Powder in the jar
Mickey Jagger is a Star
S-T-A-R spells Star
He can whistle
He can hum
He can wriggle his umpumbum
Pretty little Pam
Passed her exam
What shall we give her?
Doughnuts with jam
Stupid little Sam
Failed his exam
What shall we give him?
Who gives a damn?
Staying Awake
Monday came so I fucked off to school
School is a big huge building
Where you’re not supposed to get any fucking sleep
We hung around till they counted us in a room
With pictures of fucking owls and bats
Then we hung around some more
Miss Harburton ponced in and yelled about
How her fucking bike’s gone missing who cares
Then we all fucked off to another room
It was Mister Collins from Outer Space
Talked about not leaving gum stuck around
And Queen Victoria up the Suez Canal
And how he wouldn’t let us act out
The Death of General Gordon again
Not ever and no he never saw Chainsaw Massacre
And no didn’t want to even free
On Goodgeman’s sexy mother’s video
And Beano Black said his mother was poorly
And started to give us the fucking grisly details
Saved by the bell and we hung around
Smoking in the bog and not getting any sleep
Then we all fucked off to another room
And it was Mrs Grimes Environmental Studies
So I finally got my fucking sleep.
I stay out of trouble but in my head
I’m bad I’m fucking bad as they come
When I die they’ll punish me
For the things I done in my fucking head.
They’ll send me off to a big huge building
And they won’t let me get any fucking sleep.
Well that’s what I reckon
Death is like fucking off
To another fucking school.
Bring Out Your Nonsense
A detective-sergeant walks into the police station
A woman with a floor at home inspects the carpet store
A train stops at the platform after deceleration
Librarians enter the library through the library door
Telephonists at the switchboard are answering telephones
A Telegraph reader buys the Telegraph from the paper shop
Cars drive, pedestrians walk and my heart groans
As out of the Billericay copshop steps a cop
But I’m wrong – the cop debags himself to give birth to a phoenix
Which zips down the High Street with Dizzy Gillespian squeals
And the silver and gold melts in all the jewellers’ windows
And the town is crotch-deep in whirlpools of syrup
And you sail over the horizon in a pea-blue schooner
Bearing the wild good news you sail bearing the good wild food
Over the horizon with a ton of friends playing magical banjoes
And the people of Billericay dance in delirious dozens
Give It to Me Ghostly
give it to me ghostly
close-up and long-distance
i’ve an open policy
of misty non-resistance
so give it to me ghostly
shudder up and lisp a
bogey-woman promise
to your will o’ the whisper
give it to me ghostly
spook it to me somehow
haunt me haunt me haunt me
oooo thanks i’ve come now
Bury My Bones with an Eddy Merckx
live people don’t often
have eyes for the overhead stars
but gloom down roads
in microwave cars
they dunno how the rippling
of the wild air feels
frowning round town
in tombs on wheels
but ghosts ride bikes
free-wheeling mostly
singing songs like
Give It To Me Ghostly
ghosts got no rooty-tooty
duty to be done
cars are for bloody business
bikes for fun
Remember Red Lion Square?
I haven’t heard any Moderates lately
Mention the name of Kevin Gateley,
The student who, so the Coroner said,
Died from ‘a moderate blow to the head’.
Ode to Her
You so draggy Ms Maggie
The way you drag us down
The way you shake your finger
Way you frown your frown
But a day’s soon dawning
When all the world will shout
We’re gonna catch yer Ms Thatcher
You’ll be dragged out
You so draggy Ms Maggie
You tore this land apart
With your smile like a laser
And your iceberg heart
You teach the old and jobless
What poverty means
You send the young men killing
The Irish and the Argentines
You so draggy Ms Maggie
With your million cuts
You slashed this country
Till it spilled its guts
You crucified parents
And their children too
Nailed ’em up by the million
Here’s what we’ll do
You so draggy Ms Maggie
Madonna of the Rich
We’re gonna introduce you
On the Anfield pitch
Oh you can talk your meanest
But you as good as dead
When Yosser Hughes butts you
With his poor old head…
On the Beach at Cambridge
I am assistant to the Regional Commissioner
At Block E, Brooklands Avenue,
Communications Centre for Region 4,
Which used to be East Anglia.
I published several poems as a young man
But later found I could not meet my own high standards
So tore up all my poems and stopped writing.
(I stopped painting at eight and singing at five.)
I was seconded to Block E
From the Ministry for the Environment.
Since there are no established poets available
I have come out here in my MPC
(Maximum Protective Clothing)
To dictate some sort of poem or word-picture
Into a miniature cassette recorder.
When I first stepped out of Block E on to this beach
I could not record any words at all,
So I chewed two of the orange-flavoured pills
They give us for morale, switched on my Sony
And recorded this:
I am standing on the beach at Cambridge.
I can see a group in their MPC
Pushing Hoover-like and Ewbank-like machines
Through masses of black ashes.
The taller men are soldiers or police,
The others, scientific supervisors.
This group moves slowly across what seems
Like an endless car park with no cars at all.
I think that, in one moment,
All the books in Cambridge
Leapt off their shelves,
Spread their wings
And became white flames
And then black ash.
And I am standing on the beach at Cambridge.
You’re a poet, said the Regional Commissioner,
Go out and describe that lot.
The University Library – a little hill of brick-dust.
King’s College Chapel – a dune of stone-dust.
The sea is coming closer and closer.
The clouds are edged with green,
Sagging low under some terrible weight.
They move more rapidly than usual.
Some younger women with important jobs
Were admitted to Block E
But my wife was a teacher in her forties.
We talked it over
When the nature of the crisis became apparent.
We agreed somebody had to carry on.
That day I kissed her goodbye as I did every day
At the door of our house in Chesterton Road.
I kissed my son and my daughter goodbye.
I drove to Block E beside Hobson’s Brook.
I felt like a piece of paper
Being torn in half.
And I am standing on the beach at Cambridge.
Some of the men in their MPC
Are sitting on the ground in the black ashes.
One is holding his head in both his hands.
I was forty-two three weeks ago.
My children painted me
Bright-coloured cards with poems for my birthday.
I stuck them with Blu-Tack on the kitchen door.
I can remember the colours.
But in one moment all the children in Cambridge
Spread their wings
And became white flames
And then black ash.
And the children of America, I suppose.
And the children of Russia, I suppose.
And I am standing on the beach at Cambridge
And I am watching the broad black ocean tide
Bearing on its shoulders its burden of black ashes.
And I am listening to the last words of the sea
As it beats its head against the dying land.
RELIGION, ROYALTY AND THE ARTS
The Liberal Christ Gives a Press Conference
I would have walked on the water
But I wasn’t fully insured.
And the BMA sent a writ my way
With the very first leper I cured.
I would’ve preached a golden sermon
But I didn’t like the look of the Mount.
And I would’ve fed fifty thousand
But the Press wasn’t there to count.
And the businessmen in the temple
Had a team of coppers on the door.
And if I’d spent a year in the desert
I’d have lost my pension for sure.
I would’ve turned the water into wine
But they weren’t giving licences.
But like – you know how it is.
I’m going to shave off my beard
And cut my hair,
Buy myself some bulletproof
Underwear
I’m the Liberal Christ
And I’ve got no blood to spare.
Miserable Sinners
Now I know that revolutionary Catholic priests have died fighting for freedom and socialism in South America, and Quaker schools are smashing, and Donald Soper’s all right in his place, and some of the sayings of Jesus are worthy of William Blake – but to hell with organised religion.
In Ireland, the basic human needs of liberty, equality and fraternity go to blazes while the two big local superstitions fight it out.
If the professionals in the churches believe in Christ, why don’t they work as he did? Jesus didn’t take scholarships so he could study to become a rabbi. He didn’t ask for a temple and a vicarage and a salary and a pension scheme. He didn’t push for exclusive propaganda rights in schools.
To Jesus, the Churches of England and Rome would have been strictly science fiction. Vast, rich propaganda machines, thriving on spiritual blackmail.
He worked differently. He told as much of the truth as he could until they killed him – like many other good men, religious and irreligious. I’ve met many people like that, most of them members of no church, most of them completely unknown.
If the churches cared for this world, they would extract their hooks from their people, disestablish, disperse and house the people instead of God. De-escalate organised religion and some of the most hopeless political situations in the world would become clearer, even soluble. Even Ireland. Even the Middle East.
If you detect personal bitterness in the above, you are damn right. I will declare my interest. For a few years I attended a school where evangelism was the dominant religion. We used to go to camp in North Wales for intensive Bible readings and declarations of conversion.
The message sank in deep, and the message was guilt. And the punishment for guilt was Hell. I was taught the ugliness and vileness of the body. I was taught terror. The Hell we were threatened with was the Hell of the sermon in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In short, we were children with no defences, and we were violated by holy Hitchcocks. It took me about fifteen years to shake off most of that fear and disgust. I don’t know what happened to the others.
Sure, this was an extreme case. Sure, it was way back in the nineteen-forties. But Frankenstein’s monster (alias the Church of Christ) keeps rolling along, crushing children as it rolls.
QUESTION: But what would you put in the place of organised religion?
ANSWER: Omnicreed.
QUESTION: What is Omnicreed?
ANSWER: A custom-built religion, which incorporates the most imaginative ideas of all religions and rejects the boring, terror-laden and anti-imaginative concepts.
QUESTION: Can you give me some examples?
ANSWER: You bet your sweet soul. The Anti-Imagination, known and rejected among Omnicreed initiates as The Brown Lump, embraces such concepts as the Sabbath, clergymen, popery, no popery and Cliff Richard in Westminster Abbey. On the other hand, Omnicreed awards its Good Church-keeping Certificate to such doctrines as The Immaculate Unction of Pope Joan, Nirvana as a Motel, the Bank of England Formation Dancing Team, Bulldozer Rallies, Calvin as the Inventor of Milk Chocolate, Nationalised Delicatessens, Zen Washing Lines and the Company of Dogs.
QUESTION: Have you got a light?
Sunday Poem
(to the Christians)
Eat this: God has a place,
Incense-deodorised, a vaulted mouth
Where the good dead always
Alleluia among towers of teeth.
Boring? In that honey of saliva?
They tell me male sharks come for seven
Or eight hours. Multiply forever –
You still can’t count the heaven of Heaven.
Eat this: God has another place,
A gaol-hole. Walls contract and crush
Necks on to legs, bellies into faces
And all parts in a constipated hash
Of cancered madmen, vomiting and skinned,
Skewered in flames which rot, restore and rot,
Breathing only the tear-gas of their sins –
That’s what the bad dead get.
Quite Apart from the Holy Ghost
I remember God as an eccentric millionaire,
Locked in his workshop, beard a cloud of foggy-coloured hair,
Making the stones all different, each flower and disease,
Pulling the Laps in Lapland, making China for the Chinese,
Laying down the Lake of Lucerne as smooth as blue-grey lino,
Wearily inventing the appendix and the rhino,
Making the fine fur for the mink, fine women for the fur,
Man’s brain a gun, his heart a bomb, his conscience – a blur.
Christ I can see much better from here,
And Christ upon the Cross is clear.
Jesus is stretched like the skin of a kite
Over the Cross, he seems in flight
Sometimes. At times it seems more true
That he is meat nailed up alive and pain all through.
But it’s hard to see Christ for priests. That happens when
A
poet engenders generations of advertising men.
The Eggs o’ God
Last Thursday God manifested himself as a barrage balloon with varicose veins and descended on the Vatican. I’m shrivelling, he shouted to the Pope, once I was bigger than the Universe but now I’m shrinking fast. The bulk of God lolled in St Peter’s Square, deflating soon to the size of a double-decker bus. Quick, cried God, before I vanish, one last request. When I’ve disappeared, put my eggs in a jar, keep in a cool place and run a world-wide search for a warm-hearted virgin. Let her hatch the eggs and then you’ll find –
But by now God is a hissing football, and now he is a grapefruit, now a grape, and now the grape has exploded and nothing is left in the Square but the Eggs of God.
Four Switzers armed with money-trowels shovelled the golden spawn into a lucent white container and bore it to the Papal fridge.
At two in the morning a whisky cardinal staggered in, his stomach growling for a snack. Unfortunately he fancied caviar…
The Pope has risen frae his bed
On his twa holy legs
And doon the marble staircase gaed
Tae see the sacred eggs
O wha has stolen the Eggs o’ God
Gae seek him near and far
O wha has stolen the Eggs o’ God