Begging for pure sex, one unembarrassed friend
To share my boredom and my bed – One masta want
One boy – one boy for bed … and like an elephant
That bungles with its trunk about its cage,
I make my half-sloshed entrances and rage
Like any normal lover when I come
Before I’ve managed it. Then his thin bum
That did seem beautiful will seem obscene;
I’m conscious of the void, the Vaseline,
Pour shillings in his hands and send him back
With the driver, ugly, frightened, black,
Black, black. What’s the use? I can’t escape
Our foul conditioning that makes a rape
Seem natural, if wrong, and love unclean
Between some ill-fed blackboy and fat queen.
Things can be so much better. Once at least
A million per cent. Policeman! Priest!
You’ll call it filthy, but to me it’s love,
And to him it was. It was. O he could move
Like an oiled (slow-motion) racehorse at its peak,
Outrageous, and not gentle, tame, or meek –
O magnificently shameless in his gear,
He sauntered the flunkied restaurant, queer
As a clockwork orange and not scared.
God, I was grateful for the nights we shared.
My boredom melted like small cubes of ice
In warm sundowner whiskies. Call it vice;
Call it obscenity; it’s love; so there;
Call it what you want. I just don’t care.
Two figures in grey uniforms and shorts,
Their eyes on quick promotion and the tarts,
Took down the number of my backing car.
I come back raddled to the campus bar
And shout out how I laid a big, brute
Negro in a tight, white cowboy suit.
II
Advanced psychology (of 1910)
Bristled from thin lips the harmattan
Had cracked and shrivelled like a piece of bark.
She egged me on to kiss her in the scented dark,
Eyes bottled under contact lenses, bright
And boggling, as if for half the night
She’d puffed cheap hashish to console
Her for the absences, that great, black hole
Pascal had with him once, l’ abîme ouvert
He thought was special but is everywhere.
He cackles from Heaven at the desperate Earth.
We permit ourselves too much satiric mirth
At their expense, and blame the climate, so
I touched her bosom gently just to show
I could acknowledge gestures, but couldn’t stroke
Her leathery, dry skin and cracked a joke
Against myself about my taste in little boys.
Then the party drowned us in its noise
And carried us apart, I, to my jests,
She, to her gesturing with other guests.
I’ve seen her scrawny, listless husband still
Such rowdy booze-ups with a madrigal,
His tonic water serving for rare wine
Toasting the ladies with O Mistress Mine;
Sort of impressive. I confess such prick
Songs make me absolutely bloody sick,
But he can sing them straight at his third wife.
Changey-changey! But they can’t change life,
Though they meditate together with joined hands,
Though his psyche flutters when he thinks he’s kissed,
Cuddled and copulated with New Zealand’s
Greatest, unpublished, woman novelist.
III
All night a badly driven armoured truck
With grinding gears crunched on the gravel, shook
The loose louvres and the damp mosquito mesh,
And glaring headlights swept across my flesh.
Back to loneliness, pulling myself off,
After a whole White Horse, with photograph
And drag, a Livingstone with coloured plates,
That good old stand-by for expatriates
Hooked on the blacks; again have to withdraw
Into myself, backwards down a corridor,
Where in one of many cold, white cells
They play cold water on my testicles,
When I should be breaking out … must … must
Matchet the creeper from my strangled lust.
The sticky morning comes and some loud gun
Fires short distance shells into the sun.
Goes on about curfews through a megaphone.
A new anthem: tiddly-om-pom-pom
Blares the new world like a Blackpool prom
And promises corruption’s dead and lies
Riddled with bullets in three mortuaries.
An American’s got it all on tape.
The proclamation: murder, looting, rape,
Homosexuality, all in the same breath,
And the same punishment for each – death, death!
He plays it back to half-seas-over, hushed
Circles in the bar. I flush with defiant lust.
Now life’s as dizzy as the Book of Kells.
Thank God for London and Beaux/Belles.
I must get back again. I must, but must
Never again be locked away or trussed
Like a squealing piglet because my mind
Shut out all meaning like a blackout blind.
Next door, erotomaniacs. Here, queers,
And butch nurses with stiff hoses mock
As we grow limp, Roundheads and Cavaliers,
Like King Charles bowing to the chopping block.
IV
Insects strike the clapper. The school bell
Clangs for nothing. Nothing; and her little hell
Begins when darkness falls. Her garden moves
With mambas, leafage like damp leather gloves,
Cobras, rats and mice, and bandicoots,
The drunk maigardai and their prostitutes
Who help them pass their watch. Time drags
For such lonely, unlovable old bags.
There’s too much spawning. Men! Beasts! Ticks!
Spawn in their swarmfuls like good Catholics.
She wanted children but she gets instead
Black houseboys leaving notes beside her bed:
Madam your man is me. Where is the yes?
Putting pressed frangipani in her dress.
She’s not as desperate for a go as that.
She has her gaudy parrot and her spayed, grey cat
For company. Babar’s a champion impressionist
Of whisky noises when his owner’s pissed.
She pretends he’s learnt it when he’s heard her wash
And offers visitors a choice of squash.
Darkness. The swoosh of soda and the glug
Of Scotch come from Babar as that drunken thug
She hired as a watchman and must fire, treads
Down her phlox and pees on her arctotis beds.
She knows what he’s up to. Brute! The garage door
Swings on its hinges for the watchman’s whore.
And now they’re rocking. One cracked heel
Scrapes after purchase on her Peugeot wheel.
Rustle and gasp, black creatures claw
At one another in her packing straw.
You never know in these hot climates; coups
Can throw the whole white quarter on the booze.
Whisky and danger. Ah who knows? Who knows?
Some drunken Public Works might still propose.
But she wouldn’t have him. No, not her. Boy!
She’ll give you the sack for those grunts of joy.
V
Northwards two hundred miles, an emptiness
As big as Europe; Sah’ra; Nothing
ness.
South six hundred, miles of churning sea
Make of the strongest swimmer a nonentity,
Bleaching the blackest flesh as white as spray.
The sea makes no demands but gets its way.
The campus wants its pep- and sleeping pills.
It’s not diseases, but the void that kills,
The space, the gaps, the darkness, that same void
He hears vibrating in clogged adenoid
And vocal cords. Through his cool stethoscope
He hears despair pulsate and withered hope
Flutter the failing heart a little, death
Of real feeling in a laboured breath.
He knows with his firm finger on a pulse
It is this Nothingness and nothing else
Throbs in the blood. Nothing is no little part
Of time’s huge effort in the human heart.
There’s love. There’s courage. And that’s all.
And the itus et reditus of Pascal.
He’s not asked out to drinks or dinner much.
He knows how the slightest sweatrash on the crutch
Scares some and with good reason, whose child’s whose,
Whose marriage depends on sjamboks, and who screws
In Posts & Telegraphs, and reads instead
His damp-stained Pensées on their double bed.
The Nothingness! Lisa – she couldn’t stand
The boredom and packed off for Switzerland.
She sends him a postcard of a snowblown slope:
Boris, ich bin frei … und friere. He can’t cope
Here alone. There’s nothing for a sick MO
Sick of savannah, sick of inselberg,
Sick of black Africa, who cannot go
Ever again to white St Petersburg.
2. The Railroad Heroides
I
A lake like lead. A bar. The crowding, nude
Slack-breasted, tattooed girls made lewd,
Lascivious gestures, their bald groins
Studded with wet francs, for my loose coins.
I’m surrounded by canoes. Cadeau! Cadeau!
I fling out all my change, but they won’t go.
One paddles underneath and pokes a straw
At my bare ankles through the gaping floor.
I’m on my fifth warm beer. I need my cash.
I crunch her knuckles hard, and yell out: Vache!
Then as she pulls my sandals: Tu, vache noire!
They rock the rotten stilts that prop the bar.
My boatman saves me, and for ten francs more
Canoes me blushing to the nearest shore.
I lie back like a corpse Valhalla bound
And sleep. Only a wet, withdrawal sound
Sucks at my ear. I dream. I dream the sun
Blackens my bare balls to bitumen.
II
Again I feel my school belt with the snake-
Hook, silver buckle tauten and then break
From the banisters I swung off. Suicide –
The noose’s love-bites and a bruised backside.
I laughed a long time and was glad I fell.
The white wake swabbing at the woundless swell,
The swashing, greasy pool, the spindrift fine
As Shelltox seasoning my lips with brine
Makes sadness shoreless and shakes sullen grief
Apart like gobs of spittle. Off Tenerife
French soldiers from Gabon dressed up as sheikhs
Waltzed amidships and blackamoors cut cakes
Iced thick with tricolours. The Marseillaise
Boomed from the tannoy and the easy lays
Beamed at the officers. I flung your zig-zag
Tuareg ring and the red, goat-leather bag
I’d bought for our swimming things into the sea
Placating nothing. A little lighter, free
To saunter in fancy dress the festooned decks,
In the midst of plenty, hungry for good sex,
I found a lonely woman. I got you off my chest,
But had to have my hand held and I lay
All night with my confessor, fully dressed,
Afraid of my terror, longing for the day.
III
Bordeaux – Paris – London – Leeds; I get
Cold and tachycardia in my couchette.
With weeks of travel thudding in my brain,
Bilges, ship’s engine, and the English train,
Too much black coffee and cold lager beer
I find sleep impossible. My throbbing ear
Bangs on the pillow with an angry thud –
It’s you, it’s you, with a sound like blood,
After the bloodshed, if your tribe survives,
Pounding a big man’s yams among young wives.
IV
Leeds City Station, and a black man sweeps
Cartons and papers into tidy heaps.
3. Travesties
‘… the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a pansy into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.’
(Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)
Distant Ophir
(after Hieronymi Fracastorii, Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus, Veronae, MDXXX)
‘Westerners, who laid the Sun’s fowl low,
the flocks of Apollo, now stand and hear
the dreadful sufferings you must undergo.
This land, where you are now, is that Ophir
your flashy maps show off like jewellery
but not yet yours to own, nor domineer
its quiet peoples until now quite free;
cities and new sacraments you won’t impose
until you’ve suffered much by land and sea.
Self-lumbered pilgrims of San Lazaro’s,
brothels and gold bars bring you no joy,
porphyry and rape bring no repose!
You’ll war with strangers, bloodily, destroy
or be destroyed, your discoveries will cost
destructions greater than the siege of Troy,
worse wanderings after with more thousands lost,
comrades you fitted out search parties for
hutches of bleached ribs on our bare coast.
You’ll go on looking, losing more and more
to the sea, the climate, weapons, ours and yours,
your crimes abroad brought home as civil war.
And also Syphilis: sores, foul sores
will drive you back through storm and calenture
crawling like lepers to our peaceful shores.
The malaise of the West will lure
the scapegoats of its ills, you and your crew,
back to our jungles looking for a cure. –
You’ll only find the Old World in the New,
and you’ll rue your discubrimiento, rue
it, rue Africa, rue Cuba, rue Peru!’
And away behind the crags the dark bird flew.
And everything it prophesied came true.
Note. Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483–1553), the author of Syphilis, was born, as perhaps befits a true poet, without a mouth. The fact is celebrated in the well-known epigram of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558). Fracastorius died, after an apoplexy, speechless.
4. Manica
‘An experienced doctor has said that he has never seen tropical neurasthenia develop in a man with a sound philosophy of life.’
(Notes on the Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates, London,
The Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene, 3rd ed., 1960)
I. The Origin of the Beery Way
The Coast, the Coast, a hundred years ago!
Poisonous mangroves and funereal palms,
Victorian hearse-plumes nodding victims in
To bouts of wifeless boredom and El Vomito,
Shacking with natives, lovely Sodom’
s sin,
Boozers with riff-raff in their British arms.
Reports put down ‘futility & worthlessness’ –
I’m just a big colon: kick, kick, caress,
Administer, then murmur beau, beau, beau
Like some daft baby at your Mandingo.
From dashi, dashi to cadeau, cadeau,
Armed with my Dettol, my Od-o-ro-no,
My African Personality, I go
For a bit of the old Français finesse,
Not work at your ballocks like a kid’s yo-yo,
Then buck you off them like a rodeo.
With prudish pansies I am passionless.
My sex-life’s manic like a bad rondeau.
I need to forage among Francophones.
A real beaubarian and buckaneer, that’s me, Yo Ho,
Bottles of Black & White do me for rum.
I soft-shoe shuffle on the white man’s bones,
Windborne or brittle as a popadum.
Omar, not Khayam, the Gambia’s mad Marabout
Changed the Commissioners’ bullets into water;
Into water being Moslem. I, being atheist,
Am full of more potent potions when I’m pissed.
A century later, full of Guinnesses and Stars,
I’m God’s own Heaven, and as I slash I shout:
The white man’s water turns back into fire!
Braving castration at their scimitars,
And single-handed put Islam to rout,
And vanquish the missions with my bent desire,
Spouting a semen capable of slaughter.
Flat on my back, beneath the Galaxy, I fear
This burning in my groin is gonorrhoea.
II. The Elephant & the Kangaroo
The first rains slap the leaves like slow applause.
My nerves are soothed by it.
The insects’ constant grind has been put down.
It means a night indoors;
nothing doing in the town;
power failure; all the dives unlit.
The imported apples begin to look like shit.
The Star beer’s warmish, the cut fruit brown.
Chops will be rotting in the Lebanese Cold Stores.
The rainmaker wraps away his amulet
and hugs his gods to see the great downpours.
So the world comes back into its own
and all the houses through a stage-scene gauze
of wavering, driven rain and drunkenness. It
goes on spinning and will not run down.
In cool bush-shirt and shorts I sit
feeling the world spinning, the spinning floors
between the brandy and verandah. Laterite.
Bush, like effigies of bush, is washed of it.
A clean green everywhere and it still pours.