In a 50s British motor car, screaming my dreaming,
Speeding us, red-dialed, to laze by Roman fountains.
When I am young again.
When I am strong again
The sinews of my arms
Will strain to halt the spin of Earth
Until an answer comes (and no answer simply will not do)
When I am strong again.
When I love as I loved then
The sweat and heat and heave
and life and the arched back
and the secret whisper
Will be the only God
When I love again as I loved then.
When I am bold again
I will split the ground with my words
And plant the oriflamme on 3rd Street and Van Buren.
Into the fissure with the red -faced coward
When I am bold again.
When I am young again
All’s for the making.
My futurist colours attract without pleading.
All of this I know will come to be
When I am young again.
Lain in the tomb
After the bloody birthing,
The slap of learning,
The first stirring,
The stone-smile masking,
Where were you?
During the slack-jaw lying,
The marked-me digging,
The wasted booking,
The crouched clerking,
What use were you?
Of a New Year’s meeting,
A biting loving,
A Roman sealing,
The ice advancing,
You had nothing to say.
Amidst the desperate ageing,
The vacant roaming,
My difficulty making,
The useless wishing,
You were entombed.
But in my scattered caring,
My sparse giving,
The rare minding,
In my scantlings of humanity,
I glimpse you.
Land of yobbish glory (with apologies to Elgar)
Land of yobbish glory, all on CCTV,
How shall we defraud you, who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider, may our trash piles be.
Even the PM told us, there’s no society,
Even the PM told us, there’s no society.
Birthplace of the skinheads, give some dole to me,
We do as we want now, screw authority.
Playing dumb’s in fashion, it’s so plain to see,
Robbing upper class bankers speaking “Estuary”,
Robbing upper class bankers speaking “Estuary”.
Throwing up in public, brawling in the street,
Swearing at the teacher, Britain’s all on the cheat.
Chavish is our nation, chavish is our creed,
Smash up somebody’s property
Drive off at a high speed,
Smash up somebody’s property
Drive off at a high speed.
Lo the old ways dying! See them while you can,
Here’s one I found crumbling “Manners maketh man”.
Each man for himself now, shout your “where’s mine?” loud,
Help to keep Britannia dirty, yobbish and proud,
Help to keep Britannia dirty, yobbish and proud!
A Petty Alchemy
Who will work a petty alchemy for me?
I have a famished scantling of a dream,
Once divined in silver and in gold,
That latterly cannot withstand
Corrosion by a base and ordinary breathing.
My name, whisper-kept so long ago
By hollow eye and calloused hand
Was written in quicksilver
Upon a sheet of muslin and cannot now be found.
Make me other than I am.
Recompound my elements every whichaway
So the song of my imagining is still heard
And drowns the knell of fearful reason.
On the Sea of Cortez
I dreamt of sailing on that spinel sea
That comes to turquoise as we outrun our dreary stars
And make them new.
The red-faced Sun, here not in mockery,
But sublimely sinking, beckoning beloved night
And all that is my truth.
At dreaming’s last the mountains of my inner eye
Sable-climb against the western ruby-embered sky.
I know upon awakening from my assumption
That I would give the riches of my gemmed escaping
For an hour another could surely afford to gift.
Carol for a starving child
Drown out the prone mumbling of the bloated boy
with the bursting eyes and the barely breath.
Chianti pairs better than Claret with poultry I find.
Mocked by his bowels at his closing
far passed the cares of indignity.
More turkey or beef?
A girl’s razored throat cuts into her time left
-quite young in dog years-
preventing her from gorging the air.
Leave room for pudding!
Tobacco-leaf dried skin marks them as waiting to depart
with voices stilled.
Yet every year I hear them as I feast.
I generally rise from the table and tape their mouths firmly shut.
Anyone for champagne?
Once around the Sun
All changed since then. That was the last day planned.
I had believed it was only in the shining small things that I might catch my reflection.
But then God dropped the world.
Smithereens.
For a few days I thought I got to decide how the continents fit together,
and could make the station clock stand still.
Some mornings I awake and feel that I still can. Hard to keep it going though.
Take it from me; it’s hard to look directly to an Angel when she’s set on maximum.
The four elements of Greek philosophy
At my first? Water.
Red scream-water of a mother’s pain
and the full-brim belly of the sea between.
Obscured child of the final fogs.
A drizzle-damped London baptism.
Earth of my parent’s famished story,
never my home but my only home.
Slack-jawed speech and sign of the cross.
Within, a petty civil war.
A sort of megalithlic mind is flinted
even before the years of jumped-up tumbledown.
New air to breath of the big sky
across the run-away main. Soon runs out.
Fish on the bank with gaping gills. Same eyes as mine.
Behold, I carry my cross into the Americas. Unrequested and anyway no-one’s looking.
It’s all been seen before here.
Fire is the best of it. Setting the heather blazing before I go.
At least that’s what I say but never do.
But beneath my slough the unuttered rage of the biting baby
threatens the happiness of the other animals.
There are no accidents
I regret
slamming the car door and catching my niece’s hand.
She was seven and I loved her
as if I had played a part in making her.
Because I had not done such a thing myself.
A sensitive child, her lump-in-throat and dewey eyes
indicated that she was bound to journey on a solitary road.
I was her favourite, being of her nature.
Returning from a family lunch I played my usual role
and without a thought shut the door on our special understanding.
As metal bit into tiny fingers
she at first uttered no sound but looked directly at her betrayer.
Then the shockwave hit and she voiced my pain.
A Cracked bone, the bruised and bloody hand of a child.
