Or Something
Selfepitaphs
FOR THE AFRICAN CENTURY
Here in My Skin of Many Colours
The Radio Thief
African Elephants
The Beautiful Ghosts
A Song for Thabo Mbeki
A Poem for Nomtha
SHOWSONGS
Shake My Soul
Four Windows
Orpheus Sings
The People Walking
Saint Lover’s Day
Tissue Paper Flowers
Last Thing
from THE SHADOW KNOWS Poems 2000-2004
William Blake Says: Every Thing That Lives Is Holy
THE SHADOW IN WARTIME
The Shadow Poet Laureateship
Unjubilee Poem
Anti-Establishment Poet Is Difficult, Court Told
A Refusal to Write a Royal Elegy
Back to the Happidrome
No More War
Human Beings
The Operation
Roundabout
Playground
The Famous Battle
Shadow Speeches
All the Light There Is
When They Tell You to Go to War
Work to Do
ENGLANDING
Englanding
Fun in World War Two
Banned for Six Months
In a Brown Paper Bag
To Somebody Considering Suicide
for mental patients
Doctor Rat Explains
ARTEFACTIONS
Misery Me
What Poetry Says
Blake on His Childhood Visions
King Lear’s Fool Waves Goodbye
A Sense of Complicity: Advertising Supplement
Advertising Will Eat the World
Rest in Peace, Andy Warhol. Enjoy.
Pioneers, O Pioneers!
The Café Kafka
AUTOMAGIC
Memoirs
Her Life
Disguise
Sorry
Thanks to My Dog in an Hour of Pain
Pour Soul
Not Fleeing But Flying
IN THE OUTLANDS
The Ballad of the Familiar Stranger
Every Day Is Mothering Sunday to Me
Rosaura’s Song
The Knife-thrower’s Slender Daughter
Philosophical Agriculture
ON BOARD THE FRIENDSHIP
For Dick and Dixie Peaslee
How William Blake Dies a Good Death
For Miranda and Tom
A Song for Maeve
Seventy More Years
to all our friends
from TELL ME LIES Poems 2005-2008
IVERS RUN THROUGH IT
or Waterworking
West End Blues
Five Walks
Sad Walk
Glad Walk
Bad Walk
Dad Walk
Mad Walk
CITY SONGS
or Don’t Mutter in the Gutter
The Baby on the Pavement
The Dirty Smokers
Live It Like Your Last Day
THE REALLY GOOD OLD DAYS
or The Underbelly of History
About the Child Murderer Marie Farrar
The Plays What I Wrote by Shakespeare
ENJOY THE LIGHT
Love, friendship and sheep
Enjoy the Light
Death Is Smaller Than I Thought
Our Mother
Our Father
Early Daze
Beattie as Smike
Edward Lear’s Imagination
A Visit to Ivor
With Love for Mike Westbrook
Sheepishly
A WALK ON THE WEIRD SIDE
or Better Out Than In
This Morning’s Dream
Wongo the Wonder Dog
Ghosts on the Line
TELL ME LIES
or Truth-Ache in the Anglo-American Empire
At the Crossroads
Tigers and Monkeys
The Doorbell
Peacetime Haiku
Dust And Ashes
The Question
Is it all right to Kill People?
Peace and Pancakes
To Whom It May Concern Remix
MY LITERARY CAREER SO FAR
Adrian Mitchell: Select Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
COME ON EVERYBODY
from
HEART ON THE LEFT
POEMS 1953-1984
MY FAVOURITE ARCHIPELAGO
To You
One: we were swaddled, ugly-beautiful and drunk on milk.
Two: cuddled in arms always covered by laundered sleeves.
Three: we got sand and water to exercise our imaginative faculties.
Four: we were hit. Suddenly hit.
Five: we were fed to the educational system limited.
Six: worried by the strange creatures in our heads, we strangled some of them.
Seven: we graduated in shame.
Eight: World War Two and we hated the Germans as much as our secret bodies, loved the Americans as much as the Russians, hated killing, loved killing, depending on the language in the Bible in the breast pocket of the dead soldier, we were crazy-thirsty for Winston Superman, for Jesus with his infinite tommy-gun and the holy Spitfires, while the Japanese hacked through the undergrowth of our nightmares – there were pits full of people-meat – and the real bombs came, but they didn’t hit us, my love, they didn’t hit us exactly.
My love, they are trying to drive us mad.
So we got to numbers eight, nine, ten, and eleven,
Growing scales over every part of our bodies,
Especially our eyes,
Because scales were being worn, because scales were armour.
And now we stand, past thirty, together, madder than ever,
We make a few diamonds and lose them.
We sell our crap by the ton.
My love, they are trying to drive us mad.
Make love. We must make love
Instead of making money.
You know about rejection? Hit. Suddenly hit.
Want to spend my life building poems in which untamed
People and animals walk around freely, lie down freely
Make love freely
In the deep loving carpets, stars circulating in their ceilings,
Poems like honeymoon planetariums.
But our time is burning.
My love, they are trying to drive us mad.
Peace was all I ever wanted.
It was too expensive.
My love, they are trying to drive us mad.
Half the people I love are shrinking.
My love, they are trying to drive us mad.
Half the people I love are exploding.
My love, they are trying to drive us mad.
I am afraid of going mad.
Icarus Schmicarus
If you never spend your money
you know you’ll always have some cash.
If you stay cool and never burn
you’ll never turn to ash.
If you lick the boots that kick you
then you’ll never feel the lash
at least you’ll never crash.
So why why why –
WHAT MADE YOU THINK YOU COULD FLY?
C’mon Everybody
There’s a grand old dance that’s rockin the nation
Shake your money and shut your mouth
Taking the place of copulation
S’called The Bourgeois.
See that girl with the diamond thing?
Shake your money and shut your mouth
Didn’t get that by picketing
She done The Bourgeois.
Do-gooder, do-gooder where you been?
Shake your money and shut your m
outh
Done myself good, got a medal from the Queen
For The Bourgeois.
Is it a singer? No.
Is it a lover? No.
Is it a bourgeois? Yeaaah!
Wave your missile around the vault
Shake your money and shut your mouth
Somebody suffers well it ain’t your fault
That you’re Bourgeois.
I play golf so I exist
Shake your money and shut your mouth
Eye on the ball and hand over fist
I do The Bourgeois.
Five days a week on the nine-eleven
Shake your money and shut your mouth
When we die we’ll go to Bournemouth
Cos we’re Bourgeois.
To Nye Bevan Despite His Change of Heart
Because I loved him
I believe that somebody dropped blood-freezing powder
Into the water-jug of vodka Nye Bevan swigged
Before he asked us:
Do you want Britain to go naked to the conference table?
A difficult question.
Whoever saw Britain naked?
Britain bathes behind locked doors
Where even the loofah is subject to the Official Secrets Act.
But surely Britain strips for love-making?
Not necessarily.
An analysis of British sexual response
Proves that most of the United Kingdom’s acts of love
Have been undertaken unilaterally.
There have been persistently malicious rumours
From Africa and Asia
That Britain’s a habitual rapist
But none of the accusers have alleged
That Britain wore anything less than full dress uniform
With a jangle of medals, bash, bash,
During the alleged violations.
So do you want Britain to go naked to the conference table?
Britain the mixed infant,
Its mouth sullen as it enters its second millennium
Of pot-training.
Britain driven mad by puberty,
Still wearing the uniform of Lord Baden-Powell
(Who was honoured for his services to sexual mania).
Britain laying muffins at the Cenotaph.
Britain, my native archipelago
Entirely constructed of rice pudding.
So do you want Britain to go naked to the conference table?
Yes. Yes Nye, without any clothes at all.
For underneath the welded Carnaby
Spike-studded dog-collar groincrusher boots,
Blood-coloured combinations
And the golfing socks which stink of Suez,
Underneath the Rolls Royce heart
Worn on a sleeve encrusted with royal snot,
Underneath the military straitjacket
From the Dead Meat Boutique –
Lives
A body
Of incredibly green beauty.
I Tried, I Really Tried
Mesh-faced loudspeakers outshouted Fleet Street,
Their echoes overlapping down Shoe Lane
And Bouverie Street, pronouncing:
WASH YOURSELF POET.
Blurred black police cars from the BBC
Circled me blaring: WASH YOURSELF POET
AND DON’T FORGET YOUR NAVEL.
My ears were clogged with savoury gold wax
And so I failed WASH to hear at first WASH.
WASH WASH YOURSELF
Since I was naked and they wore
Chrome-armoured cars and under the cars man-made fibre suits and under the suits Y-front pants and under the pants official groin protectors and under the groin protectors automatics,
I obediently ran to the city’s pride,
The Thames, that Lord Mayor’s Procession of mercury,
And jumped from Westminster Bridge.
Among half-human mud I bathed
Using a dead cat for a loofah,
Detergent foam for gargle.
I dived, heard the power station’s rumble and the moan of sewers.
The bubbles of my breath exploded along the waterskin.
Helmeted in dead newspapers, I sprang
Into the petrol-flavoured air
And Big Ben, like a speak-your-weight machine
Intoned WATCH YOURSELF POET.
Clothed in the muck of London, I yelled back:
I HAVE BEEN WASHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE THAMES,
BIG BROTHER, AND FROM NOW ON I SHALL USE NO OTHER.
Nostalgia – Now Threepence Off
Where are they now, the heroes of furry-paged books and comics brighter than life which packed my ink-lined desk in days when BOP meant Boys’ Own Paper, where are they anyway?
Where is Percy F. Westerman? Where are H.L. Gee and Arthur Mee? Why is Edgar Rice (The Warlord of Mars) Burroughs, the Bumper Fun Book and the Wag’s Handbook? Where is the Wonder Book of Reptiles? Where the hell is The Boy’s Book of Bacteriological Warfare?
Where are the Beacon Readers? Did Rover, that tireless hound, devour his mon-o-syll-ab-ic-all-y correct family? Did Little Black Sambo and Epaminondas shout for Black Power?
Did Peter Rabbit get his when myxomatosis came around the second time, did the Flopsy Bunnies stiffen to a standstill, grow bug-eyed, fly-covered and then disintegrate?
Where is G.A. Henty and his historical lads – Wolfgang the Hittite, Armpit the Young Viking, Cyril who lived in Sodom? Where are their uncorrupted bodies and Empire-building brains, England needs them, the Sunday Times says so.
There is news from the Strewelpeter mob. Johnny-Head-In-Air spends his days reporting flying saucers, the telephone receiver never cools from the heat of his hand. Little Harriet, who played with matches, still burns, but not with fire. The Scissor-man is everywhere.
Babar the Elephant turned the jungle into a garden city. But things went wrong. John and Susan, Titty and Roger, became unaccountably afraid of water, sold their dinghies, all married each other, live in a bombed-out cinema on surgical spirits and weeds of all kinds.
Snow White was in the News of the World – Virgin Lived With Seven Midgets, Court Told. And in the psychiatric ward an old woman dribbles as she mumbles about a family of human bears, they ate porridge, yes Miss Goldilocks of course they did.
Hans Brinker vainly whirled his silver skates round his head as the jackboots of Emil and the Detectives invaded his Resistance Cellar.
Some failed. Desperate Dan and Meddlesome Matty and Strang the Terrible and Korky the Cat killed themselves with free gifts in a back room at the Peter Pan Club because they were impotent, like us. Their audience, the senile Chums of Red Circle School, still wearing for reasons of loyalty and lust the tatters of their uniforms, voted that exhibition a super wheeze.
Some succeeded. Tom Sawyer’s heart has cooled, his ingenuity flowers at Cape Kennedy.
But they are all trodden on, the old familiar faces, so at the rising of the sun and the going down of the ditto I remember I remember the house where I was taught to play up play up and play the game though nobody told me what the game was, but we know now, don’t we, we know what the game is, but lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us arseprints on the sands of time, but the tide’s come up, the castles are washed down, where are they now, where are they, where are the deep shelters? There are no deep shelters. Biggles may drop it, Worrals of the Wraf may press the button. So Billy and Bessie Bunter, prepare for the last and cosmic Yarooh and throw away the Man-Tan. The sky will soon be full of suns.
So Don’t Feed Your Dog Ordinary Meat,
Feed Him Pal, Pal Meat for Dogs,
P-A-L, Prolongs Active Life
(Enriched with Nourishing Marrowbone Jelly)
My bird had a grin like a water-melon,
My bird was a hopeless case.
She wanted to look like Elvis Presley
So she paid a man to wipe the
smile off her face,
He was
My friend the plastic surgeon
Your friend the plastic surgeon
Your friendly neighbourhood plastic surgeon
(Enriched with nourishing marrowbone jelly).
My mate was a dirty little Fascist,
They shouted him down when he cursed the Jews,
And nobody recognised his patriotic motives
Till he hired a man to explain his views,
He got
My friend the public relations man
Your friend the PRO
Your friendly neighbourhood public relations man
(Enriched with nourishing marrowbone jelly).
My dad was a nervy sort of navvy
He insured his job and his life and me
Fire, flood, suicide and acts of God,
And then he insured his insurance policy,
He paid
My friend the man from the Prudential
Your friend the man from the Pru
Your friendly neighbourhood man from the Prudential
(Enriched with nourishing marrowbone jelly).
My mum spent her life watching telly
Till the Epilogue told her that her soul would burn.
Now she’s got peace of mind and she still does nothing
For she pays one-tenth of all we earn
To
My friend the Anglican clergyman
Your friend the clergyman
Your friendly neighbourhood Anglican clergyman
(Enriched with nourishing marrowbone jelly).
The plastic surgeon and the public relations man,
The man from the Prudential and the man from God –
Pals, pals, every one a pal.
P-A-L,
Prolongs Active Life
(Enriched with nourishing marrowbone jelly).
Time and Motion Study
Slow down the film. You see that bit.
Seven days old and no work done.
Two hands clutching nothing but air.
Two legs kicking nothing but air.
That yell. There’s wasted energy there.
No use to himself, no good for the firm.