* * *
Confession
Of course I’ve been corrupted by publicity
A friendly journalist once likened me to Bogart
And I took to exposing my upper teeth when I smiled at enemies
Several years later I was in a theatre
At the same time as Lauren Bacall
And she was so beautiful I could only look at her for two seconds
And that was enough,
Sam, that was plenty.
Self-Congratulating, Self-Deprecating, Auto-Destructive Blues
If you’re betting on the horses, you know you’ve got to follow form
Got to vet up on the set-up and get up and bet on form,
I was losing losing losing before I was even born.
You may come from Venezuela, but I was born on Mars,
Venice or Venus or Venezuela, but I was raised on Mars,
I’ve got a head full of meteorites, heart full of little green children
and balls full of shooting stars.
So if you want a good investment, better not buy me.
I’m on the edge of the ledge and I’m not gilt-edge so your broker will
advise I’m a joker so get wise and don’t buy me.
Some men are like insurance, but I’m more like – suck it and see.
I Passed for Sane
If I’d been born without a mind
I would be happy, tame and kind.
People came, saying good things.
So many people, saying good things.
I hid my eyes under my skin
And so they never saw right in.
Sometimes I Feel Like a Childless Mother
My hands shake, my eyelids tremble.
The tigers in my head assemble.
The Institution
The crazy talkers in my head
Steal lights and moments when they can;
Beat at the windows to be fed
Or listen to the sounds of rain.
They stroll, they shout at passing Man,
And in extremes they form a plan
To drown at night, or catch a train.
Simple as glass, they wander through
The colours of my twenty years
Singing and whispering the true
And false of all my private cares;
Inflated songs that shrink to fears.
My chest is thick, so no one hears
The lovely mute who kicks and tears…
A Slow Boat to Trafalgar
I was born in a country called Bloody Strange
With the means of seduction, prostitution and derange
I was red all through and I was raw on top
I had a billion megatons and nowhere to drop
I was a suitable case
A suitable case
A suitable case for
Urgghh.
Married ten times to the gulp next door
She was twenty to virgin and half past whore
We had a mini monster and we called him Meat
And he sucked our cold sweat through a teat
He was a suitable case
A suitable case
A suitable case for
Aaragghh.
Martian mother and Venusian father
But I tadpoled out of the shaving lather
Here come the State chewing Gandhi on toast
Send your subscriptions to the Rolly-Poly Ghost
He’s an accusable suit
An unstable goose
A two-sable sake for
Raarhh.
A Machine That Makes Love and Poems and Mistakes
The whirring stops, the door in my chest
Slides open. Fatty squeezes out
Smiling like silver. An airliner staircase
Appears under his first step. He podges down
Applauding himself with padded palms.
Next Jagged, wearing his frayed-wire suit,
Scales my legs, jerks through the door and pulls
My starting handle. Thought-gears grind.
He’s muddled, pressing all my buttons
Too hard. Not hard enough. His blood is caffeine.
He exits limping, gladly. Then he flops
Prone on the tarmac, hiding his splintered eyes.
A milk-faced boy of five who sings to himself
As he tries to play tunes with knobs and levers.
I’ve got other mechanics. Sometimes they fight
Over my delicate controls. They strike,
Or try to make me fly. They blow my fuses.
Just now I didn’t answer. You caught me between shifts.
Ask again now. Someone will answer you.
Toy Stone
I dived and found it.
A wedge of stone,
Grey mixed with the mauve
Of sky before snow.
Flakes of crystal
Shining among its mineral clouds.
Now and again I look at the stone,
Convert it into the relief map
Of a nude island or the night sky.
Or use it as a racquet
For bouncing light into my eyes.
Today I took it with my eyes shut.
Turning the stone between my hands
I learned
That it shares the shape and weight
Of a small pistol.
Now it has a barrel,
A chamber and a butt.
Held by the barrel, it could be used
To bash almost anything to death.
Stone-shine is in my head,
But so is the killing weight of the stone.
Toy stone, weapon stone.
I will keep it.
Unfulfilled Suicide Note
because there is a golden plastic arrow on the desk in front of me
because my stomach is heavy and drags downwards
because I cannot find anything
because I cannot understand anything
because I am afraid of everyone
because there is a small amount of snow on the ground outside
And Some Lemonade Too
Drinking gin eating curry
That’s my second favourite game
Begin feeling hollow
Then you sip and swallow
Till they start to taste about the same
Well gin got a bite
Curry got a burn
Try to teach your tongue to take them in turn
Drinking gin eating curry
Shoobi doobi wah wah
Drinking gin eating curry
Feeling my way to my ease
When the curry was dead
The gin hit my head
Till I fell down on my knees
Curry’s ambrosia
Gin is the elixir
I am the champion concrete-mixer
Eating gin drinking curry
Shoobi doobi wah wah
Drinking gin eating curry
Gulped down all my trouble
Spent a magical sleep
In a happy old heap
And woke up with chutney-flavour alcohol stubble
Took a look at heaven
Took a look at hell
Reckoned I fancied them equally well
Sinking gin and beating curry
Wah wah shoobi doobi wah wah wah
It’s a Clean Machine
(to the Beatles and Albert Hunt)
A cop needs a gangster, gangsters need cops,
Fire against fire and it never stops,
But I don’t want a fire, I’ve got underskin heating
Thank you.
They know what we’re afraid of:
Soundproof cellars, rhinoceros hide,
Genital electrodes, kneecap sledgehammers,
The moment when they take off your shoes –
All of the commonplace terrors.
But I won’t name my own special f
ears,
Thank you.
I have been a one-man band to the galaxies over Bradford
As I skated over the rust-coloured pavements singing:
Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me
A four-legged friend, a four-legged friend, he’ll never let you down.
Oh you can knock me down, stamp on my face, slander my name all over the place
But we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when –
There is a laughing policeman, lives along our street,
You can hear him laughing, when he’s on the beat –
Oh R, I say R-A,
R-A-T, R-A-T-T,
R-A-T-T-F, R-A-T-T-F-I-N-K,
Ratfink (brawawa) Ratfink (brawawa),
Mona Lisa Mona Lisa men have named you
So squeeze my lemon baby till the juice runs down my leg –
Singing dangerously
As I bulged with the dynamite sticks of love.
They never caught me yet, but they keep trying.
It happens every day.
I’m standing down the lavatory end
Of a shadow-inhabited bar
When in walks the winter gangster-cop
And everyone he passes is gripped by his metal hand
And they wince as the grip tightens
And their faces sag as the grip relaxes.
The loudspeaker says:
An invitation to the glittering world of Robert Farnon –
Then he acts.
His icicles focus on my eyes.
Capone or Fabian, he yawns.
His iced knees, like car bumpers,
persuade me to the glittering pavement
Where his wide-shouldered Mercedes waits to eat me.
So far, so bad.
But they never warned him at headquarters,
They never told him the end of the story,
They never told him the way it always ends.
For here they come, sudden surrounders,
All of them laughing, all around us,
The gentle, fire-fighting cavalry,
House-high on ladders, crouched to hydrants,
Flashing their scarlet down the boulevard,
Hoses jumping with the pressure of water from
A thousand Welsh waterfalls, a hundred thousand lochs,
Aiming their polished, jerking nozzles –
And here I wish I could record all of their names but they know who they are, the men and women and children I love and those who love me and may the two lists always coincide –
All my friends, crimson, helmeted, hatchet-holstered.
Their hoses slosh him down slush-flushing gutters and:
I’m sorry Adrian, I’m sorry, he drizzles,
I didn’t know you were a member of the Fire Brigade.
The Sun Likes Me
‘The sun likes me’ – Spanish way of saying ‘I like the sun’
The sun likes me.
Maybe I’ve been lying out in the Mayakovsky too long.
Maybe my mind’s been a breast-stroke commuter between London and
New York too long.
Maybe I’ve been longing too long.
The sun likes me.
Maybe it’s because my dynamic tension comic-strip bible hath taught me that it’s better to kick sand into the sunlight and watch how it shimmers than kick it in a twenty-stone muscleman’s face.
And maybe it’s because my atoms won’t stand still because they want to rock and roll all over the place –
But she taught me to say it.
I was near enough to lick her
And I licked her like the sun licks me and
WOW
She was a buxom anchovy.
Through both our sunrise sunset bodies I heard her say:
‘Repeat it after me –
The sun likes me.’
So I said it (and I believe it):
The sun likes me.
I woke up full of business.
After a two-day year at the Registry of Companies I discovered that a 61 per cent majority on the board of the sun was held by a holding company (Sol Investments) represented by Phoebus Nominees who were nominated by a legalistic fabrication called Icarus Consolidation half-immersed in liquidation.
And the only stockholder –
Thanks to Auntie Irma’s will –
The only stockholder
Was ME.
I seem to have changed.
The sun likes me.
I’m indifferent.
The sun doesn’t like me.
See if I care.
For like it or lump it,
I own it.
Last week I found I’d left my Barclaycard in Das Kapital but when the bill came round I simply reached into my asbestos wallet, produced the aforesaid golden disc or orb and you should have seen the faces of the waiters or their feet for that matter as they blushed to the colour of burnt semolina –
Because I own the sun,
The only one.
Mine, mine,
Sixty-one per cent of it,
MINE.
Self Critic
who is it trips me in the jig?
she wears a cast-iron dress
and growls because i can’t recall her name –
my heavy-heartedness.
it’s Radio 2, it’s after-flu,
it’s the Water Board’s statement to the Press,
it’s the sonic boom above the toothache room –
my heavy-heartedness.
got a weighty parcel shaped like awkwardness
wrapped in slippery plastic stuff.
trying to get my hands to clasp around it
but my arms aren’t quite lengthy enough.
everybody thinks i’m carrying a bomb
but it’s a book from a beautiful press.
oh the rain gets chiller and the buses get fuller
and the forecast – heavy-heartedness.
who’s that extra-awful character in my plays
from the SS Officer’s Mess
who makes hour-long speeches that you can’t quite hear?
my heavy-heartedness.
so if I sink in the drink and sing Sentimental Journey
and then clown and fall down in a mess,
i’m just trying to kick that gangster out of my soul –
my heavy-heartedness.
Adrian Mitchell’s Famous Weak Bladder Blues
Now some praise God because he gave us the bomb to drop in 1945
But I thank the Lord for equipping me with the fastest cock alive.
You may think a sten-gun’s frequent, you can call greased lightning fast,
But race them down to the Piccadilly bog and watch me zooming past.
Well it’s excuse me,
And I’ll be back.
Door locked so ra-a-tat-tat.
You mind if I go first?
I’m holding this cloudburst.
I’ll be out in 3.7 seconds flat.
I’ve got the Adamant Trophy, the Niagara Cup, you should see me on the M1 run,
For at every comfort station I’ve got a reputation for – doing the ton.
Once I met that Speedy Gonzales and he was first through the door.
But I was unzipped, let rip, zipped again and out before he could even draw.
Now God killed John Lennon and he let Barry Manilow survive,
But the good Lord blessed little Adrian Mitchell with the fastest cock alive.
A Ballad of Human Nature
The Buddha sat on a banana crate
Sunning his mind in the shade,
Trying to imagine Aggressive,
Trying to imagine Afraid.
A man staggered up to the Buddha,
He was horrified and thin.
He was hacking with a knife at his body,
Paring his own skin.
The Buddha said: ‘Be kind to yourself.’
The thin man lowered his knife;
Then he said, as his blood ran into the earth:
‘Where’ve you been all your life?
‘You know, you can’t change human nature just like that.
I once saw it proved in a book by a scientist’s rat.
We’re jellies shaking with atavistic greed.
You can’t change human nature – you may as well bleed.’
This Friend
I’ve got this friend you see and it was the Cuba crisis and the voices were telling him that there was a plot to set the world on fire and so he shook his way round London lurching deliberately into policemen so they took him in and they knocked out his front teeth and all the time they were knocking out his front teeth they were calling him SIR and after he had been in Brixton for a week or maybe more he doesn’t remember they decided he was mad.
This friend now carries a certificate which guarantees that he is schizophrenic.
Birthdays
(for Ray Charles)
You shout that you’re drowning,
You give it everything.
A manager walks by and says:
‘That little cat can sing.’
You go to bed mad
And you think that’s bad
But what you going to do
When you wake up mad?
There’ll be no more birthdays.
I’m talking about
Pain man and fear man and shock man and death man,
Not the Hollywood kind.
I’m talking about
Man made of bone made of wood made of stone
By some Frankenstein.
Talking about