CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Andrew McMillan
Dedication
Title Page
martyrdom
I
playtime
first time
glimpse
curtain
things said in the changing room
what 1.6% of young men know
first time ‘posh’
to the circumcised
transplant
first time with friends
Jocasta
with child
paternus
death dream
first time sexting
watching the students
first time penetration
personal trainer
making weight
watching MMA
boxing booth
II
praise poem
blood
inheritance
damp
skirt
spit
making love
making up
anaphora penises
clearance
phonebox
last train
workman
dancer
priest
local train
intimates
train
returning
notes & acknowledgements
copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, circumcision, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.
McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those which explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew McMillan’s debut, physical, was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award; it also won a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Northern Writers’ Award and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. It was shortlisted fornumerous others including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He is a senior lecturer in the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
ALSO BY ANDREW McMILLAN
physical
for Ben
PLAYTIME
Andrew McMillan
I would be born, and I would bear. Amen!
The Acts of John
MARTYRDOM
tonight I started walking back to you father
it was meant to be a stroll but then I started
walking faster father I started chanting all
the names of all the men I ever went to bed
with father my thighs were burning and my feet
were heavy with blood but I kept the pace and chants
of names up father listed them to fenceposts
and the trees and didn’t stop and started getting
younger father and walked all night till I was home
just a spark in your groin again and told you not
to bring me back to life told you I repented
every name and had freed them of me father
I
I know a lot! I know about happiness! I don’t mean the love of God, either: I mean I know the human happiness with the crimes in it.
Even the happiness of childhood.
Harold Brodkey
PLAYTIME
it will take a good ten minutes for them to stop
breathing as heavy as they are for the burning
in their lungs to dampen for the mud from the yard
to be trodden down into the hairbrown carpet
one boy clutches his chest as though trying to keep
his bones from bursting out later he will ask me
how many tattoos I have whether I have one
on my bum whether he can look to verify
my denial such innocence such freedom in asking
for the body of another I point him back
to the page there will be time for him for them all
to learn of the body’s curve into awkwardness
to find their way into the rules and the lessons
they will come to know by heart once some schoolgirls
of ten or eleven in my primary drew
red crayon down a tampon and left it hanging
half out of one of their schoolbags in the cloakroom
trying to rush themselves to adolescence
the girls in this class are huddled in the corner
having already learnt they should be suspicious
of new men their necks seem longer than the boys’
they’ve learnt to hold themselves they’ve learnt what small
words from them can do there was a storeroom
in my primary school and if we were chosen
to tidy away mats after PE lessons
me and another boy would try out wrestling moves
on each other the last time I remember it
we were both laid out on the mats after a slam
my body over his cheap shorts almost touching
and I felt a warmth nothing wet or sexual
something like light spreading across a cold surface
and a small part of the back corridor
of my mind is still lit by that moment his eyes
on mine for longer than they should have been
seeing in them the whole incident the grappling
amongst the quoits and plastic footballs the fall
onto the mats the staledinner breath the knowing
then of what it was of what it would be soon
FIRST TIME
before the early times finishing
in old socks or on my own belly
to feel the puddled temporary
warmth there was the first time and before
even that there were the shameful years
of not knowing what it was or why
I’d wake each morning sure
I’d wet myself and find myself dry
but larger than the night before why
the piss fizzed as it hit the bowl
why I always shrank back down to size
what the other boys were laughing at
in school why they would brag how many
times a day they did it why the men
at football games would move their hands like that
and then that night of discovery
an October holiday Blackpool
because my granddad had recently died
and grandma wanted the family
together the sea couldn’t rest
and the empty slots of days dropped down
in front of us each morning one night
when it felt as though the whole hotel
was asleep I reached down and tented
the floral covers on my single bed
a few quiet strokes and then a tide
a pool a bursting through my joggers
and I ran to the bathroom I hadn’t
reckoned on the stuff that lingers after
the smell the taut body’s fear of being
caught it didn’t feel pleasurable
more like learning a secret you could
forget and learn again each day
I went back to bed hoping the night
might dry me as I sank down into
my given task mourning what had passed
GLIMPSE
on the pitch by my house the weekly game
of football there was one lad already
famous in our class for having snogged a girl
and still my friend despite the pull
of the pack mentality I always felt
outside of I had no skill could only
put my body in front of someone else
in hopes of slowing them for a moment
and this time it caused my friend to fall
and in the split second it took for him
to regain himself I saw slipped
from shorts and briefs his whole private self
though he hadn’t noticed still giggling
at my sudden prowess at defence
and after that there were other times crowding
not to look as someone showed himself
to a girl and the emptiness that followed
nobody yet ready to do the things
that come after though it was still deliberate
and so different from that earlier time
the grass that glimpse of something that seemed
to be all potential tiny sapling
not yet seeding just another part
of our innocence fear and lust and shame
not yet ripened to full blush
CURTAIN
we were above the stage in a corridor
I was due on next to fool my way
through a singing part I can’t remember
if he worked there or what his role could have been
I know I wanted him to help me into
the trousers liked the way his hands smoothed
the leather maybe the end of the run
made him brave lets take a look at what you’ve got
he I don’t want to say asked requested?
the way an audience can request an encore
pulling it out of you from that deep part
beneath the ribs that doesn’t want to disappoint
when I was sixteen I wanted so much
to please would steal any scene for laughs
and so I did pulled down the yfronts my mum
had bought for me and let it hang like a rope
is that all you’ve got he said and didn’t ask
for more and it hung there in the backstage cold
like something already dead and I bowed
and pulled up and stepped out and performed
THINGS SAID IN THE CHANGING ROOM
I don’t still carry them on my shoulders
I think probably they’re rested somewhere
in the scoop of my clavicle the time
a teacher shamed my obese body
as I pulled my shirt over my head
or the time a new young supply teacher
seemed to look at me with pity as though
my body was someone else’s misbehaving child
so each time I’d take myself to the edge
of the tiled square away from splintered benches
the whole thing no bigger than a modest
corner shop and full of my classmates
the two types of bodies boys that age have
the flabby baggy ones the skin a shirt
draped over them they’re trying to grow into
or the ones thin as bunsen flame who seemed
embarrassed by their own fragility
all waiting for the body to exert
itself over its own boundaries
some boys knew how to make a performance
of their size my instinct was to hide
not shower let the acrid stink of sweat
and nylon settle on my skin the ones
skinny enough to be able to pretend muscle
would take their time do slow circuits
of the group hold eye contact with everyone
over half of them have children now
where before I’d think of them undressing
for their wives now I’m kept awake by thoughts
of them as fathers what they’re thinking
as they bath their sons how they will tell them
the stories of their bodies what soft curves
they’ve built to hide the minor injuries
of marriage which parts have grown slower
which parts of them ache as they lift their boy out
WHAT 1.6% OF YOUNG MEN KNOW
to get the body of their favourite sports star
they must starve themselves that the muscles
are there already if they could only
get at them that the thing to do is eat less
and replace meals with water so that they bloat
and then feel their insides flushing out
that the stomach will expand and shrink back
like a gas holder in a former
industrial town that once the body
has burned off all its fat it will start on muscle
that more exercise just gives more energy
for the body to eat itself alive
that they can forget what it’s like to stand
without feeling dizzy that their eyesight
can fail that their salad can be carried
in smaller and smaller tupperware boxes
that the doctor will be forced
to ban the gym will deliver his prognosis
with their mum saying imagine a child of mine malnourished
FIRST TIME ‘POSH’
how many other young lads did this took
themselves to bed in order to prepare
for the real thing like pregnancies
in the dark ages the self shut away
only to emerge empty yet somehow
more important the body that is only
true in private the undressing the legs
slightly raised the pinch and roll that feels
almost surgical then afterwards
something like peeling back a stocking
a possible life seeping out the end
you didn’t know to knot before binning
the tiny deaths you would come to know
the smell of and their ghoststains on the sheets
TO THE CIRCUMCISED
and what happened to their foreskins
afterwards perhaps thrown in the rubbish dumped
in landfill or incinerated maybe
and now just dust on someone’s office chair
and what difference between the ones who have
it done when they’re babies before they know
the significance of what’s been cut and the ones
who turned sixteen find the foreskin too tight
for their urges trying to breathe
in a shirt done up to the collar
when the collar is too small and how these boys must
force themselves to tell their parents then show
a doctor then a nurse how they must feel
like someone who is trying to prove the fault
with a product they are wanting to return
and what of the ultra orthodox ones
who as newborns had the blood sucked from the tips
of their fresh cut cocks by the Mohel what do they
remember as they grow up missing a piece
of themselves that could they might come to think
have protected them and the ones who lose it
when they’re older do they mourn it more for having
known it for being able to remember the gas
that forced them into sleep being woken roughly
and their whole flaccid boyhoods wrapped in blue
spongy gauze and do they still hold their memories
of each time getting hard being agony
of getting used to the absence
its true it had not been of use to them
but how extravagant they must have felt
to have a part of themselves that had no purpose
or was not fit for purpose but still had its place
TRANSPLANT
the sound of hair being ripped out
reminded me of velcro shoes
being hastily removed I hadn’t
realised it possible
that I might grow into kinder
ownership of my own looks
that I could one day have been fine
with baldness but it seemed to me
at seventeen that I was being
unmanned and that my unlived youth
was already receding
so I paid a doctor thousands
to take a strip of hair from the back
of my head pull out each follicle
and put them into the front
to give me the line I thought would
make me happy and stitch the skin
on the back of the skull together
leaving me with this grimace
this equator this scar
that catches the cold weather holds
it deep inside reminder
of my vanity tideline
of Canute tattoo of the time
I couldn’t live with what I was becoming
FIRST TIME WITH FRIENDS
having just learnt of the pleasures the body
can give itself I am waiting for the rest
of the tent to fall asleep they should be tired
having spent the whole day being taught how to surf
I didn’t get the hang of it hadn’t dared
to stand rode in each cresting wave on my knees
while my classmates seemed born to ride them out
already able to lock their legs use their core