I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.
Flood
His home address was inked inside his cap
and on every piece of paper that he carried
even across the church porch of the snap
that showed him with mi mam just minutes married.
But if ah’m found at ’ome (he meant found dead)
turn t’water off. Through his last years he nursed,
more than a fear of dying, a deep dread
of his last bath running over, or a burst.
Each night towards the end he’d pull the flush
then wash, then in pyjamas, rain or snow,
go outside, kneel down in the yard, and push
the stopcock as far off as it would go.
For though hoping that he’d drop off in his sleep
he was most afraid, I think, of not being ‘found’
there in their house, his ark, on firm Leeds ground
but somewhere that kept moving, cold, dark, deep.
The Queen’s English
Last meal together, Leeds, the Queen’s Hotel,
that grandish pile of swank in City Square.
Too posh for me! he said (though he dressed well)
If you weren’t wi’ me now ah’d nivver dare!
I knew that he’d decided that he’d die
not by the way he lingered in the bar,
nor by that look he’d give with one good eye,
nor the firmer handshake and the gruff ta-ra,
but when we browsed the station bookstall sales
he picked up Poems from the Yorkshire Dales –
’ere tek this un wi’ yer to New York
to remind yer ’ow us gaffers used to talk.
It’s up your street in’t it? ah’ll buy yer that!
The broken lines go through me speeding South –
As t’Doctor stopped to oppen woodland yat …
and
wi’ skill they putten wuds reet i’ his mouth.
Aqua Mortis
Death’s elixirs have their own golden gleam.
I see you clearly: one good, failing eye’s
on morning piss caught clumsily ‘midstream’
it’s your first task of the day to analyse.
Each day dawns closer to the last eureka,
the urine phial held up to clouding rays
meaning all solutions in life’s beaker
precipitate one night from all our days.
Alchemists keep skulls, and you have one
that stretches your skin taut and moulds your face,
and instead of a star sphere for sense of space
there’s the transatlantic number of your son,
a 14-digit spell propped by the phone
whose girdling’s giddy speed knocks spots off Puck’s
but can’t re-eye dry sockets or flesh bone.
My study is your skull. I’ll burn my books.
Grey Matter
The ogling bottle cork with tasselled fez
bowing and scraping, rolling goo-goo eyes is
gippo King Farouk, whose lewd leer says:
I’ve had the lot, my lad, all shapes and sizes!
One night we kept him prancing and he poured,
filtered through his brains, his bulk of booze.
The whisky pantaloons sans sash or cord
swashed dad to the brink of twin taboos.
As King Farouk’s eyes rolled, dad rolled his own:
That King Farouk! he said, and almost came
(though in the end it proved too near the bone)
to mentioning both sex and death by name.
I wake dad with what’s left. King Leer’s stare
stuck, though I shake him, and his fixed Sphinx smile
take in the ultimate a man can bear
and that dry Nothingness beyond the Nile.
An Old Score
Capless, conscious of the cold patch on my head
where my father’s genes have made me almost bald
I walk along the street where he dropped dead,
my hair cut his length now, although I’m called
poet, in my passport.
When it touched my ears
he dubbed me Paganinny and it hurt.
I did then, and do now, choke back my tears –
Wi’ ’air like that you ought to wear a skirt!
If I’d got a violin for every day
he’d said weer’s thi fiddle? at my flowing hair
romantic background as once more I’m there
where we went for my forced fortnightly clip
now under new, less shearing, ownership,
and in the end it’s that that makes me cry –
JOE’S SALOON’s become KURL UP & DYE!
Still
Tugging my forelock fathoming Xenophon
grimed Greek exams with grease and lost me marks,
so I whisper when the barber asks Owt on?
No, thank you! YES! Dad’s voice behind me barks.
They made me wear dad’s hair-oil to look ‘smart’.
A parting scored the grease like some slash scar.
Such aspirations hair might have for ART
were lopped, and licked by dollops from his jar.
And if the page I’m writing on has smears
they’re not the sort to lose me marks for mess
being self-examination’s grudging tears
soaked into the blotter, Nothingness,
on seeing the first still I’d ever seen
of Rudolph Valentino, father, O
now, now I know why you used Brilliantine
to slick back your black hair so long ago.
A Good Read
That summer it was Ibsen, Marx and Gide.
I got one of his you-stuck-up-bugger looks:
ah sometimes think you read too many books.
ah nivver ’ad much time for a good read.
Good read! I bet! Your programme at United!
The labels on your whisky or your beer!
You’d never get unbearably excited
poring over Kafka or King Lear.
The only score you’d bother with ’s your darts,
or fucking football …
(All this in my mind.)
I’ve come round to your position on ‘the Arts’
but put it down in poems, that’s the bind.
These poems about you, dad, should make good reads
for the bus you took from Beeston into town
for people with no time like you in Leeds –
once I’m writing I can’t put you down!
Isolation
I cried once as a boy when I’d to leave her
at Christmas in the fourth year of the War,
taken to Killingbeck with scarlet fever,
but don’t cry now, although I see once more
from the window of the York–Leeds diesel back
for her funeral, my place of quarantine,
and don’t, though I notice by the same railtrack
hawthorns laden with red berries as they’d been
when we’d seen them the day that we returned
from the hospital on this same train together
and she taught me a country saying that she’d learned
as a child: Berries bode bad winter weather!
and don’t, though the fresh grave’s flecked with sleet,
and dad, with every fire back home switched on, ’s
frozen,
and don’t,
until I hear him bleat
round the ransacked house for his long johns.
Continuous
James Cagney was the one up both our street
s.
His was the only art we ever shared.
A gangster film and choc ice were the treats
that showed about as much love as he dared.
He’d be my own age now in ’49!
The hand that glinted with the ring he wore,
his father’s, tipped the cold bar into mine
just as the organist dropped through the floor.
He’s on the platform lowered out of sight
to organ music, this time on looped tape,
into a furnace with a blinding light
where only his father’s ring will keep its shape.
I wear it now to Cagneys on my own
and sense my father’s hands cupped round my treat –
they feel as though they’ve been chilled to the bone
from holding my ice cream all through White Heat.
Clearing
I
The ambulance, the hearse, the auctioneers
clear all the life of that loved house away.
The hard-earned treasures of some 50 years
sized up as junk, and shifted in a day.
A stammerer died here and I believe
this front room with such ghosts taught me my trade.
Now strangers chip the paintwork as they heave
the spotless piano that was never played.
The fingerprints they leave mam won’t wipe clean
nor politely ask them first to wipe their boots,
nor coax her trampled soil patch back to green
after they’ve trodden down the pale spring shoots.
I’d hope my mother’s spirit wouldn’t chase
her scattered household, even if it could.
How could she bear it when she saw no face
stare back at her from that long polished wood?
II
The landlord’s glad to sell. The neighbourhood,
he fears, being mostly black, ’s now on the skids.
The gate my father made from bread-tray wood
groans at the high jinks of Jamaican kids.
Bless this house’s new black owners, and don’t curse
that reggae booms through rooms where you made hush
for me to study in (though I wrote verse!)
and wouldn’t let my sister use the flush!
The hearse called at the front, the formal side.
Strangers used it, doctors, and the post.
It had a show of flowers till you died.
You’ll have to use the front if you’re a ghost,
though it’s as flat and bare as the back yard,
a beaten hard square patch of sour soil.
Hush!
Haunt me, and not the house!
I’ve got to lard
my ghosts’ loud bootsoles with fresh midnight oil.
Illuminations
I
The two machines on Blackpool’s Central Pier,
The Long Drop and The Haunted House gave me
my thrills the holiday that post-war year
but my father watched me spend impatiently:
Another tanner’s worth, but then no more!
But I sneaked back the moment that you napped.
50 weeks of ovens, and 6 years of war
made you want sleep and ozone, and you snapped:
Bugger the machines! Breathe God’s fresh air!
I sulked all week, and wouldn’t hold your hand.
I’d never heard you mention God, or swear,
and it took me until now to understand.
I see now all the piled old pence turned green,
enough to hang the murderer all year
and stare at millions of ghosts in the machine –
The penny dropped in time! Wish you were here!
II
We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands,
or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks
and some days ended up all holding hands
gripping the pier machine that gave you shocks.
The current would connect. We’d feel the buzz
ravel our loosening ties to one tense grip,
the family circle, one continuous US!
That was the first year on my scholarship
and I’d be the one who’d make that circuit short.
I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm’s Law
and other half-baked Physics I’d been taught.
I’m sure my father felt I was a bore!
Two dead, but current still flows through us three
though the circle takes for ever to complete –
eternity, annihilation, me,
that small bright charge of life where they both meet.
III
The family didn’t always feel together.
Those silent teas with all of us apart
when no one spoke except about the weather
and not about his football or my art.
And in those silences the grating sound
of father’s celery, the clock’s loud tick,
the mine subsidence from deep underground,
mi mam’s loose bottom teeth’s relentless click.
And when, I’m told, St James’s came to fetch her,
My teeth! were the final words my mother said.
Being without them, even on a stretcher,
was more undignified than being dead.
Ay! I might have said, and put her in her box
dressed in that long gown she bought to wear,
not to be outclassed by those posh frocks,
at her son’s next New York première!
Turns
I thought it made me look more ‘working class’
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad’s cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You’re every bit as good as that lot are!)
All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR),
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folk might think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.
He never begged. For nowt! Death’s reticence
crowns his life’s, and me, I’m opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.
Punchline
No! Revolution never crossed your mind!
For the kids who never made it through the schools
the Northern working class escaped the grind
as boxers or comedians, or won the pools.
Not lucky, no physique, too shy to joke,
you scraped together almost 3 weeks’ pay
to buy a cast-off uke that left you broke.
You mastered only two chords, G and A!
That’s why when I’ve heard George Formby that I’ve wept.
I’d always wondered what that thing was for,
I now know was a plectrum, that you’d kept,
but kept hidden, in your secret condom drawer.
The day of your cremation which I missed
I saw an old man strum a uke he’ll never play,
cap spattered with tossed dimes. I made a fist
round my small change, your son, and looked away.
Currants
I
An Eccles cake’s my petite madeleine!
On Sundays dad stoked up for next week’s bake
and once took me along to be ‘wi’ t’men’.
One Eccles needs the currants you could take
in a hand imagined cupped round a girl’s breast.
Between barrels of dried fruit and tubs of lard
I hunched and watched, and thought of girls undressed
and won
dered what it meant when cocks got hard.
As my daydream dropped her silky underclothes,
from behind I smelt my father next to me.
Sweat dropped into the currants from his nose:
Go on! ’ave an ’andful. It’s all free.
Not this barrel though. Your sweat’s gone into it.
I’ll go and get my handful from another.
I saw him poise above the currants and then spit:
Next Sunday you can stay ’ome wi’ yer mother!
II
At dawn I hear him hawk up phlegm and cough
before me or my mother are awake.
He pokes the grate, makes tea, and then he’s off
to stoke the ovens for my Eccles cake.
I smell my father, wallowing in bed,
dripping salt no one will taste into his dough,
and clouds of currants spiral in my head
and like drowsy autumn insects come and go
darkening the lightening skylight and the walls.
My veins grow out of me like tough old vines
and grapes; each bunch the weight of a man’s balls
picked by toiling Greeks and Levantines,
are laid out somewhere open air and warm
where there might be also women, sun, blue sky
overcast as blackened currants swarm
into my father’s hard ‘flies’ cemetery’.
Note. An Eccles cake was called a ‘flies’ cemetery’ by children.
Breaking the Chain
The mams pig-sick of oilstains in the wash
wished for their sons a better class of gear,
‘wear their own clothes into work’ but not go posh,
go up a rung or two but settle near.
This meant the drawing office to the dads,
same place of work, but not blue-collar, white.
A box like a medal case went round the lads
as, one by one, their mams pushed them as ‘bright’.
My dad bought it, from the last dad who still owed
the dad before, for a whole week’s wage and drink.
I was brought down out of bed to have bestowed
the polished box wrapped in the Sporting Pink.
Looking at it now still breaks my heart!
The gap his gift acknowledged then ’s as wide as
eternity, but I still can’t bear to part