*
Are you bored by pictures of burning people?
You will be bored to death.
They did the dying.
You did nothing.
Not a gesture, not a word, not a breath,
Not a flicker of one line of your face.
You said: There is nothing I can do.
As you said it you seemed so proud.
*
There was a wretched danced with a wretched
The music began to burn.
*
In the chapel-cold porridge of fear
Crouched the spirit of Edward Lear
Through the hole in his head
His agony bled
Till he changed to a Whale
And spouted a hail –
Cholomondley Champagne and the best Babylonian Beer.
*
To Ian Hamilton and A. Alvarez, Poetry Reviewers –
Get your blue hands
off the hot skin of poetry
*
(to dogmatic men and automatic dogs)
I’m an entrist, centrist, Pabloite workerist
– Sweet Fourth International and never been kissed,
I’ve got a mass red base that’s why I’d rather sit on the floor,
If you want to be a vanguard, better join Securicor.
My daddy was opportunistic
My mama was mystified
I want to be a movement
But there’s no one on my side…
NO REVOLUTION WITHOUT COMPASSION
NO REVOLUTION WITHOUT COMPASSION
*
Never look out
You might see something bigger than you
Never go out
You might get your iambics dirty
Wine is a river
Flowing down to sleep
So climb in the boat
With your legitimate wife
No sharks No storms
No underwater explosions
Never look out
The sun might punch you in the eye –
Say home.
*
I pulled on my solid granite gargoyle suit, borrowed a hunch from
Sherlock Holmes and swung down from the turrets of Notre
Dame just in time to rescue the naked Andromeda who was
chained to King Kong in the middle of Red Square,
Milwaukee.
Mark Antony immediately denounced me to a mob of Transylvanian
peasants, who hurried me to the nearest oasis for a good
guillotining.
Luckily for me the Flying Nun was power-diving down for a
suicide raid on Moby Dick.
She noticed my plight, shot out a tentacle and scooped me into an
echo chamber full of Dusty Springfields, thus foiling the
machinations of Edgar Allen Fu Manchu, the Jackdaw of Zenda.
So you will understand why I am delighted to be here tonight to
introduce a fourth member of fiction’s Trolleybus Trinity –
ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for Miss Marlene Brontë.
*
At the end of each adventure
Mighty Mouse stands, arms folded, on a pedestal,
Cheered by a crowd of infant mice.
Every Sunday
God is praised
In several million churches.
Mighty Mouse saved us from the Monster Cat!!!!
*
In case the atmosphere catches on fire
The first thing to do will be to burn
My brain socialist
My heart anarchist
My eyes pacifist
My blood revolutionary
*
The man who believes in giraffes would swallow anything.
There’s been nothing about ostriches in the papers for months,
somebody’s either building an ostrich monopoly or
herding them into concentration camps.
Butterflies fly zigzag because they want to fly zigzag.
I have looked into a hedgehog’s face and seen nothing but goodness.
A huge ram stamps his foot – a million sheep charge and occupy
the Bradford Wool Exchange.
pip
pop
pip
pop
pip pip pip
pop
i am either a sound poet
or a bowl of Rice Crispies
*
(to a friend who killed himself)
All that pain
double-bulging under your forehead
I wish you could have taken
a handful of today’s Yorkshire snow
and pressed it to that pain.
You rummaged for peace
in the green country, in the eye of the sun,
in visions of Tibet,
brain-shaking drugs, black magic,
police stations, among the stones,
beneath the stones.
But the stones, which seemed so calm,
screamed into life in your hurt hands.
Simpler than you
I simply wish you were alive
walking among this snowfall.
I’m glad that all your pain is dead.
*
Your breath is like deodorant, your blood like Irish lager,
Your idea of paradise an infinite Forsyte Saga,
Your head belongs to Nato and your heart to the Playboy Club,
You’re the square root of minus zero, playing rub-a-dub-dub in a Fleet Street pub.
Sit tight in your tower of money…
You’ve got a problem of identity, ooh what an intellectual shame,
You’ve got a million pseudonyms and can’t recall your maiden name,
You cannot tell your face from your arse or your supper from your sex,
But you always remember who you are when it comes to signing cheques –
Sit tight in your tower of money…
In case England catches on fire
The first thing to do will be to form a committee
To organise a weekend seminar
On Little-Known Conflagrations in Italian History
Or The Rise and Fall of the Safety Match in Literature and Life.
*
Many thin men
saying: No.
But of course we’ve got to inside-out ourselves
and splash around in our own juice,
and the juice can’t shine if you don’t throw it up into the light,
and of course you’re hard to hit if you keep dancing
and harder to hit if you make up your own dance as you dance,
and of course Tarzan is more exciting than Anthony Trollope
because he can MOVE, swinging through jungles of clubfooted prose,
into your eye and out your navel,
and of course there’s no perfect music,
no perfect words,
only the ridiculous beauty of man and woman
silly with each other,
pulling off their skins and swinging them round their heads,
becoming incredible fountains upon legs –
Many thin men
saying: No.
*
There’s a factory for making factories,
A sinking pool for learning to drown,
A university like a pencil sharpener
To whittle you down to a pinpoint.
There’s a mean old weather machine
Churning out crapstorms
And a generation gap between
Me and what I used to be.
But the cities of horror,
Skull pavements, murder girders –
They’re going to crumble away in our hands.
*
The ice-cubes in my bloodstream decided to melt today.
I’d buy a moustache like everyone else
But I’m too attached to golden syrup.
There are hailston
es big as hailstones, but I’m sure
They’re not aimed at me.
Yes, Timbuctoo. I suddenly want to go to Timbuctoo.
*
Grass pours down the hillside.
The stone wall gradually turns green.
A dead tree can keep its balance for years.
*
You can’t win
Mary Queen of Scots invented high-heel shoes to make herself
look taller they cut her bloody head off. (John Walton)
Suddenly it hits me that it’s May Day and I hadn’t even noticed it was April,
And was gazing over the floodlit fields at a group of socially-minded cows,
And laughing to myself about the time Allen Ginsberg bared his arse to the people in a whizzing-by train,
And marking passages in a book of Fidel Castro’s speeches –
Quote – And then you hear a revolutionary say: They crushed us,
They organised 200 radio programmes, so many newspapers, so many magazines, so many TV shows, so many of this and so many of that – and one wants to ask him,
What did you expect?
That they would put TV, radio, the magazines, the newspapers, the printing shops –
All this at your disposal?
Or are you unaware that these are the instruments of the ruling class
Designed explicitly for crushing the Revolution? – unquote.
And I was also thinking of the pirhana fish grinning in the depths of my bank manager’s soul,
And I was looking through the BBC Folk Club magazine and trying to imagine the BBC Folk,
And I was looking forward to a bit of bed with Celia in the afternoon,
And my eyes kept returning to a letter from the poet Tim Daly,
Liquid blue handwriting between strict blue lines,
His words saying – quote –
As a whole, the support I have received has amazed me,
I had anticipated only antagonism.
Love be praised, I was wrong – unquote –
And I look again at his address:
Her Majesty’s Prison, County Road, Maidstone, Kent.
Tim, aged twenty-one, who took his petrol bombs
To the Imperial War Museum
Because the Museum was teaching children war…
And so when it suddenly hits me that it’s been May Day all day
And I should be feeling solidarity,
I think yes so I should, and yes I do, and so yes I write this down
As a demonstration of solidarity –
With the cows, who have now moved on,
With Allen Ginsberg, who has now moved on,
With Fidel Castro as he moves socialism onwards,
With Celia who moves me as we move together,
And with Tim Daly the poet,
Locked away for four years
So that England may be safe for the dead.
Back in the Playground Blues
I dreamed I was back in the playground, I was about four feet high
Yes dreamed I was back in the playground, standing about four feet high
Well the playground was three miles long and the playground was five miles wide
It was broken black tarmac with a high wire fence all around
Broken black dusty tarmac with a high fence running all around
And it had a special name to it, they called it The Killing Ground
Got a mother and a father, they’re one thousand years away
The rulers of The Killing Ground are coming out to play
Everybody thinking: ‘Who they going to play with today?’
Well you get it for being Jewish
And you get it for being black
Get it for being chicken
And you get it for fighting back
You get it for being big and fat
Get it for being small
Oh those who get it get it and get it
For any damn thing at all
Sometimes they take a beetle, tear off its six legs one by one
Beetle on its black back, rocking in the lunchtime sun
But a beetle can’t beg for mercy, a beetle’s not half the fun
I heard a deep voice talking, it had that iceberg sound
‘It prepares them for Life’ – but I have never found
Any place in my life worse than The Killing Ground.
The Swan
The anger of the swan
Burns black
Over ambitious eyes.
The power of the swan
Flexes steel wings
To batter feeble air.
The beauty of the swan
Is the sermon
Preached between battles.
Farm Animals
Clotted cream sheep
We troop in a dream
Through the steep deep wool
Of a yellow meadow
We are oblong and boring
We are all alike
Liking to be all alike
And the grass-like grass
Is alike, all alike, and all we think
Is grass grass grass
Yes grass is all we think
And all we do
Is wool
But that’s the deal, the ancient deal,
The wonderful deal between sheep and men
Men give grass
We come across with wool
That agreement was signed
On the green baize table in Eden
What would happen if we broke the contract?
Oh that would be mutiny, we would be punished
By being eaten, we would deserve to be eaten.
But of course we never rebel, so we are never eaten.
On the Verses Entitled ‘Farm Animals’
The stereotypical tra-a-avesty opposite
Purports to speak for sheep
Nothing could be more cra-a-assly human
Despite our similar coiffures
Each sheep’s a separate planet
With its own opinions and visions
All that we share is the furnace heart
Of all long-distance serfs
We’re hot and getting hotter
So shepherds, you better watch your flocks
A. Ram
Commuting the Wrong Way Round Early Morning
Caught the Gospel Oak train
At the dog-end of Tuesday night.
Camden Town darkness
Laying like gravy on a plate…
But at Liverpool Street Station
They’ve got a smudgey brand of blue daylight.
Here comes half the Essex population
Tensed up for their desky work.
I’m struggling up a waterfall –
Bubbling secretaries, rocky clerks.
For I’m off to Billericay
Like a sausage on a fork.
For My Son
‘The next best thing to the human tear’
ADVERTISING SLOGAN FOR AN EYEWASH
The next best thing to the human tear
Is the human smile
Which beams at us reflected white
For a lunar while.
But smiles congeal. Two eyes alight
With water cannot glow for long,
And a better thing than the human tear
Is the human song.
If cigarette or city burn
The smoke breaks into air.
So your breath, cries and laughter turn
And are abandoned there.
Once I had everything to learn
And thought each book had pretty pages.
Now I don’t even trust the sun
Which melts like butter through the ages.
Nevertheless, crack-voiced I’ll sing
For you, who drink the generous light
Till, fat as happiness, you sing
Your gay, immortal appetite.
I bring you air, food, grass and rain,
Show you the breast where you belong.
You take them all and sing again
Your human song.
Four Sorry Lines
Sixteen years old, and you would sneer
At a baby or a phoenix.
Mock on, mock on, in your blue-lidded splendour –
Most well-paid jobs are reserved for cynics.
Action and Reaction Blues
Further back you pull a bow-string
the further the arrow goes whooshin
Further back Maggie drags us
the further the revolution
Screws and Saints
What’s worse than the uniformed devils
When they trap you in a concrete hell?
The claws and boots of the angels
When you’re savaged in a golden cell.
New Skipping Rhymes
Good little Georgie
Worked like a madman
Three years at Oxford
Five years an Adman
Went on Mastermind
Did so well on that show
Now he’s the Host
Of a TV Chat Show
My savings are my baby
Money is my boss
My mummy and my daddy
Were profit and loss
One thousand, two thousand, three
thousand, four…
Meat on the hook