RICHARD SCOTT
Soho
For Daniel
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, Rialto, Swimmers, clinicpresents.com, Butcher’s Dog, The Poetry of Sex (Penguin, 2015) and Wound (Rialto, 2016).
Thank you also to the following writers for their words, queer theories and translations: Walt Whitman, David. M. Halperin, Valerie Traub, Sigmund Freud, Vatsyāyāna, Leo Bersani, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mark Doty, Socrates, Jean Genet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ellis Hanson, Adam Philips, D. A. Powell, Felice Romani, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Martin Sorrell, A. S. Kline, Norman Shapiro, Edmund White, Donald Revell, David Wojnarowicz, Henri Peyre, Stanley Burnshaw and Haydon Bridge.
Profound thanks to Matthew Hollis, Lavinia Singer and Hamish Ironside; and so much gratitude to Daljit Nagra and Edward Doegar for their unflinching belief in these poems.
Additional thanks are due to the Poetry Society, the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, the Arvon Foundation, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Snape Maltings, the Poetry Trust, Poetry London, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, Goldsmiths College, the Faber Academy and the Rialto.
Loving thanks are due to my brother, sister, mother and father; and to Rhona Johnstone, Joan Scott and Margaret Theophanous.
Thanks also to Alice Dixon, Owen Willetts, Abigail Parry, Michael Mackmin, Chrissy Williams, Anna Selby, Reneé Doegar, Hannah Lowe, Rebecca Perry, Edwin Burdis, Liz Berry, Maura Dooley, Mike Sims, Sarah Macdonald, Jamie George, Elspeth Henderson, Matina Goga and Lina, Alex and Rafael Mahdavi for their support, encouragement and collaboration.
All the poems in this book are dedicated to my partner Daniel, who makes everything possible.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Public Library, 1998
I ADMISSION
le jardin secret
crocodile
plug
four arias
Dancing Bear
Childhood
Permissions
‘slavic boys will tell you’
Reportage
Sandcastles
cover-boys
Fishmonger
Admission
museum
Public Toilets in Regent’s Park
II VERLAINE IN SOHO – 15 LOVE POEMS AFTER PAUL VERLAINE
blue-screen
love version of
tinder
green
pastoral
stupid love
the hole
W1D
like to go for long walks
heath
the presence of x
today
sertraline 50 mg
in the style of richard scott
other people’s dreams are boring
III SHAME
[have rubbed myself against bark]
[mostly because I had been re-reading freud]
[even if you fuck me all vanilla in]
[you slug me and]
[no muscular fields just scrub and]
[under neon lights my arms glow scar-]
[but our crab shells are orange]
[5am cadaver-slack in my arms]
[legs straight as you go forward knees]
[are you looking for me in these lines]
[how could I forget the hot-faced]
[people say shit like it gets better]
[you spit in my mouth and I]
[shame on you faggot for bending whitman to your will co-]
[I am the homosexual you]
IV SOHO
Oh My Soho!
About the Author
Copyright
SOHO
Public Library, 1998
In the library where there is not one gay poem,
not even Cavafy eyeing his grappa-sozzled lads – I
open again the Golden Treasury of Verse and write
COCK
in the margin. Ink stains my fingers. Words stretch to
diagrams, birth beards and thighs, shoulders, fourgies.
One biro-boy rubs his hard-on against the body of a
sonnet, another bares his hole beside some Larkin. A blue
sailor spooges over Canto XII. Then I see it – nestled like a
mushroom in moss, tongue-true and vaunt – a queer subtext
and my pen becomes an indigo highlighter inking up what
the editor could not, would not – the violet hour of these
men hidden deep within verse. I underline those that nature,
not the printer, had prick’d out; rimming each delicate
stanza in cerulean, illuminating the readers-to-come …
I ADMISSION
loose the stop from your throat …
WALT WHITMAN
le jardin secret
boys were my saplings
a hundred soft palms
reaching for my warmth
boys were my herbs
square-stemmed furred
scented with musk dank clove
& lovage boys were my
crops my ripe-red yield
my seeds each one exploding
onto my lips like sherbet
boys were my vines my
creepers my climbers
tattooing my neck back
& thighs with suckle boys
were my nettles my thistles
my thorns tickling me with
scratches & painting me
scarlet boys were my berries
my doll’s eyes my yew
bitter on the tongue dizzying
& psychedelic boys were my
pitchers my fly-traps my
venus a petalled mouth wet
throat around a grave
crocodile
I know how I will die then
in a death roll scales to my
cheek claws sunk into my pale
shoulders water burning my
throat like whiskey the un-
countable rows of yellowed
teeth ringing my scalp and
in the heat of the thrashing
river he will press his white
rawness into me like that man
who held me from behind
when I didn’t know sex and
gripped my mouth like a muzzle
and unsheathed his anger
stubble grazing my neck see
I have died already and somehow
survived hauled myself up from
the river mud to taste blue air
though I was not the same I
was carrion bleeding into the silt
and didn’t I wear those wounds
well pity me the boy who cried
crocodile I have these moments when I
know I wanted it asked for it even
to be special to be scarred
wading along the riverbank feet
in the brown flow flirting with
wildness the green violence in the
shallows and I know he is swimming
back to me his horned body slipping
through sediment and weed for
nothing ever really heals he can
smell the red meat of me
bait lighting up the river
plug
remember when I ached to bottom be sub-
missive after a lifetime of playground fisticuffs and you
you urged patience bought me a valentine’s day gift of moulded
silicone this marbled root which shone like a newly hatched
grub and glistened with spit whe
n you put the tip into your mouth
and pressed its malleable girth against my hole
remember how I flinched and you bit my ear to distract me from
this muscular shuddering this movement of internal peony-dense
flesh this sting-twisting and somewhere near the centre of me I could feel a dilating
like how a sea-anemone releases its blood-rich tentacles into the
saline current remember how I came in your hand then external
symbol made fetish I tell you now I had been waiting
years to feel this brimming over this stoppered-up this
ripe fullness
four arias
after Vincenzo Bellini
Perduta, perduta io son!
FELICE ROMANI
I don’t remember when I lost it my
greenhorn my cherry my
only wedding satin is the
skin of my inside wrist thighs and
as far as lilies go I’m an arabesque
amaranthine puce scarlet etc
all those fancy names for red
that just mean red
you can be humble white
unopened but I tell you
we all bleed when it comes to it
you can sing of the april lily the
but we all bud in muck and shit
you’re a little boy when you
sleep all curled up shrimp-
like your pillow-creased cheeks
dank brow and is it me you’re
dreaming of eyelids caught
in birdlime clementine lips in a
mid-dream duet who is this
sound that comes to you in the
beetle-blue night an O a B a V perhaps
just never an R tell me his
name darling roll closer
sing it into the feathered pillow
so I might hold it against
your gorgeous mouth
there you go again silver-
plating the bus stop
you make my veins pop blue
as a boy I could name all your waters
sea of crisis sea of cold you
did not turn away as I
jerked off explored my down with your
darling beam oh satellite
follow me home and I will open my
walls for you tonight I want
your lidless eye your pearly hum
wash my beard with translucence
transmute my skin to semi-precious metal
enter my mouth my anus with light
lidl roses don’t last
they rot
even a dash of 7up in the vase can’t save them
the skin-pinks slacken scrotum-
like the reds
crumble to eczema scabs
I did not know you would fade so soon oh flower
and in the cemeteries
after pentecost
boys are heaping the
overblown fetid and sick into
wheelbarrows
scrubbing the gravestones with horsehair
wiping the lichen from your initials
Dancing Bear
Children bring me coins
to watch him balançoire, tombé –
they imagine he has a
forest inside, they close
their eyes to see him
foraging on a high cliff
above a burnished lake –
belly to the wet earth
but inside is just a savage
who loves with only his
claws, his wild mouth,
tears at honeyed flesh
with his barbed tongue
so I tamed him with
a rod, a crop, my fist –
starved him until he would
dance this way, that way.
At six o’clock you should
see me count my money –
hatfuls of brass and gold.
I uncouple his snout, rub
a drop of lotion in, pour
myself a drink as my
father unzips his bear skin –
places his naked head
on my lap – throat exposed.
He apologises to me
for all the places on my body
his hands have scarred
but I just close his eyes,
sing him to sleep,
nuzzle his ears – a blade
in my other hand.
Childhood
Can I come with you? asked the clown
in his caterpillar-green silk jumpsuit.
If you’re going to say no then give me a crisp!
he spat, thrusting his fist spelt L O V E
into the open mouth of my Golden Wonder.
Crumbs stuck to his chapped lips.
I watched his grey beard struggle for freedom
under a smear of hastily applied pan-stick,
I counted the missing buttons on his coat,
the soup-stains on his ruff …
Can I come with you or not, you little
tease? His breath all salt and vinegar.
I nodded and gingerly led him home
by the path that winds through the cemetery.
Permissions
I am always writing my pamphlet of abuse poems collecting rapey verse like a tramp pocketing bin-butts fuse ’em together later have one magnificent slow cigarette and when my chap is read readers will sharp intake of breath just as they do mid-poetry-slam over a glass of house
red white pink whatever tickles your how daring how dark what marvellous images the one about what was it the schoolboy’s sphincter being like a I never realised how pink the inside of a cheek confessional surely not this writer wasn’t that would be too awful
but how does one ask outright my dear boy is the I you well I am not hinting anymore please take your hand out of my trousers
‘slavic boys will tell you’
slavic boys will tell you
when the chill of a journey sets in
simply upturn a chanced-upon mushroom
& taste the stem starting just above the dirty root-
pad – you must lick the length of it – dry out your tongue
on the spongy white limb & if it’s spicy drop it – but if it’s
salty, sweet or bland then eat especially if it’s salty – eat
eat your fill
of the beautiful
firm growth
in your hand –
gorge on the
dense white
meat – eat, chew,
swallow hard – for
the forests are will-
ing to provide – stern,
cap & gills – they
know the hunger
of their men
Reportage
When I read how they poured petrol over that man
I see my own death in some outlying federal province.
Men I went to school with drag me into the arable scrub
chanting queer! in a different language – they slip off
my hood, wet my body with tractor fuel; the ringleader
spits in my face before pulling out his tarnished Zippo –
eyes skittering with white hate, his hand steady
and as if Europe were a funfair mirror I look back
across the thousand miles of moving corn, the brick-wall
estates, the shuttered-up villages – to see myself free,
pacing the avenues of a liberal city, scanning a tabloid –
poem forming in my head. We are not so different
that poor sod and I – I too was born into this world to have
dirt on my knees, another man’s saliva in my mouth.
Sandcastles
A tall gent waits
inside the playground
not looking at any one
child but rather mostly
at the darkening door
of the public lavs
and the shadows
pooling within.
I wish I could enjoy
forging sandcastles with you
and your two-year-old,
filling the lime-green bucket,
packing it down
with the luminous shovel …
only now this man is
watching me –
he’s caught me
among the families,
caught me trying to play daddy.
His gaze is iron-heavy
as he walks
to the lavatory door,
pauses
like he were crossing a road, enters …
In one version of the poem I
follow him in, slide up next
to the cistern. He bolts the grimy
cubicle door behind us. Un-
zips my jeans. In another I stay
building with your daughter,
perfecting the castle’s invulnerable
keep. In another I am your
husband. I yearn to leave our
daughter alone for just a
handful of minutes and be loved,
in there, by him. In the last
version I am your daughter,
sculpting the intricate castle
from damp sand, oblivious to the
men, the poem being written.
cover-boys
top-shelf rags are not always pink curves&tits
sometimes an out-of-date LATIN INCHES hides
forgotten behind RAZZLE – three pixelated pricks