The sky – the worst offender of all,
Tasteless as Shakespeare, especially at sunset.
(I wish my body were all one colour).
There are too many colours.
I collect flat white plates.
You ought to see my flat white plates.
In my flat white flat I have a perfect set,
(It takes up seven rooms).
There are too many colours.
The Ballad of the Death of Aeschylus
Eagle flying along
hey hey
Eagle flying along
Swinging his golden all along the hey hey sky
Tortoise rumbling along
hey hey
Tortoise rumbling along
Dreaming of salad if you want the hey hey truth
But that was one heap of an
Astigmatic eagle
Astigmatic eagle
The kind of person
Who looks at a tortoise
And believes he’s seeing casserole
Eagle swivelling down
hey hey
Eagle swivelling down
Clamping that tortoise into his beak
Dragging him up into a neighbouring cloud
And shutting the hey hey door
Aeschylus was steaming through Athens
Somewhere near the Parthenon Gents
It is believed
Aeschylus was steaming through Athens
Out to get his tragical propensities
relieved
That’s the hey hey set up so remember it love
Man down below and an eagle plus a tortoise up above
Better carve that message in a durable cheese
And let it learn you a bit of manners please
It wasn’t one of your charter flights
The eagle got Aeschylus in his sights
It was tortoise away and super-zap
Doing kerflumph and possibly BAP
Does anyone want a flat-headed tragedian?
Poor old bloody Aeschylus
hey hey
Poor old bloody Aeschylus
Come to that poor old bloody tortoise
Gaston the Peasant
Gaston liked being a peasant. He enjoyed all the things which peasants usually like, elemental things like being born, living and, something he looked forward to with oafish optimism, dying. Often, seated on a sack of blackened truffles in the steam of the peat fire, he would speak of these things:
‘We peasants are almost excessively privileged,’ he would vouch, in the expressive dialect of the Basques, ‘in that not only do we delight in the elemental joys of Mankind, but also in that we are denied the manifold responsibilities accorded will-he nill-he to the holder of high office.’
Gaston had lived a long time, seen much, known many, done little. He was sketched eating turnips by Van Gogh. D.H. Lawrence dropped in to talk to him about the blood. He once tried to cheer up Emile Zola. Orwell slept with his pigs for the experience. Ernest Hemingway borrowed his pitchfork He did not return. He did not return the pitchfork.
Lady Macbeth in the Saloon Bar Afterwards
It was all going surprisingly well –
Our first school matinee and we’d got up to
My sleepwalking scene with the minimum of titters…
Right, enter me, somnambulistically.
One deep sigh. Then some lout tosses
A banana on to the fore-stage.
It got a round? Darling, it got a thunderstorm!
Of course, we carried on, but suddenly
We had a panto audience
Yelling out: ‘Look out! He’s behind you!’
Murders, battles, Birnam Wood, great poetry –
All reduced to mockery.
The Bard upstaged by a banana.
Afterwards we had a flaming row in the Grenville
About just who should have removed it
And just when –
One of the servants, obviously.
And ever since, at every performance:
Enter myself in those exquisite ribbons
And – plomp – a new out-front banana.
Well, yes, it does affect all our performances
But actually, they seem to love it.
And how, now Ben’s in Canada
Doling out Wesker to the Eskimos,
Can we decide who exits with banana?
You can’t expect me to parade down here,
Do a sort of boob-baring curtsey and announce:
‘Is this a banana that I see before me?’
Anyway, darling, we may have egg on our faces –
But we’ve got a hit on our hands.
To the Organisers of a Poetry Reading by Hugh MacDiarmid
You chose the wrong place –
A neutral room with tawny blinds pulled down.
You pulled the wrong audience –
The gabbiest cultural bureaucrats in town.
You picked the wrong poet –
Too clever too daft too great for you to deserve his spittle
And you brought the wrong whisky
And you only bought him half a bottle.
Private Transport
round and round
his private roundabout
drives the little critic’s car –
a sneer on four square wheels
What the Mermaid Told Me
(for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the British Broadcasting Corporation.)
Every sentence in the middle section of the piece was broadcast by BBC TV during the period 13 July – 12 August 1972.
Strapped on my aqualung and flippered my way
To the bed of the electric ocean.
The water was flickering white and grey
And thick as calamine lotion.
Groped along the rocks till my hand came to rest
On the lukewarm pudding of a mermaid’s breast.
She was British, broad, corporate and fiftyish
With a hint of aristocracy
Her top was woman and her arse was fish
And this is what she said to me:
‘How dangerous are these cable cars?
We have a lot of fun on this show.
When is all this killing going to stop?
I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?
‘We are very environment-conscious
This is like a bloody Xmas grotto.
What if everyone else refused to obey
The laws of which they don’t approve?
‘What does Muswell Hill mean to you?
Will the ceasefire stick?
He was not the man to embarrass the police.
I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?
‘I came to an arrangement with him
To come up with 40 million dollars.
When I sing my songs you can’t sit still,
Your big toe shoot up in your boot.
‘If only women could get on with women
Like men get on with men.
It’s lovely for me to be sitting
In a seat like this again
‘Just in one day our lives were crushed.
I don’t want to be an old curmudgeon.
Are the five senses enough any more?
I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?
‘You’re doing to this country what Hitler failed to do.
Has he been the victim of a personal witch-hunt?
He makes no bones about carrying the can
For Rio Tinto Zinc.
‘There is going to be a very high attrition rate
In this field of 26 starters,
Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
We’ll kill ’em all or get back into Cambodia.
‘I’ve had people who’ve had conversion experiences
Following leucotomy.
You can never be certain of anything in Ireland.
I think they deserve
some applause, don’t you?
‘British public life is singularly free from any taint of corruption at all.
Our towns are almost ready to be destroyed, they are uninhabitable,
They are completely contrary to human life
The British found it necessary to intervene to protect their interests.
There are so few young women in Highbury who are in any way suitable
What has become of your traditional British phlegm and common sense?
We’re only giving the public what they want.
I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?’
The mermaid was ten thousand times as heavy as me
And the scales of her tail were moulting.
But since she was the hottest thing in the sea
She was also the least revolting.
I proposed a little sexual action
And she smiled (which was mostly gaps),
And she wriggled her satisfaction
As she whispered to me: ‘Perhaps.’
A Blessing for Kenneth Patchen’s Grave
may hummingbirds
forever hover over
white and purple domes of clover
Discovery
Unpopular, Tibetan and four foot two,
He ran an underground cocktail bar
Near the pit-face of a Congolese coal-mine.
Nobody would listen to his stories
So he scribbled them on the backs of beer-mats,
One sentence on each mat.
Because he hated coal
He wrote, mostly, about the sea.
Years later two critics from Cambridge
Spent their honeymoon at the same colliery.
They discovered a black chamber
Empty but for a hundred thousand beer-mats.
After years of beer-mat shuffling and transcription
The critics published the text
As The Fictional Works of Joseph Conrad.
Three cheers for the critics!
Three cheers for Cambridge!
Where would Joseph Conrad be without them?
Down the mine.
Where be Joseph Conrad?
Two hundred yards down in the same Congolese pit,
Serving mint juleps to the husky miners,
Speaking when he is spoken to.
There Are Not Enough of Us
How much verse is magnificent?
Point oh oh oh oh one per cent.
How much poetry is second-rate?
Around point oh oh oh oh eight.
How much verse is a botched hotch potch?
Ninety-eight per cent by my watch.
How much poetry simply bores?
None of mine and all of yours.
Oscar Wilde in Flight
motherofpearlcoloured feathers
preposterous wingspan
glides over earthscapes waterscapes icescapes
dropping a trail of surprise green blossoms
and archangel Oscar
rolls with laughter as he dives
through the sunset revolving door
of a cloud decked out like the Café Royal
only once in every thousand years
he downs a glass of liquid granite
and privately weeps with memory
for the butchers chopped his wings to stumps
and threw him into Reading Gaol
with the other amputees
he weeps for them
not for himself
then he shakes away his tears
and up he soars again
swinging his way
throughout the blue and white in happy flight
John Keats Eats His Porridge
It was hot enough to blister
The red paint of his mouth.
But if he let it lie there, glistening,
then clipped segments from the circumference,
it slid down like a soggy bobsleigh.
Grey as November, united as the kingdom,
but the longer he stared into that dish of porridge
the more clearly he traced
under the molten sugar
the outline of each flake of oatmeal…
When the milk made its slow blue-tinted leap from jug to bowl
the porridge became an island.
John’s spoon vibrated in his hand.
The island became a planet.
He made continents, he made seas.
This is strange porridge.
Eat it all up.
Forster the Flying Fish
Forster the Flying Fish
In a purple tank did dwell.
I say dwell, it sounds damper than ‘lived’
And also I would be the first to inform you
Were Forster the Flying Fish to be dead.
And ‘did dwell’ gives a quirky kind of antiquated
Twist of the wrist to the opening lines,
Good.
I mean the bones of this poem to show
And I make no bones about it.
Forster was named Forster by his master
After the liberal novelist.
Forster the Flying Fish was born to stunt,
At least he thought of himself as a stunt fish
But he never learned the knack of stunting.
Look, I promise you the critics will hate this poem.
They hate all poems they haven’t read already.
However, the audience of gentle, wealthy readers
Who drooled over Tarka the Otter, Hazel the Bunny,
Bebop the Hobbit and Dolly the Wet Hen –
Surely they will salute
Forster the Flying Fish,
The latest Literary animal hero.
Forster the Flying Fish
Had a sidekick –
A slick amphibian called Cissy the Coelacanth.
Together they paddled and lapped round the globe,
Righting the wrongs of the animal kingdom –
Forster taking care of war in the air,
Cissy looking after land jobs.
If you have intelligent pets
Ask them to complete this poem.
I’ve got stomach ache.
The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry
Back in the caveman days business was fair.
Used to turn up at Wookey Hole,
Plenty of action down the Hole
Nights when it wasn’t raided.
They’d see my bear-gut harp
And the mess at the back of my eyes
And ‘Right,’ they’d say, ‘make poetry.’
So I’d slam away at the three basic chords
And go into the act –
A story about the sabre-toothed tigers with a comic hero,
A sexy one with an anti-wife clubbing twist –
Good progressive stuff mainly,
Get ready for the Bronze Age, all that.
And soon it would be ‘Bring out the woad!’
Yeah, woad. We used to get high on woad.
The Vikings only wanted sagas
Full of gigantic deadheads cutting off each other’s vitals
Or Beowulf Versus the Bog People.
The Romans weren’t much better
Under all that armour you could tell they were soft
With their central heating
And poets with names like Horace.
Under the Normans the language began to clear
Became a pleasure to write in,
Yes, write in, by now everyone was starting
To write down poems.
Well, it saved memorising and improvising
And the peasants couldn’t get hold of it.
Soon there were hundreds of us
Most of us writing under the name
Of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Then suddenly we were knee-deep in sonnets.
Holinshed ran a headline:
BONANZA
FOR BARDS.
It got fantastic –
Looning around from the bear-pit to the Globe,
All those freak-outs down the Mermaid,
Kit Marlowe coming on like Richard the Two,
A virgin Queen in a ginger wig
And English poetry in full whatsit –
Bloody fantastic, but I never found any time
To do any writing till Willy finally flipped –
Smoking too much of the special stuff
Sir Walter Raleigh was pushing.
Cromwell’s time I spent on cultural committees.
Then Charles the Second swung down from the trees
And it was sexual medley time
And the only verses they wanted
Were epigrams on Chloe’s breasts
But I only got published on the back of her left knee-cap.
Next came Pope and Dryden
So I went underground.
Don’t mess with the Mafia.
Then suddenly – WOOMF –
It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al
And it didn’t matter how you wrote,
All the public wanted was a hairy great image.
Before they’d even print you
You had to smoke opium, die of consumption,
Fall in love with your sister
And drown in the Mediterranean (not at Brighton).
My publisher said: ‘I’ll have to remainder you
Unless you go and live in a lake or something
Like this bloke Wordsworth.’
After that there were about
A thousand years of Tennyson
Who got so bored with himself
That he changed his name
To Kipling at half-time.