Selected Poems (8 page)

or butt-end of your rifle,

you would enter an air

as warm as the blankets

just left by a lover,

yours, if you have one,

an air full of fireflies,

bright after-images,

and scuffed Krasnoe snow

like unmeltable stars.

for Miroslav Holub,

Havana, August 1969

Watching the Soviet subs surface

at the side of flagged battleships

between Havana harbour and the USA

I can’t help thinking how the sword

has developed immensely,

how only nomads in deserts

still lop heads off with it,

while the pen is still only

a point, a free ink-flow

and the witness it has to keep bearing.

Miroslav, you must remember

there’d be no rumba now,

if the blacks who made Cuba

had not somehow evolved

either when shackled or pegged

or grouped for a whiplash harangue

or under the driver’s bluebottle eye

following their own eyes flicking,

flies dying in jam-jars

jerking all over –

       
Think

of those trapped pupils let loose,

the offal they’d flock to,

O have to, being so hungry,

History inescapable, high,

necessary, putrescent,

unburied, still not picked over,

only the balls of it gnawed at –

had not evolved as I said,

together, somehow, with slight spasms

of only the nipples or haunches,

a calf-muscle tugging the chain taut,

the art of dancing on the spot

without ever being seen to be moving,

not a foot or a hand out of place.

A spoor from a kraal. Then grass

greens the turd of the carnivore

gone all gums. So the sick Boer

lays on with the whip less.

Panic in him and round him

like a wind-flapped tilt –

only the sable sons of Ham

cram Death’s dark veld.

Coupled together in God’s span,

outnumbered many times over,

ox, dog, Hottentot, Caffre,

and just one Christian man.

‘This Babylonian confusion of words results from their being the language of men who are going down.

(Bertolt Brecht)

What ur-Sprache did the labour speak?

ur ur ur to t’master’s Sprache

the hang-cur ur-grunt of the weak

the unrecorded urs of gobless workers

Their snaptins kept among their turds

they labour    eat and shit

with only grunts not proper words

raw material for t’poet

They’re their own meat and their own dough

another block    another

a palace for the great Pharaoh

a prison for their brothers

Whatever name’s carved on those stones

it’s not the one who labours

an edifice of workers’ bones

for one who wants no neighbours

Nimrod’s nabobs like their bards

to laud the state’s achievements

to eulogize his house of cards

and mourn the king’s bereavements

The treasurer of Sprache’s court

drops the bard his coppers

He knows that poets aren’t his sort

but belong to the ur-crappers

Ur-crappers tongueless bardless nerks

your condition’s shitty

no time for yer Collected Works

or modulated pity

but ur ur ur ur ur ur urs

sharpened into Sprache

revurlooshunairy vurse

uprising nacker starkers

by the time the bards have urd

and urd and urd and Sprachered

the world’s all been turned into
merde

& Nimrod’s Noah’sarkered

sailing t’shit in t’ship they urd at

no labour can embark her

try and you’ll get guard-dog grrred at

the shitship’s one class: Sprache

Bards & labour left for dead

the siltworld’s neue neue

bard    the HMV doghead

in that
negra negra
Goya.

(See the picture ‘A Dog Buried in the Sand’ among the Black Paintings of Goya in the Prado.)

(from Aeschylus)

Geldshark Ares god of War

broker of men’s bodies

usurer of living flesh

corpse-trafficker that god is –

give to War your men’s fleshgold

and what are your returns?

kilos of cold clinker packed

in army-issue urns

wives mothers sisters each one scans

the dogtags on the amphorae

which grey ashes are my man’s

they sift the jumbled names and cry:

My husband sacrificed his life

My brother battle-martyr

Aye    for someone else’s wife

Helen    whore of Sparta

whisper    mutter    belly-aching

the people’s beef and bile:
This war’s

been the clanchiefs’ making

the ruling clanchiefs’ so-called ‘cause’
.

Where’s my father    husband boy?

where do all our loved ones lie?

six feet under near the Troy

they died to occupy.

A Ballad of Beverly Hills

Big mouth of the horn of plenty

horny    horny Hollywood

Food    flesh    fashion
cognoscenti

grudge the midge her mite of blood

Fat bugs fry and small gnats ping

against
Insectecutor
bars

so no slight unsightly sting

blemishes the flesh of stars

Don’t adjust the skew-whiff Manet

you’ll touch off the thief device

monitored each nook and cranny

of this closed circuit paradise

but tonight she’s feeling spooky

plucking plasmic plectra strike her

nervestrings like a bop bazouki

boogie-woogie balalaika

Divinely draped in 3rd World ‘folk art’

(Locations where the labour’s cheap!)

unaware she’ll soon join Bogart

big C first and then big sleep

Brown tits
on show ’ll

scotch the lies they’re not her own

Death’s the only gigolo ’ll

rumble that they’re silicone

Death    the riveting romancer

in sheerest X-ray underwear

nimble-footed fancy dancer

bonier than Fred Astaire

Girning atcha
gotcha gotcha

(on his dance card once you’re born)

cold carioca or chill cha-cha

charnelwise to Forest Lawn

Or choker sheikh whose robes hang loose

O worse than loss of honour fate!

His kisser sags from black burnous

your veils are blue barbiturate

Freeway skiddy with crashed star’s gore

(fastlivingwecanshow’em!)

the jelling jugular ’ll pour

at least a jereboam …

Places that you once changed planes at

or hardened second units shot

this afterlife eternal flat

horizonless back lot

places    faces from your worst dream

say    starvelings of Recife

who made your slimmer’s body seem

embarrassingly beefy

On such locations old at twenty

boys grub green crabs from grey mud –

big mouth of the horn of plenty

horny    horny Hollywood.

Ah, the proved advantages of scholarship!

Whereas his dad took cold tea for his snap,

he slaves at nuances, knows at just one sip

Château Lafite
from
Château Neuf du Pape.

‘In 1799 special legislation was introduced “utterly suppressing and prohibiting” by name the London Corresponding Society and the United Englishmen. Even the indefatigable conspirator, John Binns, felt that further national organization was hopeless … When arrested he was found in possession of a ticket which was perhaps one of the last “covers” for the old LCS:
Admit for the Season to the School of Eloquence
.’

(E. P. Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Class
)

Nunc mea Pierios cupiam per pectora fontes

Irriguas torquere vias, totumque per ora

Volvere laxatum gemino de vertice rivum;

Ut, tenues oblita sonos, audacibus alis

Surgat in officium venerandi Musa parentis.

Hoc utcunque tibi gratum, pater optime, carmen

Exiguum meditatur opus, nec novimus ipsi

Aptius a nobis quae possint munera donis

Respondere tuis, quamvis nec maxima possint

Respondere tuis, nedum ut par gratia donis

Esse queat, vacuis quae redditur arida verbis …

Si modo perpetuos sperare audebitis annos,

Et domini superesse rogo, lucemque tueri,

Nec spisso rapient oblivia nigra sub Orco,

Forsitan has laudes, decantatumque parentis

Nomen, ad exemplum, servo servabitis aevo.

      (John Milton, 1637)

How you became a poet’s a mystery!

Wherever did you get your talent from?

I say:
I had two uncles, foe and Harry –

one was a stammerer, the other dumb
.

for Sergio Vieira & Armando Guebuza (Frelimo)

Read and committed to the flames, I call

these sixteen lines that go back to my roots

my
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
,

my growing black enough to fit my boots.

The stutter of the scold out of the branks

of condescension, class and counter-class

thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass

of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks.

Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress

clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,

the looms of owned language smashed apart!

Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!

Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting.

In the silence round all poetry we quote

Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:

Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting
.

Note
. An ‘Enoch’ is an iron sledge-hammer used by the Luddites to smash the frames which were also made by the same Enoch Taylor of Marsden. The cry was: ‘Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them!’

I

Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each

rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise

‘mob’
rhubarb-rhubarb
to a tribune’s speech

crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze.

The gaffers’ blackleg Boswells at their side.

Horsfall of Ottiwells, if the bugger could,

’d’ve liked to (exact words recorded)
ride

up to my saddle-girths in Luddite blood
.

What t’mob said to the cannons on the mills,

shouted to soldier, scab and sentinel

’s silence, parries and hush on whistling hills,

shadows in moonlight playing knurr and spell.

It wasn’t poetry though. Nay, wiseowl Leeds

pro rege et lege
schools, nobody needs

your drills and chanting to parrot right

the
tusky-tusky
of the pikes that night.

II

(On translating Smetana’s
Prodaná Nevésta
for the Metropolitan Opera, New York.)

One afternoon the Band Conductor up on his stand

Somehow lost his baton it flew out of his hand

So I jumped in his place and conducted the band

With mi little stick of Blackpool Rock!

George Formby

Finale of ACT II. Though I resist

blurring the clarity of
hanba
(shame)

not wanting the least nuance to be missed

syllables run to rhubarb just the same …

Sorry, dad, you won’t get that quatrain

(I’d like to be the poet my father reads!)

It’s all from you once saying on the train

how most of England’s rhubarb came from Leeds.

Crotchets and quavers, rhubarb silhouettes,

dark-shy sea-horse heads through waves of dung!

Rhubarb arias, duets, quartets

soar to precision from our common tongue.

The uke in the attic manhole once was yours!

Watch me on the rostrum wave my arms –

mi little stick of Leeds grown
tusky
draws

galas of rhubarb from the MET-set palms.

Note
.
Tusky
: the Leeds word for rhubarb.

Best clock. Best carpet. Best three chairs.

For deaths, for Christmases, a houseless aunt,

for those too old or sick to manage stairs.

I try to whistle in it but I can’t.