Your loop'd and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?
King Lear Act III, Scene IV, Lines 28-32.
Contents
Road. 4 This Place No Good. 5 Tramp. 6 Autumn. 7 The Street I. 8 Awaiting An Answer. 9 Decisions Of A Life. 10 After Hours 12 First Love. 14 London. 15 The Apology. 17 The street II. 21 She. 22 Absence. 25 Child At The Window. 26 Strange Meeting. 27 Now different. 28 Postcard. 29 Tatters Of Fact. 30 The City. 31 Fumbled Epitaph. 32 Belief. 33 Dialectic. 34 The Flag. 36 Tested. 39 That Dangerous Road. 40 Hovel. 41 Smile. 42 Violence. 43 Sometimes. 44 Horizons. 45 Voyeur. 46 Morning. 47 Park. 48 0povženíhodný. 49 Gardens. 50 What Do I Know Now? 51 Poison. 52 Bad Verse. 53 Quiet 54 Laugh. 55 Failure. 56 Home. 57 Drink. 58 “Never!” 59 Moth. 60 Brno, 1993. 61 ‘Culture.’ 62 Summer. 63 Family. 64 House For Sale. 65 The Way 66
Appendix I: Juvenile or discarded poems. 68
Bars. 70 Rocks. 71 The Lone-Ranger. 72 Stepping On Winter. 73 Perhaps. 74 Field, Wood. 75 Forsaken Ghost. 77 ‘Though The Winds May Stare’. 78 The Saviour Of Painters. 79 The Collection. 80 Roots And Flowers. 81 Offering. 82 Garments. 83 A Month Past. 84 Not A Word. 85 Illusion That Is Soul. 86 She Was A Lady. 87 SmallTownBlues. 88 Shadows Of A Life. 89 R. M. Rilke. 93 Some Cry Of A World. 95 ‘Strange Excess Of Trumpet Glare.’ 96 European Dreams. 97 Moment. 99 Star. 100 An Empty Lair. 101 Sweet It Is To Die 102 Poet. 103 Hitchhikers monologue. 105 Never Again. 109 Brutalities. 110 Bluebell Wood. 111 Shadow Of Identity. 112 Moments. 113 Picture It. 114 The Age Of Darkness. 115 Labyrinth. 116 Darkness. 117 Odd Numbers. 118 O Why Should I Care? 119 Ambitions Of Twenty Nine. 120
Appendix II: New Poems 122
Everything 124 Where Are You? 125 ‘So That Everything Becomes Attenuated’ 126 All We Have 127 Her Smile 129 Being There 130 ‘Nothing’ 132 I will Never Be Gone 133 Suit 134 Trying To Listen 135 Index Of First Lines 164
Road.
“Down that road I went.” He said, pointing somewhere.
I thought you were near, a companion of mine, The sun hot, softening a brittle floor, And I here dawdling, walking as if drunk:
White not exactly white, blue which stretched beyond blue.
This Place No Good.
Restlessly wandering for a place Of silence and poise: is this life? Hot brush on a canvas of desert dust: In the beginning white paper, ashes swirl, mindless.
Here a cafe, time is nine, place Holborn: tea. An occasional diner shuffles an entrance. To quote: “This place no good.”
Tramp.
Forgotten towers Broken in my presence. Or I’m a tramp Exhausted in travelling, Beaten by brooms.
Just as I was saying “Yes, I realise...” She kicked me from the stair, Emptied me like a bucket On the street, Spilling to the cat flaps, Simultaneous purr on each door, Preaching like Jesus “I’ll heal no one!"
Autumn.
Below the cry of a bat Foots shadow on frozen faces:
Wan luxuries, Chilled notes of dawn.
The Street I.
Corners catching A broken moon: That and the tumble Of drunken feet, Splash of voices.
Thirst among the lamps pools, Cry from the slashed mouth, Flutter of lids and the street Like the stamped pieces Of a fractured vision.
Awaiting An Answer.
.1.
Tempered, awkward key Of that pianos sound Disturbs sunlit dust, This corpse's epidermis. And on afternoons, It seemed long and desperate, Searches for that glimpse of woman Heard in sounds of Joan Or other musty romances.
Perhaps merely the hair Reminded of the dust Of those old school days Or a pure line expressed In the profile, catching A last evaporate fantasy; Maybe some dim sympathy, Merely the union of interest In one trajected plain, Slim yet a basis for partnership.
.II.
If I’d found a place It was, as always, momentary, Caught in a second’s glance of sun: Blue, common bell chimed its noiseless scent More irritant to plans, more conducive To the forgotten, forgetful days of school.
But those other ones: rather a feeling Than tissue of incident where one hung At the most appropriate place As for a meal. Separate, I’d tempt A natural force to come swing my way.
Decisions Of A Life.
.I.
She headed to the door Of some burnt out world Lost to the dried flare Of Apocalypse. With words Telling of that special place Her mind halved its voices Where one would call “Where?” To the others reassurance of “One foot more, one age less.”
And held by the endless tide Of works companions Some sense of proportion was lost. At home a dear friend Had uttered the martyred cliché of “Be yourself!” A thousand victims - Were there more?
.II.
Down the battle broken world Where the shadows left around: Corpses, corpses flew To glare their unholy cries.
.III.
And among the luggage of travel A niche was found: Here a shadow shared a bottle With a friend or two, Words scattered among the unintended, Formed their partial puzzles.
.V.
One friendly companion, Whose ever forming grin disturbed, Pronounced, heartily, Some ending term, Some clause of binding.
Sealed by the wax of finality She considered her attention weak: It had stopped at the cover, Started at the completion of smiles, Had broken at the ribboned bow.
Twisted in a distracting knot These decisions had been made.
After Hours
.I.
Those noises in the blank hour Between twelve and one, The ingenuous girl singing a song Perhaps borne from the late closed pub, The car alarm that mischievously sputters Its unfrightening sound off and on, Drinkers warming themselves Over the hollow sound Of their chanted slogans Ready to beat, in the unifying desire Of oblivion, any fellow man; And, in between, quiet and quiet, This slow, singing, melancholy hour.
And, to distract, the thought of you asleep Comes and goes like that crying alarm: Dog barking desires of my frightful cellar.
.II.
If, in this sphere of solitude, Egocentric and sentimental, You could somehow intrude, Could arrive with bags and face turned To that obscure, private life we somehow share What, in the broken paces of private habit, What movement outside it and therefore hope, Could bloom, stare its tired stare, Bare from beaten limb (yes, that fellow) The one, doubled, solitary flower?
.III.
Among the insomniac cars My shattered face stares whitely At the moon. The blown flowers Of our common school die quietly Aged gestures of a beaten face. Conversation, left In my struggling, conceiving days, Bouncing back from that rough, gauged place, Poses the question of our death.
Am I then, in this absurd posture, Abstracted by the flying blue lights Making those correct, forewarned waves?
Death is a sordid thing Done by sordid men Use to a sordid world:
This our modern way We love but cannot have The once promised life?
.IV.
My mind has not the peace that’s promised But a rage, a rage at a limb and joints Incomplete, broken desire, The unforewarned abstraction of our death.
And yet if you were here like the nurse You would find only words of blood And the absurd indignity of this mans fall. Death crying (sentimental) among The blotted whiteness of a ward, Silhouettes of urgent shadow And the dark faces beaten beyond
First Love.
A naked figurine in a green shrub Or adorning the neglected lawn The one comical illusion of one mind - mine. And the great barn hall, stacked with dust, Echoing the straw Upon which we might have lain. And, as your fingers curled the keys, I was there in courtly guise, Attendant, dancing upon your cast tunes, Counterfeit of your desires. Did you see?
London.
.I.
It was a comic sight: His earnest face forward In the fury of impotence, Awkward and shyly expressed, And she agile in her agreements Reassurance with a “Yes, yes, yes.”
Had muddy eloquence enchained her Or the force of that will Desperation implies Perhaps afraid of turning keys Of murderous desire:
Who knows the end of these things?
.II.
In the street and in the rain He let her dwindle like his voice That, lost and inept, Had weakly made a pledge Diverted by the beer She ordered at the bar: Words stopped in a shock stare, He and she were released From the embarrassment of proposal: “You must avoid awkward promise of intent Striving for a perfect civic form Impossible and blind.”
.III.
That was the last time he saw her: The idea afloat for a while Till stress and ulcer and the starving age Each had slashed its way Through to his cognisance. All the point was gone: What had been a mirage Of tempting possibility Was a joke a city smiled at In its busy search for gold.
The Apology.
.I.
The heat folded in an airless layer. So you see my seeming arctic heart How foolish this tearful child and babbling eye Which is drunk and staggers, Broken below your stairs.
We never could lift up our waxen wings Or lifted did not the hateful, burning accident Dissolve then drown its flesh? You and I Adrift among the pillared trees, Charred in our two dreams wary sleep. We float on the lazy but then unstoppable streams.
So, to be left in the Arctic land, Here, where the bell broods hollow. Among the clattering ice Of your eyes dream Never where we so formed Nor oned like our lips seal.
Then darling (you permit me thus?) I have fought the darker things That instant light extinguished, That here with fortune rise. And age but the second tide. Oh, perhaps sensed beneath the skin Youths wild but aesthetic bone.
Then how we might laugh, how dream As the tedium formed stalagmites Count our mortality. Blushes for the flesh And a pointed limestone world.
Yes. But love? Words that patter on the floor: It will not utter, it will not speak, disclose. Our memory will blow like dust in the common wind, Absorbed in a million pores it will forget itself.
.II.
I have fought this long hard day to contain you But you where ever braver than I: Will I always, thus, fall under your hammer Auctioned at the obscurest price?
And how, then, do the ages tell You from your dalliance, Those ages that could never tell Old bones from new dust.
And how then, pray, will you find A companionable skeleton There for me to commune Through it’s blown skin ribs?
.III.
Our talk has a fungal form Or metaphysic and directed down From some ill hell it wiry swells Like creeping ivy through the gloom. Sad and distempered a fiery rage Infects its veins and illuminates A wistful steam that pales the face.
And, how, across this space, That when I look stretches dizzy, As if with ambition coils the Earth, Can we again drown the cold In ignorant passion? Our desires recoil and wrap In frigid, spiritful fire Till love is all but a little, Indistinguishable, sanctuary flame For how long burning?
If the branches here do touch Can the steal there then melt? And, if inflamed, would you despise The uncontrolled, fast beating heart Or, then, mourn ices wavering Or unwished loss of our loved Stone, statuesque, seeming godhead?
.IV.
Caught in the webbed distraction of a gaze Buzzed impossibilities, Utopic dreams. Your breath dragged at a thousand coattails Saying seeming unity. I was aware of slurs Genetic tales drowned in its inaction.
And you said: ”Then this sole point I put there?” “Our land marks, thus devised in the conscience, Display an open world, inessential. Such mortality and such the way its tunes Out echo as the corpse the body.” So thus I.
The street II.
Now and then a curtain flits and a stare At second or third floor windows opposite, Half inquisitive of hotel happenings, Half irritated by mock grandeur, Brute noise this particular Victorian, Part empty site displays. It’s the habit Of some drawn up to face, across the nightly peace Of no mans land, the street, dull combatants On each side: Perhaps poverty separates you From the pub downstairs, a certain angst About the pull of popular haunts, Getting more than your fair share of inarticulate friends. A chance modern law decides Dividing speech and the neighbourhood, Forming false battles, situating Between you and it a televisual screen, Your thought on some Heaven Where face to face we met, Your eyes on some dark glass of a window. You’re seen, the curtains drawn.
It’s something to be remarked upon, Odd how every night it is done Not only by you but repeated Down the street, each side a sentinel, If not throwing sticks in a fire, then Looking out to see who’s watching who, Catching the nightly skirmishes that, With not uncommon frequency, continue To punctuate a phoney war. Now and then That irregular exchange of cigarettes Or your side strikes the light, mine offers the fag. Usually, though, askers are causalities Rejected by us both, mostly ignored, Often sleeping somewhere out of sight, Under a bridge or whatever bomb shelter Accident has devised, they roll in slumber Tight into a plastic bag or the damp, Soggy cardboard once used to wrap our guns, Tanks, communications, surveillance units.
It is to be remarked upon how little I see of you, how quickly you disappear, How suspicious of you and I this neutral, Unneutral status makes us: Together Manufactured means of war – now we test them out.
But I’m bored of killing, it’s become such a Common exercise – I wish you’d sign a truce.
She.
.I.
It is not for this that I waited alone, Listless afore a feeble fire, The sun impatient to have done. All the lighting bad no matter its source, The coarse street shoppers shouting excitement In fears oblivion: I was patient, Readinghorrid Milton, sipping cheap tea, Smoking a haze of desire in troubled Pandamonia. And those ‘after thoughts’ circling a vortex In the blackened hole of incurable want.
.II.
To long and a chair to comfortable Excusing the silence of passive desistance: I claimed ignorance, then corruption, Then the impossible greatness of the task And so destiny: fated thus To the eternal Ovidian whine, Claiming sanctuary in exile. The dark obliged, the nocturnal vigil, The lack of vitamin D: Cold, an empty gullet, the night.
.III.
One Sunday I ventured out: The street was the same shabby bin Of flowering tin and copulent flies. I discovered the polluted sea As I had discovered her before: From the strand and at a distance, Reflecting a sapien backside, Resigned, as passive as a slave, To complexions blare. And so, Seeing the mutual indifference Of man and water, I did not protest, I certainly was not shocked, I retreated back to my door: Another forty days vigil In the barrel of my bed, Expecting Alexander With a preprepared, laconic tongue So to list instructions Confused but tolerable.
.IV.
Next the eye saw around The hostility of the times, The self sacrifice requisite to repair Deep holes in the fabric Torn in an uncaring glance. This was She who held the power to maim, Taking what accident had gathered In a forceful hands fine brutality. Pain of a posterior enervation Left the relics of charred anatomy Scattered as an after burn Whether the death, the caput mortuum Of an alchemical change Or the autograph of a miracle – Who knows?
.v.
Who dances in the Elysian fields Or laughs in the alley of posterity? No songs past memories rest: all, all a ball Of billowing winds wrapping chaos In the cries of vulgar sentience; Or the mechanics of bombardment And the assorted atom contending For upper air in feverish necessities, Scratched epitaphs of void. Death is a place past illusion Where permanents and eternity Are finally confounded As dust across a plain When a plain has gone.
Absence.
.I.
Caught in a translunar spot A dying butterfly in a pool, A thousand old visions lost Mortal in it’s metal lids:
A note pinned upon a door Through which a friend had made Her exit: it was nearly missed, A faltering rope, suspended, clue giving.
.II.
Breaking the fingers Faulty in ice Thoughts push along the floor, Screech up a wet tank.
“I’ll rise next morning, I’ll set the day.”
.III.
Arm on the butter stain That’s now between the cornflakes: “She should have been here to enjoy.”
Child At The Window.
Raining again among the ash pots And hardened flies of a garden.
And the expected face at the window Seemingly wet, staring at the one broken tree Toppled on the late roots of a burning.
Eyes amongst clogged weeds Tossed through the sly greys of morn The reception he demanded:
Blank and called at dawn To witness the first vision Of a broken, scattered soul Ever to stay hidden In destined torment Of childish pains.
Strange Meeting.
Not many years after that we realigned, Catching eye to eye a second sight: With age had come the clearer thought that sees And does not like, the in become the out. Lining the brow with an ignorant script Intervening chance and all those things not done As two. And this chance that’s worst of all.
She seemed to say through move of eye and mouth (Though she asked the usual things one asks) That, where ever once we’d met, those people Then had ceased to plague a time unfortunate And dead: who were these gathered on a chance It did not matter, an inconsequence Set up to sting a faded photograph.
Faded, yes, but not gone: we both had kept The odds and ends of our separate lives And, this one conjunction amongst them all Illusion, like the rest: one recovered, The other not: “The lies that we call soul I see and yet I cannot dispense with soul But have kept that wound festeringly bad.”
And so her to I had not forgot. But, As usual, I blindly circumscribed My image there on cast. And though her face Discouraged all it had not changed for me But grew inside till it at last cracked out. Shocked and battered and in retreat she said: “Well, must be off. Another day, perhaps?”
Now different. I see you different, now, flattened by age Till every feature lines the white of your skin Like contours on a map. Pale, you luminess A past of hopes, loves and lands seasons Have obscured, a moon through thin cloud you show Nothing I can recognise.
A loss and a feeling Of a power that was important, Whose tug still irritates, whose decline Still saddens, I stare over the walls Of Europe, see you in this town or that, Ask meaningless questions, gain meaningless Replies, each letter ending “Love –“, The expected lie.
Postcard.
.I.
That postcard, whipped with the wind off the Hudson, Monosyllabic and exasperated, Words sped to a staccato breath like a wave bye, bye. And I lying still, only by chance, tilted to catch These paper words tumbling through the air. How much attenuated, the spoken thought, Its time crushed, instantaneous arrival Expected and found on an American train Saying, “Distance does not matter.” And I believing the lie.
.II.
Ill eyes abed smoke the sour jaundice Of an English room. And that picture Of New York an agony of ground glass Stabbing each window the fragmented Possibility of an absent wave. The sky the same drab, abstract balm Its saving, enhanced, artificial grace I can stare at here. Only you, turning North or south the Hudsonway, Were missed in person, a shadow cast, Edging an American infinite.
Tatters Of Fact.
All the body’s turnings merely serve To enshroud the certain loss of departure, Once gratitude. A time measured by absence, Forced forgettings, I stare up indeterminate Distance, find only the severance Of memory, a murder performed in a week.
We have resurrections as comedies Their buffoons and twice now we have toured The shifted bargain of lies we told Our two nights. Hills of Utopian flesh Made a nightmare of a need to be Always central to a two oned self. Illusion of integrity our line And bait, echo and echo of enquiry Till, shattered all light, tungsten snapped, we fall away.
Gathered such half real, remembered imagery A perfect pastoral in the dark. Sleep pierces; I wake to the tatters of fact.
The City.
A Sundays gentle cycle through seas of empty streets Shadowing the shadow of Paul. We are expecting death, September’s enervation as yet unyellowed, A stilled silence at the grieving bed.
Or the hidden poor that scuttle out of view, the boxed porter, Trader, shopmen with wives babed, again gestating. The desperation of pubs bellowed by tongues of swollen want, The dissipation of drunks, sickened
By that tumbled sense of all in one oned on Saturday, Now stirred to listless cry of child, distorted hand of care. On the makeshift carpet of grass men and women quiesced By capital poison of fat and food.
An empty hall of towered streets, sepulchre of feet’s Ghostly echo, the solitary essence of crowd, work, money, The staccato knock of question and frigid stone. Lost the prepared confusion of route,
The lanes that rebelled to be straightened, Wrens Imperfect gloom twisted to a bridge and Thames.
Fumbled Epitaph.
That stilled, ineffable frown, A photograph of faded shock Where had leaned impotence On query, cold rejection… Or, frozen in a concrete angst, This fumbled epitaph…
Lines straightened, surveyed The taut geometry of a choice Your absence has defined: A last hour when fear fought The swollen lip, the offered cheek, I faced that end of you and me Snatched in a flinching hand.
What final count you have made, I find burdens in its silence: Pressure of reluctant flesh, That ending, lie of an easy stroll. I booze till cash is gone. The delayed hours of listless grief Stretched on the wrack of damp England, Surveyed the possibilities, You on that Wien restaurant tour, Me, the room, the DT’s.
Belief.
That hug, epitaph to a tube stop, Was too much full of the response I’d wished for. And more? A compassion? Or the lame Departure of the ‘brother’ and the ‘lover’, Our two desires dislocation? Of course, I returned to the party, already over, Deciding to recall a blindness That disappearance broke and not succeeding. Ending in the decline of the unwritten and the postponed.
I have watched the many dawns since Only with those ‘inane’ and fond regrets A youth’s ‘first love’ is supposed to be designed for. We don’t believe or, if we do, What should all these visions amount to But the superintended echo Of passion itself. Like insomnia Or a living out of sorts.
Dialectic.
.I.
You deal only with the hard present, Something I envy: your record’s written By another, no one cares at the time To stop you, drink doesn’t kill you or, If it does, it’s at the end, a full stop To who you are. We die, some of us, Still incomplete and some whose life is nothing But the presence of failure. I write this Like a man who sits in the comfort Of possibilities, the cobalt Of a gun eyeing his talk of sophistries, Entertained passion, solitude, A neat cushion to back me up, stinking fear. I don’t register what’s there.
Unlike you: you have the gun, I think. As an aspect of that script I haven’t grasped You turn this B movie into something more: Like Marriott in ‘Farewell, My Lovely’ I’m the patsy, the limbo of certain guilts Whose weaknesses ditch me in the end; A clobbered beauty, corrupted by such Expectation my body is forced beyond What feeble reach I had into those other lives, A sub plot that’s their harder climb.
.II.
Offended by the wrong words and never Catching your welcome I retell mostly A monologue of what could be done Given conditions, appropriate sun, Five mile wind, compliant interlocutors, The usual list, verbatim anaesthesia Of the irrepressible ego. Can’t be done.
Everyone expects, seconds before The end, some kind of recognition: Just the usual mechanics of the gun. Except: I knew you before, before The days of ‘hard drinking’ and searching out Other people’s lives: a time when you were Merely possible, not always there, Treated as a friend of what was future.
Tested.
I’ve tested it then, The hollow sound of a world Like the end of a journey Whose expectations proved true.
Or, discovered, the enormous futility Of the scheme, workers slouch In a grubby tavern, Take their pay.
It is the night, ponderous echo Swelled in a worlds dizzy stream, Large and warm, Makes Jonah’s burning cry
Or charred the soul A twitch of wings Pinned by your image A great black butterfly.
That Dangerous Road.
We wandered on, Not willing to say goodbye: Our bodies turned to that road You’d be lost upon. We sat on the scruffy edge Not knowing, unwilling to say “When is the last parting?”
The grass like an old mans hair And our eyes upon our feet As our words, torn vagaries, Fluttered at the boundless sky. Caught in the echo of your smile Czech sunshine Dreaming of chances graciousness.
And then a slow, then a weighted Dwindling under cloud, Walking the untested horizon, That dangerous road.
Hovel.
Not a night to be seen: The curtain, what’s left, The dwindling, seeming circuit Of autumn’s coming cold:
As this page may testify Bought at a lower rate Peace from oblivion of love.
That invented horizon Aimed to or turned from The test I failed at.
Scraped sense in the ditch of words Till the line, a borrowed light, Illumines what memory Imagined as love.
And yet the illusion real, You the ghosted thought, Muse of this hovel.
Smile.
All that time a denial Of your impossible smile Declaring an only child's Own private love Indifferent to the beloved.
Most when least I knew Affections covered eyes Affirmed an open fever: That hard, 'pathetic' effort To create your image After you and know Our unwarranted words More real than truth.
Violence.
Cascading from the dark A streets brutal light Hoofed as the devil Pounding on you My murderous need To make it known I can believe. Untrue.
The encumbrance of the second Bulged from the blank Dictates my empty page: It is you against whom I rage.
Sometimes.
Sometimes In a pub’s borrowed chair You sit there and smile: Amused ghost of memory, A lover’s tempting fantasy Bidding that madness come.
It is pain that keeps me sane.
Horizons.
Blind, my love, to futures chance, That path to absence A ragged way has forced me home. And back? No. We have seen A brandished curve, the scythe Exit has turned us from, Spin the spiralled sky a dream: Who knows the horizons line? The limits of its distance?
Voyeur.
Lilting among the wilting trees The figure in the garden is me: Expectant before every window The cinema of romance, voyeur Of improbable happiness, Safely distant from commitment.
Morning.
Farcical rumour of not being What I am intruded upon, Dawn delivers the accidents Of nature insistent upon That note experience cannot alter, Indifferent to place or time, Of the first, almost painful Darkening of age.
Park. Parks the grace Of a jaded place, Rough wood seats And winter mud The kind of good Londonunderstood.
0povženíhodný.
I remember your bedroom window Staring at the snow and I wondering, With pen in hand, at this new distance, A foreign land and you too perversely so. When you appeared it was always only That tumbling extension of a clumsiness I had rediscovered, the broken door, A two foot jump, you collapsed upon me. Pregnant with a new thing I was merely ‘Opovrženíhodný’, motiveless And subterranean, like, you might have said, Some crushed crab barely crawling for escape. I was just brooding, I saw no reason To move, perhaps, I was slightly shocked.
Gardens. ‘In unsern Jugengarten führt strasse mehr.’ H. Hesse
What amused in the gardens we treasured But never had was the pretence that somehow We could abandon with our clothes our fear, On certain rare, indeed impossible nights, Those saturnalias, vague, as imprecise As antediluvian grass, caress The warm, illusory dream of our being Ourselves alone. Among asphalt, Embedded stone, between the slabs of urban business Our toy soldiers fought, finally lost, Slain on the battlefield of the interstice.
We still live in those cracks the best of council Maintenance cannot fill, disillusioned As to security, the uniqueness Of its fauna, even that ossified And precious ego we watered and wept over, Kept secret, was proud of, itself But one common blade of grass: picked, plucked, gathered In our cities, pressed to that green and bitter dew Of being human somewhere in the subsoil We pretend to maintain a true home: Place of temporary, shabby rooms, Of ‘secret gardens of ‘childish fantasy’.
What Do I Know Now?
What do I know now But the winds breath Passing to say: We are frozen?
Even in winter There is spring Thin and unwarm, The long road, untried.
Of land and sea Memory.
Poison.
.I.
“I am not dangerous.” Their new form Of politeness. Outside the white, flat world Of roads. And, of course, they are not: A picture In the paper come vividly alive With all its crude, blunt art, the reds, the blues, Folded into the bed a wedge of desire To be ecstatic standing out in the land.
.II.
“I am not...” a partial conclusion to their ecstasy: The distance of these walls a private cosmos Urgent, diffident, the cataract and the vein Only half oblivion wholly pain lost in oblivion. If to work then to home the expanding enclosure Finally unravelled a ‘failed life’ which, at this turn, Frightens a room. What is left but persists, What is to come is nothing in a small poison.
Bad Verse.
Half a line of bad verse Are the days of this house Or if you try to hear Your own or an others voice Listen carefully for the cars In the nights silence
Or in the roads Whose feet may search Stone and drain For absence as certainty Forgotten with last year’s ghost.
Quiet
Everything is so quiet and peaceful now: How can there be an end, a beginning? Yet slowly the darkness comes, voices fill The streets and houses, the last light Gathered by the children in their play Hesitant among the cars filled with dad, mum, The returning student wandering the last Reluctance of once more returning home: What was my hour has become a small town's Suburbia where family and friends retrieve All their efforts purpose – the work, the sorry Climb of forced and futile destruction Lost in the general folly of Being.
Laugh.
Like the wanderer and his shadow, As tall as failure, you sit In this mythical age of functional living, Equality and race, god and his double, Exhaling words a match may allow Between cigarette and pen, Writing ‘arse’ for a cheap bit of realism.
Lend me, you say, a message to hand over: So much is about yet you cannot see it – The heavy statues worked for others glory Will always fall, noticed only When the crowd is permitted a sacrifice, Exhibited, appendages missing.
If all the flowers, herbs, trees of alien nature Had that smile as their misjudgement Could you still laugh at the folly of it all? The rabbits, the foxes, the salivating wolves Slapped as one slaps stone with the metal brightness Of a crowds disillusionment, spat upon, Could you be then still quite so curt With your honesty and as if the failure Was merely ordinary like a broken home?
Failure.
On the moment, they say, here and now: All your expectations flattened to a bed Not much smaller than the room, drifting In and out of windows, bounced between The rattle of cans, the dance of feet, The bodiless discourse of being. ‘To be is to be present’: where once Two might have seen there is the mirror, Where once light the sound of this silly hour Reflected stale betwixt failure and failure.
Home.
What maltreatment made you beseech A stranger of his word, The second hand poets song Destined, surely, this silent home?
Two extraordinary eyes, beautiful and young, Always demanding a tale impossible to tell. Yet for one smile even the stones had words. I gave you room and board, I talked and talked And talked till finally you loved me: For one moment I knew a chance joy Like a starved man fed poison. In the morning you were gone.
Or was it I who fled the miles Just for a coward’s home?
Drink.
For three days I drank, certain of failure, That you wouldn’t return... Without a penny, Rich on the envy of others, We boiled grass and smoked our emptiness... Jumping up and down, shouting “You love me! You love me!” I knew I was without belief... Behind you with a bottle that wouldn’t open I spat my pain into your silence Expecting, at least, the reaction of hate: I gained that, broken on the stair My test of unalterable love.
“Never!”
A gloomy summer’s rain so alien To you with your hot, dry and lovely days, Your unchangeable seasons, those certain Winters of snow and a cold so cold it froze The spirit. And I suppose that steady swing Has pulled you more beautiful still than when, Your eyes so blue, I knew heaven Indifferent: A failure before ‘Possession’, knowing the end, having once Gained from you the grace of that impossible Answer of a smile, I fell, lost, at ‘home’. The steady roll, stronger than generation, A country bred you, twisted merely release. The sharp urge of a road: “You’ve left me.” How curt, stupid my answer: “Never!”
Moth.
Do I have a relationship, Then, with that dead moth? Caught in a summers evening, Dead in the morning Of the first, the second day?
What was allowed a nocturnal flight Burnt by my impotent vision, Defeated between the soured sugar, The faded cotton, The fantasy and boredom of gold?
Command and it will obey Whacked by a newspaper, Bursting upon the ceiling The little generated warmth Of his fossilised brethren:
Civilised brothers that sublimate energies A continuous constancy of flame, A standard of intemperance Worked towards but never achieved.
The hours, with weight and measure, Of day and night, Finally turned their chaotic end Broken in age.
Whose wings are, perhaps, Prettier than I imagined, A bulbous, pathetic fluff, A clumsy angel Scattered backwards, The untragic, dying fly.
Brno, 1993.
Up through dusty sunlight, hobbling over dried mud, The discovery of a thousand allotments: Age had finally learnt its Voltairian lesson: “Make carrots, cabbages and flowers.” Between tyranny and disaster, favour and exile, The dubious loyalty of land.
Except this was limbo: the Russian slap still stung, The tin slash of the west still vicarious, Still unlimited: easy to forget, amidst vodka, Dumplings, countless songs, the ugly death This world, too, must suffer: cranes, cement, foundations, The path ending arbitrarily in a fence:
Mere intoxication, in love and in love with people Who seemed to continue a conversation Only imagined, gleaned from books and fantasy, Animated over alcohol, guitars, Through alien tongues, intelligence, community, A smile: all of us mad, drunk with illusion,
A mess of cracked stone: They call them flags, flagstone Unnoticed as the awkward obtrusion Of obstacles, the unsteady chair At the barbecue, a flat rough for a butt, Something one just wouldn’t lie on, Sun or no sun: shoddy and inexact, Badly paid labour, ‘spoilt’ by nature, This rough, obvious ‘culture’.
Summer.
Summer is where you are.- Is where we are? And England’s ragged weather, Its people blown from street to room, Fix of the vicarious. When can we be together?
Just a photo, a momentary respite, You turn from solitude your beautiful head: Vistas of your own world beckon
Yet your thoughts are mine Bridging a thousand miles The agony of love, surety Of being and not being here.
Family.
Always again the wish to begin Brilliantly new, once more to look clear And innocent on what’s not clear and innocent, To imagine these dirty rivulets Spilling down the street as children imagine: Surprising, delightful, infinite. But the street is only a playground for louts, The frustrated conduit of labour, The town a particular of a history Intensely, chronically self destructive. We cannot unlearn contempt for the world, The fragmentary spirit, the family That fell apart even before it began.
House For Sale.
Friends that were not and have already gone Leave that glamorous emptiness, the void Of an age that has forgotten the words Of a conversation or why it meant Anything: each day behind the curtain Must be found the appalling but still Discreetly vague urge of the animal, Panic before the inarticulate weight Of this negative about to be exposed. Upon the stairs phantom ascending and Descending whispers left merely to Remind one, if not of departure, Then of a past where opening a door Was significant, where each room was A place, where being in a house made sense.
The Way ‘The way out is vior the door: how come nobody knows this?’ Confucius, The Analects
Neither to go far nor to come home Is the point, they say: To stay that distant fixation found In their farmers fields There to scare the crows. Others, Across the years, from family To friends, may beg benediction, Proper words to confirm What their presumptions will always presume, But you that timid daring Which says there is a way but I cannot find it As the parameter of a town Beyond which the road leads past the graveyard But never past fear.
Appendix I: Juvenile or discarded poems.
Bars.
One moves through the corridors, through the soul Of this hot and humid city With only the antenna of desire Which, with misted glass for eyes, Is ones only sense, one instead of five. It is the nose, it directs us like the blind And deaf to the women and drugs Of this great, smoky and odorous bar.
And then one leaves, exasperated, Desperate and athirst, leaving the saloon door Open slightly, a shaft of sun and its odour Stabbing the gloom within, ripping the smoke, Leaving that bright light, the space and memory Always left in place of the departed.
One moves along, perhaps, with the independence And relief of the traveller and in between One bar and another one feels freedom, A man again, in between one hell and another.
But, alas, one falls back and down Into another night, the loud music Which thumps from within and without Throws you up and throws you down Devastated upon a ladies lap. One falls into the reverie and fever Of past passion, past women and past hopes.
Afterwards one walks past the meanness Of those mice in ‘Tudor’ houses With their dumb and virginal Daughters, virginal as idiots.
And one never loved their daughters so much.
Rocks.
Riding along the dark rivers Of my soul we came to a sea Of gold and green, of yellow and Rugged brown. We sat, dreamily, In the ship of my eye, which, With beauty, reflected in your pools. We sat and I told you, clumsily, With the shyness of youth, of The darkness, the sweet succulents Of your limbs that opened to me As dates. And you asked, knowing My crimson heart, what I saw In the future? What wholesome visions My dark eyes had rested on?
“My love, you are perfect As the sweet succulents Of dark Mediterranean fruit.”
Thus I dived into you And crashed on the grey rocks Of your stunned indifference.
The Lone-Ranger.
Leaving pressured prints, They shall be friendly to no one: Rolled in the mud of dark conscience He has travelled far, he has sung Sweetly, importunately sometimes, Others with the eye, hot and dark, Handling love lost debauch: He shall be friendly to no one.
Limbs taken, torn by crimson hands Daintily varnished, The Lone-Ranger is he: Having followed his wandering path Through the red sea, having seen The colours of the bright eye That is ceaseless in its path And having seen the bright night, One of his deaths in a sense: The Lone-Ranger is he.
I have searched myself and have seen him coming Across the biting, unnourished desert With his steal weapon over consciously handled And his eye that knows too much Having pierced me in sharp sparks: I have seen him coming But he was faster than I, Laid me down and went off, hollowly, Across the biting, unnourished desert.
Stepping On Winter.
I have not stepped Into that river twice Nor once, my love. I have But drunk of its liquid, here, Sunken in its darkened bed, Sand lining my mouth, Lovers creaking, The picture of you Rippling within The waves of autumn Stepping on winter.
I have not stepped twice Nor have I seen the gods. My love, things ripple But they do not reflect, Diamond cut, the crystal Shape of your bones. I have lived and I have waited to live Stepping on winter.
Perhaps.
Perhaps they shall say His face is unredeemable From the past of many, A shade but for the knotted Bent of hoary vision.
To wither in the raging storm Was a perverse delight of his: Out there upon that hill he stood A monument of obstinacy Till the craggy tree had rooted In an ageless rock.
And Perhaps they shall say For counting over much On a calm world He died in this chaos.
Field, Wood.
.I.
On that day we went down to the field By the woods and I lingered in the heat, With face to the grass, examining The exertions of creatures in their wavering Minuteness: I called them the spirits Of a more delicate vision, the lower order That had reached from the heights, with A peculiar nakedness, with delicate movements And others encrusted in corruption: I had called them Vermin of Heaven, How goodness might be made visible Only here and how corruption began: The moths become bats, wavering flight That brushed mud on the clearer elements. And I thought to extract the moth from its skin.
.II.
Then we were in the woods: Shade like hands that bathe, Caress the tension and heat, Moisten the roots, clean us, As if we were entering some sanctuary Where purity is a compulsory fervour Of bodily disposition.
Were your hands in that, too, Bathing in some delicate pond Caught in the upturn of a leaf As if begging for righteousness? Yet there were myriad hands Like shredded winds, Orphaned hands that supplicate And shades like a thousand souls.
Love grew there, too, Her hair stretched among the roots, Some rare orchid flower, To be picked but once, That folded in the matted layer Of those thousand souls, Laughed in silent breeze That turned and was gone.
Forsaken Ghost.
In the bruised sleep of a few unpunctured hours Pearled in the dark a body of pained experience, Voice of the wind's synthesis that sings: “I was she fainter than the dream where now I lie. You coveted a dull, pale wicker frame from the corpse’s breath Of the only unretarded woman known to you. You built her beauty so she sang not what she knew Till, tossed on the shell broken shore, The wind blew my disturbances.
I, unmemoried, haunt the stilled conscience Of your despair. Band: please remember.”
‘Though The Winds May Stare’.
Though the winds may stare A thought or two, may blow Some forgotten scene of some forgotten show And some forgotten book its leaves may flare In an old embered flame, We’ll not mind, we’ll not know, We’ll not see our two minds so Distracted by a distant name And word upon our whitened lips: You’ll not fret my mind to see Of what I thought might be, We’ll count the years upon our finger tips And blunt our affected passion with a sigh, Then look back and hope we die.
The Saviour Of Painters.
“Who rules, who serves? See in my new land The blankness of paper, The white, almost Halcyon expression Of the clean, Empty canvass.”
The jewelled profusion Of sense and nonsense Whose hundred centuries have Their each and own argument Cakes his walls and floor Like ditched cargo. An infinite sea He tells me Of his plans for more.
“I reward rich, Deserved talent It is true But I assure you My fiscal policy Is tighter Than your belt. And my name: The Saviour of Painters.”
The Collection.
Ditched or broken the tourist ruins Swell their mad excuse of coated veins – Their refrain age and the dampness of the season – And the service of a rats evisceration, Sound of the extolling, maddened, Loosened voice and echo.
These bones will pass – prodded and poked, Dressed, set with imaginary challenge And brought to perform ‘The Tragical Tale’ Of Messrs the Actor – listed among The painted lipstick stains of public subservience.
Loose orchid petals are lost In the richness of this new collection – Toned down the broken, lacquered stems, the barbed posts, The carved land – sinking slowly, unconsciously, The canvass of age wails with each bubbles burst.
Roots And Flowers.
Let not the burst thunder Or the licked light caress Of the breast of the wave Or slouching sea Laid low in humble cry Disturb you, prove you Blind, glitter upon the ice You made
Slow fate Wind you in ascending stairs To the stars; and the bell tower Runed with light sings, rings Time, moments of sonic Blessing – they bless you And your eyes ecstatic distend This world of ice, A world of blackened depths: Roots and flowers.
Offering.
In each place I’d broken circles, the figured Spotlight world of eyes, a question to each Children’s mouth emanating complications Of webs torn and tattered.
Wordsworth would commend me – Finding muttered sounds, where it echoed right, Where the soft tunnelled lair would provide Its protection, these I avoided: where mouths Would swallow my fear, cushion the bristle Of back, take on tongue temerity’s And, also, courage.
Digging holes I’d provide the pupil, Paint the appropriate colour, mixing Its iris hue with the mud and experiment Of this ‘wee’ flesh.
Thus clothed the buried head of some bird Or rotten rat did as an offering.
Garments.
List the bright heat as one change of garment Discarded like a skin or gossamer eye Quickly blown from view, Finding in the mind A momentary flicker of fire.
And each age has blown brief its ringed vacuity, So glad in found oblivion – whispered In dark and but marked with the moons lines Present and gone.
List each sun as the spiders Sticky strivings to web a world: what but layers? Lace or silk stacked in a draw open for view.
A Month Past.
Winter sky but lately dawned White and grey – And on the horizon Other colours.
A month past And with it something else.
Little succulent meats Rest on the tongue – Nauseated I spit them out.
This chameleon age Seems so solid, Grand dowager And eternal aether.
A skylark blown Through nothingness On a cold wind – Gravity has eluded, Broken rubble Burning the stars.
Not A Word.
Not a word - silence.
So, did I go beyond that point Where the minds cherubim blaze Guarding its hidden, unseen world? And was I in her bed And clawing at her hair, Sinking these cruel teeth in her brain? And does she hear me now Burning at her ear? Or is love but a dirty joke Or just dumb, primitive and absurd?
Not a word: silence hides our pain As the killing cold chatters again To say - not a word.
Illusion That Is Soul.
Trek round the mirror pole To stare at the vain, unwanted face That stares back its lie of desire: So we have discovered our over stretched romance One walk in the figurative hell of circular devising.
So that we end where we began: A neutral place, a neutral face Staring with neutral eyes: A kind of knowledge whose ignorance Is our higher desire and our higher reward.
But still the mirrored brilliance deceives To drink the false drink in this our false lagoon. Mirage on the rebound, separation, Illusion of godhead from hearts desert rising, The illusion that is soul.
She Was A Lady. She was a lady of unfolding passion Drowned in dark, unfolding passion; Whether battered by bottles or men She could not be fitted into maturity.
Somehow those brutal arms had barred her From pains of youth, overriding reach Of missed paternal sway: Sometimes she’d laugh The suckled bottled held Whilst dancing on her grave.
She was a desperate sort Yearning for some new time And we were never quite sure Whether death or drink would take her mind…
(Now with such pain and gloom it is A physiological extension of the soul Fluttering in a hollow heaven.)
Small Town Blues.
The trees so sharp they promise nothing But the black monument of delicate Torture, so still and stubborn in the strained Whisper of wind that their frosted twigs, Minute in detail, feel foolishly proud. To die as you are, a portrait stilled In corporeal corruption, to stand and have The hot air escape with the common words Of conversation, a last opening Of mouth and bland mind, must be painful, as sleep Sometimes is painful, with that dissatisfaction Of being present in your absence, Anonymous in the lie of the undone And not being as a small towns disunity And dispersal. Such is death: To see your words grow dark and your eyes go blind, Racked to emptiness, turning, like an hour glass, In the cold, bland April of birth, The uncollected piled a new collection, Hollow and grave.
Shadows Of A Life.
.I.
And down those corridors He’d half croon his inclinations Among chatter of abstraction Or when a passion raised him To exclamations of ‘cosmic praise’.
Till around concrete insignificances We had drawn ourselves Full circle to renew, as if in echo Of the larger seasons, our crawl.
Happy those times Brought to exhaustion.
.II.
I would find him on the stair: Confined within the confusion Of intentions he’d grow His forests of words.
He’d laugh, perhaps intending to cry. The ending nous of disinclination Later to be found stopped altogether
. III.
On that last day he had come To a point he had long prepared. Meticulous in his assault, Gratifying in his politeness.
His passion was obtuse, That is not acute. His decline not at all Unexpected
Or so he said in the chance Of a later glance.
. IV.
In invitation to his later lair I noticed the quiver of memory Hidden on the lips.
“But, ah, mere memory,” I later expressed “Where does it get you?”
“In the glare of the bulb The written word.”
It’s true, I was surprised, He had cared.
.V.
Scared, as if at the chance Of a dear photos loss, Memory of gathered acquaintance, I insisted on the written word.
The thinned line of the past Made us dear. From there The blossom of balloons
Or let us say The new creation Of the new world.
.VI.
Ingenious, gratifyingly proud to know, His obscurity pleased me.
As if saying something Not quite commandable He would display Volubility
Expanded to the creation Of an old inclination.
.VII.
And yet I was somehow detained.
Only later I found his grave.
On it was written Someone’s stupidity:
“Hard to remember the past Now frozen at last.”
R. M. Rilke. ‘Exposed on the hearts mountains.’
.I.
A soul flavoured in the neutral tones That builds a granite world He climbs the rocks With shocking ease
One would have thought That coldness would bemuse To finally benumb – not That a strange affinity Would be built across Those stones jagged ways.
But his testing call echoed Their metaphoric sound Reminding of the history Of those carved teeth of fire That cut this world:
And now but merely roots. Not a divine thing That would gently shake Ones hand. And yet he Maintained so, had strength to.
‘Exposed’? If so, alone, Building destiny.
.II.
The world is gentle to the strong – Of them even the Gods have fear Rivalled in their imprinting power That pounds an age.
Through them all origin’s disappeared, Is consumed in a single fire That must burn before it builds.
.III.
So this sounding form That’s now form entire Speaks in stony words Elemental love:
Only it is gravity Or quantum force Bringing worlds To bind or explode.
Or silence at the centre Of a whirling world, Soundless humming Of the stilled frozen bee.
Some Cry Of A World.
.I.
Among the whispered wind and wet Of an old shore town Some cry of a world?
How from this ungathered spot Could detection tell?
Where voice of death In a second room Forms but futility? Where laughter’s bell In a second room Rings lost in me?
.II.
Report of a war and I think “We’ve had many of those.” Hitting the cold stone I nod Lost in perpetual prose.
.III.
Last night – And a moon beams, Leering an epitaph.
I…I was Precluded too soon.
My constitutional noon.
‘Strange Excess Of Trumpet Glare.’
Strange excess of trumpet glare Wound down the broken rocks: Upon the spiralled stair The bones of a coffin box.
European Dreams.
.I.
Patterned shadows on the floor Project the hundred complications Of face and form, the stretching mire Of bottles and discarded scraps Scratching pavement and road.
And in this mud and rain You cut an edge, draught a line, Form a lip, perform the wiry, blond Distinctions of your regular stroll.
Thrown with the wind of the unpredictable British weather I find myself, for a moment, Stretched before your feet, lying tossed In one of the many anxious ridden gestures That I seem incapable of preventing.
And this one time kiss drives us by force Once more to part where, half grateful, Half unexpectant, we are, each in distinctive pose, Lost in our two of the Earth’s corners.
“So,” we harmonise, “Let these partings be blessed.” Tortuous, painful, caring, That is how others see us Were as this indifference is, To put it mildly, surprising….
.II.
A mixture of mud and leaves paints again The years transpired canvass – this for me: For you a European port of call And another half empty theatre – Wishes, phobias, fantasies – Once more a sleepless dream.
Moment.
Times revolution rings round, for a second Scans this ‘I’ and for one fatal stare sees The deformity of line, the bulbous, Irrepressible pseudopodias Of being, the confession of confused want, The lie of desire, unable to keep In form or follow the plan set ages hence In a bogus Eden.
Face to face, time to time, The restricted circle of bullied light Catches accidental acts where you and I Seemingly move as one. Ah, but a special affect: “The centre does not hold.” Time cracks in fractured forms, The chaos of discarded tries.
Star.
How did that star break Against this O to dark a dust Lit for a moment Of accidental end, Swallowed among A million furnaces?
We’d watched last flicker Of evening sun and Were surprised by a dawn Blazing the south side In evaporate glare,
Lost among the irate Fools of panic Running to the west, To the east, to any Sure concept of sense.
An Empty Lair.
Now the days all ended and the years past When I could tempt your sexual self away From future other dreams of another day. And, in the end, the Platonic self divides, at last. To confess, to my surprise, I feel relief And strain and growth: then I was beneath Whatever I can be now. Simple, this seems, The fateful, innocuous diversion of dreams And how upon that broken day I set my mind to my mind delay. Doom is new and an altered child And, though the throng, around me wild, Stares bleak and blank, I have my air, The cushioning blanket of an empty lair.
Sweet It Is To Die
Sweet it is to die without cause or reason, Having no undone for a conspicuous tail: No defeat in memory, no love in mourning – Sweet and also just: For these heavy deaths And unaccomplished frauds, the farcical offbeat Of the drum, the untuned pipes, the illusory, Marauding gang of hearse musicians, these are Only the pompous accidents the Master Actor finds Useful in his conjuration’s ‘for the unruly crowd. Let Death come when he has talked with friends Who wait to bewail us first: It is charity To deprive us of those who will be deprived the most. Or better one turns ones head, modest in silence, Patient of the scythes decapitations.
I served Proserpina with a distant awe Nor did I batter the tympanum of Dis With deprecations: I expect the shade Of fruit and wine, insubstantial but better taste, On that table where I have reserved my place.
Poet.
.I.
That poet could not know A time like this And yet he cursed his day Better than this.
Is time then a falling slide, Poet and knave bruised On a dumb rocky mountain side? Then what we have we lose.
Still, what has been has been: That from beauties flesh was born Some marvellous, flesh tearing form Still finds its somewhere reflective dream.
.II. Or do we but count the corn, Watch the rats’ numberless dawn, Hear the room tying rain, See ragged faces painless pain?
We always do that, The prisoner and the rat Eyeing their despair; Or in the day Where in we might say “Here is the wrong, stupid lair.”
It’s hard to keep eye fixed ahead When there’s but counting of the dead.
.III.
“Enough fools for us all!” Democrats say: Thus they have built their day – To confound the strong and the good Idiots for a guard they’ve stood Sweating, breaking out loud.
What poet can pierce that crowd? .IV.
Over the hill more might be seen: You watch the Tower beaten in dream You who see the living die.
Over that crowd beaten eye There’s but the canopy of lead: Let the dead bury the dead.
Hitchhikers monologue.
.I.
A thin, weeping mist squeaks along the grass Shrouding the bulbous shadows of mice Again busy building a new home: The aching legs, tired of their twenty four hour fit, Throw the gauntlet of choice to the brain, The tired arm annoyingly nags to be parted: On the aged bench, wet and dulled in the rain, When the years have marked me, Will pleasure replace this pain? Could I say: “Here I have lived.”? Scuttling like some odd, savage animal Through the unbrushed matting of motorway grass I am already sick of my naturalness, Of my cowardice, my stopping Before the butt beating guards And my inability to come down to mortality. Somehow the sweated fever of my youth May seem peculiar to one, a shameful perversion, An indescribable immorality, that which is not done. Always that which is not done, always the odd sharpness.
.II.
Crying like a baby among friends At the dullness of their desire I’m the odd one here I feel. So much hope, so much happiness In its failure: why this contentment? Contentment breeds inaction, Contemplation, love of the lines, An artist eye and moribund stare.
Sometimes, a rabbit among stalks, I wallow in the dough Of unfulfillable desire: I admit it and this is a sloth.
But one face of benediction was turned And then I was happy? Involved in oblivious activity, Is this without blindness?
.III.
Her benediction was not Always so bright: Not the polish of the mirror Or intenseness of light But a sense in which I was too inattentive to stare.
Crawling from the womb I was shut in its sack, Carried, it seems, through A few hundred years, I was always tempted To crawl right back Dulled in parties with Talk and whisky and beers. I was so wrong From the beginning It makes me laugh.
But triumph in defeat I am no Christ.
.IV.
Everything seems beautiful: Should I not be more radical? Should I not spit and curse Like a saint? Call for the end Of everything that’s not vital Or not coloured most vividly?
Things are ugly, too, But what is ugly will Dully reflect the whole, Is, somehow, a more tempered beauty.
Even in the blackest pit I carried my mirror, Dashing with light The groaning of its roots.
.V.
Sick of my love of the game I smack him round the chops…
Too much akin, too much revealed, Perhaps my ambition Will take the Devils part:
Who will be my parricide? Who wants to peer in the bone?
Let’s dig at the pate Of this smug fellow’s devil To find if the old sixes are there.
Funny the Devil without draws Being dragged down the stare.
Never Again.
That night we were cold, Flame licking frosted endeavours, Borrowing the warmth of strangers, Songs whipped among frailty Almost with rhythm of heart, A few frozen sparrows twittered, You smiled politeness, I said: “How do you do? How do you do?”
Then: Sudden catch of a fevered glance, I panicked, spilled the tea, Scolded the mutterings, Eched an awkward pleasure. Late, I took my leave, Came never again.
Brutalities.
How many times have we heard her say “Bring him back! Bring him back!” Or the constant calling of a name (Spring bird without mate); And we, Helpless before the incomprehensible tragedy, Singing (duet) “What’s wrong?” and “What can we do?” The ache and impotence of rage Thus then became the first limit of age.
And now, When we have spiralled To the wider (maybe limiting) view It comes to seem that that ‘great tragedy’ Was the farce that broke the cow.
And all that ache and strain and pain (Burning in a bottle) Was it (in our wide, wild children’s eyes) The last ditched nobility of a twitched body Singing: “John, John, John, John!”
And now: “Mother, mother, mother, mother!”
Bluebell Wood.
Rambling in the mirror of leaves Perhaps in those scarce caught visions Shallow fire. As if bone, tissue, Tendon, ripped on the bloody thorns, Their flesh outspread. Young, dallied, Uncaring of the blood, the injury, I left to that wood (who knows?) The better part, the strength of leg, Limb, thigh arm, eye, Things hours here demand. Later, the captured, midday nocturne, The dust, the half tuned piano Where ‘I saw my Ladies play’
Simple tunes broken on the black keys, Dripping from the snapped, impudent wire And who cared and who knew? Ripped curtain, collapsing seats, The unbeaten, bug ridden sofas And our ‘protestations’ and our ‘strikes’ And I through my youth’s dark wood.
Lying in the trampled corn, alone, My ecstasy of solitude, My youth and meditation, My battle with all creatures Turning on that round: And, beyond, on the thorns, In the mirror of leaves, In the carcass of an allusive dream, That first, bluebell eaten wood.
Shadow Of Identity.
Sentence of mine With its long vowel, Soft, affluent memory Whose candle contrast Of bright, irrepressive years Sings a weakened song Of identity, fatal lure:
A mind's green rock fading grandly; And, here, irreversible masts of straw, The spewed tatter tossed on endless, Flat foot, trampled beaches:
Young, who laughed merely, Was silent, dumb: The extra, added shadow Of a summer or autumn day Lingering like memory.
Moments. Set in the lingered Pivot of preparation Each moment passes With a senseless silence, Detained, expectant, ‘Whose vast countenance is’ A ragged roof of stars.
This tramp life deserts me: Now and then glazed moments, Unmeasured penetration, forgetful Of certain disgusts, tastes: Habit formed flickers Washed on impatient pools Of misplaced want.
Deserted, sense of self Is packed in the film flamed Bubble of eye, is lost In the washed refuge of sea:
Space of vortexed cartons And cans, place of whispers, Centre of blown, discarded lies: At moments indifferent, absorbed.
Picture It.
The farce of a young man playing the prodigal son – It’s a tired act to follow: a self proclaimed wordsmith Weaving a web to catch a fly: it took six years “But she just walked right through.” “It was thin air to her.” Now, the last act, he works to a proper sentiment And dies. Tragedy. Move on to the next case.
A girl, tenuous grab of life, she tries hard not to slip, Forces ignore her – it is to hard to find foot space. What could she do without all those clothes? Keep the characters strict and few and so pass through life Singing the two songs. Edge between with lyrical politeness, Last , ‘but a presence in the air’, stubbornly, Till on her ninetieth birthday she falls into her soup. And the words so well prepared. Tragedy two.
Let the final picture form: world where everywhere There are mirrors, each face but a looking glass And each endearingly peering in the others face. Picture the ‘empathy’, the moments of ‘shared passion’, The ‘care of the self’, see the ‘theatrical’ parents, Feel the ‘ambition'. Each one circling A dedicate task stuck in the centre Of their ‘selves’ and called ‘soul’: picture it.
The Age Of Darkness.
The chatter on the wind is the irritation Of the street: drunks or illiterate poor Claiming back bitter heritage of dark Or barbaric recompense of pillage. The habited Romans on their destined sword Of solitary circlings; burnt books, Artefacts in whose flames is seen the death Of some peculiar, personal march To some incongruous goal. Not sacrificed But burnt with the words and flaming tongue Taking all in a lying confession Of confounded biographies. The time heralded on an ox skin drum And thus brought to a passive, anonymous march, A prayer of strangers.
The Flag.
.I.
Conceived, born and here, a place near the sea, A path, bright but indistinct, where I walk, Add a gesture, a sign to part and dissolve dawn’s early air.
You I met and have forgot, Will remember, we shook briskly Our forged request and let the here Become the past without regret.
Then the eyes were precise and as ever Misdirected, seeing beyond the hand And the arm and the body two ghosts Divert the dawn who both expected someone else.
.II.
Left the added butts sogged in water A common signature termed B movie As the superfice of what’s been, Illusion of memory. At the bottom of the card the faded ink, A nation’s stamp that’s released From the pressure of representation Behind us and gone. What the faded air Illumed as flag is the flare a dawn Now scatters as ash. Our hands are glass Darker and darker in the dark, gesture of distance Twisting its banner of intercession An apparently losing hope. Or, if a day has burned itself a universe, It has burned a tapestry of spread Perception. ‘We’ lies forlorn, a mark On the cotton like a stain of blood Fingers scratch there. Notes that puncture Their own hours as a mesh of stitched time And leave frozen the particular. I walk And you walk a tango in the sordid street, One more blown wrapper found parting on the horn.
.III.
As a quest for something more exotic It leans abandoned in the air, a patch Of wall fluttered Rome’s Scottish border. A Caesar will arise, reel some restless Discontent to a march on an old idea. Thus, broken upon flutings, faded In a different age, it has assumed Resurrection, hooked the grave with the bait That’s a sword’s sanguine hope, the drums, pipes And shouts blunted a dissonant song Collected chance redemption. If, when the marching’s stopped, the city Returned to board, pub and bedroom, The back wave that is history Knocks us out again, all we can mark Are the lists of the dead, the captured, The hoards, the rapes, the consequent Retelling of adventure… Cancel but revivify the ailing culture And make true the absent as the present. So, this thread rolled around as sky outlasts The individual, does not touch the individual Except as the burn of that alien one Togetherness may pretend we enjoy. To begin or find the origin Which is nowhere, cannot be contained, Is known only in and is known only as Appearance: radial of no foci, Hub of no turning, start of all That’s not creation. Wave or somewhere the flag, A signal that was individual.
.IV.
We remedy history, its stretch of The warp and the woof, its tear of the glimmer By our rebellion against the lie Of an impersonal intent, circumference Of a revolving god, by a habit Of seeing ourselves as limbed In the tree, the bird, the dog, his howl At the sky, a process that contains both The general and the particular, A word passed in the roll of cloth, appearing Ramified essence, not common nor A whisper termed misunderstanding.
‘Utopian’ – but history turns the conversation Back from the dead, out of the present, Into the present as a holla That peaks the rumble of burnt forest And factory, demos jumble thrown A break in the ‘fix’ of an arm, rubble Stimulus defined, mathematically, ‘Dead matter’. Azure not gravity spins The words as tapestry, pageant, perhaps ‘Triumph of Life’, benign as golden faces And as frightening. These ones return Silent, the offered gesture a graceful start To that being more than enervated.
Labyrinth.
The street is a thought Redeemed by its being empty. And though I expect you It is only now as sleep Its knowledge of forgetfulness: Soft on the pavement, a bruise Before the blows of emptied halls, Uncertain cries, the poverty of clubs – I expect you like you your drugs A pleasure more in keeping With wished for happiness than The reality of a wide awake buzz. Or, you a child, one of the many, Lost in a Minoan fold, A labyrinthine fantasy, A Minotaur expecting Your Perseus, your Ariadne?
Darkness.
There is a darkness in the street Like a pall, a shadowed fissure Entered as the mythology Of our own fear, intimate But civic, private, also public, The town criers, the officials, The citizenry, covenant arteries, A lonely Hell. There your son, My mother, wife or child So difficult to hear or left unheard All that was not, will not, cannot be said. Folded as comfort and disillusion An hour dawn will unroll.
Odd Numbers.
Odd numbers on a scrap of paper Found in my library Blake, seeming so familiar: Did whoever wrote that read this or underline And spoil, gather like a hoarder scattered words That confirmed his or her own boredom, Were these accessed digits loves, vague catches Of possible friends, the desperate last Samaritan to a falling despair Or the casual overflow of the overly social: What did Blake say except how we are born Bludgeoned by our imaginings, sweating An infernal magic, ignored and burdened With needed, wrong acquaintance: dictums Of law and friendship, a private room, The fantastic visions of candlelight, Silence of before the telephone?
Is he or she a friend, this Blake ‘scholar’, This desecrator, this egotist, This humanity? Probably not.
O Why Should I Care?
Gold and silver Honey of your hair O why should I care? Long since your departing Beauty stayed O why should I care? Could I waylay fate, Take once more (O heart) The listening part, Catch in the air Songs that fade And a voice, a face, a form That now, long since warm, Holds me distant and in scorn? O face, O beauties dawn, O honey of hair But one more dance, One more glance Or why should I care?
Ambitions Of Twenty Nine.
Ambitions of twenty nine: to be content, Have a wife, children, home is not enough; To gather the discarded, smooth out the written, Turn the passive into the active, A monument or epitaph for failure, To have made, like the carpenter, one good table, One perfect chair, one absolute poem The ambition of the male, of man, Of human kind, to turn the flattened Presence into the beyond of all time? Ambitions of the individual, The urge of the mortal to make but One moment essential and eternal?
Appendix II:
New Poems
Everything
Wandering in the woods It might all be over, be ended – Yet here it is: Without words, everything.
Where Are You?
“Where are you?” Then the smile, The simple entrance, as if survival Was just an accident, one fell off The bicycle, one bruised ones head. And yet I was beginning to die And perhaps I wanted to. Do I feel joy? I might do. With you, for you, I survived too.
‘So That Everything Becomes Attenuated’
So that everything becomes attenuated. I do not allow the silence necessary To take on that silence. The art of the fugue I have learnt the best and to unlearn it I need More than a figurative closeness. I am not Strong enough merely to function on sympathy. Without the juvenescence and expecting The unexpectable I have to long and to well Tortured myself with the impossible. ‘Ješte nevyslovené’ - a future that may not exist. Some things may never be said, some poems (the best) Are rightly never written: Is that it, the silent place Towards which we are going, the sacred place, The place for only the silent? And all these words, then, The barbarism of an era, the superficial, The over loud chatter as the frightened anticipation Of dreaded departure? Like the abandonment Of this house, the security that it offered, The mother that it was. A silence that exists, O fearfully exists, now, if only I would listen, If only I was to refuse the usual and continuous Distractive absorptions of the temporary. Sometimes. Never once truly.
All We Have
.I.
What was given was not what was expected: The hour in the dust, the snow melted, And the streams dry: something more intelligent: Wild meadow, a thousand flowers, The overbearing noise of birds, The useless, therefore, unsaid words, Our bodies searching into silence An attempt to forget, your smile At a weight the world had pressed upon you Wondering if you were dead. I wondered if I was dead. We asked whether we could live After such insult, such injury. An answer, tentative, to desperately sought, Demanded of but there if we allow. We are reluctant to live once more Yet it is no longer our decision. We can only die again.
.II.
The vague questions that bore us forward They are still there. If words no longer answer Then our hands continue to. Over what does the world have power? Not us, my love, not us. We always walk beyond, together.
.III.
Come forward where there is light, let me see: For I could not see but had a feeling Of dread, as if a ghost might ask me If this were not death, as if you could No longer answer, were gone, had gone. Amidst the woods the darkness terrifies.
Hold my hand, come into the light. Yet still I cannot see you and all I grasp Is your hand. If the stars are not enough They are all we have. Do you not see?
Her Smile
I have you, therefore, above my desk, A smile which distinguishes nobody, The tasted, tasteless essence ‘Of that forbidden tree’ The heart is not willing to forsake: For what is knowledge but love Repelled by the Other, Broken back, angular, Reflecting merely surface. And yet strangely, somewhere beneath Being does speak to being. That uncounted kernel of one.
I have you, therefore, always within reach: No, I would say ‘inside’ if to perceive Brought the soul from the body Reduced to viscera, lung and bone. And that smile always a dawn Barely perceptible (Or is it the twilight of the east, A star which leads To the seemingly humble Center of things?) Self secluding, occluding Almost everyone, perhaps everyone.
It is the silence that focuses everything: From where, two, one, alone, being calls for Being.
Being There
The malady of being there. That particular faltering step Towards what? A covert neon Or the moon, eclipse of the night. Like those long roads of understanding At the end of which only a fields Grubby grass, the twitch of a tree, Broken and misplaced alien nature.
Rather, on the obdurate pavement, Ones feet grooved to a steady tread, Here in the town is one truly alone: Anonymous with the anonymous, Destructive with the destructive - Out there another world, ejected ghost Of a field that haunts our want Of substance, useless to intrude upon.
Merely A Poem
Alone but for the involuntary Company of tinnitus, the ghost of wall, floor, ceiling, Once again a silence dividing The drowned and the stranded. behind only brutal hope, The thousand humiliations Of a world expected, taken for granted: A love that’s merely a poem?
‘Nothing’
Yes, you may say: “I am nothing.” That ‘Now’ is all I will ever be.” Yet the earth wills otherwise: There is death and though you fill Your days with faithless action, The endless mantra of a common ‘No!’, Such wanted dis-appearance Is only edge, a crescent glimmer Of what is always dark, Innocent, tragic, affirmed. Life, which needs no knowing, Lives you without you.
I will Never Be Gone
A wintry airlessness, a tundra between us, A white impossibility, your belief your nobody, The dissolution of a thinning ghost. You would like to dissolve, become nothing - I will not let you – I’m a stubborn man! With this faith I can breathe a vacuum, With this love I can live even death. And, should you finally force me, Though I might be gone, I will never – be gone!
Suit
The jacket of some dead, left handed chap - And, now, soiled, unlaundered, wet with the rain, A fantastic imposition on the neat Courtesies of these reserved Durham streets - Neither with the safe and unassumed (Because there!) reassured flow of learning Nor with the native anger - ‘a tramp, Beaten by brooms’. Unsure because unrefered.
Trying To Listen
“Take the opportunity to listen” And, though all the chords Had forced their disgust, I tried: but there was merely A laziness, a fallacy of sound Which toured that mid-ear Of safe distrust, of distance kept Because no distance could be understood. So it was presumed we began With only an undisciplined cry And, searching for that word, The ‘honest genuine’, the strict Discipline was ‘do not try’. Those ‘triers’ who where impotent And strange and finally excluded.
Collapse
“Hell, the floor collapsed: there we were, Dust and plaster, our arses that had Bumped some bottom of a world. And, so, A frightened laughter, as if laughing Might be a ladder lifting us above ourselves: The shattered bed, the cracked chair, there was I Thinking “Well, I must rise.” And, thus, broken Upon it, holding a useless head, I had to try a door. But, first, the stair, But, first, all that was above and, now, Below us, but, first, the joke “Do we care?” I must go home, without wish, without will.”
Joke
The sadness in a joke Is the surprise it cannot give: You look, then, in that face With a question that is wrong Asking “Are you real?” The reply always “Yes!” meaning “No.”
To Hannah Arrant
O, Hannah, there is always this: Between the past and the future There is this: dead? No, but Wanting this ‘past’, always hoping (‘Killed by hope’) for merely a summer: A field, a forest, the wilder, wilder flowers.
The Whale And Parrot For Anna (194O-1994) “All the cod is gone! “ B.B.C. World Service.
I
A big fish eat me But there are no fish in the sea And God will tell you who is right and who is wrong. A big fish eat me but there are no fish in the sea And the world will tell you who is right and who is wrong. Jonah died, was born again, lived back to tell Who was right and who was wrong. And the world, did it end, did it begin? A big fish eat me but there are no fish in the sea.
II
What, in the schematic muddle of it all, The stars, the broken galaxies, the effluent Of no-thing, what began or ended at This point and at this point, the fallacy Of forgetting or of being here or there, Something which said “I love…” and forgot what It was it loved: and to love!, to begin and Again! A wish, perhaps, a child’s Broken Sunday, thinking “Here, alone, There will be someone that sees.” Expecting that gladness of recognition Which, of course, fails – here to there And only the indecision, the amused surprise Of a face you’d wish you’d remember. . The earth, the taste played by the mouth Of a child alone and wanting, wanting I know not what. Though he fights away The blasphemy of being ‘one’, it can only Be fear, the ‘fiery blush’, the desire Not to be only Other. ..
III
What begins, the force before it begins, Grunt, inhuman human folly Of taking a moment (and you forget which) As sacred: and, yes, it belongs (but it will not) To this Now of nows: beyond that The clear space, the land seen free, The ‘wanton abandon’ and the exhaustion: Only wishing something was or I was or, Finally, ‘this was’: it’s not, mother.
IV
Once, there was a thought, beginning with – So, a summer rescue, coming along In the car, the fiat 500, And saying, this way (take a drink) To what you always wanted: From a distance, I must see All the untruth that 'should', for a child, Be hidden: the joke of inconstancy, The fallacy of ever wanting a mother – I saw it all – you forget, loins That bore, that professed to bare me, That said I was born: I was not. But then, even earlier, from the day I exited Your prison, your device, your despair I knew it was wrong: that you lied, always Forgetting (or knowing) I was watching, Why I was silent? For a hand that caressed, A thought towards me, a sense of saying “You’re O.K.” But you’re not. So, dumb, unheard, ‘Beautiful eyes’, there was only the redemption Of pathetic resistance: did you see? Could you see? Could you want to see? And if you did, what would you have done, Only have beaten the more?
V “An angel!" My hair dresser .
It’s merely individual, the four wings cramped, A slight burn of candlelight And we say “He’s OK.” And so he is, Broken not by any peculiar expulsion, Cracked, rather, by a room. And endless, endless those scribbled Petitions back to God. You say “Land on your feet!” which, of course, Were broken before, even, the saints Began their song. Because this age Is so new, so endlessly new And he, ancient, has forgotten, again, How to say ‘Yes! - to God.
So, ‘across the water’, he will drown, And, yet, ‘the attempt is worthy’, Or, merely, vanity. How endless the call! And below him and above him the stair That could never fail to climb, to descend
-------------------------------------------
For, see, the precipitate stone: up, Just the barred impossible: a roof, Those walls, the handle of a door, Window that cannot open: grubby, entirely? His closed wings, vicious in a room. Yes, this is useless. “There is no god.”
VI It’s hard, hideous and wrong, Probably, a vicious joke, a fellow Who cannot remember (nor right His name) Beginning, perhaps, to listen, ears forced, to God. “There is no God’ “, and, as Nietzsche So eloquently put it, ‘God is dead.’ God dead, dead God, I rebel against All that lies. All lies are strong, Stronger than truth. I wish I was stronger than lies.
VII
Every hotel from which I was expunged (But, of course, I did not stay) Every face that glances backwards Some kind of lie, all those that lie Into their (or others) pants, The slight, coarse affair of me even looking, (Oh, I assure you, a random glance) Begins and ends with what is least important: I said (louder still) begins and ends With what is least important: a dead parrot Which still will continue to say The words “I love...” or, thus, “I love God.”
VIII
And think (think again!) it was beyond us, It was always (why? you should ask) from this-afar. We began with those hopes (they last to long), Taking what were mere words As just God could have said them: If we were older we would have said: “These are lies!” but they weren’t. An attempt to bring us forward that failed.
And then, you said, “I am that I am.” Blasphemy that must almost be true: I thought I’d found some word, some devil Saying, quietly, “Here is a man: Bring him close, bring him home, Make him speak the word this God demands." God demands nothing and nor do you.
IX
But the death of unhappiness? That peculiar death Happening only with happiness? No. And do I mourn it, desire it, bring it Back, for it, the resurrection Of a ghost that one has to know must die? And we all have to, wish to, want to When, having seen death, we know the broken face, The quiet breath (was she breathing?) The still dust of this – a life “Well, you know, was really so superb!” Yes, we know death, we want it or how else Say “Yes!” to an end that cannot, forget The equanimity of her leaving, Be just. Can one be just? Justice? Where is justice in this death?
X
That the truth were told The balance would hold? Broken beam, fallen satellite, Star that burnt or began to burn (We are too old to with stay the fire) Forget us: there are other planets, other wheres! They say, too, life exists there. So, do miss us, But don’t miss us, destroy us But don’t merely warm us: Living is dying – say thus: “You are, I don’t know who you are.”
XI
And to begin – from nothing, again? And why? There is no beginning, there is no end, The pity in it, in that century, The hundred million dead arid the torture And the murder and the women, the poor men: Yes, we failed, perhaps, ultimately? What did we want, ‘only’ to be ‘happy’-? The worst sin. Or history Cracked beneath the corps, broken. Spirit that cannot ask any more questions.
XII
The hooves are running backwards Over a broken head and “that’s history.” We have grown smaller and, thus, our guilt grows great: Magnificent, this pygmy size, This laughing below our sleeves, This to large coat turned up at the cuffs.
So, there we were, laughing on the ramparts, Broken, of course, a castle whose name, Even, is unrecallable (could we pronounce it?) Spouting a name that we’d also forgotten: Is that possible? Come (but, please, don’t) Meet my contemporaries: the list of casualties Is endless, the reason (we are to small) unknown. That’s us, liars, and not the guts to say The size of this life no longer suits. Faded the cotton, the colour, the moment. Don’t stop to see, my dead ones. I’m small, too.
XIII
But we still live: this dead breath, this whisper Of Godlessness, this violence to our name, This dishonour, the cynical wanting Of a nothing that will, O I promise, come. O yes, you dare to live? You live, You don’t live, you desecrate my dead. Think of it! Think of it. O God, think.
XIV
I ask, and only I ask “Do I deserve to live?” No, not only my mother, that vast, broken candle, Because I asked at birth, ‘a stilled, stunned thing’, Being born, not only not knowing why the silence, But who, behind the silence, who, not person, Could not speak. Could not speak! I could not speak. A poet. Here was, not, was, not. Nothing. Nothing?
XV
She began: again and again, she began: Yes, she died, curse her, but she began, Again and again. And where the strength? And I a coward – listen to me! Angels that lie and mock me, God that smiles in His cruelty, Shits that bathe in oblivion, listen! Is it a lie, this end, this mortuary, This charnel, this final breath: God, my God, help me to know (‘to know’?) To know a grave. You (I hate you, God) please bring me The peace that’s promised. No? No.
Yet – it is my only duty – I the only last? Only my duty? Yet these trees still stand Green and silver and oblivious.
XVI
Want, then, the smile, thinking beyond, Merely, the possibility: guide Yourself towards the quite legendary path That, ‘as yet’, does not exist: The mantrap, the green, the profuse flowers, The red, the blue, the joke And, yes, a parrot, the parrot Speaking those words You thought would come from God.
Morning Happiness
Oh, in the heart of Hell – or, a voyeur Staring at what is impossible – happiness. Somewhat numb, glad for an unfeeling, Hoping to make this just a dream – then I’ll wake up, open the curtains, stare at what was Once my life. I’ll be tortured by hope, Begin, again, to say the words “I love you.”
Ask Not
Falling down – and, last night, probably Bashed about – to deserve happiness Or be punished. Please don’t ask.
A Chance Of Blue I
What will happen will happen: The crowd Of millions that, perhaps, have their own Destiny: Accident jostled an understanding That 'did not exist'. To look, completely, In your eyes and smile. Something O so innocent: to forget fear.
We both see, we hope, the same chance of blue. The sky above just the destiny that destroys. To wander beyond what is possible: Men hope it will follow. Wanting What our cowardice has denied us.
Justice
The words are gone – the impotence of the poet. I am no Jonah – do not wish to declare A dead humanity – do not wish to declare Apocalypse, Armageddon, holocaust. Merely to weak to declare another’s wrong My own so harsh, so bitter, so just.
Return Home I was hoping for a punishment With grace – to be somewhere So terrible that the Angel must appear Before me, here, now, listening.
Blue Eyes
I
I will not tell how I tried To sing her into my arms. Neither bending forward nor backward will do. A murderous humiliation. And what was bright has been lost now.
A poet is a wretched man. As if We were stepped on and began to sing. But death must make even The most perverse silent. Bored With all this glamour and prose. I merely want what is true.
II
A smile, two eyes so beautiful I could only die. The burnt, racial Stain of the brown, leaves of autumn. And, in winter, dirty beneath the snow. You found I was not all white, Just one of those slaves. Not an Angel. So you went. I love you.
Never Pretty
Poets are never pretty After thirty-five. Look at Auden Who might have said, like Socrates, “I have mastered all the worst things I am full of.” Disingenuously, of course.
Chance Of Blue II
I suppose, to confess, I always wanted My sky to be blue. With some cloud, To prefer us to change. A chance Beautiful. Somewhere in the rocks Looking towards the shore and knowing there That family had a picnic and those, at a late hour, Were rescued from a summer shower. And because the sun must shine (it must) There was someone, the children that picked seashells And wondered and compared and forever were told “The sea is a dangerous monster,” And were happy, there were some people, old perhaps, Sharing their unflasked, metallic tea, Trying to gather the sun, who said “I love you.” “I, too, my dear.” “Isn’t it beautiful?” “My love, it is beautiful.” “Aren’t we happy?” “Happiness is what we are.”
Nativity “Notre crime est del’homme” Lamartine. ‘L’homme.’
Everything stained: The tea stains the cup, The cup stains the counter, the foot stains the snow, The moon stains the air. Everything said. I am told this is not an original thought. Below, what was forgotten and cold, As if it were not merely, actually true, There was a birth, the unthinking was done And this messy mix of snow and blood Produced a word that meant ‘goodbye’ or ‘hello’, Unsorting a chaos into ‘this one and that’ And saying “Insofar as I am here, that is there.”
Or if they are ‘mad’, we are ‘mad’, since Neither they nor we can prove the obvious: That Johnson kicked a stone but Berkeley Was already dead, that the delusion suffices To make a few words bring a cup of tea And that, without God, preserving the hollow Takes so long to say, every man Could seek to find Putrefaction of his mother, Of his brother, of his kind.
Lewis And Martina
L: A broken nose more expresses health Than your ridiculous screams and cries. I keep, at least, some human cowardice At home. Making tea in the grubby room But acknowledging this Angel. He will not, For the moment, destroy me. That you wished To deliver yourself to man was what disappointed.
M: There was no sense, speaking in the wrong language, In any action. Neither theirs nor mine. If I felt or smelt destruction don’t think of it As intended. I have told people as, perhaps, A piece of vanity, that I saw things. Nothing was so crude. Only those who wished to love me. They could not. Hate becomes, sometime, stronger than love.
L: And yet, for me, nothing was more ‘subtle’ than mine. To you it was merely looks, a means of accommodating Body to body and the dysfunction I must finally feel When doubt had to sleep with both of us. I ached And I ache everyday for what, well, I never wanted. For I tried for merely a word that would say You know me.
M: I know you but You were not enough. Or never could be. Listen, Lewis, I joy in those few months When we really were discovering what it was that always is so strange about each other: Our mortality, our distant death, our always otherness. Don’t you see – I have gone there, I have lost you, I have lost myself. And your child Is the only human word I can now discover. I hate you. You were not an Angel. I hate myself For saying this. How could I demand this impossible?
L: No, you could not. And yet you, O beautiful you, Had a right to. You had a claim on an Angel. But he did not come. Only me. I love you.
M: But you, my fool, my once-was-guest, remember: Love cannot be there merely to please you. We women are accused of eating hearts – It is not us but God that burns your soul, It is not I, it is never I, but these fragments, These joys and sorrows, this ecstasy you refuse To forget. Don’t forget. I may be mad But I do not miss the compliment. For in a glass I joy greatly at what memory can produce. The happiness of a boy who cried “I love you!” Because he had never loved before nor has since.
L: I had never loved before nor have since.
Beauty
Yes, she would walk the streets, sometimes to solve A problem, sometimes because she loved the darkness She would always find between the houses. We tried to stop her – we talked to her, Told her that this was being childish or Stupid or romantic – it was foolish To walk in the all innocence of nature And say: “This is true.” Only, lunging forward, We happened on the chance of history And, hey presto, dead bodies. Still, we told her “We love you” but your ‘schizophrenic’, We said “Open your mouth”, without saying “Speak!” – but she wouldn’t – a merely Beautiful idiosyncrasy: Which we crushed, destroyed, crushed as a bug And then said “Crawl back.” She couldn’t. Why Couldn’t she be beautiful again? Only because the mirror will kill us. We have no conscience. No love. No honour.
Epithalamium (For Oliver and Barbara)
The rails of fate which run assuredly on You think mechanical until, rusty turns Of metal, they suddenly end, the grass Stands tall, the flowers are indifferent And what’s left of a forest creeps up: But, no, you’re not alone, the main station Ushered you to a seat and a stranger Who became a friend. And now, as the driver Has nothing to do and cannot turn back, Beneath all your discomfort, you find
You’re holding her hand. A miracle! Was it you who unconsciously fumbled for safety, Unsure of direction and afraid of derailment (Yet you knew you would end here, were happy And loved it) or was it an accident of grace, Perhaps that bit of sunlight deifying An ugly day, suddenly some word (which you later Realise you misunderstood) made the Other not so far Or you were just thinking of your mother? Never mind how or why, it became
And now lasting for ever – and who knows whether She be that especially designed one or is it Only the forced meeting that makes us dear, That all of us (not being lunatic or bad) Could love all of us of which marriage is a token? Such questions we leave to philosophers, Analysts and other buffoons – for us the effort And the pleasure of a good deed done, of a Love and a fidelity that makes us happy, Of that constant light we can steer by, Turn to and call a home. And if scoffers
Insolently shout that fidelity and all good things Are dead, that childhood is hell, that mother Is always beating us and daddy always Turning away, that the one you love always Loves another and will leave you for him and that, Anyway, life ‘ain’t perfect’, it would be silly To disturb them by a reply. A happy smile, Maybe, and, long after one has stopped listening, The thought recurring of the love and the marriage, Wholesome, good, that’s Barbara and Oliver.
Morecambe
Precise terms, correctly said Might point a moral to be had: The eviscerate beast will be fed With the inane, the hapless or the sad,
The little joke become universal Till cosmic gizzards grin, A gods fading, pathetic appal Irking some tummy ache of sin,
But we, who ‘know’ exactly when The anti-Christ and Christ shall meet, Bitterly say ‘I love’, again, Hanker for the canker of defeat,
Leathery, inept, miss hewed, Burnt, blathered but staring at the sun Our being brave merely crude, Our families broken before they’ve begun:
A wino whine like Ovid-On-The-Sea, We must be exiles, perpetually.
A Winter Poem
i
My right hand in her left hand – so they say. Those best words we had and yet neither God nor man could join us. But this Is pointless, to see one smile and break and be angry Because you could never tell what it meant. To want the resurrection, now – why disturb The dead? We only joked because we enjoyed The others pain. Or guilt.
ii
If I see you again and every night Am I then better? Will I become good? Will I love their souls, even broken? Or laugh in a new birth? I am a bitter, bitter man, A hollow world that falls away, a sun That has left me in darkness, the vision Of even others happiness I must decry. O god, O world, O woman – if one smile Could disturb these stones why not Again and again and again?
iii
Ten thousand cuts, ten thousand blows, a beating And then to stand all night, to stare at a corner, To joke, maybe, with your friendly betrayers And then watch them march into death, your left With a word, like a photograph, which says “This face is harmless.” I don’t wish to be in this world. You wish to be Unhappy, don’t you? You have no right to that.
iv
Dirty and unshared and in a miserable room Winter has written our desire upon this wall Because I am what you, perhaps, must want, This writer. A liar, true, a thief, also, a pornographer, A self-hater, a wanter of man’s destruction, All these things and more. Love which bringeth understanding.
v
The eloquence a persuasion of God – To ‘believe’, I suppose, was what I meant. Or not to believe but to know. Because an Angel Pressed against me. I felt his lips.
vi
No joy talking to oneself, being alone, No joy, again, in sex, no joy in delight Over a face seen again, no morning Waking because you had kissed me, No love in tears or smiles or that said “I love you.” No love for me or you or this morning, Just damnation, the coldest fire that could ever burn.
vii
If the streets were colder, only colder, I could force back a time when hand in hand I caught something of your smile. Extremes, they say, can produce illusion Which I could grasp, never let go Of your presence, however mad.
viii
Chalk on the pavement Water is a sore destroyer Whatever trace people leave The city will illuminate The very same world Even on the last day The pavement will be laid Sorrow or joy do not counter What is permanent This the same rain That rained before
Choose merely now, then, Forget our yesterday, The darling face, the nay Against belief, remember The street must return Shouts that defy or plead And you, before you sleep, Must try to make room For tomorrow By listening to this rain, Today.
Something strange
Something strange. The chipped value of buildings That are always odd because they're historical. A vague memory of my grandmother saying ' Hello' And her 'permanent' counsel house being taken away As soon as she died. Or my mother, Seeing faces In the stonework of an obscure yard
And me having to rescue her and no gratitude And I didn't expect it. Madness is it's own reward. For once bowing to the inevitable and bleedingly obvious.
Just like buildings that bow at your command: Are somewhat obvious, chipped and broken.
Happiness
Happiness is like a very good morning. Waking up in laundered sheets, knowing the birds sing in those pretty trees you saw yesterday, knowing a cooked breakfast is on the table and, no matter what you've done (within reason!) they'll still smile and say "Hi" and what a fool. After breakfast and if it's not raining, you'll walk into the garden and laugh at the sky.
The sun shines
The sun shines on even the terribly ugly. The violence perfectly real. The shabby Inns I have collected. Walking the other side of a sea wall I am protected from a bay that is tame and beautiful.
The if smile
Broken, the if smile and tomorrow you will know Who loves you – no one. Everyone smiles in Morecambe. To die a kind of 'get-in'. Like smiling at the bottom Of our world. You cannot smile upwards, can you?
Eyeless in Gaza
Eyeless in Gaza, I squint and grasp blindly For this mornings coffee. The noise and rumble. A newspaper boy running past. My French friend Comes in to tell me his office is packing up and going back To Paris. How cowardly. And I’ve been here before. In Alexandria, for instance.
I broke my smile waiting for yesterday
I broke my smile waiting for yesterday. Martina, you think it easy, making this sun shine? Were as thunder and clouds come every day. Everything I can do except hold your hand.
West End
It was easy to be at the edge of the world, See the sun slide in with the blue and gold tip of a wing Like the Angels that must have visited me in my prison Of heretofore – a former Morecambe whose Streets were called Clarendon, Westminster, Balmoral and this was the "West End" A different exile. All exiles are equal. But that one bullied forward And this, self imposed. The cries are equally as barren and threatening. The hope equally as meaningless. I got out last time by a kind of Alacrity, a jumping into the barrel which others began to roll. This time, there are no others. The same barren hope, though.
London was so vast you could meander
London was so vast you could meander Through it's soul and it wouldn't know: Going up to the Contemporary Poets Library And coming down with a big red book and no-one knowing What you had – until, you were so drunk, you talked To the girl in the peep show, studying law, and She quoted you Pound. So ashamed and knowing No drink would help you, your feet twisted and turned. Back to the ugliness of Catford and Lewisham. This was the way, the toa which you disrupted, my love. For a moment, for a couple of months, but not for ever.
The nights are coming in and close, like a black storm
The nights are coming in and close, like a black storm: To stand high and old and curl up and fall – like paper burning: The words that had meant so much, the honesty – and the lies. Guilt shredded through the afternoon and, in the evening, just rest, Exhaustion, overwhelmed by everything that is wrong.
Who are you?
The violence outside is always a beating postponed: The gimp mask just falls away from your face And you wear the usual garb and just walk out into the sunlight: Blinding and bleaching and a judgement you can't take You have begun to smile at the alleged children That other people have. Tomorrow, but today, You will gather those judgements and cans and bottles and yourself, As if you were trash. How to live? The kind of joke I began with. Asking questions. Who are you?
Hope Is A Bully
How does hope get us there? No cars run on hope - is it carbon free? - My boiler buggers on hope and if I ask my feet Their twisted but somewhat sensible way is "Out of the door!" and as quick as is legal. Hope is a bully.
Happiness is what happiness does. It seems to appear
Happiness is what happiness does. It seems to appear In other people. They smile a lot and have children. A smile is a grimace like the grave. I wish to see Certain smiles, I've hunted them out. I have an APB on smiles. We should not appear in the same room, because my 'appearance' Embarrasses you. Peering into the dark corners of my room You assume this is me. Well it is. The coach is waiting for you And our sadness, too. After you have gone, will I not follow?
The assumptions we have followed are rather strange?
The assumptions we have followed are rather strange? Just to assume you are good, a man, just and beautiful, As you did assume, must make you pretty ridiculous, A laughing stock, a freak. To assume anything means To assume to much. To assume everything or nothing.
Kensington
I walk down my street and my courage fails,
Has failed. It isn't that the key in my hand
Will no longer work – the police and the other
Officious guardians of our fate will have
'Permission' to slot in the key and turn the key
And open that garden of butterfly's and June days
But also muddy winters and alone London -
But I am now excluded and know that,
Whatever I do, as a human being, is suspicious.
So cowardly, I divert to the local pub and smoke
My death giving fag outside.
Drive
Everything said forgets it's bonne chance
Of an accident that broke my screen as I was
Driving through the dead skirts of Paris:
Where the car must turn but doesn't to the heart of
Those streets smiling and forgetting.
Broken
Beneath that bridge and our youth on its hands and knees
Or back there, the half green lawn, and where jokes
Where a plenty and didn't need to be remembered.
I thought, something strange, like hope might brew
As when – I bought a house, I sawed the wood,
And the place disappeared beneath me.
To go home is a good choice – to ignore
To go home is a good choice – to ignore What is obvious: The woman you love distressed And, obviously, needing your help. You smile In the corners of your couch and cry sometimes Very hot, sentimental tears. Hatred in your own room Feels better than hatred in theirs. An illusion Only oblivion will cover. Like snow, like ice.
The minimal that is required is to love
The minimal that is required is to love. But only one without love could make such a statement, Be conscious of such a requirement. Innocent of heart But dead. I am Lazarus come back to tell you all Or Jonah, spewed upon a beach, refusing still Those words that came from God. Or being In the belly of the whale, drumming his indigestion, With the oil cans, the plastic bags, the half eaten fish, The etc detritus of being human, I, inhuman, Wallow in this strange, submarine defeat. I like it down here. Hows it up there?
Everything you thought was wrong was wrong
Everything you thought was wrong was wrong. Your awkward smile that misremembered me, Your false laugh at remembering. Kicking the frost From our feet and fearing to look at each other We boiled with a kind of love. Soured in a bag The homeless that asked us to look at them. It's not pretty, poverty. It's not pretty, your smile.
For Martina
I
The canker in my eye is not so great I can't see the cancer in yours.
Being an amateur 'doctor' with my quack remedies
I'm going deaf, but I hear you through this lonely night,
From how far away? O to far, in time, in space, in hope
And yet, you are there, in hospital, with your neighbors (I imagine)
Screaming at the wall and you, trying to sleep, trying to hope
That I or someone still thinks of you. (And me thinking all the time).
And me, impotent to help you, to be there, to love you, as I do.
II
Nothing smells worse than death -
The stinking soul hanging between my shoulders
Like a sweaty and unwashed shirt - resurrected every 'perfect'
Dinner I wear it like a shield or a sign -
‘Here are fools!’ - and no one notices - they continue
Cutting their food and saying their say.
Loneliness is terrible.
My nose broken, I walked along the street
Looking for someone who would break it back.
I found that, the rain and the gutter
And my desperate cowardice. For down here
I want to say 'Hi' to you but I'm too ugly
To do so. I think, if I sent a message through
A 'friend' and he sent a message to you,
You might receive it. You might understand why
I have punished myself, for so long?
III
An Angel came down to me and said
"These ascending and descending stairs
Are for you. Come up." "No", I said "For I hate man,
I hate the world and I hate everything that has
And will exist." "Every word you say
Could be turned to love and your words
Roses among the thorns" "But I want to be the thorn,
The sharp spear that cuts God and salves him
With vinegar!?" "Boy, you will never be that,
You are gentle of heart. Come and follow me"
"No, I will stay here and die." "So be it"
How I hung, above the abyss,
Smiling at you. And I mistook
Your upside down smile as a smile
When it was a grimace, a wince of pain.
I feel so wrong for not understanding
When I should have. And, now, your mind and your will
Have both disintegrated. A wall
Against which I wail and will do so forever.
That Angel, from God, a long long time ago
(Well, at least, ten years), told me
The meaning of love. When, one winter morning,
Waiting for a train that never came,
Dark and crepuscular morning, the sky
Began to fall, at first like little bells
Chiming on the concrete and the rails - ting, ting -
And I knew it was a call from God - knock, knock -
Whose there? No one, no one at home.
Of course, God doesn't exist but nor do I.
That morning when the stars were so bright
I could grasp them, when I knew I had lost
Everything and nothing would return,
That my love, which was destroying me, was for 'nothing',
That I had 'taken the wrong turn', as usual
(But fatally this time), God sat beside me and told me
To be of good cheer. "These temporary things" He said
"Are of no matter. For what is in your heart, my son?
Your heart is of me. Say something beautiful."
I could not. I can not.
IV
Everyone I look at
Pats me on the head, feeds me a bone,
Chucks me outside or leaves me on my own.
I am a dog and alone.
My stupid 'masters'
Who can't master themselves
Are not my masters. I dream
Of running with my brothers.
I am a dog and alone.
Everyday my ‘owner’ dumps me outside
And I bark because
I am a dog and alone.
Thoughts out of Season.
(For Martina, bride of my soul, mother of my child)
I
1
Sadness like those streams you sat next to
As a child. The smell of wild garlic,
The whooping flutter of birds, and, crowded
Above you, a bully of trees and their greenness,
Alien, except for that stream and the tears that fell in it.
2
'I'
An imagined mumbo-jumbo of words. A haitiesque
Raising of the dead. The streets kind of empty
And sullen. A bruised foot that had kicked the face
That had seen the moon. How does one wake up
Or go to sleep? Both are impossible..
A tin can kind of reflection.
3
Love is a monstrous story. I can't help sweating
In a kind of fear of loss. My bed is soaked with this sadness.
The smell of being human - which I presume, is an attempt
To keep clean. The arrogance of myself. A pointless thought.
4
A pattern that only foreshadows gloom
The wind and the rain somehow upset you
Assuming you where inside and silent
Brokering a bargain, smashing a plate,
Marrying an idea of a roof above you and the four walls.
There is nothing nice about being human.
Pandora’s box allowed all evils to escape -
Disease, old age, ambition and, finally, hope -
That which has always bullied us forward.
5
Where the wonders of the world merely
A mockery, then? A shining through thick
And sullen cloud? A glint on the stab
Of a broken can in a shabby alleyway?
No, on the contrary, they where
The beginning, preparatory to something other...
II
1
For Lou Reed
My Dead Book is getting full of names:
People who I can call only up from Hell
For those who go to heaven I never knew.
Sweet smile as we turn the soil, like turnips,
Like potatoes, the rooted soul, like disease,
Like fungus between my toes, like an awkwardness
Of gait, a 'funny walking', like sadness and grief
And the guilt in forgetting, like Anna and
My never seeing her or if I did it was only
Her corpse. I didn't know what to do so I went
Into the toilet and grinned at my reflection.
A scowls grin for a grin. The first name in my Book.
2
The happiness of an hour spent listening to a guitar
And songs of another man, so fugitive, and now
What? A grimace before this weather. I'd forgotten
Or meant to remember how hearing someone else meant.
Like sitting at the front and seeing the sea
Threaten to drown you. One wave upon another
And each knowing the borrowed light of a moon
Is merely lent to them. Each song singing
It's mermaid song and beckoning forward.
III
Bully
1
The head was broken - split asunder -
The poring out of blood and soul - gargling
What was left of my spirits - down there,
In a Lancs gutter - I cried out to you,
I asked do I deserve to exist,
Can I, must I, should I?
The echo of an emptiness is my answer.
2
A broken soul, like the Jew and his belongings,
His pictures, his Picasso, his Pizaro - we have distinguished them,
We have decided between the twain, we have put on one side
This person and on the other this thing - almost a cleverness,
An articulacy, as if to alienate was to be.
3
For I have stepped upon bones and heard them crack
And slime as they attempted to grasp and plead.
I stood upon them and had no guilt.
I stabbed down, only to quieten them.
For I have stood upon bones and known there suffering.
I have seen eyes outside of context
And hands without history. I have been
Haunted by souls that do not exist.
Or smiled at smiles that have no history.
I am dead and yet am I arisen.
I have been stamping upon a world
Yet I live.
4
The cracked smile I smile is not a joke.
An askance, a lie or a slyness. A semblance of a smile.
No. Not the pretence to seem, not this, a talking
Into nothingness. A carpet mouth and a joke.
Those two eyes a befuddled constellation
Beckoning this kind of death. In the middle of Europe
Some kind of sand. Which you realise
Is a man hair.
5
Down on the ground, then, a bully above you
And you turn your face to the left or the right -
For which way is best? Not to love is best
Not to be loved, second, but better still
Never to have been born. Hatred is gallant
In the glad old days. Sorrow, too.
IV
1
After Ivan Blatny, from memory
To live alone is a crime. What does Lamartinine say:
Man is the criminal, l'homme est criminile.
Get a wife and child. If you can't have a child
Have a wife. If you can't have a wife
Get a dog, a dog only.
2
The beauty of an embrace: How does it happen?
That extraordinary love you feel
At the touch of a hand:
Now, then, do you remember this?
Walking those old streets
And staring in other peoples windows -
You seem to have forgotten what it is to smile?
When she stroked your hair and it was like fire,
You were aflame, you were burning
So that every touch afterwards was like
A new sun had been born? Memory was actual,
Was alive. Delight in the morning
And to forget the only crime I know.
3
Belly full of bags and old rules
I feel a connection with everyone.
How did you know? A ghost that tracked me.
Like a brother. Like a mother.
I've stayed clear of eclipses, they pick out
My bottles. The sun gleaming
On what might have been but isn't.
I can't see the sky. It's a fuzzy mess to me.
You 'smoke' in the back yard of your dreams
And, down every ally, is that blaze
That entered your head, cut from a tin can,
A piece of glass, spiking the light
And, that others, might never see. Suddenly
That Angel of theft and vagabondage
And I hate myself. A smallness in my soul
Destroyed what was good in me. Cowardice.
'What is seen is what is known'. So you say.
I see nothing. Therefore nothing is known.
V
1
Oh, one of those days! When I must struggle
From beneath the covers to find clean socks,
Clean my teeth and post a letter? Why?
2
What this Saturday morning means? What have I
Done with my life? How old am I? How much
Could I have done? Should I have done more?
Lewis Deane, Sept-Nov 2013.
Index Of First Lines
“Down that road I went.” He said, pointing somewhere. 4 “Hell, the floor collapsed: there we were, 136 “I am not dangerous.” Their new form 52 “Take the opportunity to listen” 135 “Where are you?” Then the smile, 125 “Who rules, who serves? 79 A big fish eat me but there are no fish in the sea. 139 A broken nose more expresses health 155 A gloomy summer’s rain so alien 59 A mess of cracked stone: 62 A naked figurine in a green shrub 14 A soul flavoured in the neutral tones 93 A Sundays gentle cycle through seas of empty streets 31 A thin, weeping mist squeaks along the grass 105 A wintry airlessness, a tundra between us, 133 All that time a denial 42 All the body’s turnings merely serve 30 Alone but for the involuntary 131 Always again the wish to begin 64 Ambitions of twenty nine: to be content, 120 Among the whispered wind and wet 95 And down those corridors 89 Below the cry of a bat 7 Blind, my love, to futures chance, 45 Cascading from the dark 43 Caught in a translunar spot 25 Conceived, born and here, a place near the sea, 36 Corners catching 8 Ditched or broken the tourist ruins 80 Do I have a relationship, 60 Everything is so quiet and peaceful now: 54 Everything stained: The tea stains the cup, 154 Falling down – and, last night, probably 147 Farcical rumour of not being 47 For three days I drank, certain of failure, 58 Forgotten towers 6 Friends that were not and have already gone 65 Gold and silver 119 Half a line of bad verse 53 How did that star break 100 How many times have we heard her say 110 I have not stepped 73 I have you, therefore, above my desk, 129 I remember your bedroom window 49 I see you different, now, flattened by age 28 I suppose, to confess, I always wanted 153 I was hoping for a punishment 150 I will not tell how I tried 151 I’ve tested it then, 39 In each place I’d broken circles, the figured 82 In the bruised sleep of a few unpunctured hours 77 It is not for this that I waited alone, 22 It was a comic sight: 15 Leaving pressured prints, 72 Let not the burst thunder 81 Like the wanderer and his shadow, 55 Lilting among the wilting trees 46 List the bright heat as one change of garment 83 My right hand in her left hand – so they say. 160 Neither to go far nor to come home 66 Not a night to be seen: 41
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