Before Sundown
Before Sundown
Once there was a rainbow with many colours.
I was young then and I looked at it for hours.
Then the colours slowly started to fade
People with me cried a bit and said
perhaps we should pray!
When there was only one colour left
we all worshipped it like dogs
and called it holy names and dyed our socks
and everything the same colour.
But soon even that started to fade and
everyone got together to invent
a new one before it got dark.
It was absolutely no use I just
consoled myself as best I could
by trying to lose my sight
in a dignified manner
I said to myself,
Well blind people develop better hearing,
smell better and all that sort of thing.
But perhaps I should have thought
about listening to rainbows
before sundown.
Devil's Disciples
Devil's Disciples
The hair, the clothes the jumble sales
the box, the used cars, the telephone
the used houses, the yellow pages
the young solicitors and agents. The devils disciples turn up
In her dreams every night. Something dreadful something fails
“I’m on my own, I’m on my own.
The theatre the cinema the fairy tales
supermarkets, new cronies and old crones
a guru in his Russian tunic fools
the communist mums from finishing schools.
The heavy rites burning her up in her sleep every night.
Something dreadful something fails.
I’m on my own, I’m on my own.
The dozen years, the last hopes,
the children the future the loving parents the gifts
the blind men who offer lifts.
The doling out of rescue plaits
whole armies climbing up the ropes
with sores to show and wounds to touch.
Something dreadful something fails.
I’m not alone, I’m not alone.
Dream of Bean
Dream of Bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
It’s the best you ever seen.
Well, don’t you get me on that toast
I know it ain’t the most
I don’t want to get in that saucy old can
Get me out of that can
If you’re a good man
Get me out of that can…
Ah quick as you can
Get me out of the can
Because you know I’m a man
And I’m a man with a dream of bean.
I’ve got a dream of bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
I’ve got a dream of bean
It’s the best thing you ever seen
I’ve got a dream of bean.
It’s the best you ever seen
I’ve got a dream of bean.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Get me out of the can
if you are a man
Get me out of the can
and don’t put me on the toast
You know it ain’t the most
if I get on the toast…
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Get me out of this
I wanna get out
I got a dream, man I gotta dream
the best you ever seen.
Oh please help me please
I don’t wanna get in the can with all those other beans
Oh, oh, I gotta dream, I gotta dream
I gotta dream, I gotta dream,
Oh please I gotta dream.
Please please help me please
cos you know I gotta dream
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Oh please help me now…
I gotta dream of bean yeah yeah
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
Please help me
I’ve gotta dream of bean
Oh no get me out of the can
Get me out the sauce
I don’t want to be just like all those other beans in a can
Please help me now young man
Cos I gotta dream
Have you got one too?
I’ve gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream of bean
I gotta dream
I gotta dream of bean man, Yeah….
William's Clocks
William's Clocks
William’s clocks go tic tic toc
and sometimes toc toc tic.
They bing and bong upon the hour…
though often bong and bing.
He keeps them with a jealous care
And knows their every part.
He still loves their movements
when they will not start.
And time is unimportant
to Williams whirrs and chimes.
They move of their own willing
so handlessly sublime.
Chanson Pour Norman
Chanson Pour Norman
In that odd moment
stopping for black coffee
halfway through Hemingway
the first really educated man in the family
is always attacked by unforgettable silences
though he feels bound to call them noises.
This is understandable but when he starts
giving them voices and even worse faces
that is where nostalgic reconstruction
gives the lie to a loss of what is mere figment
and though the bitterness is fierce it is false.
New things are happening which he does not understand.
This is not real he says as he returns to
his own salty pages his own meaty cows
his own sacred earthiness
those qualities he admires in others.
I want to tell him that all he can hope for
that way is plain pre-history a lake of sodium chloride.
Because I know how it feels when you’re stuck
for a nice big bone to pick.
His coffee is understandably black.
Punch
Punch
Who hates authority and hits the policeman?
Who hates women and hates Judy?
Who has a long aggressive jaw?
Who fights the green croc who isn’t there?
Who gets away with it every time
though classically he should be caught?
It’s Mr. Punch, it’s Punch who does it all
and the green croc isn’t there, isn’t there… (repeat).
A Poor Man's Belly
A Poor Man's Belly
Why
When something beneath the eye
has been born
must we zoom down to zero in
the analytic sights of some chunk of glass ?
Will you say that fear of knowledge
is bad
if I tell you that my hands
were not made of that cool grasping metal
which are the trappings of well-versed heads ?
I find it hard to play with lenses
with easy finger exercises
like they do
though I can see you now, I admit,
the naked weight on some dull butcher’s scale
and everybody’s woman
and only the butcher’s thumb between you
and the rest
and being so lovely and tender
you’d definitely not end up in a poor man’s belly
for some unhungry success
would have his wife’s daily
fetch you to a nice big fridge.
What makes me twitch at the lips
is that you’d have no choice in that set-up
being the choice yourself.
Sometimes we all seem butcher’s meat
Or just plain butchers
and our words are sometimes knives of wisdom
that we like to understand because
they’re nice and clean and sharp
But they’re not ours then
and I feel more eloquent simply gaping
at things I never have understood.
this is all so much offal for the flies;
to see the scales in all their massive
deathly lead
is a simple, almost childish vision
but why should children have
the best of it ?
We don’t have to learn love
do we,
to know what happens when we’re all alone
together ?
But that is a question not an answer.
After the Clowns
After the Clowns
The feet of lesser beings
come to the circus o our summit meeting
and our hands hold time and space
by the umbilical
We are next on after the clowns
before the trained apes
We are draining our senses in the heights
in the one night only show of
paid for, understood as rigged-up
slightly pitied bravery
We grope darkly
You serene in a way
but just as frightened as me
aware that the moment
must be held now or lost in a murmer
of satisfied customers.
Now my darling we hang on for life
but these are not the frightened limbs
of tight-rope wlkers any more
Now we are swinging on the ropeless sky
of mutually entwining and rope-bursting flesh
Now we have done and
where is the cord they all came to watch
us fall from
into the one face of their dead-pan sea ?
What we have done is to make from sawdust
and sadistic expectation
an unseen laughing-crying thing
a soul independent even of eternity.
June 1965
June 1965
And when you think you’re
in a house of keys
and the doors even themselves
have secrets
what do you do when
the gaoler gets a plastic death
in his cold bomb brain ?
do you take up a cane
and thrash the old daylight
back to your vacant cell ?
do you call the withering bars
to a courtroom and cool chaos ?
do you sentence the dead judge
to a black cap it all punishment ?
What do you do when
the keys the keeper and the day
that all went pop
leave you holding the wrinkled
baby-dream you never knew
was even in the scheme of brick-laid things ?
The Tomb of Sigmund Freud
The Tomb of Sigmund Freud
Every year in a beautiful
part of Beverly Hills
many people of many different lands
end up by admitting that the only place
to go is the tomb of Sigmund Freud
which luckily is also in a
beautiful part of Beverly Hills.
They are supplied with keys at birth
which they can sometimes when they feel
the urge
turn off.
But sometimes these people somehow
lose their precious keys
Then they cry “Oh, deary me!”
We’re all wound up and we cannot
wind us down!”
That is when they all go to the tomb
It is a gruesome sight and only
the very toughest kids are allowed out
on the day of the pilgrimage.
They laugh when people hobble by
with weird repetitive mechanical spasms.
They know better than to cry.
The poor pilgrims gather in front
of the richly ornamented and exquisitely colourful
fountain which many a busy camera
had captured to preserve its fine and
glorious workmanship, for admiring posterity.
One by one each member of this motley crew
has his head dipped under the water
to see if he can find his key.
It’s stupid really, no one ever does.
But it gives them hope.
Personally, I go for the change of air,
And I never get excited over keys.
Some people say I should be
Psycho-analysed, but I’d probably end up
with everybody else’ key
and then there’d be fun.