Frae the Gentleman’s Relish jar
Then up and spak the Cardinal
His voice was like a Boeing
O I hae eaten the Eggs o’ God
And I’m eight miles tall, and growing…
ROYAL POEMS
Another Prince Is Born
Fire off the bells, ring out wild guns,
Switch on the sun for the son of sons.
For loyal rubbernecks who wait
Stick a notice on the gate.
Thrill to frill and furbelow,
God Save Sister Helen Rowe.
Lord Evans, Peel, Hall and Sir John
Guard the cot he dribbles on.
An angel in a Hunter jet
Circles round his bassinet.
Inform The Times, Debrett, Who’s Who,
Better wake C. Day Lewis too.
Comes the parade of peers and peasants,
The Queen bears children, they bear presents –
Balls and toy guardsmen, well-trained parrots,
A regal rattle (eighteen carats),
And one wise man with myrrh-oiled hair
Brings a six-foot teddy bear
From the Birmingham Toy Fair.
Lying in State
He’s dead. Into the vault and out
Shuffles the reverent conga.
With his intestines taken out
He will stay sweeter longer.
Poem on the Occasion of the Return of
Her Majesty the Queen from Canada
Some love Jesus and some love brandy
Some love Schweitzer or the boys in blue
Some love squeezing that Handy Andy
But I love model airplane glue
Gloucester Gladiator
Super-Constellation
U2 U2 U2
I can see all of Russia from up here
Once upon a time I couldn’t leave the ground
My wings were warping and my props were through
No elastic could turn them round
Till I found model airplane glue
Supermarine Spitfire
Vickers Viscount
Junkers Junkie
Come fly with me
Take one sniff and my engines start
Second sniff I’m Blériot and Bader too
Holds me together when I’m flying apart
So I love model airplane glue
BOAC
El-Al
Sputnik
I am Eagle I am Eagle
Some love a copper and some love a preacher
Some love Hiroshima and Waterloo
Some love the Beatles and some love Nietzsche
But I love model airplane glue
A bit of wire
A rubber band
Balsa wood
That’s man
And a man needs glue.
My Shy Di in Newspaperland
(All the lines are quoted from the British Press on Royal Engagement day, the only slight distortions appear in the repeats of the four-line chorus. Written in collaboration with Alistair Mitchell.)
Who will sit where in the forest of tiaras?
She is an English rose without a thorn.
Love is in their stars, says Susie.
She has been plunged headfirst into a vast goldfish bowl.
Did she ponder as she strolled for an hour through Belgravia?
Will they, won’t they? Why, yes they will.
They said so yesterday.
He said: ‘Will you?’
She said: ‘Yes.’
So did his mother – and so say all of us.
Who will sit where in the head of the goldfish?
She is an English forest without a tiara.
Love is in their roses, says Thorny.
She has been plunged starsfirst into a vast susie bowl.
Most of the stories in this issue were written
By James Whitaker, the Daily Star man
Who has always known that Diana and Prince Charles would marry.
He watched them fishing on the River Dee –
And Lady Diana was watching him too.
She was standing behind a tree using a mirror
To watch James Whitaker at his post,
James Whitaker, the man who always knew.
Who will sit where in the stars of Susie?
She is an English head without a goldfish.
Love is in their forests, says Tiara.
She has been plunged rosefirst into a vast thorn bowl.
All about Di.
Shy Di smiled and blushed.
Lady Di has her eyelashes dyed.
My shy Di.
She descends five times from Charles II –
Four times on the wrong side of the blanket
And once on the right side.
Who will sit where in the rose of thorns?
She is an English star without a susie.
Love is in their heads, says Goldfish.
She has been plunged forestfirst into a vast tiara bowl.
Flatmate Carolyn Pride was in the loo
When she heard of the engagement.
‘Lady Diana told me through the door,’ she said last night.
‘I just burst into tears. There were floods and floods of tears.’
Who will sit where in the forest of tiaras?
She is an English rose without a thorn.
Love is in their stars, says Susie.
She has been plunged headfirst into a vast goldfish bowl.
THE ARTS
Goodbye
He breathed in air, he breathed out light.
Charlie Parker was my delight.
Jimmy Giuffre Plays ‘The Easy Way’
A man plodding through blue-grass fields.
He’s here to decide whether the grass needs mowing.
He sits on a mound and taps his feet on the deep earth.
He decides the grass doesn’t need mowing for a while.
Buddy Bolden
He bust through New Orleans
On his cornet night and day,
Buddy kept on stompin’
Till he was put away.
He chose his girls like kings do
And drank like earth was hell,
But when they tried to cut him
He played like Gabriel.
The notes shot out his cornet
Like gobs come off a ship.
You felt the air get tighter
And then you heard it rip.
They threw him in the bughouse
And took away his horn.
He hadn’t felt so mean since
The day that he was born.
Some say corn liquor done it
Or layin’ a bad whore
But I guess he blew so much out
He couldn’t think no more.
Bessie Smith in Yorkshire
As I looked over the billowing West Riding
A giant golden tractor tumbled over the horizon
The grass grew blue and the limestone turned to meat
For Bessie Smith was bumping in the driver’s seat.
Threw myself down on the fertilised ground and cried:
‘When I was a foetus I loved you, and I love you now you’ve died.’
She was bleeding beauty from her wounds in the Lands of Wrong
But she kept on travelling and she spent all her breathing on song.
I was malleted into the earth as tight as a gate-post
She carried so much life I felt like the ghost of a ghost
She’s the river that runs straight uphill
Hers is the voice brings my brain to a standstill
Black tracking wheels
Roll around the planet
Seeds of the blues
Bust through the concrete
My pale feet fumble along
The footpaths of her midnight empire
What to Do if You Meet Nijinsky
The special child
Remains a child
&nb
sp; Knowing that everything else
Is smaller, meaner and less gentle.
Watch the creature standing
Like a fountain in a photograph.
He’s moving carefully as a leaf
Growing in a hothouse.
What are the roots?
What is the stem?
What are the flowers?
Nijinsky
Dancing too much truth.
If you don’t kill Nijinsky
He’s going to turn you into Nijinsky.
You’ll live like a leaf, die like a leaf,
Like Nijinsky.
Sweet magical
Skinned
Alive
Animal
You must decide for yourself how you’re going to kill Nijinsky.
Leave him in the prison
They fit every contour of his skin exactly.
Leave him collapsing
In the foreign forest clearing
While the pine trees burn around him like a circle of matches.
Climb into your car and drive like a rocket right out of the world of feeling.
Leave Nijinsky dancing
The dance of lying very still
To the Statues in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
You stony bunch of pockskinned whiteys,
Why kip in here? Who sentenced you?
They are buying postcards of you,
The girls in safety knickers.
Tombfaces, glumbums,
Wine should be jumping out all of your holes,
You should have eyes that roll, arms that knock things over,
Legs that falter and working cocks.
Listen.
On William Blake’s birthday we’re going to free you,
Blast you off your platforms with a blowtorch full of brandy
And then we’ll all stomp over to the Houses of Parliament
And drive them into the Thames with our bananas.
Crusoe Dying in England
Always the seagulls cry on me
Weak from the waves. They tell me tales,
Say: Now you breathe the English sky;
You have been rescued from the toils
Of the black island. All the day
They speak fair times. But constantly
Caged in my chest a huge fowl wails
And screams the truth above the lie:
England is drowned. Old age despoils
My senses. I am cast away.
My body is a breathing weight
Obscenely formed to be my shame.
I cannot show it to the light
But hide it in my hollow room;
For now the rooted traps are set,
The springs are sour and my estate
Is lost to me. I have no name.
Thick grow the poison weeds, no flight
Is possible. The branches loom
Shining above with lazy sweat.
Fruit hangs and drops upon the hut
Endlessly from heavy trees.
I have no will to hook or net
Fantastic fish I used to prize.
Shuddering skies melt in the heat
To soak my limbs. My heart is shut
And locked to hope. My silly knees
Kissing the earth, let me forget
The ghosts who turn before my eyes,
Companions of sea and street.
We would go, swaggering and fine,
To rake the taverns of a port.
My storming friends, we loved in vain
For now your eyes are all put out.
Shackled along the rusty chains
Of thought, you are not truly mine.
Captives, but you will not be taught
To sing, or move, or speak again.
Bad air invades me from without
My friends lie sullen in my brains.
Crusoe? I am some other thing,
A city caught in evil days
Of plague and fire: I am a throng
Of shaking men: I am a race
Undone by fear, for I was born
In a cursed country. Who is King?
Who is the ruler of this shattered place
Myself? The Bible God? But strong
Crusoe is dead. I have no face;
An old mad god, my powers gone.
Whitman on Wheels
Fanfare: in transports over transport
I salute all passenger-carrying machines –
The admirable automobile, the glottal motor-cycle,
The womby capsule bound for Mars.
The tube train (see how well it fits its tube).
The vibrant diesel, the little engine that could
And all manner of airplanes whether they carry
Hostesses, hogs or horror.
Gargantuan traction engines.
Curmudgeonly diggers, bulldozers, dinosauric tank-tracked cranes.
Zoomers, splutterers, purrers and gliders
I salute you all,
And also the reliable tricycle.
Canine Canto
Dogs thurber through the whitman grass
On wild shakespearean excursions.
They have no waugh or corneille class
In their laurence sterne diversions.
They sniff blake blooms and patchen weeds,
Or walks on firm jane austen leads,
Formal pope gardens or the baudelaire room.
As for donne love, while going it,
They lawrence without knowing it.
Thank You Dick Gregory
King Lear kept shouting at his Fool:
‘These children squeeze, bruise and knot my arteries.
I ache and shake with fatherhood.
Sex can’t ache or shake me now
But bawdiness makes my old eyes shine.
So make me jokes that jump, and tumble,
A whole crowd of jokes, a courtful of pretty people jokes
So I can meet each one just once
And then forget, meeting another joke.’
But the Fool made a face like an expensive specialist,
He put one hand on the king’s pulse, one on his own heart
And said: ‘Your Majesty, you’re dying, man.’
Dick Gregory, the funny man, left the glad clapping hands
Of San Francisco, where tigers still survive,
To walk in the dust of Greenwood, Mississippi.
He walked as Gary Cooper used to walk
In Westerns, but Gregory walked blackly, seriously, not pretending.
He burned as Brando burns in movies
But the flames behind his eyes were black
And everything his eyes touched scorched.
His jokes crackled in the air,
Gags like Bob Hope’s, but these were armed and black.
Liberals realised that they were dwarfs,
Colonels got blisters, and Gregory laughed.
When Dick Gregory reached the South
They told him his two-month son was dead.
I heard that today.
I had to write and say:
Thank you Dick Gregory,
I send as much love as you will take from me,
My blackest and my whitest love.
King Lear is dying of your jokes,
Of your flames, of your tall walking –
Thank you Dick Gregory.
Lullaby for William Blake
Blakehead, babyhead,
Your head is full of light.
You sucked the sun like a gobstopper.
Blakehead, babyhead,
High as a satellite on sunflower seeds,
First man-powered man to fly the Atlantic,
Inventor of the poem which kills itself.
The poem which gives birth to itself,
The human form, jazz, Jerusalem
And other luminous, luminous galaxies
.
You out-spat your enemies.
You irradiated your friends.
Always naked, you shaven, shaking tyger-lamb,
Moon-man, moon-clown, moon-singer, moon-drinker,
You never killed anyone.
Blakehead, babyhead,
Accept this mug of crude red wine –
I love you.
For David Mercer
I like dancers who stamp.
Elegance
Is for certain trees, some birds,
Expensive duchesses, expensive whores,
Elegance, it’s a small thing
Useful to minor poets and minor footballers.
But big dancers, they stamp and they stamp fast,
Trying to keep their balance on the globe.
Stamp, to make sure the earth’s still there,
Stamp, so the earth knows that they’re dancing.
Oh the music puffs and bangs along beside them
And the dancers sweat, they like sweating
As the lovely drops slide down their scarlet skin
Or shake off into the air
Like notes of music.
I like dancers, like you, who sweat and stamp
And crack the ceiling when they jump.
Hear the Voice of the Critic
There are too many colours.
The Union Jack’s all right, selective,
Two basic colours and one negative,
Reasonable, avoids confusion.
(Of course I respect the red, white and blue)
But there are too many colours.
The rainbow, well it’s gaudy, but I am
Bound to admit, a useful diagram
When treated as an optical illusion.
(Now I’m not saying anything against rainbows)
But there are too many colours.
Take the sea. Unclassifiable.