Wolf Tongue (20 page)

Shunned, ignored, cast off, slung in the bin,

sent from the bridge, pariah man, Mr Negative Endless,

fiercely fingered out by his ice queen and put on ice:

Gazer at photographs, kindler of memories hung on the wall.

But there’s no breathing hot reality here today!

You lean, arms out east west, on the powerful rivetted

spine of our Malevich Suprematist bridge, above

the raging salmon spawning greatest river, but

it is only a picture, and the sky is moonmilk blue.

Today it’s me with the twelve strings, the three

bars, me with the solo harmonica, unaccompanied

raw heart sax machine. Me with the loony frets.

No more us the boon fruits. Me Disney Dumbo big ear re-make.

Big ones, plopping pear drops splash on the silent pathways.

Always the salinations, cheek wiping, straight up

from the human salt beds. What matter this?
Don’t ever leave me.

Harmless nightdressed Palladium utterance

it really seems. Yet it blows like thunder

crushing at least one fucked up skull.

When it pops out of my enzyme count I’ll sign for it,

if write I may and can. Don’t bank on it, as in bank.

My great hero Kazimir Malevich, how the moon the other night

was just like your Suprematist plate in 1917, when

you quietly stormed the waiting world

with your railway sidings. I wear a cap in honour of you.

Now I have my CAFE CUBANO – Tueste Oscuro, and

today, with the rosemary flowers so azure

beneath the borage heavens, I,

like you, and Sergei and Vladimir, hate

all of my replicant oppressors, double-breasted

faces, Otis lift tunes all of the way to the boardroom if you fancy.

And Kazimir, I think of your wonderful plate, wonderful

is not too great a word to use. Indeed, it is undervalued

these very salination days, these days of liver expansion.

And Sergei, and Vladimir, I think of your guns,

and what they can eventually do. I used to myself shoot one,

but never at myself, though I have always had reason.

Yes, bless, blessure, bliss and blood, worst and wine

are my saintly, thorny words. I am crowned by them!

Not wearing fur-fringed gloves upon her flinty fingers

which sometimes taxed my shifting planets, she

felt my collar, for I am a drunken criminal of overspent

love, and she threw me in the jail of my terrible life.

Always in the locker of my single-minded lit-stricken cuffs

reaching for the emerald glass cylinder

cork within aperture, and the demons rampant

in their crest cockiness hands down my throat.

Hysterical psychotic drain cleansers.

Gnashed fervour licks down like fire

as the diazapam takes over and I lurch worse than drunk

down the locked ward. Barred windows, bedlam,

and all that mashed potato. I am mashed

also, stale holocaust bread without milk.

The autumn leaf which blows its tiny way

through the wonderful universe

before streams sweep it into nowhere.

No milk, just water with the dosage, urine. No wine.

But that is the curse of the Demon who shall always

be known as The One With the Mouth filled

with Rustling, Restless and Relentless Blades.

The wine comes complete with salt! Drink

at your own expense, but lap that brine. Suck

the Dead Sea dry and imagine it best burgundy.

In the hospital, locked and barred in the Harding Ward,

up the redbrown carpet into the first floor mental asylum,

away from the ground floor ward of patients under section,

with a blue carpet, with a phone, as in telephone, booth

working, first charge 20p, 10p not enough, 10p to

the red telephone company and 10p to the new trust,

which frankly seemed minimal, even the most heroic

twig of my family’s tree died for want of mashed spuds

in Cork on the blanket on a prison bedbunk, it’s all

on the gravy train of pills down the dry throat

and the mashed taties a comforting white collar.

I was not there to hold his hand when he died for

freedom and he was not in bedroom 4 to hold mine

when very funny vermilion lines slide viper-like

up the wall escaping the ant-gangs gathering to

plan a throat-choke raid on me at 4.50am.

Knocked up at 7 for the showers, the brain-dumbing

first knock-out of the day, the tick-off from Mr Starched

White Coat with Himmler clipboard, then the shit-brown

bran after a look at the slumped pink cardies to see

if death had come upon them yet. We tumble to

The Trough and exchange our troubles. And when we,

except Tony, dying from self-imposed malnutrition

and not from any kind of certifiable brain disease,

and who was from a village sacked by the shock troops

of this present Government, and not even on a proper

glucose drip, sitting on his bed in Bedroom Four, and

when we, not to repeat to even test your listening boredom,

sank back pill-brained and detoxing into bed, I

knew why in 1994 the windows were still iron-barred.

No corpses to be found on the York stone flags please

or it would have meant deducted funds on April Fools Day.

The Jesus Christ Almighty is a barely stripling bare-chested biker.

Bolting Pharisee jailers shaking shackles and chains, knuckled

love
and
hate
in Galilee blue, ace of clubs across his tanned blades.

He rides into town on a Vincent Black Shadow and moves his feet around.

My territory, his territory.

But we won’t fight it out. We won’t do a Hemingway.

We’ll exchange bike parts, accelerating road stories

and little-known facts about best oil and chrome polish.

In our eyes we can both see it: no curses or cures, both

on a dustbowl highway leading to the cleansing of temples

and the unstrapping of my Goliath gargle gargantuan addiction.

He had telling things to say and I had mine. Townsfolk

arced around in an awe of wariness and dread, planning

all mock trials ahead.

He had a cross to go to

and I have mine.

O yes, let’s kick some Makem Pharisee

scruffs from the thrash-hot main drag

handing in all badges and spreading allegiance to nobody.

Together let’s beat the smotherers of justice.

Fill her up, load her up, ready to run.

Your blood’s fluxed with serious innocence and grace,

but my tongue tells me I need something stronger.

Ferocity?

Try me my provoked and peppery friend.

Meanwhile, until the thunder rolls

and the street becomes a bloodbath,

come inside and lean against the bar.

Red wine for you, gin for me,

as the menfolk shrink away.

Later we’ll listen to the eternal music of plovers.

You’ll meet Pearl and her unremitting ceaseless silence.

I’ll tie one on, ready for a vomit seizure

alone in the treeline.

Expecting an overcooked cauliflower brain

convulsion, a horizontal twitch dance in the locoweed.

Addicted to alcohol, poet away with the prairie fairies,

the monkeys and the demon mixer.

Ignore me and the medics arriving

stuffing the bottle down a gopher hole.

Stick around.

You’ll make sheriff one day.

Demons, big-hatted and hard-hatted, far as gutter-toppled

squint-eye with grapple-lost spectacles can see, custard brain

head slanty on kerbside perch, vomit ready for a roller ride

into the X-rated, dog arse emptying unlit street, mongrel eyeing

the demon conveyors from here to eternity, bottle after bottle,

twisted cork to twisted head and unscrewed, screwed-up life,

over the slag heap of stonegrey aggregate from the moony saltpan

beds where the stones will surely lie upon my swollen liver,

as the swollen argent river sweeps across the tumblestones.

Grog demon biceps leaving me moan groggy, foggy-bonced,

pouring lunarstruck salt, sel de mer, coarse white pellets

scuttle-funnelled on MacSweeney’s stuck-out begging tongue:

Tongue stuck out like raw begging hand in the mall, sticking

out straight, single digit filthy message signal up yours tongue,

in the air bloated for booze upright needle Cenotaph tongue,

grovelling, whining, soliciting, pleading, eyes imploring,

thirst, thirst, thirst, craveache, pinecovet, itchneedlust,

but on comes the salinating, saliva-droughting insult, Sahara

mouth an agony O, my Lot’s wife tongue, rough orange fur tongue,

tongue examined by Dr Guo in needle room number two,

bladderwrack tongue late of the ebbingtide pools, salt on the rocks,

tongue of the deep sea trawler lick hull clean department,

tongue out on rent as a dog’s public park hard-on, for

artists to paint in glory of its pinky stiffness and quality

as blotting paper for anything as long as it’s a double on the rocks.

Blot, blot, blot, blotting me out: moan, moan, take me

from the slake tide to lake or snaky clean river, before

the endless chained pails of salt end me, tireless demons

happy in their work: a regular seven dwarfs scenario,

whistling darkly all the way to the daily saltbeds as

they pour, pour, pour, and the demons’ capped gaffer,

fancy Dan Demon Man, who shall always be known as

the one with the Mouth of Rustling and Relentless Blades,

swaggers barely into focus from my throne in the gutter,

one hand filled with bottles and the other with scran.

Just one more, sir, for the road?

Arrest me asleep, crashed out

under the eye of the borage: So what? I’m

just pissed as a primrose posy

beneath an April shower. I’ll do.

At least I’m speaking in cogent sentences

from the back of nowhere below an argent moon.

At least I’m not a replicant Labour Party goon.

I sold my fancy suits for vodka and a copy

of The Russian Experiment in Art.

It was the only way I could get near

Kazimir. I stood proud alone

in the Stalingrad rain and read

the legend headlines: Fiend Poet

Shot Dead With Broken Hat. Scald

Of The Steppes Before Firing Squad

Accused Of Dawdling On Lithic Tuff

With Shattered Socialist Heart – Gun

Seized. Friend Of Few Flees Not So

Lengthy Life With Unpunished Book.

But they were all too long or badly

bust and the typeface choice at least

debatable. So much in my oddly spring-

like foreign guises – Swanne, Ludlunatic,

MoonySwooney, Madstag, Lenin Wolfboy or

swiftly skilful terrace tantalising

push and run teaser fan pleaser Sweeno –

I yearned for 200-point Cyrillic caps

across seven cols or in cirrus strands

and to be a bloodred flower too, guts &

heart upon my sleeves and not a pinko posy!

Not to be out in rainy Nevsky Prospekt

but here I am at the back of nowhere

under a fickle sickle harvest five-year

plan pearly Shirley shiny moon, dreaming

in my railway sidings way of tiny toes

and teeming tumblestones twined without

torment in greeny locks and coronets

of cushy crushed footfall meadow cowslips. In

the dimmed and dimming day when it

will be dark along the river and always

dark and Othello will pad freely demented

a panther in my sickened heart, I feel

the gutter twisting, hard-fortuned

carrier of water and nitrates to the

unholy earth, and it all, all, yes, all

of it, howls in the basement bowels as

the gale gets up its fatal goat. Starlings

thrash the sky at dawn in feathered

shoals, quitting nightrest rooftop

cat-free safety of the city centre Odeon.

Truly, I do have 20/20 Vision: She’s

gone, she’s gone, but what can I do? What

drives me to you is what drives me

insane. Mental rental idiots in hatred

uniform pursue me through fire

escapes to arrest once and forever

before the racing sails of my heart

can capture her eyes of borage blue.

They’ll drag me away from B&Q the

gall and spite and malice crew, to

filthy demon paperwork and drinkwork,

to slurword work, collapse hardwork,

to tonguebite drudgery
grand mal
jerkwork

and far away, my fingerfast, from you.

All my rotten reeking shrieking shreds

are speaking fast now, sledging off my

funnybone tongue. The very last words

sung, they’re exploding and expanding

as they hit the croaking creaking rhizome

rats’ tail ground. Outbreak! Outbreak!

Thousands dying and thousands dead! It’s

more an incurable curse than a human

tempest clashing in the midnight blue

of the outer outskirts of Murmansk.

All human malevolence planned, sewerage,

invade my hair and lips and lovely

blue far horizon cloud cotton-soft eyes.

Killer virus in my brain bane, this liquid

poison potion passion pestilence for which

I have shown so little prayerful penitence

coughs its infection into my lovely kitten

drunken face. Spikes, brads, studs and welds

bussed up the bombed-out road from Nixville

to empty eager waiting bottle-holding hands.

Nailbite squall-stirring helicopter gunships

of darkest green – it is dark now along the

moonless river and dark and always dark –

descend to drop the flogging hammers in.

Tell Anne she can have her wildest pills

again tonight and the devil be on look-out.

My rattlechain hands go out unshaking now

in feverfew frenzy, big Russian tarragon

twister tornado as it whips its Monroe hips,

in the hostile thunder bellow days alone away

from you my lovegun, my bullet to the heart.

The violence universal of all you warders,

white coats or blue: needle room number two,

Chinese doctor grinning at me Manchurian

Candidate with her needles and punctures,

bars or no bars, mashed spuds or no spuds.

In single mode I speak out clearly astride

the argent turquoise starre system which

beams in your eyes. No log-in further

sequence needed. To log-out now means to die.

And the terrible gutters move again aching

with gargoyle gushing rain above the graves

dug by those who will lie in them horizontal.

The moon’s awesome gaping craters lean in

and the lurid savage cranberry sunne muscles

up inside its squadron of burning over and above

the iceblue rims of the fabulous fjords. Is that

Kazimir, John or Percy in the railway sidings

astride or in or beneath or moving through

the water? It is the streaming dark water,

for the water is dark and it is always dark

and the night is dark and cold is the very ground.

The emerging lanceheads of the chives are so

beautiful tonight, by offshore rigs, mainland

bridges and cranes, and humans walk beneath

the stars by the streaming dark water where

in the land of tumblestones it is dark and always

dark. Hear the roots of the flowers stress even

the mighty earth and cry. Feel the mad planet

buckle at the soul and knees. This memo to all:

I am 72-inches tall, yet when I go to meet John

and Percy and Kazimir and Pearl, stick me in

an oven and burn me just the same. Then I will

be a true Jew, a poet through and through.