UNDERGROUND

I WAS DRUGGED.

I was drugged I was drugged

Oh I could have been Lord Nelson

Or a tree worth seeing

In the garden of Eden

I was drugged I was drugged

Oh I could have been a star

Twelve billion light years out

Playing a nuclear guitar

I was drugged I was drugged

I could have said it all

So well it would all have stopped

Dead in its tracks

And looked me in the eye and shook my hand and said

Now you can walk tall

I was drugged I was drugged

I was lying on a fence

With the tanks going over me

Into the distance

I was so drugged all I could hear was birds singing

And sometimes my own heart

In my ears like a telephone ringing

I forgot seven languages

Or was it seventeen,

I was so drugged I was even drugged in my dreams –

Or especially then – I was out like a tiger

Waiting to be tagged with a radio collar –

Still can’t find the damn thing, where is it,

Still can’t tune in to any good music –

Like ‘Tiger Feet’ –

But that’s a crap song –

I was so drugged it was way beyond wrong –

I was drugged I was drugged

I could have been a scientist

I could have worked it all out, I insist –

I could have walked hand in hand with God –

Well, I did –

But it was just the drugs,

Just the drugs, believe me, kid.

BLINK

The tiny sleep of every blink,

No time to pitch from the brief brink

Down the warm steeps, leaf-slow to sink,

Before the bright new day screams THINK!

No room for you, no time, dear vast

And blind meandering love – too fast

The blacked-out train, whose shakings last

Less than a full amnesiac’s past.

No time for dreams to work, no time

To conjure justice out of crime,

Build a straight backbone out of slime,

Do the whole Illiad in mime –

Only an anti-flash, a snap,

Klok of the bolt, click of the trap,

A silk snake slipping off a lap,

A small burnt field, its small black map.

LYNCH.

I am so glad that rogue was strung,

The fence that pens my yard not strong,

Silk-soft my pigeons and my bantams,

Easily mangled into phantoms.

Too close, his neck-bone and his spine,

Better to have them stretched, I reckoned,

By hoisting from the grand old pine –

I saw him stand on his last second.

Now I am safer in my roof,

Though not from ghosts, it’s not ghost-proof,

Also in through the cracks runs lust,

Quick as the rust grows on the dust –

And I can see the little stars,

Pouting Venus and punching Mars,

Through all the crumbles in my pointing,

Which is a little disappointing –

I hear a knock on my front door,

It is a parcel from the whore

Of Babylon. My fence needs mending,

Which will require increase of spending.

I will electrify the trees,

Where he swings ghostly in the breeze,

And zap him with the National Grid,

For all the dead things that he did.

HMP

This one

Having escaped all education,

Struggles to study

Among the prodigies of truancy

This one

Fights for the rights to his teapot

This one

Will not take part in the Easter play

Unless he can be Jesus Christ

This one

Once woke up just in time in a morgue

This one

Suddenly remembers

Shaking his daughter to death

This one

Once looked down at himself from the ceiling

This one

Says that he eats children

This one

Is cured of himself

Twenty years into his sentence

This one

Is a policeman

This one

Is diagnosed ‘a political prisoner’

By the pyschiatrist

This one

Works out

This one

Refuses to feel remorse

This one

Cannot read

But holds the keys to the chapel

Here all the plots break down,

Entirely discredited stories are hawked round

Like boxes of wet matches.

Here all the failed disguises

Are hung up to rot on gibbets,

Beside a rubbish heap of alibis.

Here the stars won’t float

But must be propped up, every one,

The trees kept green by your grin,

The walls white by your smiling.

 THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF EVIL.

Evil goes down the aisle with evil;

Circles of International Devils

Discuss the necessary evils.

Evil gets tough with evil, evil

Finally triumphs, deals with evil

Once and for all. On the tired walls

The damned words hang, rotting in irons.

Evil begs evil to be evil

No more. Now, in an evil hour,

Fallen on evil times, pure evil

Praises the necessary Devil,

Under a fist of evil weather,

Saying we’re all in it together.

 WATER.

All I remember is the water

in people-shapes pouring

into beds and each other

sighing out clouds

and the rain's chatter

and the black gape of the drains after

in ditches mixing

with all the fallen jammed into dams

in the blind stream

till their shapes flowed out of them

 OLD MAN

All day past my French window

Napoleon’s glorious armies

march towards Moscow,

with plumes of buddleia and pampas.

Only to creep back,

These freezing evenings,

a thinned and disordered scattering of stars.

Crippled by wisdom

Napoleon is with me here.

I offer to the emperor

trembling cup and trembling saucer.

 PENANCE

My friend the abbot, caught out, has been banished

to the Vatican Library.

(Turning over an old leaf.)

SHIT

Turds are bobbing on a sea of laughter.

Immune to mockery,

These unpersonalities

Are going to be processed.

Mute confessions of the intestines,

They are off, unforgiven.

Every household

Being open to Hades,

These soft Herculeses

Descend continuously,

Off-key Orpheuses

With their dead memories

Of breakfasts and dinners and teas.

Waste-product of munching silences,

But human waste, human,

Not muck pushed out from under a tail

To be flailed on the fields,

Except when, launched on the sea of laughter,

In hat, gloves and cane,

They fertilise the language.

Otherwise, daily the final disaster.

In the solitary box,

Expulsion from the garden,

Whose thin leaves are printed with no salvation.

FROM THE HUNGARIAN

There was a poet

In a time when there were no poets.

There was a wise woman

In a time when there were no wise women.

Still, the trains ran on time.

One day, everyone climbed onto two trains

That left, on time,

And ran straight into each other

And that was the end.

THE QUEEN IS DEAD

Goodbye to my Roads Department,

To all my farms and mines,

I will not wave to the children

As I glide by supine

Or any of my millions –

People and sterling pounds –

I am going I am going

Into the Council House of the ground

And there among the dark workers

I will not shake their hands,

And there will be no flashbulbs

In that steadily-firelit land

And I won’t have to remember

Anybody’s famous names

As my silk scarf slips off my minted head

Into the rearranging flames

And I rise again, to a casual reign,

Observer of emergencies

With bubblegum disdain,

Kicking down Pall Mall, spitting at the sparrows,

Who do me fine for my Red Arrows, thinking

Nice to have met you

Nice to forget you

Nice to have been you, Ma’am,

Crowned with oblivion, ermined in unknown, thinking,

Watch me scoot baby watch me scram, now

Nobody knows who the hell I am!

LONDON.

Based on an event reported in the Guardian, July 9, 2005

London, my love, I heard you’ve been

Battered by jealousy again,

Given a new wound underground,

Where the deaf clay drank up the sound,

Not like before when you were burned

By the wild woman you had spurned

For a rich marriage with the Romans,

Not like the passion of the Germans,

Kissing you to obliteration,

But a black spasm of frustration

By those who hold it as a virtue

Since they can’t have your love, to hurt you.

I didn’t know I loved you. Having

Fled from your dogbreath and your raving

Ways, for six years asphyxiated

And poisoned, I presumed I hated

Every square inch of your stained pavements,

Every chain link of your enslavements,

And it was odd to feel my eyes

Filling for you. I have heaved sighs

For other murders, but to hear

Names like King’s Cross and Russel Square

Bloodied forever and forever,

That was a wetter kind of weather.

Which is hypocrisy, I know.

Others have suffered worse than you.

I never wept for them, which proves

That it’s for nothing but small loves

And trivial incidents of mine,

Dotted around the circle line,

I’m being wrung out now, regretting

The degradation of the setting

Of my slight life, the London structure

Of parts of my poor mind, whose ructure

Hollows me out, as if my childhood

Home was developed into Wormwood

Scrubs. But I think my own sweet London

Was dying anyway, a woman

Joined to a beast whose transformation

Seems endlessly postponed. Imagine

If London really was a woman –

What would she look like? Foul half human

Half chromium crone, with tiny rooms

To cram her dreams in, her own fumes

Greying her blood, a stinking river

Draining the poisons from her liver,

And her hair dangling with the phantoms

Of her old sacrificial victims.

I don’t love that! It must be something

Different invisibly imprinting

Its image on the mind’s eye, lifted

Out of the husks of buildings, sifted

Through windows, out of eyes and mouths,

Rising and spreading out like vows,

Wider and brighter though unseen,

Than the Eye, Tower Bridge, Big Ben –

Something more like a constellation –

Like the slow march of the two million

From street to street, waves on the shore

Trying to wash away the war.

Like this new image that has come

Out of a whole new kind of tomb.

A man goes down into the black,

Hoping to bring some bright thing back.

A long way under Piccadilly,

His torchlight drifting like a lily

On a black stream. It is his duty

To view the far remove from beauty.

And it is there, in outright silence,

And the suppression of intelligence.

He rises to the air, unhuman,

And someone asks the way to Clapham.

LONDON 2

Concrete and abstract city, you can take

Bloody attacks, on bridges, in the street,

And keep on going, like those shoals that break

And mend, as the crazed sharks strike and retreat.

You dark and brightly coloured stream of shoes

And shirts, all wired together by invisible

Crisscrossing swallow-flying texts that fuse

Into a swirling vast brain-dome-shaped fizzing ball –

How can you be so heart-sunk, so undone

By this sky-tomb, this burnt-black tower block,

Not the action of enemies, London –

Why is this worse than a deliberate shock?

Because you did it to yourself, perhaps?

One block burns, and all your stories collapse –

WITHOUT THE SOUND.

Without the sound it would have been alright,

Simply a picture made of shifting light.

Of interest to the eye, the cities burning,

The dots of bombers banking and returning,

But foul to look at with the screams of children.

And the stopped mouths were worse, the dust that filled them,

Than the unrhythmical drum-tap that killed them –

But with the cross-wired talk cut off, imagine

The radio silence of the mind! Forked flashing

To the deaf girl, of the mute storm that quickened

Her window with its cartoon dancing, beckoned

To her electric future.  And your mouth,

Fluttering on our subject like a moth,

Or underwater butterfly, all my life.

Not like the breeze deceiving with its leaf.

 JUST ONE MORE WAR.

Just one more war said the General,

Alright just one said the Priest –

One thing we know for certain,

One thing we can say at least:

It’s not that we are violent

Or after a Golden Fleece,

It ought to be self-evident,

This is a war for peace.

Just one more push said the clown,

Just one more kiss said the youth,

And truth’s steel rain came down,

Obliterating truth.

SPERM SONG

cargoed in vesicles

flung with Columbus,

seed windblown,

under the heartbroken stars

searching for virgins.

land moans staked out naked

warm she calls on heat always in season

spreads her estuaries

rivermouth pouting

breathless mountains pressed against heaven.

vulva discovered

by frantic navigation.

sperm battalions discharging

armoured and hoofed

sharp lance opening vulvas.

many big deaths

void calling

die in the breach make space

for everlasting advance

into abwhored vacuum.

sperm on the parapet dashing about

in the sharp air on the edge of the trench

over the top flowing

into the ragged void

ripped by the big guns.

scales the balcony rhyming

under the heartbroken stars.

now eyes and stars meet

space always on heat void calling

come to me come quick quick my darling my darling.

globes of love.

peppered space calling.

into the virgin stars

the void’s need

ten night eight seven six five four three two one 

PHOTOGRAPH.

Cut off the air

and all elements of the moment

cancel history

and fate

stop the sweat in its tracks

suspend the digestion

pin the expression

on a thin background,

remove the universe

and all the dead

suck the music

out of each ear

and now leave the subject

nowhere forever.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

MAIDEN:

Pass over, oh be over,

Leave me, hard man of bone,

I am too young for such a lover,

Leave me alone,

Leave me alone!

DEATH:

Lovely soft sculpture, I am kind,

No need to weep, with me –

Lift up your heart, give me your hand,

And sleep with me,

And sleep with me!

DESCRIPTION OF A PROSTITUTE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW IN AMSTERDAM

 .

There has been a murder.

There is an investigation.

She admits everything.

She holds back nothing.

She has submitted her own body

As evidence. It has been frozen.

She accepts the jurisdiction

Of everyone.

She has been locked

In a glass prison.

There is no limitation

To visiting times.

Neutrons turn in her nuclei,

But she is not moving.

She has promised not to try to escape.

Here she sits till death comes!

The poet who tried

To compose a sonnet to her,

Sobs in a crab’s stomach

Weak jokes about the weather.

Of her three Magi,

One died a leper,

One was killed by the other,

Who lives in a skyscraper.

Famous explorers

Who have pierced her interior,

Amazed, have discovered there

The ruins of their own civilisations.

She has established peace

Where there was war,

She has achieved agreement

Among the philosophers.

No one has ever done

Anything against her.

A crime is no longer a crime

When it has been paid for.

She has lent to the kind of friends

Who will not return them,

Everything she has ever done,

Everything she has ever seen.

Only what is hidden is wrong,

Only what is denied grows inhuman.

She has done so much good

You can see straight through her skin.

Hatred, forgiveness, rage,

Bitterness, have all bled out of her.

All that remains is the pure

Clear certainty of murder.

Over the burned dunes,

Through the grey acid streams,

Under the green sky of Venus 

She runs and she runs.

ENTERTAINING THE HANGED MAN

Sunburst of trumpets.

Now, from the hills all around,

In a rush of colour,

Here come the clowns.

For one this highly strung,

Swarms of distractions:

Each croaked blasphemy drowned by a legion

Shrill in pink. And now, as the blood curtains,

In a fresh sluice, at a heave

Of the cave-stomach, panther,

Jaguar and ostrich come prancing

With excellent imitation of intelligence.

Another scream

Fights its way out through the teeth:

Multiple drums,

And the trees twisting hand in hand.

For one hanging in the wind

Out of Iceland:

A strong story

And passionate acting.

But now the executioners,

To entertain themselves,

Start to execute the entertainers.

Blackness, breakdown. (Larksong.)

DELAYS FOR THE EXECUTIONER

In the twinkling of a cathedral.

Just one more Cup of Sorrows.

In the turn of a (stone) swallow.

After six herons on one roadsign.

In the next instant

Identical to this one.

IN AN OLD CHURCH

 Under a whale's ribs,

Among stone soldiers,

On the skin of a unicorn

Stretched out before the altar,

How death's light

(Through green panes)

And death's air

(Cold from the ground)

Dare our prayers

To make light of God's murder

AFTER THE FIRST DEATH THERE IS NO OTHER

But what if it’s the opposite?

Two or three times a minute?

Vast giant sloth flesh

Quick with just one death,

Longs for a thousand an hour.

Is suicide sometimes impatience?

 GHOST

You think I know who murdered me?

What do I know? I am unknown!

You think I drink a cup of tea

At five o’clock, hear the phones ringing?

Think I think words, think I go dancing,

Here where I whistle the same tune

Not even over and over again

But for the first time, world without end,

Think I go walking, think I wander

Out of my pattern? I am treading

In my own footsteps to the shower,

After my trouble in the river,

I am your circular pursuer,

Circle away from me forever!

In your imagination grown

Fabulous, like a tree with eyes,

I am shrunk nothing in my own,

Death makes me bigger than I am;

So now you see me where I stand

With the towel round me, in the corridor,

This is my portrait, not in oils

But eels - it moves, it turns, it stares,

But it is art, not life, imagined

By me and then shocked into you.

See how I pick my words like coins

Out of your mind, my own all stolen,

But I can only speak in breeze,

And I have nothing much to tell you,

So I make everything in your room

Lift and go spinning, waltz the curtains,

Rush like a lover through all your borders,

So you will know me as I am,

Seventy years of marriage no closer,

Feel the full blast and roar of me,

Although we never could be happy,

Or stroll through Paris in the springtime,

Or creep along the streets of nowhere,

My broken lock, my open way,

Who by half dying has seen me,

You chosen second mouth of mine,

Shivering coughing borrowed body.

I will be wasps, I will be flowers,

And the slow dying of a bee.

And I will never set you free.

I think you know who murdered me.

HOURS

Dog in the distance, everlasting afternoon,

chimes half-past three thousand and nine.

Bull calls twenty-six o’clock

out of his blind stomachs.

Owl-clock clangs in the ash tree, irregular time,

two shrieks, three shrieks any old time of the night.

Cock flings the dart of his retch

at the dim numbers.

Blackbird, watchman, cries, here comes the light again,

all is probably well,

all may well be well

in heaven and hell.

SEA

Whose is this kingdom? What’s the system?

What the complaints procedure, for instance?

Self-disestablishing, what’s this state,

As if a hand in smashing a plate

Should itself disintegrate.

Whose is this kingdom, what’s the system,

This loose two-thirds of the Earth spewing and staggering,

Or pacing its mania in shapeless devotion

To the will that ordains, it shall be this way, which is not a way.

Is this moon a Queen, turning away,

Half-face, quarter-face, eighth-face, nothing?

Are these her counsellor clouds, breaking up their meeting?

Who mends these highways? Where’s the care system?

Here where even now innumerable keels are tilting.

 TREE.

Your head is buried in your foliage.

You have no interest in the present age.

Your arms are many and their gestures unclear,

Your leaves a school that swims together for fear.

Your leadership is firm though, and you stand.

To take your banner they must take your land.

Drenched in booze whilst you are steeped in sky,

I see you in the window passing by.

Fears cluster round my skin as round your bark

The leaves all tremble in the unresting dark.

My years are passing like an afternoon

Whilst yours go slowly and brightly like the moon.

FLAMES

Out of the grain, emerging worms

That loathly writhe from the distasteful light,

And rise as if twitched up on hooks,

But now more bold denounce the wood

With quickening rage, describing it

With sculpting gestures, quick as fish,

With silk-sleeved brush-sweeps, and in flourishes

Of Arabic and now more frantic,

Big bass, huge amps, mad crowd, impi stamping

Rush as of air into a sprinter,

No a long-jumper who now leaps

And through the force of his own leaping fades

into the sand

 ADVICE IN HIGH WIND

Cling to the bottom of the sky

Where it’s compromised,

Pooled in the lee of walls,

Strained thin by plantations.

Keep yourself tucked in.

Open your wings and

It will bowl you straight up

Featherball shattering

And shattering through nothing till

Your reach its topmost height

Where it is not

DEAD

Over the dead young rabbit

A small brown cloud of disappointment.

CAT

Sensitive to moods, today

Our cat has gone back to the animals

FLY

You don’t want to look at me swivelling on the pane white October, turning and turning eyes out in front my two bodies joined under my grey veils

I’ll tell you what you taste what I’ve got and then sweat and babble for nine days and nine nights then

fly out the window

MAY

Why are you rooks still black?

Now all the flowers are out

Do you not think you should change?

You look like vicars at Woodstock.

Yes you are fire inside,

And maybe you’re trying hard,

It’s May, the month of love

Blasting your charcoal hearts

Till winter suits your song.

TREES IN WIND

Rip-your-head-off drunk, the old women,

who have washed down pills with packs of special witch’s brew,

twist their fists into the grass and shake their heads and

thrash them round

as if to fatigue the skull from the neckbone,

or root their thoughts out

or shake the snakes, if they were gorgons

and still they shriek and shake and

will shake and shriek everlasting hell until

blind to their own limbs scattered around,

rainbow-comforted weeping asleep they croon.

RAT POEM

Rat you are trapped

in the trap of a rat

Hiding in fewness, shopped

by your womb’s assembly-line

From starving slimness pushed out

by your cupboard brilliance

Whisker-precise, twitch-perfect

to your tail’s last 0.00

Rat you are trapped

in the brightness of rat

Rat rat rat rat

how will you get out of that?

TO A CAT DYING OF POISON

What learner driver

Jerks your gears?

What arthritic dancer

Has taken over?

You were a stream

Escaped from the river,

Leaping at bees

Like a sprinkler.

Prize-winning work

Of an apprentice angel,

Who passed you round,

Proud as Lucifer.

But now what ambitious ghost

Has got trapped in there,

Who thinks these electrified gestures proper,

What stumped conductor,

Or drunk puppeteer,

What part-time god,

Full-time joker?

 CANAL

Through the flat air

a square kingfisher.

Cuboid lilies rise

from octagonal pads and

by the parallel banks a nymph sitting

with both her arms cut off,

but still smiling.

DEAD RAT IN THE LANE

Nimbly

the emperor of alleyways

swift king of vanishing

and impossible gaps

is escaping again

now with his frenzied attendants undressing him

he slips away again

in two days totally gone

FLY

 Fly.

We are very near the end.

No flesh, no bones, no brain.

No charm.

No auguries in this jagged flight.

No gravity.

Thief at the mouth, carrying off

the last light remarks.

Noticeable only when it settles

on dead conversations.

Fly.

We are very near the end of thought

just looking at it.

A DREAM

Once in a while there is a war in hell.

I dreamed of it. The pain-thin souls rebel.

They have no hope, their only chance was death,

They know, and here they never speak or breathe.

But their despair, in time, pathetically,

Defeats them, and they struggle to be free.

When you are told that you are dead and damned,

Madness begins. The work and thought you crammed

Into your life, appals you, and the pressure

Increases, though the goal is there no more.

The pressure on the world is very great,

But where there’s death there’s hope, that bears the weight.

CHRIST, CHILD AND CRUCIFIED.

This is the image in the eyes

Of the child upon the throne

Of his mother: he who crucifies

Both of them in himself alone.

But there can be no reprieve,

The child is safe in heaven today,

And feels no horror to relieve,

Sees no reason to delay

In the lap of what he made,

Where mutual fate gives cause and grace,

Alone of all things unafraid,

Smiling on his own tortured face

That struggles to remember now,

And then, remembering, grows still,

Childhood returning to the brow

That thorns have aged upon the hill.

SONNET (extended) Crucifixion.

The working week is crumbling to its end.

The weary soldiers leaning on their spears

Ache to be off. The starving hours distend.

The seconds circle-dance in masks of years.

Slow as the abdication of the sun,

Loath to surrender its bright golden chair

To a successor (though it's its own heir,)

The work of killing God is almost done.

The empire pauses, its extended powers

All pressing on this point, as if a tome

As thick as time was used for pressing flowers

To decorate the temple and the home.

The blind in widening circles tread their dooms,

The planets, having packed their crumpled stars,

Unscrew the light bulbs in their hotel rooms,

And disappear. In groves of German Mars

The leaves turn brown, the sacrifices green.

The end's in sight, but still no end is seen.

DEATH

My two minds joust like clouds

And in the flash you are seen

 WOMAN SILENTLY WEEPING

How many times now

Have I watched, through a glass wall rising,

A crack spring across the face of the moon,

Imagining the ice-sheet groans and booms,

As the two halves

Collapse into the chasm between them

THE DEATH OF THE YOUNG WOMAN.

All down the golden edge of everything

The people creep, in blue and green,

In country colours.

Children dance, fling balls, drop them,

Run laughing after them.

Seeds float, miniature armadas,

Brave on the azure breeze,

Snag on grass stems,

Crash into wing mirrors.

A dog, in the angle of his smile

Squashes a pork pie.

The snakejaw boots are wide open,

Bubbles rising in cider and champagne,

The weather is warm, all is amphitheatred

In a circle of heaped-up clouds, charging,

Enormous marshmallow drums, not yet booming.

People are recklessly betting, they are happy

On this thermal day, dropping paper cups safe

In the knowledge that they will rise eventually to heaven.

Now the dry thuddering

Of the hooves comes round again,

They leap, and brush dust off the fences.

Here come the straining geldings,

Leaping - thuddering - leaping -

Young women are balancing

On the elastic animals

That reach for the ground

And kiss it away from them.

Now one, clutching for the green, misses, and pitches,

Rolls right over,

Ton of thumping blood.

Something lies crooked.

The beast heaves up again

And off, into the race, stiffly.

This was the death of the young woman.

And now an old man walks over, looks, falls down,

Crawls off on all fours. Young men start shouting.

At last the ambulance comes,

Spills a circle of dangling hands.

Now they are bringing the mother, here she comes,

Over the turf.

Now they have caught her under the arms.

Tannoys announce the end of the celebrations.

Thunder begins, heavy rain.

The day has failed,

All the people go home,

Steering their many-coloured caravan

Along the golden edge of everything.

DREAM.

I saw a picture of a King

Enter the echoes of a building,

And stovepipes fluted by the wind

Sang praises, high and low, to him!

We struck the hollows of our hands,

And made great zeros with our mouths,

And our brains floated out like clouds,

Dripping a pattering refrain.

And the prayers wandered through our minds,

Like the last bison on the plains,

Seeking a place to lie down, not

Already taken up by bones.

Long boxes wrapped in flags, more empty

Than if they had been filled with nothing,

Floated towards the altar then,

And my head burst like a baloon.

TO MYSELF

After the last idea

Has stepped out of your head

And gone off, leaving its prospects

After the corpses of your thoughts, name-tagged,

Have been cleared away,

And you are a tourist battlefield

After every single one of your historical events

Has been re-enacted to death

Around its bronze monument

After all your breaths, a bright shoal,

Suddenly vanish at the approach

Of the shark of your true self

And the whole zoo of your radio headsongs breaks out

To go scratching and chittering away,

Dying among the deaf

Meet me

In the damp earth

Under unnamed trees leaning

At no time

In no country

DEFROCKED

Went down

Into town

To walk around

On the unconsecrated ground.

 KILLING.

In the garden the airgun

Pricks holes in the bright screen.

Darkness shines through them:

Doors too small for a boy,

But still you can peep through.

Made of sprawled wings

Bloody breasts

And the eyes dis-brightening.

Patch as you can,

The rips are proliferating -

They meet, and it’s gone,

The whole silver thing.

And now all the strata of darkness can be seen,

Its deep destinations.

A fledgling, gaping, with ripped wing,

And now a rabbit lifted up

For its neck to be wrung,

Become constellations.

BENARES

In the grey Ganges,

A tiny white hand.

In a dream God said, “I am not a dream.”

I write this down

Before I too go down into the stream.

HOWEVER YOU GO

However you go it will be failure -

Brain, heart, liver, whatever.

Your angel dive down seven flights of stairs

Will be reprieve for the survivors,

Feet on the ground, bums on their chairs.

OH NIGHT

Oh night who took away your face

And filled you like a pint glass

With the black blood of disgrace?

Each time I wake I see you crawling,

Drunk, in the wrong direction, howling.

Oh night, where do you think you’re going?

To your missed meeting with the morning?

IN THE GARDEN.

I am an orange fog

In the crabapple tree in the garden.

I go out to fetch myself in.

I am refusing

In a stream of languages

And bird talk and moonsong

And genetic codes

And the cipher of viruses,

And the semophore of accidents

And the dialect of Acts of God.

I am hissing and spitting,

I am hot iron in my head

I am begging myself to come in,

Lie down out of the rain,

Leave the new moon alone

And the dreams of my neighbours under their rooves.

I change colour like the fog around traffic lights,

Rage red, deep drowned green,

I change shape, I am giant redwood,

I am snail in can.

I am occult, I am terrifying,

Juggling lightning

In the crabapple tree in the garden.

I am threatening myself,

I say I will bite out my stomach,

Crack my skull from within,

Boil my bones soft with poisons.

I say I will crawl through worms,

Join organisations.

I offer myself sweet prayers

Wrapped in coloured paper,

Rivers, woods, mountains,

Possible changes of Government,

Try songs from various stations -

Can’t find the right band -

I see I am eating the static

Like an infant sand.

I say I have jurisdiction,

The power of the death cell,

Of solitary, of ritual humiliation,

Have ratified no conventions,

And anyway no one will believe me;

Have files of confessions,

Will spill all on Television;

Now I am climbing the tree like flame,

Collapsing again

Into the cell of a thimble.

So I take myself in.

I lift myself to my ear, I hear

The tiniest, tinniest sobbing.

 LINES FROM A PLAY (UNWRITTEN.)

As spiders weave their webs on window-panes,

To catch the flies attracted to the light,

Illumination leads us to destruction.

And anyway we never would have made it

Through the invisible glass.

LACRIMAE. The following poems are the words of refugees in Plymouth, set to the rhythm of John Dowland’s LACRIMAE, and set to music and performed by STILE ANTICO. The first poem alternates Dowland’s words with new words, the following poems use less and less of Dowland.

 LACRIMAE ANTIQUAE NOVAE

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!

Exiled for ever, let me mourn;

Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

There let me live forlorn.

I, at home, wrote to expose,

Being a journalist, the fate,

The torture and the street hangings of those

Who spoke against the state.

Never may my woes be relieved,

Since pity is fled;

And tears and sighs and groans my weary days, my weary days

Of all joy have deprived.

Now I cannot write – if I try to,

Ice makes my brain shrink.

And I will tell you why, because the rope, the endless rope

Still breaks necks, for all my ink.

Hark! You shadows that in darkness dwell,

Learn to contemn light.

Happy, happy they that in hell

Feel not the world’s despite. 

 LACRIMAE GEMENTES

Flow down fire, out of thin air,

exiled forever let me mourn.

Time passed and death was left passing time there.

Here let me live forlorn.

Down vain lights, shine you no more!

Hash tag Aleppo for the dead

that in despair their last fortunes deplore.

We will rebuild, they said.

Never say you will rebuild,

since pity is fled.

You crush and smash the city and its faith, oh and its faith

of all joys have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment

child friends were turned cold.

And fear and grief and pain for my deserts, for my deserts,

and my land pricelessly sold.

Look! All you who say that love is war,

learn to contemn light.

If so, love is evil – therefore

feel not the world’s despite.

LACRIMAE TRISTES

Need, mine grows, more every year,

Punctured, my heart gasps, bleeds black light,

Like a harsh hand had stabbed me with a spear,

Inside me, out of sight.

Hit so hard life has to change,

You might find shadow-thoughts run free,

And in your head a new whisper, ghost-strange,

Says, You are nobody.

You are just a burden, a weight

On loved-ones and friends,

And hope and will and wish all turn to dust and blow away

And the pit is your fate.

Had a Mental Health Care appointment

Right out at Mount Gould.

I feared the bus was late but it did come, it was on time,

But my heart, my hopes were fooled.

Oh! I counted out my pennies well,

But I was one short.

Driver, driver, save me from hell!

I was denied transport.

 LACRIMAE COACTAE

Now, good friends, wisdom for free!

In this old country which we call

the Czech Republic, a man said to me,

there is no need to crawl –

Give me cash, bang on the nail,

and I will get you work, for sure,

in England where no adventure can fail,

and I said, say no more.

Never should good luck be believed!

He left me alone,

and hours that posed as years I waited there, for his return

from just being relieved.

This was Cornwall, in the reception

of some old hotel.

And I was stuck, this man I only knew as Sergio

gone to earth, or else to hell.

Well! Good people did assist me, burned,

back to these homesteads.

Sadly, madly, not a pound earned

in those meat-packing sheds.

 LACHRIMAE AMANTIS

Rum? Not me, I am not drunk,

I am not Cornish, I have trudged

from London with my old empty trunk,

harshly have I been judged.

Ripped, I ripped off my old rags,

now in foul shreds they strew the floor.

I’ve laid down cold under certain thin bags,

and I will say what for.

I am not some Irish disgrace,

from London I ran.

Am sick and poor and old and need a job, this is the face

of a trained, a skilled man.

If you want to grant me confinement,

then this is the truth:

you have to give me clothes or in your cell, your merry hell,

I will sit, bare as a tooth.

French!? No never I am not, be fair,

I am a printer!

Give me, give me something to wear,

sick, sick the whole winter.

LACRIMAE VERAE

From Dharfur, in the Sudan,

Suffered displacement, mind not well.

In a small village, child, teenager, man,

Raised goats to milk and sell.

Dad and mum killed in the war.

Arabic speaker, I could say

Nothing at all when I came to this shore,

Secretly stowed away.

Plymouth is a safe place but sad.

For nine years I wait.

The news the news it calls my friends and I, my friends and I

Enemies of the state.

I was once a lover of music

Then out of the blue

It stopped, it stopped, it stopped, I now can hear

Nothing sweet, and nothing true.

Once, in Plymouth, I got lost. That took

Six hours to set right.

Now I know it, and the streets look

Quite safe in the daylight.