Lowestoft. The armour-piercing shells she lofted, tossed towards
the target of an oil tanker’s rusting hulk were each disguised
as armchairs – realistic in their leather-covered button-backed
bulk, they tumbled through the air, dropping their cushions,
showing their seats, their backs, their crude undersides.
‘Look there! See the little wheels! And there, and there again!’
cried the beguiled air that stood aside to shuffle in once more
behind each high-explosive chair, and smile and clap quick little
claps at the passage of this, no surely not mirage, but entrancing,
discombobulating kind of camouflage! (I never saw the guns
themselves, and can only venture a guess as to whether the barrels
were deeply grooved within, to accommodate those legs
and castor wheels, or whether, more probably no doubt, the legs
flipped out like fins on exiting the gun’s single-nostrilled snout.)
The warship’s hull was fashioned in the form of a vast and inside-
outed drawing room with décor late Victorian. The oversize, sea
spray spattered paper was a William Morris pattern; the enormous
pictures hung like fenders, swung in gilded frames, grinding arcs
and thumping on their giant walls with the tossing of the choppy
sea; they were genre pieces, chock-a-block with dogs and little girls
and sympathy. So the ship she had her inside walls faced outward
in a gesture of apparently unguarded openness, but which might,
just as likely, have been evidence of its opposite, or the opposite
of that, or the opposite of that. How cruel that she was sunk by
the bastard French before she could fire off a single armchair round
in her defence. How it pains me to imagine all the men and women
happily inside the ship before the hit, their faces lit by monitors or
reflected in the doorknob’s vast expanse of brass as they polished it.
That knob, which even had it turned, would not have opened the
humongous door onto the drawing room and all this infinite vacuity.
Underground Beekeeping
There was a febrile buzz around free range
back in the day,
and didn’t he know it!
That,
and Christopher Isherwood, and stippling.
Of course with Christopher it was always seafood,
seafood, seafood
after he went communist. It’s funny
to recall how we got so properly lost
among the rock pools without moving a muscle.
Later, when push came to shove, he had
the dachshund put down because it snapped.
Vegetable Magnetism
He was partly German, so it turned out,
and that was certainly a plus, the Germans
being famously more grown-up
when it comes to such matters,
perhaps due to the increasing
frequency of avalanches
as the rolling hills give way to
mountains proper and that
invigorating piquancy spikes the air.
The young architect found his kartoffelpuffers
particularly captivating. She couldn’t
get them out of her mind for love or money.
Outdoor Philately
Would you Adam and Eve
it, I picked up a fracture
on my way to collage.
It was a huge affair.
A kind of communal, cut-
up in the bibliothek with
the great and the good.
And there she was!
I broke my toe when I
stamped on
a baumstumph of all things.
Anyone
who’s anyone was there
brandishing butterflies,
I mean incisors like calling
cards. Did I say butterflies?
No Moose
An English seaside town at dusk, warmth
radiated by the stone buildings, warmth
emerges like sunburnt evening promenaders
from the stone buildings, warmth is secreted
like a pheromone from the stone buildings,
warmth emanates like the warmth of
the breath of a monotone speech from
the stone buildings, streetlamps brighten
on a darkening sky, a middle-aged man bares
his teeth and cracks through the choc’ of his
choc-ice, as an unfortunate explorer might
crack through the ice in the thaw on
the Hudson Bay, his lips stretched back in
a grimace of terror as he vanishes forever.
And there, in the chip shop, lit by its strip
lights, a cramped and uncomfortable moose,
its antlers brush ceiling, its head pushes hard
against counter, its twitching rump against wall
with informative pictures of fish. A moose in
a setting like this is like a dog in your pool,
perhaps not a vagrant in your bedroom sitting
on your pillow, or a noose in your playpen,
or sick on your patio, but a dog in your pool.
So remove it. Lit by the lights of the chippy, an
ordinary street; there’s a man with a choc-ice,
the fading scent of a moose, the heartening
odour of vinegar, and the warmth given off
like a sigh of relief by the stone buildings.
Sucked
Sucked perhaps, and popped
from sockets, but still tethered
to the face by strings (as kites are
to their grounded flyers) the eyes
themselves won’t cry, but their vacated
hollows might, the twin concavities
the tears fill until they, overflowing, spill.
So, two strung conkers now; portholed
bathyspheres which, both held between
a finger and a thumb, might each
be shown the bloated fish of the other.
These clackers, these sackless knackers,
this bolas which we gauchos use to hunt
on the scrubby plains of blindness.
Sometimes a Phallus Is Just a Phallus
(Interior. An earthy apartment.) This is how he puts it:
‘I is properly done by the doubling, trebling or more
promise of my collected substance that jogs up to itself
in a like-minded, stiff congregation.’
‘Pardon?’ she says. ‘What I means is,’ he continues: ‘that
all its serious/partly-comic wealth stumbles (not drunk
but not sober) onto the spot-lit stage of your cocked look.
The whole day is trumped. The sunlight on the sheets,
for example, is nearly in tears. So when I meets my
gathered dong, undressed in all its exquisite fine-grained
pomp, the stolid pleasure I draws in greets the pleasure
which the dong itself (my italics) accumulates, as aerials
pick up heavy tunes, or as money pulls down more money
to itself so furiously. Oops, it’s coining it! It feels itself up,
my boner, and pumped on promise, it looms out of this
otherwise ordinary day as a charging horse crashes out
of a field, or as a bleeding hand reaches from the crumbly
grave, or sweet odour might bark (might it not?)
off the horny ground.’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake, put it in,’
she whispers. And everything will be okay.
The Dead Are Helpless
You can do exactly what you want to the dead,
you can call them filthy names,
you can poke your uncovered arse at them,
you can stick them in the eye, or spit on them
or better, you could prop one up before you shove
its face backwards, your palm driven hard against
the nose, and still nothing bad will happen to you.
You can drag the dead outside into the street
and there you can piss upon them. You could beat
one even further into death with a brick and
no one can point a finger at you, and if they do
then you can tell them to fuck off and mock their
squeamishness by blubbing like a baby in mimicry
of the feebly sensitive.
(It occurs to me just now that you might also want
to stand a stiff in a doorway, have it held in place
by means of ropes and then with all your extant
vehemence, slam the door against it, hear it greet
the dead’s unwincing face just before it bangs against
the jamb.) You can always confound the dead.
You can act as though you’re going this way,
and then you can go that way and punch them,
and they’ll just stare up at the ceiling with that
emptied look of theirs (emptied as an egg is from
its shell). And the dead have nothing at all to use
against you but your horror at their passivity
which looks sometimes so like the unresisting
sweetness of your own poor martyred soul.
The Voice
Its yellow/brown tones and its
vibration denote all the particular
fruit that the voice carries in its
wooden barrow. The voice
is a tired old emissary dressed in worn
and elaborate robes and sent out to trundle
by a small boy, a cocky prince
(though he has but the toy parts of a child,
not yet soused in tangled, romping spells).
The ground undulates beneath his
wooden wheel. The trees, they serve up
green on every platter. The inveigling
emissary is a cuckold whose wife
the royal squirt pleases enormously while
the emissary is out earning a crust and
smoothing out differences.
Those worms that inhabit the bowel,
they have their wives and husbands
and same-sex partners and children
who play in the park with Frisbees,
and scrape knees, and eat eggs or beans
for breakfast. They live in period homes
with creaky floorboards or in high-rise
apartments with views of the distant
fatherly hills. Those worms, they lace
up their shoes and go out to the shops,
buy jewellery and underwear and
cigarettes and spaghetti. They pop pills
at impromptu raves in car parks,
and go to classical concerts in rococo
halls. They drive cars, fly in aeroplanes,
take trains, climb trees and mountains,
work in marketing, lie in steaming hot
baths, let their gaze coalesce at their
artless toes, and wonder at the nature
of consciousness. Inwardly they chuckle
at the absurd, and sophisticated
thought that their vivid deep lives
might be nothing but projections.
In the Boulangerie
‘God it exhausts me, trying to be elastic but safe
the whole time,’ I whispered
when I bumped into myself, baguette in my hand,
at the back of the queue
in the touristy village in the hilly Dordogne,
‘and also this attempting not to annoy, or attempting
to be just somewhat annoying in a manner
that gets people’s goat in a way that their goat enjoys.’
I smiled the safe smile and, though I found
every word that I’d said. And despite being moved
by a hesitant sympathy I was, I admit,
just a little surprised by my age, my height, my weight,
the tone of my voice and my apparent torpidity
behind which, inside that additional time it accords me,
I found I was able to compose myself.
Guns in Films
Guns in films aren’t like real guns, no siree.
For one thing we can love them wholeheartedly.
Also, unlike real guns that piss their banging stones,
guns in films are dirty only with our own delicious dirt.
So there’s a 1970s Merc parked outside a petrol station
on a forest road. It’s dusty and hot.
The car is a wunderbar greyish blue, yes, that blue.
A man in a black leather jacket of a type worn by Germans
in the 1970s and with a beard of the same period
points his automatic pistol at a man
in the Mercedes who ducks pathetically below the dashboard
and sucks at the last stupid bit of life down there.
The gun is a magnet that bends the fabric of the film
and draws everything flying towards it.
A gun in a movie is not the jam in a donut; it is the pip
in the jam in the donut, the jam being
the character’s motivation, the dough being the script,
the donut’s surface being the scene’s location, and the sugary
coating being you in the cinema,
sprinkled-on-a-seat, wanting everything.
It’s hard to see Hamlet as some kind of everyman,
bellows old Professor Hydrofoil above the sound of his own engine’s biscuity shout as he skims across the pale Baltic waters lit with light. The sky is crazy for him, his riveted body, all chrome fuselage, instant abdomen and what looks from here to be a thing like kindliness. He is, in fact, so shiny, so polished by his mother’s early love that we can observe ourselves reflected in his tubular skin. We can see our bent smiles which are the floaty grins of children who hold their parents’ hands and watch the happy dogs who run through parks, throwing off their ridiculous beards and laughing, laughing, laughing. But wait! Prof Hydro’s gone and got all serio’. He’s docked himself in a study in an old house in Palookaville. He’s donned huge human clothes. He looks out onto a cold wet street with the fallen leaves of trees stuck on it. The arrangement of the threads in his tweed jacket is such that that arrangement’s own woollen heart is broken. On the radio is nothing because it’s switched off.
The Decline of the Long s
Yes, perhaps it is just one example of a general
smoothening as we remove trip hazards; as we, in
cleansing everything, scrub down the surface of the
world, rub out the hills and fill the valleys with their
debris; as we, with rapid little kisses, kiss each other’s
faces before we grind and bump, and by increments
inexorably breed away our distinct particularities; as we
deselect the differences in carrots; as we chop down
the trees; as we denude our hunkered genitals which
look up at us shamefacedly – exposed Viet Cong
bared to the hovering clatter of our glossy gaze
that hangs above their defoliated ground.
The triumph of the short s, that lesser letter,
represents an early contribution to this pervading
levelling as it can barely stick its tip above the sheen
that now lies spread like spread on the world’s once
tantalising crevices and cracks. It plays its subtle part
as everything slips down and over us more nicely now.
My zipped-up inside is slick, it’s spittled pretty as a
sucked-on lolly, and that’s the womby state we ache to
have around us as well as in. Might I ask, did you spy
your own lubriciousness? Did you peruse your own
consoled reflection in it? Was your visage bouncing
back? Were you looking slippy? I rest my case.
No More Mr Nice Guy
This then,
what you actually witness here, before your
very eyelids, is an actual blooming waste of time, in action,
in real time. I squid you not, certain shall we say ‘people’
with a certain shall we say ‘cheek’ have had a go at me about
punctuality & punctuation, specifically the use
or otherwise of ampersands & obscenities and rubbish
and whatnot. As well as my peculiar drinking and poking fun
at people with or without disabilities and so on.
Well from now on, from the very next thing I do onwards,
I’m going to do exactly as I blinking well please, which is to be
marvellously wretched & frightened and broken and hidden.
Professor Hydrofoil Is Attending a Matinee
It’s a tight squeeze. The professor’s brought in through the back of the theatre, and then with much ado is carried by a series of small cranes and pulleys across the stage, into the auditorium and finally, with the appearance of the Hindenburg Zeppelin, what with the stagehands steadying his movements by means of ropes, he’s swung round by 180 degrees before he’s lowered directly down onto the seating in the house. He rests across the stalls and occupies rows g, h, i, j, k, l and m and seats 2 to 23. Much to his embarrassment a number of them are badly damaged or even completely crushed beneath his weight, particularly those numbered 5 and 6, 20 and 21 in rows h, i, j and k. He’s surprised that, having gone to such pains to get him into the theatre, the management should have done absolutely nothing to protect the seating! He’s also mortified to discover that though the dress and upper circle sightlines are unaffected, his hull and superstructure obscure the view of all the people in rows n to w of the stalls, some of whom will attempt to catch something of the performance by clambering onto seats and trying to peer at the action through both sets of his windows. Soon, mercifully, the lights are lowered and in the dark he feels less self-conscious and able to relax a little, at least for a while that is. Being in this position means the professor’s forced to view the performance by looking to one side, which he finds tiring and, in fact, he gives his eyes a break by letting them alight for short periods on a pale green exit sign directly ahead of him. He also has to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of resting on his foils without the support of water for a considerable period of time. It’s hard to say whether the professor enjoyed the performance. In the same way as forcing oneself to smile induces the emotion normally associated with a smile, so the effect of watching the performance out of the corner of his eye generated in him a feeling of suspicious trepidation which he would forever associate with the performance he saw that night.