Barefoot in the Head (13 page)

They were crying and cheering, discarding I’s. It would take on truth, be a new legend, a new communication in the ceaseless dialoga; the ground complexes given younger significance. Even Angeline thought. Perhaps he will really give us something to live by, more than the old fun grind. It surely can’t really matter, can it, whether there was a dog with a tie or not; the essential thing was that I saw it and stand by that. A phenomenon’s only itself eh? So it doesn’t matter whether he is right or not; just stay in the Banshee with him. Pray the warmth’s there, the loot.

You couldn’t tell wreckage from victim in the fast-turning shade-shapes of obliquity.

He was talking again, the audience were cheering, the group were improvising a driving song about a Midland-minded girl at the wheel of a sunlit automobile. An ambiguity about whether they meant the steering or the driving wheel.

Plugging the night’s orifices with solid sound.

PATTERN MORE THAN CITY MIND

The Intermittent Tattooed Tattered Prepuce

The moonlight of a June night

Casts shadows of crashing airliners

Onto the orthostrada of gaunt erections

Moonlight moonlight

Filing empty patios

And the big gymnastic sergeant’s marching marching

And the intermittent tattooed tattered prepuce

Does bayonet practice on a sweet civilian girl

Oh love’s a crash a parade-ground bash

An auto-immune disorder from which issues

A pair of bodies destroying their own tissues

Left right left right left

In out in out on guard

Lovers of the world unite

You’ve nothing to lose but appetite

If winter comes can the following one

Be more than a year away

Could this be loot because I feel

The flying human parts and the bits of steel

In an uato-concussion are the modern way

The military way

Of committing love

And the big gymnastic sergeant’s marching marching

And the intermittent tattooed tattered prepuce

Does bayonet practice on a sweet civilian girl

Oh love’s a smash a uniform cash

Negotiable when the moving parts peeling

Can autocade feeling anti-flowered healing speedily stealing

And the big gymnastic leather-cheeked sergeant’s marching

marching marching

And the intermittent inter-continental tattered tattooed

prepuce prepuce

Does bayonet practice on a civilised civilian sybaritic

syphilitic

Bayonet practice on a civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic

Civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic

Civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic

Supergirl

Left right left right

Moonlight moonlight

Up the motorways of love

PHIL, BILL, RUBY AND FEATHERSTONE-HAUGH

SMALL DOGS HOWLING

When you sank on my knee in the buggy

You forked your loving tongue in my mouth

And you worked me and made me come

Though your hair didn’t fit you properly

I still resemble the blur of your fingers

When the small dogs are howling

Tray Blanche and Sweetheart on the hem

Oh throw your acidhead at them

Lives deprived and broken

Bottles empty by dawn

While we were crotching together

Did you mind my shoes was torn

Some place like a magic garden

My friends all call me Rajah

And I’m a demon on the cello

Don’t ask me what we’re doing on the heath love

Because the estate has become divided

And we’re one with the ones who won

This place well the car broke down

But the street lamps were your tall wild lilies

And I couldn’t hear the small dogs howling

Tray Blanche and Sweetheart on the hem

Oh throw your acidhead at them

THE MELLOW BELLOW

DREAMING

Swept under sleep’s terminator

We send out blindfold signals

To a listener in dim Andromeda

We send out our folded signals

To the listeners in all Andromedas

Hoping dreading response

Beyond the lighted alleyways

The multi-motorways of time

Yesterday’s day regurgitates

Itself back through the limbic brain

Backwards rattling through orifices

Of ancient bugging systems

Alpha rhythms delta rhythms

Dark transmissions old as sandstone

Wild as pop

Between communiqués

Another sleep-form new-invented

Topiaries upwards outwards

Through our

Dull planetary bodies other

Messages secreted in the pores

Are also played out backwards

On an unknown waveband

These thin signals

Pipe from us in automated

Bursts

To be picked up on stars

White dwarfs

Monitored in nebulae

Identified

In other galaxies as

‘Dark

Bodies hitherto quite unsuspected’

And still between all human noises

Our figures with their own intent

Run daylight and silence backwards

When you target in to my

Perceptions

Am I reading you?

My fullness is a part

Of your thin signals

My visions

Wreckage of your orbit

From
‘The Threepenny Space Opera’

Another Dreaming Poem

My letters delay in their personal boxes

Uncertainty is on the whole my element

And the astrabahns bifurcate steeply

Low temperatures

Curtains drawn tight

A blur on the papered walls

And the night branches drooping

On the furred paths of grass

What you might call my pessimism

Is merely a long dedication

Of involved enquiry

Passionate and still deepening

Into the lost events of everybody’s

Days those past and those to come

And those standing on end unsorted

In the night’s post orifices

The great well of personal stuff

I don’t know or wish to know

Floods me with messages

Is it myself

I walk with or happiness

Found in the low night street

Footsteps on the pavement

Echoing in more than one house

PATTERN MORE THAN CITY MIND

The city has built-in pattern city

city
      
pattern

city

built-in pattern

Mind is more than city more than city Mind more

more than Mind
      
city

Roads run like fossil thought

      
run
      

fossil fossil like fossil

Mind
      
more

city

roads

fossil

Built-in
      
thought

Cities

Cities have
      
patterns

built-in

Cities

Cities have built-in patterns more

Minds are more Minds

Minds

Minds are more than cities

road
      
thoughts

A road
      
fossilised

road runs road runs A road runs like fossilised thoughts

Roads
      
patterns

runs

cities

fossilised

Thoughts
      
minds

WE’RE ALL FOR THE DARK!

Or, Life’s Never Been Better!

If you’ve ever sailed on the ocean

Or cheered when a port hove in sight

There’s one thing you’ll know — that emotion

Is better indulged in at night!

Since the time when old Noah

Spent those nights in the Ark

With the animals pairing

It’s best after dark!

CHORUS: Life’s never been better!

Each night lasts a year

Stuffed with women and music

And piss-ups and beer!

The girls that by daylight

Would blush to be stark,

Decide that their blushes

Won’t show in the dark!

CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

Just yesterday breakfast,