The Singer
The Singer(La Bassey)
Bold as a new penny
she holds us
touches us
all we can do
is not resist
trust
watch what she’s doing
breaking up distance
catching our dreams
in hands
like a goalkeepers
turning back over
a swan in each wrist
a snake in the
hips
unrest and tension
clutch boney arms
and are flung back
out to a sudden
place
where they came from
the breath is held
in the pleasure which she
holds for us
sure of her time
Don't Drop Me
Don't Drop Me(Lancashire Literature Festival 1981)
Mystics, mistresses, madams and mattresses
You are the monsters now,
in the fields and towns, on the map.
Look, see, far greenier blues,
pearly skies, hypothesize, wow!
Maybe I, maybe no,
hedgerow and Heathrow,
Hey, mister, is this it?
Beads of sweat and play-
acting,
all these years of fair-
dealing,
No, I’m not squealing,
only a wing and a prayer-wheel,
and a terrible feeling
nothing is there (is there?)
Reflexes, twitches, and
go sleep
with you monsters under
the continents
slumberland towns.
Catch me, don’t drop me
I’m coming down
I have got to come down.
Canvas
CanvasJune 1965
The brush can only try
to light a canvass with a candle flicker
the hammer and the chisel
are dumb dividers of a hot-faced whisper
the wind of flame
can never even gasp a dying semblance
of an ember in the stolen wood
of sapless lead.
When growling men
try tongueless to exude a crucial
river of expression
when howling mummers
try their roles on neurotic
first nights of the soul
the theologian will descend
to bless their efforts but only in his cloud
confess emotion.
For he and they
have dignity enough to leave
the hammering of blushes into blue
to mad exiles who wander
with unlit candles for torches
in search of tools
which trade with colours
in a lover’s pool of whirling oils.
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.
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.
Identity Parade
Identify Parade
When I am the i
that the eyes of others
wish to see
i am with their bodies
in the seas’s harvest of dead and
many times a million graves
in grains
ingrained into invisibility
on the placard of
God’s marching hand
When i am the i
the alphabetless
whisper of a seen thing
that you would let me be
because we are
not simple lovers
but unlettered phrases
in an unfettered styleless hand
i am your eye
and you are my i
and we are the seen things
that God marches by
that graves hide from
that seas and harvests
and alphabets and grains
and placards
gain form and meaning from
and would die sightless
out of our i.
The Confrontation
The Confrontation
So we confront each other
right here
where the concrete is familiar
having agreed that we no longer believe
in the wind-blown green discovery.
and our friends
who call us lovers
are equally accustomed to the formula of rocks
and when they confront each other
with close eyes and hands
we call them lovers.
but when they start wandering shyly
behind the familiar paths
(as if something new existed)
we recognize our own yearnings
to replace yellow grass
with something that wil stand up
to our foot feeling.
and we who confront each other
have never even left the concrete way
for our friends would think us mad
and no longer call us lovers
if in their well shod world
we were to seek the kiss of greem
upon the feet
but we have agreed about that.