The Tenant
Pour drink out of a can, spoon
meat out of a tin:
air moves in. Some portion
of the air wakes up,
leaves its position
reclining dozily in space and drops
quick into every virgin crevice
of that fresh vacuity.
There it squats,
just as a hermit, crazy maybe
(inhabited by loss himself perhaps),
might squat a cave for forty years;
or as an undressed crab might haunt
a whelk’s clockwise shell.
So that newly housed and hunkered
atmosphere, now it’s made its home,
begins to brood and then to stew
that very spot it’s in until
it’s made of it a rich stock that is
the vivid ghost of that exact place.
We rested our hands
on the professor’s back. I remember I could feel his unbending aluminium through the fabric of his jacket that, beneath our touch, slipped a bit against the shiny metal. That immalleable quality seemed so incongruous on him I almost recoiled and pulled away my hand earlier than would have seemed fitting. It’s also true that I couldn’t exactly tell if my touching of him was some conniving political gesture or if I’d genuinely meant it. I’m afraid that looking back, it seems that both might be true. Once you are aware of your effect, you will always be half dissembling. The professor didn’t breathe or show any sign of life of course, though not because his life is some imaginary quality endowed on him by children. In fact I’d say the opposite was true. We had made him seem not to be alive, so that his sensational existence should be still more vivid every time it came to us.
Grace
One thing I like about collecting is that when I collect a thing
and add it to the bunch, then the pile outside the bunch diminishes
by precisely that amount. So effectively I disturb the world twice,
both intimately and broadly, both in privy, in my own shuttered
room, and also in the landscape beyond, with its indeterminate
scraping and shuffling and whooshing sounds. Also, when I make
my choice of object I radically alter its value allowing it to burst
from its cocoon of mundanity, its repulsive poverty, to emerge
soft and hot and beginning, almost vile in its shimmying vividity,
awoken by the anointing touch of just my poor bashful notice.
Effectively, I do well twice you see, and perhaps even a third time
in a kind of schadenfreude, because when I lifted the thing from
the pile outside, I denied it to my enemies who are many and
include all those solipsists with their nasty habits so aggrandised.
Manning
I don’t know what Manning is, but I can say this,
that he got everywhere, in history and in space.
So I scraped him off with something like a spatula,
and then I took him off that thing like a spatula
with something like my finger, and then I undressed him
and ground him down (gently), and I wettened him
and mixed him up and kneaded him and folded him
and clothed him again, and then I filled in each of these
here holes with him to help make everything safe.
I Collaboration
At 4pm Manning and I sat down to discuss the poem and his role in it. An imaginary wind buffeted and rattled the remote French farmhouse window like some sort of device, like a signifier of something trenchant and solemn. Manning said he was so excited about the poem that he was actually rock-hard as he put it, and what about I set it in a hotel room and sort him out with a Latvian stripper and half an ounce of good quality gak. And with that, quite matter-of-factly, he pulled his johnson out of his zoot suit pants to show me his predicament. His member (though my gaze, I can assure you, recoiled from it with more haste than a hand would from a hot coal) looked something like a monstrous jewel in the setting of the surrounding grey fabric of his trousers; or like, perhaps, a misplaced floral buttonhole that would have seemed less offensive had it protruded from the suit’s lapel. It appeared to me that its grotesque rudeness buzzed against its, dare I say it, rather feminine beauty with a metallic ringing sound, but perhaps that was merely tinnitus brought on by the stress of the situation. I’d never known Manning to talk or behave in this way before. And even though it soon came to me that he’d been suffering from concussion after being hit full on the head by a lance in a jousting accident, and even though within a day or so he’d recover fully and return to his sensitive, and innately feminist self, I found that I always felt a little wary in his presence thereafter, for what I’d heard and seen that afternoon must surely have lain dormant in him for all the time I’d known him. And perhaps since then, I consequently feel a little less secure in the company of all my friends and acquaintances as well, of course, as in the company of myself.
II The Stage Is Set
Some weak, decrepit wind once sloughed off
a dismal place
and made of the yawns
of the wretched old men who once lived there
comes to a sorry halt over the land and expires disturbing
nothing.
*
Manning pulls the damaged machine out of its dive
just above the blind and dopey trees that panic only once
He hears himself laugh
like a mad Hun
and the washed skies lie all about him
thinned with the dreamt-up blood of angels.
Manning, his aircraft,
the flapping fabric of its torn wing,
the trees and the sky are all one and the same.
They each smell exactly of breath.
They are made of the same
finely patterned material,
part hard, part nothing,
of which every concocted thing is made.
Manning is most likely a poet. To his lovers he says things like:
I am rinsed through passion, my darling;
absolved, ruined; absolved, ruined.
He tries to gain height now,
he means to pull up and up
towards a cloud that looks exactly like a cauliflower
or an old woman striking a lofty attitude and lighting a pipe.
Once inside the cloud
he’ll continue to climb, using it as cover
as he hungrily re-gathers the potential
energy of altitude.
But though the aircraft’s wings judder as though buffeted
by wind,
the propeller only grasps hopelessly, pitifully over and over,
like the hands of desperate children,
at the completely meatless air.
*
Back in the officers’ mess
where I’ve put him
(I own him very much
as some people own bees),
Manning lights a thin cigar as a joke
and smiles at me
between puffs and bouts of coughing, daring me to allude to it.
The cigar is only a smokescreen though,
its smoke stands in for a hopeless ghost, all airs and graces.
III Does a Filmic Wind Tousle the Photo-Real Grass?
It does.
The ho-hum flies can barely be bothered to move their wings
to fabricate their buzz.
They use their mouths instead.
They make their buzzing
with their long black lips which consequently
blur at the tips
so it looks as if a tiny flapping fly alit
on each proboscis.
*
Enter Dr Manning with Marcie and me and you on a cliff-top path.
(Marcie and I are walking just behind the doctor
and are holding hands secretly,
you are bringing up the rear, picking blackberries
and then scampering along the path to catch up with us).
Dr Manning:
How convenient, then, that I should find
the reflection of my own self so arousing,
that I should be quite so enthralled by the sweet, up-market stink
of my smart papery hum.
Fact is, I can’t say if Manning has an actual moustache.
Sometimes he does,
sometimes he doesn’t.
Sometimes he doesn’t,
sometimes he does.
The oscillation between having
and not having
can occur many times
in a single humid day
when the stuff of which we’re made
and the material that surrounds us
become so similar in consistency
that we begin to lose
our definition
and to dissolve, or at least to fear it!
Also, the moustache
that Manning sometimes wears might be fake,
or alternatively, the doctor being, in common with us all,
spurious (or cooked-up as he puts it),
it might be doubly fake.
(I should mention, that I, as well as Manning as it happens,
have a powerful antipathy towards so much
that is nowadays labelled ‘surreal’,
perhaps because of the promiscuous availability
of ‘unlikely’ juxtaposition,
or the hideous banality of another’s dreams.
But there are elements of his story to which, I admit,
that facile description seems inexorably drawn,
much as a magnet is drawn to cheese
in the kind of easy-peasy panto which we both so abhor.)
Allow me,
under the tall ships and all their lugubrious weight,
and the cannons and ropes and what-not,
the bent sea was absolutely
wet-through, sopped right out to the gills.
What hurts
more than anything
is how I watched it lie brazen under the sun,
creaking under the lightness too
of my impossible gaze
at the very same time
as Manning was unconsciously growing an
immeasurably small volume of facial hair
right under the nose of my mother,
who sat in the actual Inn,
breathing him in,
breathing him out,
breathing him in.
My old mum Merle who, I might add,
had always laughed so dismissively at moustaches,
as people of her social class
and in that lukewarm historical moment, always did.
In the courtyard
the fading evening light walks about aimlessly,
looking at the bushes,
looking at the expensive cars,
and then back at the bushes
and then back at the cars,
in its hand,
a glass
with a tiny bit of completely melted ice in it.
Wherever you drill into the world
you’ll find its richness, dum-de-dee,
said Manning, and he ate another one
of my yellowy salted peanuts and lit a smile.
IV Denmark Brochure
The mood is polite, facetious.
Manning himself, disordered, facticious.
The average colour, purpley-beige
except when it’s dark. (Forgive me, but
all of us, we did look up at the night sky.
We saw behind the day’s
blue curtain – saw the terrible workings!
It seemed so bored with us!)
According to the intro (and why not?),
the average temperature is coldish,
depending. The sky, humdinging.
Geography, nice, alien,
peninsularic. Penguins, erroneous.
The sea, blank, made quite crispy
with say-so. Manning, popped,
avoidant. Marcie, ghosted, jizzed, lit.
I could go on. Beasts don’t even
glance at a smashed moon.
V Manning in the Rock Garden
Chorus of the small stones: We, then, are the mealy stones,
our weight untrue, our authored heat curdles our manners.
Listen to our voices. Count us out. Count us in.
Forgive me. The dreamt, having no bodies
are unaffected by alcohol. The booze goes right through ’em
without consorting avec the dry scaffold of their sticks.
Bein’ in some way, shall we say, ill, Manning the Stone
found himself born, found himself, ahem, dumped.
He can look at his actual concocted body.
He can photograph his itchy feet on the iffy ground.
He is pregnant, bone-stuffed. He carries himself in his middle
that’s as stiff as a bubble.
He will be an old man never having been slitted. (I made that.)
(I have scribbled up the all of us.)
Myself, I daubed up inside myself in colours
appropriate therein. Manning is concerned that in the long run
this trick of ours don’t work.
Forgive me, but we are absolutely cunted, absolutely coined.
VI Out Here in the Future,
Everything Is Doubly Suspect
Manning, oh Manning! Oh! shouts the lovely she-alien, her delicious tentacles gesticulating madly, her voice like that of a whale. Manning looks up at her. He feels shame at his detachment just at the moment of the creature’s joyful panic. How strange, he thinks, to find convergent evolution has produced such similar and complementary genitals on so many diverse planets. And how predictable, somehow, that every high-end creature should orgasm so similarly, and that his charm (we know he has it) as well as his innate physical skill should function so effectively when deployed on hyper- evolved vegetation, thought-stones, buzzing grey pools of intelligence or mollusc-type beings. Manning’s Plexiglass helmet has begun to steam-up on the inside. The oxygen- rich atmosphere he breathes is unlike the octatron’s, so one of them was obliged to wear the helmet while the other could safely inhale their own home-gas selected from the comprehensive menu available from room service and then fed through tiny vents into the plush, retro- styled cabin suite. Manning, as ever, had been the gentleman and donned the headgear, but now he appears, to the exhausted, subsiding octatron, like nothing so much as some comical, orb-headed creature. Then, with a gentle, and, to Manning’s ear at least, maternal laugh, she takes the heavy white ball of his helmet in a still partly engorged tentacle and kisses it. Oh Manning, how ridiculous you are, though I do believe I love you!
VII I am lordly, puce and done,
but enough about me, Manning says
as he adjust his tights under what we take for a moon.
There’s a cascading swagger,
everything is joy in a thin strip:
Forgive me, the trees themselves
are morose rather than lightweight, the sky is certainly lit.
The ground bows down like a dumpty stone
quite free under its own buff
beneath the undressed pomp of its own boff,
and Manning laughs a luvvy laugh beneath a stony arch.