song

  And sang it, quietly, into Kate’s ear.

  And then another song

  And then another.

  And Kate said: I like your songs.

  So I said: They are not mine,

  My beloved, they are not mine.

  I took one last breath of the summer air

  And let it go

  And my life flew out of the window

  And upwards, singing joyfully.

  For Miranda and Tom

  (two babies who did not live long)

  a handful of days

  a handful of daisies

  floating down a piano-playing river

  o life is so little

  far too little

  but love flies on for ever

  A Song for Maeve

  I love to watch rivers

  and the way they go

  young rivers tumble

  old rivers flow

  I love to watch friends

  when they’re letting go –

  the tumbling laughter

  and the story flow

  and the words sweet Maeve uses

  with such gaiety

  go tumbling and flowing

  to join the great sea

  Seventy More Years

  (for Gordon Snell on his birthday)

  I was fifteen, and shaking.

  I’d been asked to write the House Play

  And I’d said yes and now I was terrified.

  I couldn’t do it alone, so I sought you out

  Because I’d heard you’d written a dozen plays

  For your own puppet theatre.

  You were fifteen too.

  As I spoke to you for the first time

  You looked at me as if I were

  An intriguing painting, by Breughel maybe,

  Listened to my invitation

  And smiled Yes.

  What had I taken on?

  In the gym and at rugby you were agile as an ape,

  But I could tolerate some sportiness.

  The prefects had you down as Trouble,

  With a deadly line in Dumb Insolence

  And a reputation as the eloquent School Atheist.

  Well, that was fine with me,

  Speaking as a close friend of the School Communist

  And a loose troupe of jazz fanatics.

  We walked and talked and sat down and laughed

  As we plotted our blockbuster for the Drama Competition.

  Half an hour long said the rules, and we knew that

  To impress our toffee-tough audience of teenage boys

  The play better have a lot about Death.

  And so we wrote A Friend of Ours –

  In which Death himself, an old man in a wheelchair

  Wearing Matron’s black and scarlet cloak,

>   Invites a job-lot of odd guests to his country house.

  A Sailor, a Scientist, a Poet (me) and –

  You as Miss Marguerite Hyde – described as a Traveller.

  Death accuses Miss Hyde of nameless crimes

  And she replies with this interior monologue:

  ‘I’ve met the danger of death before,

  But it’s always been a danger I could fight –

  In the East one can fight the terrors of the jungle but this…

  I never reckoned with having to fight Death ‘in person’.

  To think that old man has the power to end anyone’s life,

  Anyone’s at all – to end mine.

  To think HE is Death – It almost seems absurd –

  But it’s not funny.

  How can I fight Death?…

  Did we win the play competitions

  By ten lengths and a carrot!

  We always won.

  You and I took turns to win the Poetry Competition

  And the best parts in the School Shakespeare production.

  When I played justice Shallow, you were Doll Tearsheet.

  When you played a dazzling Hamlet,

  I was your grumpy Uncle Claudius.

  Only once failure seemed to loom. Instead of a tragedy

  We entered a farce for the Play Competition –

  The Third Ham – a parody of the Harry Lime movie

  With my Trevor Howard, your Orson Welles.

  But the censorship committee banned our entry

  For blasphemy and obscenity.

  We glared at them and exited,

  Sat down and wrote another tragedy – Dead End.

  Its first stage direction reads:

  ‘David Hayes is seated, alone and rather dishevelled.’

  (No wonder, he has been shot at by the police

  And is dying of his wounds in a warehouse).

  His opening blank verse monologue was spoken by me,

  But written, I would claim, mainly by Gordon.

  ‘Cobwebs cast stealthy shadows in the soft dust

  The weary bales loom dark against the warehouse wall

  The black rain caresses the blank indifferent bricks…

  I cannot see the steps that led to this dead end

  I do not understand.

  Bewildered, bewildered, there are mists about my eyes,

  And I am dying without knowing the reason.

  This bullet in my stomach is my life’s result,

  The culmination of the sequence of my acts,

  A sequence I must try to follow…

  How did it all begin?…

  How did it all begin?…’

  Did we win the Competition?

  Does the Pope shit in the woods?

  Pausing only to re-cycle The Third Ham

  As a cowboy epic called Cow-Cow Bogey

  In which we played the Front and Back halves

  Of the mooing, Charleston–dancing heroine,

  We founded the Symbolic Society

  Which improvised weird and subversive plays

  On the verandah of the cricket pavilion

  To an audience of moonlit grass.

  And together we sat in the great secret attic

  Up above the Farmer Hall,

  Discussing Love and War and Thurber and Duke Ellington

  Seated in enormous wooden Shakespeare thrones

  Puffing at our Park Drives

  And laughing ourselves into a kind of

  Heaven of understanding.

  Together we cycled across Wiltshire

  To a weekend school on the poetry of John Donne

  Whom we’d never heard of

  Then J.B. Leishmann burst into the lecture room

  With a bicycle and Mickey Mouse hair

  And began to read aloud to us

  But after two lines threw down the book

  And carried on by heart:

  ‘Go and catch a falling star,

  Get with child a mandrake root,

  Tell me where all past years are

  Or who cleft the devil’s foot.

  Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

  Or to keep off envy’s stinging,

  And find

  What wind

  Serves to advance an honest mind.’

  And we glanced at each other,

  Realising that Donne was of our gang,

  And, cycling back to school,

  Chanted the words of Donne,

  Laughing with love

  For his daft and dangerous language.

  Called up to do National Stupidity in the RAF

  We squarebashed side by side

  Trying to keep each other sane

  In that insane little world of blanco, bootpolish

  And being broke and bullied –

  Always you were my ideal friend.

  When you were promoted to be an Acting Corporal –

  It seemed, at first, a betrayal –

  Had Snell joined the Establishment?

  But no, within weeks you had been shorn of your chevrons,

  Demoted back to my humble level

  For bureaucratic sabotage.

  On leave, tramping over Lakeland

  We rewrote its literary history

  In a musical movie called The Road to Keswick

  Starring Bing Crosby as Wordsworth,

  Bob Hope as Coleridge,

  Dorothy Lamour as Dorothy Wordsworth

  And Louis Armstrong as the Leech Gatherer

  And endless fantasy melodramas

  Most of them building to a Rabelaisian climax

  Involving all the Windsor-Mountbattens.

  You went to Balliol, I went to Christ Church.

  At Oxford, our adventure playground.

  Every night we were walking on the rooftops

  Or using your room as a basketball court

  For a balloon version of the game

  Played with a beer in one hand.

  We acted, we wrote poems and stories,

  We founded the Universal Monster Club

  Which turned up at movies like

  The Creature from the Black Lagoon

  To cheer the monster and hiss the awful actors…

  We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Gordon…

  But you actually worked and won a good degree

  And landed up in the BBC

  And there were Bush House sessions

  And Twite and Dromgoole

  And Moira and Annie

  And Bruce and O’Toole

  And high above the streets of Earls Court

  The laughter circus of your flat in Hogarth Road.

  We found ourselves the only inhabitants

  Of a caravan site on the Gower Peninsula

  In the depths of a Bible-black winter

  Trying to write a sitcom about

  A troupe of nutty actors in a theatre on a pier

  But continually breaking away from work

  For trips to the cliffside pub

  Or our own madly competitive

  Two–man Olympic Games

  With events like Sand Dune Jumping Downwards,

  Tossing the Boulder and

  The Walking Backwards Into the Sea Race.

  After each event we stood on the caravan steps,

  The loser on the lower step,

  For the presentation of gold and silver medals

  Fashioned from Barley Wine bottle top wrappers,

  To sing the winner’s National Anthem…

  And it was all very wild and wonderful

  But there was something the matter with the weather

  Something the matter with the light –

  The work was fine

  And the fun and the friendship were fine

  But love arrived and threw her arms around you sometimes,

  Stayed awhile,

  Then, painfully, left.

  That’s not enough love for a man

  When the grea
test among his many talents

  Is a huge gift for loving others.

  Love is tough stuff, and it was tough of love to be so mean

  To the most generous man in the world.

  But the world turned

  And the weather changed to summertime

  And the monochrome streets

  Were suddenly bright

  With all the colours sunshine paints on London,

  With all the music sunshine plays on Dublin.

  And you sailed away, for a year and a day,

  In a beautiful pea-green sieve

  And magic-carpeted round the globe –

  What a runcible way to live!

  And you sat in a tree-top side by side

  By the light of the Chablis sun,

  Writing green and blossoming poems

  And stories for everyone.

  Maeve and Gordon,

  Gordon and Maeve,

  Two names which sit together

  Like two loving cats in an armchair.

  Beauty meeting beauty,

  It was so clear, so happy,

  So unconditionally

  For ever.

  Maeve and Gordon

  Gordon and Maeve,

  Your deep joy shines

  All around you

  Warming the hearts

  Of your numberless friends,

  Warming us all

  With your deep joy.

  For ever

  For ever

  Flowing like a river –

  Your love and your deep joy.

  SEVENTY MORE YEARS!

  to all our friends

  August

  blue seas for ever

  a spicy breeze

  bears us towards an ancient island

  the harbour opens its arms to us

  in an embrace

  of boats with clinking masts

  brown children leaping over ropes

  donkeys fishermen dogs

  women with baby bundles

  shadow cats

  and the sun