Wolf Tongue (18 page)

Fusillade of the sun’s eye-piercing darts.

Then sky from Dunbar and the long curve strands

arrives laden with rain: O these winds which move

my golden hair and heart and the fierce tips

of my beloved whispering trees.

The damage has been done with moon-kissed me, running

and racing downhill, flung beside myself

with silence or groans into clart-filled ditches and drains.

Where is my fierce-eyed word warrior today? Slap with violence

all you wish night and day, my language Lancelot – left hand

margin Olympia 5022813 – ABC impossible – and

I struggle and struggle but mean to win my way in

(cat, sat, bat, mat!): only the peewit,

the puffed lark – look at him rise ardent-breasted

as the tractor comes by – and chough with poetry

in the grass-turning, wind-burning morning. Say Nowt.

Sun and rain, wild perfume in my poor clothes

from heather and bilberry and the faint remaining

smell of sheep-dip on my neatly-sewn hem by mam, all wild

as anything on the Cushat. Then as the great winds sweep

across my frozen tongue I lean and lie and weep

for want of proper placing of full stops and all other means

of regular punctuation; I draw them in the grass

but the wind just drives them away from me. Wet-footed

I tread home alone as the beasts are put in and the byres closed.

Lance, lance, Lancelot, let me practise that, index fingers

working the keys, corporal acting as sergeant: yes, leave

your argent blade inside my aching brain, its light

will help me find the way towards the proper letters of my ABC –

for I am Pearl, idiot by ford and stile, stile which does

not squeak now, idiot awash beneath the tumblestones,

receiver and glad conjuror of hailstones from the law

whose inevitable forwarding address is my face and knuckles

and who will forever be the agents which cool my blood.

And mam has let the stove die – not like her – so it is cold tonight.

Typewriter he taught me down the dale – mitts on – Red mittens –

and the sun’s last lances lingering lovingly in Penrith

& Kirkby Stephen, where clatter of brief-legged ponies

hammered in my heart, but mossbank stones pillowed my spirit:

before the awesome black velvet went over my eyes

up a height in the last wilderness on the frozen law.

Those faraway jewels and halo brooches rived from darkness:

Stars!

Forgive me for my almost unforgivable delay – I have been laying the world to waste

beyond any faintest signal of former recognition. For a start, a very brief beginning

on my relentless destruction trail, I made the dole queues longer for they did not

circle the earth in the dire band of misery I had wished and hoped before my

rise to power among the global demons.

All my demons, my demonic hordes, reborn Stasi KGB neck-twisters

and finger crushers, their overcoats the width of castles

fashioned from the skins of Jews and poets, rustle with a fearful symphony

within the plate-sized buttons, rustling pipistrelles

and other lampshade bats. Some carry zipper body bags,

black and gleaming in the acid rain, from the mouths of others

words in Cyrillic Venusian torture chamber argot

stream upwards red on banners backwards

in a pullet neck-breaking snap in the final perversion

of the greatest revolutionary poster that

ever lived: the Suprematist Heart.

And don’t forget, he will not let you forget, the man with the final

beckon, the forefinger locked in deadly

fearful invite. This demon, this gem-hard

hearted agent of my worst nightmare, this MC with spuriously

disguised gesture, this orchestrator of ultimate hatred,

the man with no eyes, no cranium, no brow no hair.

He will always be known as the Demon with the Mouth of Rustling

Knives, and the meshing and unmeshing blades

are right in your face. The blades say: there are your

bags. Pack them and come with us. Bring your bottles

and leave her. The contract is: you drink, we don’t. The

rustling bats stay sober. When drunk enough they gather on your face

and you stand upon the parapet. You sway here and she is utterly forgotten.

All that matters are the sober bats and the lampshade overcoats, which

press towards the edge above the swollen tide. You jump, weighed with

empty bottles in a number of bags – some hidden as it happens of which

you were ashamed inside your stupid sobering torment. And of course

we jump, arms all linked, with you into the fatal tidal reach. We also

pay a price. But the demon who shall always be known as the Mouth

of Rustling and Restless Knives, he stands upon the parapet. Never dies.

And all that can be heard beyond the wind are the relentless blades. 

And then there is the pure transmission of kissing you, when

solar winds seethe in amber wonder through the most invisible wisps

and strands in a tender half-lit prairie sometimes, caught in

light which is not quite light, but as if the entire world was drenched slate,

or reflected thereof, in the soon to be handsome dawn of a reckless

damp November, with the gunmetal heavens plated quite beautifully

in goldleaf of fallen nature already so readily ready for the rising

sap of a dearest darling spring when we will start again and the curtains

will not be drawn at dawn beneath the monumental viaduct of the

great engineer. The truly great span of the legs above the city, spread

and wide, rodded north and south and electrified by power passing

through beneath the novas and planets and starres. Magnetised!

Get out the shotgun put it in the gunrack.

Here I am gargoyled and gargled out,

foam then blood,

Flatface to Nilsville. In the toe-tag toerag dark,

siege upon his paling, wires berserk like cyborg fingers

in the demon neon’s placid acid rain.

All the faery cars are shattered, overparked.

This is the hell time of the final testament,

the ultimate booking, the whipped out ticket, little Hitler

with Spitfire pencil on permanent jack-up; when he’s not red

carding

your fanned-out fucked-up Bournville chocolate cheekbones

he’s planning an invasion down your throat.

Big Jack with the bad crack,

just so peak and gleaming visor, ferret eyes

glinty like fresh poured Tizer – the seepage of the coleslaw,

the duff mayonnaise.

This is the season of firestorm lightning, torment time

of hell is beautiful.

Wide-awake hell, hell with fingers in a tightened vice,

forget the armies of little white mice,

hell beribboned with garotted larks and lice.

Yes, hell is beautiful, the weirdest ABC ever spoken

here in the dead letter box

in Crap Future Lane.

Wind clicks the metal leaves tonight.

I speed alive in sequence deep,

beast field rain

throbbing to the lipless pulse of windwonder.

O tormented landscape, handscape,

deathbones hewed

at my pouldrons and gorgets. Down

in the tarred and feathered department

of gutted souls the cry is so wimp: What’s in it for me

but the Labour Party and geometric raisin bread?

Chomp, chomp, go the pink bleat sheep,

down to Walworth Road.

I’m such a bad and drunken lad, a fiend fellow

in the useless art of swallowing and wallowing,

as to invite brazenly her puckerage, her mayoral

addresses of correction, her buzzing network

of helplines flashing down the gorge.

Just look, I snarled my lute

in waspish worsement, claggy gob

clipped claptight shut.

I sledged it fast off my funny bondage tongue

but no one believed me above the cellar: I died

every day since I gave up poetry

and swapped it for a lake from the châteaux of France

and all of the saints – Bede, Bob, Sexton, Messrs Rotten, Johnson,

Presley and Cash – abandoned me.

Perhaps the purple plush pansies have an answer today.

Only my little yellow lanterns

spring vinelike

in their breezy Jerusalem

aiming for victory over the ordinary sunne.

Hell is the pavement against my shit face.

And the devil has seen Robert off on the bus.

The light of recovery is just a format.

The light of recovery is just a lost fairy tale

seeping with ferndamp

in the bluebell vales of your childhood.

The light of recovery is an ex-starre, furious with everlasting

darkness.

I am the addict, strapping on his monumental thirst.

The sky is livid like jigsawed lace

and there are no happy endings.

Let loose at morning from frost pockets the wind rips.

Enough to snuff blue candles in a huff of sighs.

Let’s use the sensational strong stuff hanging off the wall

before we electrocute ourselves forever

to a final gleam of love. We do it like a Miró or galvanised Matisse.

Her name is Bijou, her sign The Snake.

Three-storey monsters, whipcord Judas-faced accusers and sneaks, faking

that the very sky is human

filled with sham planets, nooses not yet minted

from lunar shards

at every broken tearful opportunity

while in retarded zones

the tumblestone temple tables are turned.

Heaven’s just an opened bottle

                                             in a demon’s argent mitts

smuggled to my unholy lips

from the squirrelled reservoir, the cached stash

in Stasi lock-ups

underneath the fallen arches

in Legless Lonnen

  down Do-lalley Drive, Kerbcrawl Boulevard, Cirrhosis Street

and Wrecked Head Road:

I am leader of the beguiled and fear of straps across my chest

cleave me to the haunted floorboard bed.

Ruthless vanity will have its day (as you know worshipped ones)

and the Stasi demons’ gin-soaked bat-packed overcoats

are not different, my grave advocates, my angels, allies, brave backers and boosters,

my eternal love donors,

my decency guarantors, armpit clutch helpers

jostling to seize me in my seizures

from the cobbled gutter’s facedown drenched hell,

you patrons and dauntless promoters, partners and pals,

such confrères of confidence,

my duplicate equals and ferocious friends.

Vintage and grizzled each Satan’s wretch

does purl, ooze, gurgle, spurt and twirl, gyrate,

pirouette, spin, reel and swim

in grim lashing bind, unswayable elbow grease

applied to mindcrazy moonshine not hindered.

Living daily rim to mouth, rev gun throttled, quelled and jammed,

too late to stop now.

Let the dead man walk to rise is sombre fiction

my murderers will never calibrate.

                                             It and they are all upon me now

and tenebrous squalid and ignoble night

snaps its willing neck

on every lurid aspect of my rotten scowling face.

O let me plunge my feverhands into his clotted throat. Let me free

the devil’s briars and combinations, even down upon my worn-out

woman’s honkers, fingers hinged to wrench out infection

before it has him in the demon yard, the bad god shed, orangebox

overcoat so thinly laid.

There is more to his royal light than

wings of demon pipistrelles can dim, or dreaded Stasi hats and coats

undone to hide the starres and moon.

Busy to the last

with basin of detox vomit, I am black flag nurse, noose loosener,

penitence ring wrecker, rupture lip annihilator extraordinaire,

fierce defendress of flame faith, laver

of eclipsed kiss champ.

Revivor of the passed out poet in his pissed up plan.

In fit wrath, Notre Dame gutterspouts spring up

inside his fried lamb’s liver face.

I am the woman accused: vulturefemme

pecking, beak brushing

Prometheus poisoned meat.

I am the woman admonished

with fitwords, spit bubbles

and green bad movie slime.

Yet wipe I do

to lie against him sober

when the fit has gone

and each defashioned jigsaw piece

back in place.

Yes, it is true, Albion is distressed upon her hardened knees.

The quality of mercy writ so large

upon his broken angelface.

So many darts

and drunken hurts and harms.

So many ill-formed hurtwords.

Such forays of spitting spouting guntongue.

Twelve per cent non-vintage gargoyle gurgle gobshite.

The 999 call – again.

My quivering man laid under a blue light

empty bottles left behind.