We pushed some buttons. Got kitted out in handcuffs,
leather, safety pins and razor blades. Nicked stuff.
Punch-ups. Three-chord songs with aggro-lyrics.
Style as revolt, arrogance over ability, violence
if the music failed. Like Rotten said, it’s worth
going where you’re least wanted,
since there’s so much more to achieve.
SOC.
Were you an actor, or a rhapsode?
SID.
A what?
SOC.
A person skilled in reciting verse. Who takes the stage
at festivals with words stitched together so dramatically
that the rhythm of the music loads the crowd with feeling.
Years ago I met another rhapsode, who came from Ephesus.
I convinced him that the passion of his art passes through him
from gods into the audience; in effect he becomes possessed.
That when the beat and tone are right, frenzy builds,
and like the bacchants, he can momentarily lose his mind.
SID.
Yeah, sounds about right.
SOC.
When you look down upon the spectators
from the platform and see them weeping,
awestruck at the power of your tale, is it proof
you are a conduit between the gods
and the common crowd?
SID.
Are you taking the piss?
SOC.
What was the source of your enthusiasm?
SID.
Speed. Heroin.
SOC.
Are these some other, newer gods? What was their purpose?
SID.
Purpose, mate?
SOC.
Let me ask you this:
do you claim they brought disorder
into your minds, while still protecting you?
SID.
Yeah.
SOC.
Tell me, what is the meaning of virtue?
SID.
Fuck off.
SOC.
Remember, I was once like you, the stubborn
rube who stood against society’s rules,
then was put on trial for revering new gods
and corrupting youth. I too pulled faces
at the world, and shouted down
the ruling powers. Didn’t a jury find you
guilty of crimes against the state
and sentence death?
SID.
I got fixed for good before they had the chance.
SOC.
What was the vehicle of your death?
SID.
Drugs. It was the drugs, mate.
SOC.
Me, too. This was equally my fate.
SID.
Oh yeah? What did you in?
SOC.
Hemlock.
SID.
Where’d you get it?
SOC.
It’s brought by ship from Crete or Asia Minor.
SID.
Must be good.
SOC.
The effect is satisfactory. Your legs feel heavy,
then retreat from feeling anything,
as if a cold blade went tickling up your thighs
to snip and trim off portions of your body
with a thousand nipping cuts. It leaves a chill,
a glaze that frosts toward your heart,
pinching off your breath. It was the punishment
they prescribed, all because I asked
too many questions and failed to compromise.
Ever since, I’ve been cited as an example
of how to live the good life. You see the paradox?
SID.
Listen, geezer, fuck right off. I wasn’t
looking for a dialogue, just the karzy.
But if all this tripe you’re laying out
is meant to serve me up as some stunned muppet
for your logic to outsmart, I’ve got a few words
you might need to chew on first,
since I’d hardly time to write some weepy memoir.
All that’s left of who I was
are press interviews, Pistols footage
and video of me in skids, scarred and junkie-thin,
dancing to an Eddie Cochran song in the sheen
of a scuzzy mirror. When I came on the scene,
I was just naive, then turned volatile;
they shoved me in the spotlight, stitched me up
with all the drugs and hype, then threw me to the wind.
I couldn’t get my head right, and never surfaced.
Since you’re so keen on painting
you and me as being two bin bags from
the same rubbish, I’ll tell you what: the question
isn’t virtue, but how you exercise it.
You can’t know if a wheel rolls till you nudge it
down a slope. So where was all that search
for virtue’s definition when the pro-Spartan Thirty
lodged their regime in your democracy’s agora
and started topping the opposition?
Suddenly, you were keeping mighty quiet.
Remember Heraclitus: ethos anthropos daimon?
You got yours, didn’t you?
SOC.
Are you suggesting I deserved to die that way?
SID.
No, mate, I’m just saying you must have seen
it coming, like I should’ve, coppers everywhere
and the tabloids predicting the end of the world.
Backing slogans like ‘No Future,’
I had to go the distance, didn’t I? Once the Pistols
imploded, I’d have been a pretty sight, in silk
and power tie, tugging a handgrip on the Tube,
counting off the platforms on the way to the office
and some thicko with a Green Day T-shirt shouting,
‘Hey, weren’t you Sid Vicious? Yeah, you did it
your way, looks like!’ I think I see that now.
This afterlife must be the best detox going:
a clear head and all this time to wonder
what I think, now there’s time to think it over.
SOC.
You speak as if the person you refer to
were someone else, a completely other soul
than the one you’ve left behind.
SID.
Look, I don’t know. There’s no fucking logic
in it, right? How can we know ourselves?
We change. We backpedal. We try again.
One of you blokes once said the soul’s
an activity, not a state. That would give me hope.
That way, I could’ve worked through the trap
of being me forever. What a laugh.
This still isn’t you or me talking anyway,
just proxies in a poem. We never got to play
our parts; you’d your man Plato spinning
yarns about how ridiculously smart
and virtuous you were, while I got Gary Oldman.
So what’s one more tosser playing puppets
with his hand up our collective arse?
SOC.
So who are we?
SID.
A monkey’s tea party, for all I know.
Counterweight to the comfortable
and approved. A fishbone in the throat of those
who never bothered asking
whether wealth and power were such
gasping pursuits. But what’s a better way
to go than making one unholy noise
when you’ve got the world’s ear?
You might’ve been an annoying prat,
but I’d back you every time, even while
you were turning blue across a mattress.
At night, I hear feedback so constant
I think I haven’t dreamt it. There’s
no wind here, no
sky or streets,
not even a proper pisser,
and I’m with my mind all the time.
Dance
‘I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box of smoke?’
– Osel Hita Torres
An older, more informed friend of mine
said, ‘It’s easy, step to one side
and sway, then turn to the other, like that …
Lift your arms, and for fuck’s sake, don’t count.
Snapping your fingers is okay. C’mon,
break it up a little, not once and once
and once then once to each side, you trout,
try a few moves between.
It’s like a trance.’
I was terrified in junior high
as the cool kids shuffled in orderly rows
under the eyes of our teacher chaperones.
Prism shards sluiced off the mirror ball.
I escaped to the halls, toing and froing
the next hour away, the clues
dawning on me that being a teenager
was just a field test on an alien planet,
for seven years, to experiment with alcohol.
What were we doing, sneaking mickeys
in jean legs, risking a tab of acid,
slipping out to cars? No instructions,
no prescribed numbers of downs or yards
were set to measure our progress.
In back seats, sweat squeaky on vinyl, trying
to syringe pleasure into each other’s skin,
results rarely startling or sacred, but like
meditation, a worthwhile erasure of the self.
I tried sitting in lotus position once, but kept
thinking I could use a drink. A short-term
escape from the pain we earn, these
games we play to get out of our heads.
You roam El Raval’s archipelago of bars
while debating Cassavetes and Kurosawa
with some girl or boy who’ll break your heart,
the hurt with street cred now, framed
in a long shot you learn to hold.
Umbrage
I’d spread the word that you’re pretty slow
because you’d implied I was less than bright,
and there’s one more thing I’d like to know:
are you wrong or am I right?
If a past disorder caused you trouble,
be it gastrointestinal, tooth or sinus,
if a privileged birth raised you in a bubble,
I’m afraid that’s no excuse, your Highness,
for the back-stabbing habits of an asshole.
If you’re really itching to put me in my place,
fine, let’s drop the gloves, and like Picasso,
I’ll happily rearrange your face.
And while you carve mine to a tragic mask,
we’ll raise a chorus of the same old song,
since there’s one more thing you’d like to ask:
were you right or was I wrong?
Drought Journal
The sky’s stretched so white
noon stings, bleached
of shade. In the street,
baked chrome blinds
as a car passes with sudden
starred light, and the lawn’s
a clump of stiff leaves
below the asthmatic scratchings
of the linden’s crown.
Chrysanthemum heads wither
and crisp like rust; the choked
veins of perennials are edged
with brown, flattened to the stem.
Power lines buzz above curb dust.
A cyclist ticks by
beside the construction site;
men chew bread,
looking flayed and stunned
in the faint, bent shadow
of a backhoe’s boom, the jackhammer
planted on the asphalt like a heroic
Soviet prop. The ballpark,
empty, roasts like the Negev,
just sand and brittle tufts
of grass, where Christ might
appear through the haze
and do a deal for one gulp
of bottled water. Sprinklers
whisking in the yards can’t
stave off the parched decay,
their thimble-shallow spray
sponged dry by sun in minutes.
At 4 a.m., we wake
to the window banging back
on its hinges, and the downpour,
a day-for-night burst
of blurred white in street glow,
rain slashing down
and the dry roots slugging it back.
Terms
He stood at the front of the lecture hall,
rushed to explain the important themes
of the Twentieth-Century American Novel,
last class before midterms.
Our essays were weak; he wanted us
to get this, to sift the full impact
of the novel’s plot, a book he clearly loved.
It was a quintessential early-winter day, sky
the colour of pasta water, stirred with flurries,
and the small break of Christmas before us.
The painted vents blew hot, drowsy breath.
‘Now, one more thing,’ he said, then talked
of the cancer they’d found, his treatments
and the chance of success. There’d be
a TA for the rest of term.
He blinked at his watch; the time was gone.
Silent, we loaded books into knapsacks.
‘Good luck on the exam. Reread your notes.
And please, remember the motifs,’ he said
as we poured toward the door,
‘of the white horse and the pillar of smoke.’
Time sawing its hinds,
it crests the pasture’s rump,
countless long-jumps
in a row, a pelted arrow
fletched for lift.
It shakes off sleek and quick
as too flat; its stride taps the course,
a triple-time tattoo through sprays
of heather and gorse,
where it winks, framed in haze.
Though it’s said to pound
rice cakes on the moon,
a trickster or Aesop’s fool,
it refuses to be other than real
when you see it running. Pity
it can’t sing while the hound bears
down with that boggle-eyed stare
chugging the void
on a whisk of gangly limbs
to muzzle all zags and hearsay.
What would it sing? Psalm,
plainsong, tin pans,
cable in a squall,
cymbal crash, cackle, drag
on a rutted brake pad,
chanson to sum up our fable
before its raw chords are shot,
before its shot chords are ash.
Memento Mori
Before I am called into dinner,
you call out, ‘Come here,
come look,’ lifting a cracked wand
of bone from the dry manure
you turn in your hand
and weigh. Kicking around,
we hunt for more parts of the set,
limbs or rib slats fanned
out like smashed bracelets
mislaid in the clover.
‘Let’s go,’ I say, ‘it’s late.’
You turn the thing over and over.
Circa Now
(Rhapsody)
Likely we’ll have no language
to resemble the ones we use now
when the LAGEOS satellite finally drops
to Earth. Silver, with a solid
brass core, its arc set
to track our planetary shift
unti
l its highly stable orbit
deteriorates in the year 8,000,000.
Any sense of its first purpose
will be lost to whoever
might still be here. What they’d
look like, eat or dream is anyone’s
guess, but we fixed a plaque inside
with drawings of the Earth, circa now,
and another one with future coastlines
fanned out like a stretched accordion
to show them how the world might look
after 80,000 inches of continental drift,
one every century. If anything’s left
to inspect those shifted silhouettes –
our prodigal land mounted in a dimpled,
silver ball – they might just
read them as portent, threat or tall saga
cooked up by a far-too-distant race
to understand.
•
In Fort Kochi, Kerala,
a long day of walking the baked stretch
of Bazaar Road past the ferry terminal
to Ernakulam. Textiles, pots, oils, ceramics,
paper and tobacco spilled for sale
from the open shutters of the shops.
Goats nudged garbage while the touts
called out to please look
at their leather sandals, sarongs
and elephant tea cozies. The dance
of haggling, offers
and countered head shakes.
Mosquitoes devoured your bare legs
under the batik tablecloth
as we sat for biryani and curry.
I’d spread the newspaper out,
looking for news of home
in a tiny font. But read
a report of the Italian snail
thriving on the grounds
at Cliveden and a theory about
how it got there: stowaway in 1896
on a marble balustrade
imported from the Villa Borghese.
Structures of one empire humped