thee, so baby call away. Flowers / not enough / sorry. If
you think I’ve got a fierce red mind, wait till you see my
body.
II.
Misbegotten positive reality, muffin top just another symptom
of the excluded middle. Nothing can be both; apple-bellied is
worse than small beer. Not-A is absence, which is everywhere.
III.
Always already happening somewhere, as if the way it is done
is what is done. You first have belief, which leads to the practice /
the way it is done is usually for the best. Always already leaving
without notice, it must have already happened if you want to think
about it. Flowers are soft and so vulnerable to the diversity of
interpretation / the way you do it is what actually happens Remember:
it is natural to be fearful; it is necessary to be tougher than the rest.
IV.
There is a fierce grit in the genius of girls; there has
to be, they’re bleeding. ‘It is interesting, but I don’t
love it.’ What kind of charlatan says that?
The Roses of Heliogabalus
Violets and other flowers, or roses – they
fill the mouth up all the same. The pipe
sound streams clear despite the choking
sound that muffles screaming. For those
who ate, the meal was enjoyable. For those
who drowned, their breath at least was sweet.
Thin girls
waiting by the phone
for referrals, if it happened
to men / it could be happened
at cash machines. Thin girls
wait by the phone for the
plummy voice of necessary
steps / of reassurance / arm
to shoulder. They don’t come.
Angiogram
Can you inherit
motherlessness?
My fat heart says
yes.
from ‘Donations’
TYPE F (CAPTIVE / VOLUNTARY)
Oil and blood for the bowed grey heads, as Aeson recovers
his usefulness, oil and blood for my own inviolable sense
of propriety. Uncontaminated, pint for pint, what’s the difference
between one dog and another, between dead boy and dead lamb,
except for those small miracles as blue birth becomes gentle
continuance. The only thing to do is take it as your own
indisputable property (though even in a consumption good the
former spirit lingers) but this is bad news, for the conservationist:
we will always love most what is diminishing and so as funeral
barges stream down the marshes you wake weeping in
your yellow coat, from ruptured sleep, as if these ghosts of
our own commodities cry out, like kids for milk, in the twilight.
TYPE C (FISCAL)
Do you know the heaviness of other types of feeding?
When the time comes to bolt and deliver to the diligent
hand, accomplished at dragging up, you must place the
babe in the tour’s arms, and alert those diligent sisters
to the processes of abandonment. Accomplishments
(itemised) include the delicacy of the needle, include
the practice of drawing back the suck. Overproduction,
like any other disease, can be treated. The bell rings,
and that is enough.
Agony in the Garden
Why are you walking around my garden, John Ruskin, these
are Prestige Flowers and you are gnawing like the worm. Why
must pleasure be a catastrophe? I have dedicated this sleep life
to statuary I have laboured joyfully for my base wet daughters
and you and yours have no place building nations here in the
name of purified water. When will my attention span return
from the war? Desire, hooked again, there is no inverse relation
between my dislike for you and the embarrassment you cause.
She didn’t want to fuck you either her person was not formed
to excite passion I thought there was no such thing as bad
weather? Splendid, her skin was luminous, every blood smear
every hair-like feather. When will my attention span allow me
with splinters, saved for the nation she deserved, as usual, more.
John, like sesame, like lilies, you manipulate what you have never
grown. Constant though unlessoned, stoic in the face of pleasure,
may we only tread with patience the path we have been shown.
Leaky
I.
And could you swim at Lindisfarne, softening
with sunrise and never bicker? Good intentions,
still all thumb. Pray you don’t waste time. I
pray nightly never to see you too held close by
wicker, I pray but all day slapdash careful to save
face. To have been married, I pray nightly never.
II.
There is no counsel, no closure, no opening,
just winter. ‘In leaving you, I left myself’ oh
bore on, Cara Helena Derelicta. You ask: why
must all these poems sing to me? I am trying
very much to work on my intellectual honesty.
Some cheek, I agree, to wail after a ship I
sank myself. Hard, to learn refusal is not purity.
TOBY LITT
Thank you, Emily Hall. If you hadn’t contacted me – through Myspace (that long ago) – to ask if I was interested in writing words for a children’s opera, I am not sure whether I would have written much more poetry. Before then, it had largely stopped happening. The opera didn’t happen either, but I showed you some lyrics, you set them to music, and then I started to write new words meant to be sung. We wrote a song cycle about love, then one about losing and then having a baby. Although I started writing Life Cycle as a male-female duet, you rightly insisted it all be the woman’s voice. And so I added ‘The gap so small’, ‘Not just milk’ and ‘The first turn’ to poems already written. The earliest, ‘Stillborn’, woke me in the night. I dreamed it for two friends, Jacqui and Steve, and for their daughter, Marnie. ‘Amnio’ arrived after a pregnancy scan for my second son. His bones glowed in cross-section. This was a brief period, before babies in the womb were visualised as 3-D putty putti. Some of the poems I’ve written since were written as poems – not to be sung, and so not for you. But I have kept writing about parenthood and its losses. ‘Self-Reminders’ was written as just that – as a parent speaking to themself. ‘Awaying’ is one parent speaking to another, reassuring them they still exist. More separate is ‘Friday’ – one of the poems that come along in an anti-lyrical way, although I’m mostly (as you’ve made me) that strange half-and-half thing, a lyric poet. ‘Friday’ got written while teaching an Arvon course at the Hurst in Shropshire (the playwright John Osborne’s dank house, before it was exorcised by hope and made luxurious). I stood under a tree near the pond alongside which Osborne used to recline, and send his empties off to go splosh. The bottles were still there, beneath frog-spawn. I saw the image for ‘A glow-in-the-dark skeleton’ whilst walking near The Golden Hinde. I’m so stupid. It was only in choosing a title for a possible collection that I realised I had two glow-in-the-dark skeleton poems: prepartum and postmortem. Very often, I have no idea where what I’ve written has come from; almost always, though, I know exactly where it’s going.
Politics / 9.11.16, p.m.
I.
When you cross a bridge over a river
you can be definite about something –
but the insides, altered, leave an after-
shock of what, and what the fuck is happening.
It would be neat if one were like the other,
and the flow and bowels met in meaning
so that out of it come mother, father,
family, house, all subordinated into song.
Instead, I am borrowing several futures
to explain yesterday’s present moment
that now is cancelled, and fairly brutal
was its ending – instead, I have my fears
gradated between drowned calm, burnt torment
and the headlong lull of going foetal.
III.
Against futility, and the clasped hands
of century-separated cognoscenti –
because on dapple-pattern we all can agree,
and Beauty makes eternal amends.
The whole scaffold is entirely purposeful,
and blood-soaked, as a legitimate viewpoint.
There is an act that forces whatever it will
and cannot be don’t, you won’t, you can’t.
Ease yourself into the cell, liberal,
you have prepared your own welcome
and furnished with defeats a red chamber.
This zone will always be comfortable,
and you know it to be somebody’s home.
The dead are never without number.
IV.
When even a piss against a tree has
greater significance than a new move
in a familiar opening in chess –
we come to a point, sadly, where we have
to admit to ourselves that what we meant
when we insisted upon the validity
of clear and beautiful restatement
was, in fact, a truth founded on a lie.
How argument was actually quadrille,
and laws were signed on Beatrice’s heart,
and even handshakes were made out of wood.
There are men who kill the men who kill
the men who kill,
there is a death behind the death of art,
and there is bad is caused by good.
V.
Exhaustion was the first fault, loosed
by lovers of style, the demographic
that demanded to choose where it placed
not only itself but every heretic
that had ever failed to see the funny side;
and in magazines spread self-belief
as a gospel that could be flash-fried
and served with carpaccio of beef.
Meat was a fact, this could be granted,
but butchers were not invited in, and so
butchers bowing their heads went to the lake
of all the blood they ever spilled, and counted
waves as they came in, then turned to go,
or rather turned to come back.
from ‘Life Cycle’
STILLBORN
She isn’t but she was.
She wasn’t but yet is.
Perpetual won’t, not can’t.
All didn’t and not couldn’t.
Undone; never done.
Total knowledge, unknown.
Leaving early, arriving late.
Wholly incomplete.
One remaining plural
yet indivisible.
Entirely possible
yet infallible.
One within another;
two inside each other;
three but always either.
AMNIO
Skeleton I see and sense
Baby you become and be
Innocence lost innocence
Nothing belong to me
These things are true about you
Now they are known
Absolute in gesture
Say if you want a soul
Posture then imposture
I split and make you whole
These things are measured and weighed
These are your facts
And I am now what I will always ever after be.
THE GAP SO SMALL
The gap so small
between world and child –
no gap at all
And every fact,
however small,
has an impact;
your nails can cut,
the wind can wound,
bright light can hurt.
A tiny scrape
upon your face –
both of us bled.
And now it’s here,
a tiny scar:
there will be more,
there will be more.
NOT JUST MILK
There used to be a woman in this body
not just milk
There used to be a substance to her living
not just milk
and carrying
There used to be a life that was outflowing
not just milk
and carrying
and saying hush
There used to be a flowering of action
not just milk
and carrying
and saying hush
and putting down
There used to be a world still to discover
not just milk
and carrying
and saying hush
and putting down
and worrying
There used to be a world
not just milk
and carrying
and saying hush
and putting down
and worrying
and milk
HUSHABYE TWINKLE
Hushabye – twinkle – all – hushabye
If baby will sleep then mummy won’t cry
Mummy will tidy and mummy will clean
Mummy will say something she didn’t mean.
Hushabye – little – fall – hushabye
If baby won’t sleep then mummy will cry
Mummy will dry her tired eyes and will smile
hoping her sweet babe will sleep in a while.
Hushabye – wonder – breaks – on my lap
If baby won’t sleep then mummy will snap
Mummy will wish that her baby were dead
Lie down alone in the dark on the bed.
Hushabye – what you – cradle – a nap
If baby will sleep then mummy won’t snap
Mummy will weep all alone in the dark
Take baby out for a walk in the park.
THE FIRST TURN
Now you can turn
Now you can turn yourself away from me
Now you can turn yourself
Forceful you are
Forceful you are beyond our reckoning
Forceful you are beyond
Even a god
Even a god is weak compared to you
Even a god is weak
You’re everything
You’re everything we fear we might destroy
You’re everything we fear
The best of all
The best of all the world has ever seen
The best of all the world
I want to keep
I want to keep this time, this love, this us
I want to keep this time
I know you change
I know you change each time
Each time I look
Each time I look away
Self-Reminders
First, please don’t expect them to be anything but clumsy.
Don’t expect them not to break things – things, especially, which you especially don’t want them to break.
Don’t expect them not to be as loud as they can possibly be.
Don’t expect yourself to escape breaking.
Don’t expect quietness of what you probably don’t call soul.
Don’t expect please or thank you, even though you must constantly insist upon please and thank you.
Don’t expect them to love you as you love them.
Don’t expect them to understand you or even to try to understand you until you are dead.
Don’t expect them, as children, to be interested in you, as you were as a child.
In fact, don’t expect them to believe in your existence until you are dead.
Expect painful joys and hilarious wounds.
Expect strangers who do not know our ways here.
Expect to be wrong.
Expect their deaths, and hope to be wrong.
Awaying
When we are by ourselves, somewhere
alone – as rarely happens – we
are awkward with the double lack.
We miss the two who are elsewhere
but also the identity
we have in them. When we go back,
we think, will we have lost the knack
of being who we are? The pair,
the parents, you and me,
who hold and fix, who cope and care.
But we remain that anywhere