Collected Poems (3 page)

The world's maidenhead supine for breaking

By corpuscle Tartars

To whom a toothbrush

Is a miracle;

What vast looting

What jewels of fires

What great cries

And long convoys

Of robbed and robbers

Leaving the sack

Of rich great London.

A CHILD'S DRAWING

A horse in a field drinking water:

A child's drawing (with a tree)

Is how it looks to me

From a bed and through the window.

Village houses stacked behind

But horse made beautiful

Blown into shape

Back bent to water.

My view uncomplicated:

Your eager nostrils drinking

And unseen except by me

Who sees me watching you drinking

Even the slime and water

At the bottom of your pool.

Who – as well as making you –

Put you face to face

(Within the child's drawing of a field

Looking clear into the pool

That children envy)

And me here?

No complaint,

For you have field and tree and water

And I my child's drawing through the window.

OPPOSITES

Fire and water

Chemically meet

In mutual slaughter.

Fire would the other cook:

The evangelical conviction

Of a Six-day Book.

Water would the other kill:

Philanthropy to bring

High temperatures to nil.

Yet ask what solid flesh may stay

Fire with swamp

Water with baked clay;

Neither compound an utter loss:

One left with dregs

And one with dross.

EXCERPTS FROM ‘THE RATS'

1

How did they begin? What oracular sound

Reached us from platforms underground?

What muzzle moved against the humid clay?

What well-clawed feet scratched into ocular day?

They waited, sleek-bellied rats

Whose memories (kept dry in old tin hats)

Were parchment-read and spread, then lit

As torches to illuminate for these rats

The runnels and the tunnels of each pit.

Revenge was not the fashion: those who shoved

Were put no fatal question, a balanced glove

Ignored upon their shoulders, while in the mines

Unchallenged diggers sent out signs

Of geologic stairways built on bones:

A noise of rodents nosing through the stones.

Where are they now? With perfect guile

They breathe good air and walk such streets above

That glisten with fraternity and love;

In plastic surgery of grim disguise

They sport dark spectacles instead of eyes

Who might be you or me or that false smile

That gives out bread-and-butter in God's name

And silently observes responses – like a game.

Where? No need to look around, my friend

Or in big books that open at the end

(Since legibility is no great tool).

Nowhere. Stand on your head and play the fool.

How? Put out your tongue and shut one eye:

Good. Stay like that until you die.

And then? The rats will still be underground

Snug in their galleries, unsought, unfound

Untried and tied to undermining tricks

Until your houses shiver and collapse like sticks:

They speak corruption, live among its flowers

Proliferate black seeds in April showers.

The heart stops breeding fields of verity

Becomes an eggtimer overworked and spun

By propaganda whose ignoble run

Of words begets not progress but obesity.

One day you'll take your best friend's hand

And feel his fingers turning into sand.

No one will lift the black patch from a warning

Who cannot see the night from too much morning.

So? You ask too many questions, son:

Take off those glasses, and pick up that gun.

2

Those continentals, the funny English say,

Until my brain rebels and with grey

Just logic substitutes for ‘English' a word

Many might object to, a label too absurd

To comprehend, a double syllable

That to me will remain unkillable

Like gutter children or an Arab nomad:

Namely I rename an Angle ‘
OGAD
'.

This brain-somersault has made

It suddenly impossible to call

An oak a limetree or a spade a spade

After sixty months meandering

In warm Majorca and coniferous glade

Where many tongues in silent valleys mix

To push my English to the further banks of Styx.

The first grey sago-
OGAD
met by me

Was on the high grey waves of
OGAD
sea,

Stamping passports on the ferryboat

Before the mouth of Dover's dismal throat.

Unprivileged aliens in their special queue

Etched their names for white-faced men in blue,

Unbribable stern servants of the realm

Whose rat-like ashen fingers grip the helm

Of
OGADLAND,
keep an inner circle speed

To guard an obsolescent greed

Of law and order firm behind seven veils

Of self-important mists – and Channel gales.

I lingered in this continental line

Idealizing Britain-of-the Brine

To my American wife with passport green,

Until a tall Sicilian wept and cried

That those grey
OGAD
cliffs so vaguely seen

Would ever bar his way to Paradise –

Because a leaden-weighted face of ice,

Bilious from its last attack of spleen,

Based his entry on a throw of dice.

Weeping so, he'd do no wrong

I say, but who am I when rubber stamps

And lines of
ANGLE-OGAD
faces vet

With blank dictatorship these so-called tramps?

Such rats will face the floodtide yet.

3

Many pink-faced
OGADS
of the north

I have met on Sundays leading forth

Pink-faced
OGAD
-dogs on lengths of leather

On typical wet days of
OGAD
weather.

The second month came musically sweet

And mild, blue skies glittering with birdsong

And silver jetplanes frolicking like fleet

Lambs not yet responsible. ‘What a

Beautiful raincloud over there!'

Black and grey, yet

Surely a silver-lining lurks somewhere?

How strangely like a mountain, round and jet;

Moving with speed, yet silently, no rain

Falling from its cabbage – no, cauliflower – head:

And suddenly a mushroom grows instead!

Such
OGAD
weather does not give clear vision

Hides all above the level of the eyes

Makes only power to see with fair precision

Certain orders posted by the wise

Of this dark
OGAD
world: ‘Keep off the grass'

And ‘Queue this side of sign'. ‘Thou shalt not pass

Unless your child or dog be on a lead'.

‘Keep to the left'. ‘Slow down'. ‘Reduce your speed'.

‘Don't park your car upon this hallowed spot'.

‘Drop litter here'. (That animals begot?)

‘Step along there, room for two inside'.

And not one democrat looked up and sighed:

You need not lift your face towards the sky,

All orders are placed level with the eye.

These pithy messages must make good trade

For those who paint them. A poet's blade

Can't cut more ice, the brains

Of dull bespectacled sad
OGAD
folk

Are taught by television and a race for trains

Each morning not to test the laden yoke

By a gaze to heaven, when all earthy bread

Is planted firmly at their feet instead.

4

Revolution is the word of God

A firefly that lifts from soddened ground

For one second at the end of spring.

So go the workings of the unsound

Mind in its beginnings, a minor sting

That no rat notices, and turns no brown

Last winter's leaf to face the sky.

In this live jungle must the mind leap down

To feed on pickings of dark soil, and shy

Its hawk-beak at the earth's sweet guile:

Then rise full-caloried to kill in style.

These are the commandments of the rats:

You shall be born into the melting-vats

Without an eye to give or a tooth to lose

And never want for schooling, work or shoes.

Good: but each advertisement is a decree

A hanged man on the propaganda tree

(From ITV as well as BBC)

To make it shoot up high and thin:

A hundred thousand may begin

To march one damp October dawn:

You can't thank Life that you were born,

Says Rat beneath his atom-cloud: the melting-vats

Demand obedience to no one but the rats.

You shall love the rats who take the hours

From your clumsy hands, who guide you over roads

And traffic islands, take heavy loads

From lighter brains, give paper flowers

Of happiness, and stand you in a line

For bus or train, transport you to a house

And television set and
OGAD
wine:

You too can be a rat divine

A living civil servant of a louse

Though first you must become a mouse.

O hear me, soulless
OGADS
of the mist

Older than the rocks on which you pissed

The winter snows away for idle summer;

Listen to the rawboned pitprop drummer

Who versifies rebellion from the ice

(In exile where he feeds on uncooked rice

That one day will explode his walnut fist)

Hear his warning over your contented mummer

And the mewings of devoted mice:

Catastrophe will be the last device.

5

So keep your whiskers weaving while you may

Beneath blue helmets, antennae of the law

Sensitively finding those who pray

For criminal success by some shop door.

The time to strike is now. Drop your club

Upon the head that holds ideas to boast

Your kill, who stands like an untamed cub

For buses on the wrong side of the post.

Keep your long rat-whiskers sleek

The man with garden shears may die next week

Next month, yet maybe come with fist and claw

With fuses primed in a Beethoven score

And dynamite ensconced in crated butter.

You do not even hear them mutter.

They watch you pace (from behind a shutter)

See you preen your whiskers as you walk

Twirl your truncheon, chew your rind of pork

Watch a drunk negotiate the street

(Correctly). You glance at the callbox of your power

Blind to their refusal of defeat

As they debate on when to name the hour.

King Rodent reigns on
OGAD
demock-rats

On water rats that watch each riverbank

And bridge for criminals who do not thank

King Rodent's riddance of white leopard cats:

They wait until the shadow's leap

Becomes an offer of a well-aired bed

That does not promise them a life of sleep.

King Happiness has waved his magic wand

Shown you a smooth reflection in the pond

Of television shows, recorded your own voice

In the self-selections of your choice,

Set up his directions on the street

Turned mechanic to your motorbikes

Poured patriot sauce upon your luncheon meat

Sent you out on Sunday-morning hikes:

Party-hatted happiness is here,

Each tenet brayed by a Royal Chanticleer.

6

Death is not preferable (had you

Considered it?) to this untrue-

To-life and that man's sweated brow.

How could, an end called Death

End this as easily as that

Man thinks? Questions come

From artesian springs

Labyrinths of sea and soil

Making question marks

Out of eternal water

Demanding bloody answers

And a bloody year

Of cleansing. Slaughter?

Here comes the First Battalion

Television Light Infantry

With bayonets fixed –

Break them down!

Around the left flank come

The Porno Paper Cavalry Corps

Riding pink and yellow tanks –

Cut them off!

Under your feet spring

The Rat-State Sapper Brigade:

Dig them over like a garden

Do not let their forces overwhelm you

Rather go insane before they

Force you to their ranks

Or kill you.

The pyrotechnic paranoia of the anti-rats:

Clean against dark

Light opposing Death

Tearing slide-rule and scalpel, pen and typewriter,

Scales of rat-justice, rat-precision,

Libraries recording rat-right and rat-wrong

Rats that nip away each toe

And suck the soles of too thin feet

Rats that eat your eyes like oysters

Spread false trails over burrowed hills

Swamp-rats wood-rats tree rats

Plague-rats, pet-rats, army and police-rats

Sadistic rats that will not kill

Kind rats that drug you in the night

Rats that let you crush them in the garden

Run across your path

Climb trees before you see them

Eat corn that would give you the strength to kill them

Rats that laugh, rats that fill the night with infants crying

Rats that gloat, rats that bend your life before them

Rats that move around you in the night

Rats invisible that ring you during day

Rats in books, on radios, in tins of food