from how I’m fixed on the task in claw?
Admit it. In among your stringy ethics
you lurve watching a hawk like a hawk.
Adrenaline
A piece of piss to flush you out,
who put the spear in the sleeper’s hand
when woken in the dark, who slams
the brake before the headlamps seize
the deer, who flash floods through a crowd,
who rises to sirens, who lives
in the river running under the moment
we think we’re in, who likes it loud,
who slows the violence down for us,
who sees itself in threats, in the person
pulling a knife, who takes its cues
from the archives, too, who detonates
down the decades, fluffed to come, to scream
and hide inside a thunderous chord,
whose high season is war, who numbs
us up, whose place of worship is
the theme park, who as Pan jumped us
in antique hills and glades but plies
its trade on bright alluvial plains
these days, whose tide goes out, whose curtain
falls once test results come back
or news sinks in, whose parachute silk
is gathered up and packed when we find
ourselves crossing an inland sea
that’s scarred and cracked, a caravan
surprised, who ransacks us then leaves
us high and dry, turned inside out.
Long-Eared Owl
You can feel that a bone has had some sort of use in its life
—Henry Moore
If you try to picture his spine like where
it could be right now tonight like where
it could have gone his trunk mainframe
the thing that bore his walk and weight
you start to regurgitate
the indigestible bones of a difficult year
urgh unmooring pot plants next to your suitcase
like breadfruit in the Bounty’s wake
Lime Street Euston
urgh leaving a man behind a man overboard
slowly turning into a sculpture
fine tremors twitches weakness in the hand
urgh a diagnosis with a ‘motor’ in it
and a thought loosened fluid
from the spinal tap an embrocation
and next thing a thought up and running
urgh you starting to put it all together
the parts beginning to turn over
and churn
not the doctors’ words
which went in one ear and out the other
urgh you carrying his ready reckoner tables of odds
his secret system the gambler’s friend
which also contains
the Beaufort scale the tides at Liverpool (Gladstone Dock)
sines and cosines Burgundy and Bordeaux the years
the major Port houses declared
the Underground South Kensington Sloane Square
urgh your first mice bristling between the rails
urgh a woman in furs with two Dalmatians heaves
into a grid George Best serving his ban
standing outside the fire station waiting for his lift
among picturesque Punks
urgh drinking in the Builder’s the Potter
the Phene so posh the urinal has a foot-guard for back-spatter
urgh vigils in dry baths in halls of residence
in camper vans on tiled floors
on futons and many sofas fallen into London’s
upholstery springs foam horse hair
feathers cellular structures
lost coins biros pet fur
urgh breaking into a burger kiosk lighting a candle
or waiting behind a wall drape in a church niche
till everybody has finished saying their prayers
urgh escaping on an overnight coach from Victoria falling asleep
to signs Brent Cross Flitwick Newport Pagnell
The North the names of rivers in the dark
and somewhere out there about to be born
the first students of your own
urgh an eyeball blinking through the streets
sketching anything that stays still long enough
urgh working from the model holding the pencil
between marks like a crucifix to a vampire
urgh West End Girls’ charcoal Conté crayon
under your nails the darkwood bank black pens on chains
the smell of beeswax an overdraft the rain
urgh washing your armpits in the etching sluice with Swarfega
urgh stealing pastéis de natas spinach filos
from Boris’s who claimed Hendrix paid a visit
the night he died the night he inhaled his own vomit?’
urgh your first avocado from Waitrose
‘put some vinegar in the hole’
urgh seasick your first trip abroad
Newhaven Dieppe Gare du Nord
where you copy into your sketchbook: Mauvais souvenirs,
soyez pourtant les bienvenus vous êtes ma jeunesse lointaine . . .
urgh nights ending at the bakery under Trellick Tower
urgh fetching turps back from the builder’s yard
that does VAT receipts in elegant cursive script
urgh being called home making a bedside sketch
then days of the dead midsummer pictures from Mexico
on a barroom television when replays show
Maradona using his hand
but the goal allowed to stand
urgh walking everywhere measuring distance
in cubits femurs sciatic nerves
passing the load-bearing vertebrae of that Henry Moore
twice a day
urgh you Chaim Soutine at Smithfield
sketching the meat moving into the city
urgh you Whistler on the Albert Bridge
jeans stiff with paint half cut dead on your feet
urgh looking through the useful plants
in the Physic Garden finding nothing that would help
urgh you in his overcoat
when you weren’t yourself
and when the owl flies away you wonder where it goes
if it perches in the trees and waits
out of mind if it endures lean spells
if it’s always around or hereabouts
keeping to the shadows if it’s shared
with many following vole booms
cold fronts climacterics
longing to settle on what it is
a shy nocturnal thing heard
in pinewoods on summer evenings
Nightjar
gorsewhinfurzefuzzvuzzenwhinnywhin
vuzzwhinfurzegorsefurzegorsevuzzen
whinfurzegorsefurzegorsevuzzengorse
furzegorsevuzzengorsewhinnywhinvuzz
gorsewhinnywhinvuzzfurzegorsewhinny
vuzzenvuzzwhinfuzzfurzegorsevuzzen
gorsewhinfurzefuzzfurzevuzzenvuzzwhin
furzegorsewhinnynightjarfurzevuzzen
whinfurzefuzzvuzzenwhinnywhingorse
furzegorsefurzegorsevuzzenwhinnyvuzz
gorsewhinfurzegorsefurzegorsevuzzengorse
furzegorsevuzzengorsewhinnywhinvuzz
whinnywhinvuzzfurzegorsewhinnyvuzzen
whingorsefuzzvuzzvuzzenwhinnyfurze
Panic Attack, Tsukiji Market
If you get there early enough, you find
sleep’s silver and bycatch before the plain
facts of the day. Before you dynamite
the coral with words, before you learn to think
like a factory ship, before you understand
the business acumen behind a shoal
display, you’re a kid discovering treasure
laid out on the steps of the Agora,
under the ru
ined arch of Octavia,
the dead fish turning you into a time traveller,
doubly so if you’re visiting jet-lagged
like here. The fish give back familiar daggers,
and even though I can’t say I recall
tuna big as cling-filmed, bled-out mermen
from alien reefs, swordfish with fancy sails
or these carmine tentacles and opal claws,
I’ve seen this shoal that’s seen it all before
before. Then eels disturb the surface.
Eels alive, on a furious spin cycle,
a lubed-up cluster fuck, a vinyl
black writhing, endless, nothing the eye
can settle on, no frame, just a live feed
into the cold cabling of an underworld.
Putting the lid back on the drum, our guide
tells us how these eels were brought to market
with lamps once, to mimic the lunar phase
above a tank rocked gently from side
to side to simulate their native currents.
Breathe. Pity the mud grey sole, the humble dab,
even here, a lifetime from St John’s Precinct,
and believe somebody lifts the lid to look
in on us, to see how we are doing,
and all the noises and the smells come back,
same polystyrene ruins, same frost indoors,
whetstones, oilskin aprons, slippery floors,
wherever you go, fish markets being the same,
glittering at dawn, gone by midday.
Mistle Thrush
The first park is always the fastest park,
parked under a cloudless
sky and fastened in memory
with stakes and ropes. The word picnic
is a tablecloth thrown onto the grass
attached to the word green.
The word idyll waits out of earshot.
A faun in the fountain burbles.
There is Sunblest. There is Golden Wonder.
And then, thunder.
Now the park begins bristling under that sky
which has darkened. This is the future.
This is counting towards the sound.
These are the particles rising
like the bead in your cream soda.
This is the mizzy beginning its song
from the top of the highest tree.
This is a drone shot of a thunder god.
This is a dangerous place to be
an I, sings the mizzy—I, a copper crozier.
I, a silver vaulting pole.
I, a suit of platinum armour.
I, a boom of gold.
The mizzy, with its restraining order
on humans, the wariest thrush.
The mizzy, that’s working the park pretty loose.
The day is all coming unstuck.
Where a moment ago you were in a safe place
now there’s distance everywhere you look.
The mizzy will only allow you so close.
The thunder follows the flash.
The words that you’re learning all carry a charge
and attract or repel. Bring it on,
the mizzy sings, holding its nerve,
flying in the face of us.
Hole in the Wall
I lean in close and smell its faint bilge note.
I screen my digits but the hole in the wall
knows who I am. One time, it ate my card.
If the high street were a reef, it’d be its shark
and we’d be like those smaller fish that swim
right in to clean its teeth. And if some Hole
in the Wall Gang come and try to tear it out,
when fear moves on the waters of the reef,
it squirts a special dye and clamps up tight.
I used to go deeper into the hole
by coming here to keep an evening fed,
to stay tanked up for longer. Would you like
a receipt? Proof that I passed this way one night
and dived for pearls wearing a suit with lead
in my boots. Would you like to check your balance?
Swing
Late summer evenings in swampy clearings,
Pan’s boot camp. They’re ambushing themselves
again, from certain trees with boughs that wear
garters, tied-off snarls of rope
flagging up they’re good to bear
a load. They’ve practised this for years
returning to these scrapes, this cordage
too thick for skipping games
but thinner than the type that lives
coiled up under the school stage
for tug-o’-war. Looping it round a branch
they remember a forgotten smell of tar.
The mount: nobody round here touches tyres,
forget the frilly Fragonards of art.
They’re looking for the kind of stick you’d use
to push a piece of better timber through
the band-saw blade in woodwork, or
the kind for throwing to monotonous dogs,
though knotted to a tree, shuttling
between the earth and sky, a whole summer
waltzes on its axle. They queue
to jump, and practise certain styles
widely understood and recognized.
Some go silently. Others have battle cries.
Their eyes take photographs. Clouds
beneath their feet. An inclined plain
of wheat. An onlooker’s shy smile
invisible at normal running speeds.
A bonfire’s scat. The nettles on the dump
bumfluffed in close up. After they’ve jumped
most of them can’t wait to go around
again, the youngest hanging back
like understudy savages,
and always one who gets his kicks
shoving first timers from the scaffold.
where weeks from now they’ll kneel in prayer
before an altar of spaghetti hoops,
Fray Bentos beef, pink hymnbooks packed
as tight as tinned fish in the pews, to sing
We plough the fields and scatter . . .
knowing it doesn’t matter. Here
gravity can’t work out where they’ve gone.
History isn’t looking. Before
they hand the tethered baton on
and everybody in line moves up one,
they practise their escape until it’s dark.
The tree records them in its rings and bark.
Curlew
On election night Pan fantasizes
about electoral reform
by picturing the high moorland
where ballot boxes go to spawn.
He’s trying to remember the curlew
but it’s hard—it starts strong,
wavers, bubbles, then falls towards
earth, but the timing’s off, the phrasing’s
wrong. Watching from a safe seat
he has fantasized about running
himself, but in heels and goat chaps
he’d likely lose his deposit.
His town is demented with counting
while its estuary always declares
rain fallen hours ago in the hills.
In the hills. There’s a lag on the line.
He’s gone to the country. The markets
are fluttering. He’s emptied his head
of the news cycle. Helicopters
are called out to search for subjects
with a history of wandering.
Now he uses his pipe as a backscratcher.
Still the song won’t come. To think
he once had the curlew by heart.
The Story of the Hangover
Once, before wild vine or maritime grain,
somebody must have noticed this, one da
y
in prehistory, watched how scavenging dogs
would lollop sideways from a rotten windfall,
and decided to try some; say an elder
of twenty-seven summers, calloused and worn,
his unscarred liver startled by this new,
simple poison, this blushing through the gut
the world was waiting for, its seafarers,
its herdsmen camped out on a darkened plain;
that will loosen tongues before they’re barely talking,
that empires will be founded on one day;
though for now, we’ve a drunkard in a clearing
who doesn’t know his limit, or have the words,
just a howling at the moon, his tongue on fire,
having stumbled on the biggest thing since fire,
and no one in his tribe sees the discovery:
instead, thinking him entered by wood spirits,
they lash him to a stake beyond the cave-mouth
(the first spare room), where wives and sons and daughters
keep all-night vigil through his groans and snores
and in the morning bring trepanning flints.
Positioning
Somewhere between an exhaust fitter in kitten heels
and an astrophysicist in fuck-me pumps,
if that makes sense?
Between two extremes, though we won’t use the word ‘extreme’.
We need to put some space between you and the snorkel parka,
between you and social housing policy.
Somewhere between a neurosurgeon in a kilt
and a dog groomer in a muumuu,
if that makes sense?
We can pretty much take this anywhere.
Remember: a brand is a promise.
If we get this right and hit those revenue streams
it’ll pretty much all be down to positioning.
We need to tone down the regional accent.
We need to play up the regional accent.
Somewhere between a media buyer with a half beard
and a poet in artisanal denim,
if this is making any sense at all?
Oiks
Once, they had hearts of oik, each bud, each mate,
each bruv were sappy words that glued them together,
then new words came to loosen those, like solvents,
and as the cities grew, oiks could be seen
in cafes, buses, or walking oikily along
keeping their sadness to themselves, though it sang
in the skin on a mug of coffee, the sun on high brickwork,