Wolf Tongue (28 page)

The bluebell sky, the sky of snowdrops.

Here, at the last count, where we we are,

daisies, dandelions and forget-me-nots.

At home, a late postcard from Adolf.

I cannot be there. No more Eva. No more Braun.

Too much happening. Six million.

I never counted having others do it.

Alien efficiency but the German sun

was never geared up and warm.

There was a needle and people less than me who disappeared swiftly.

I’ll shave again in heaven and grieve my love:

The whole earth I never had.

30 March 1998

Wank-fever ran the world before I came.

And the banks run by conspirators with long hooked noses.

You’ll always call me an ex-corporal in the books of history.

It’s always going to be a closed book to you, Jews

and Australians and publishers.

What the universe needed was charisma

and I provided it. Even George Orwell knew,

the least humorous man ever born on earthe.

I – me – single-handed and double-footed – put the words

National Socialist back into their rightful place.

We did not need poets or booksellers or badblood Jews.

I was particularly interested in the extermination of gypsies.

There was a purge on and I was all for it.

This was the outrageous age before nose-rings

and Gary Glitter but we enjoyed all of our behaviour.

Glory and tanks were the last two words we said before sleeping.

30 March 1998

Once I was a quiet man before Eva

Then the stars rose in the sky like enemies.

Assiduous in my beliefs – there was no room for poetry –

there were six zeroes separated halfway through only by a comma

and a six and a comma after that.

All of that in such a short time.

It was an amazing reign of terror and rage.

And a period of icy decision and we will be proud of it forever

as I was proud of it then.

Seeing St Paul’s Cathedral

and the whole of Coventry burning made me come

very heavily

while Eva sucked my Nazi cock

and Goebels ranted

in due command

steadily,

saluting better than anyone.

31 March 1998

I knew Stalin and knew him well.

Churchill even worse – not a new European.

Destroying you all was everything I craved.

Nobody left except the buttercups and milk of Germany.

In years to come, I imagined volk in pretty houses

installing old-fashioned Bakelite telephones

out of sheer nostalgia.

To me, it’s an entirely putrid idea

because they don’t match digital technology.

I don’t want V2 rockets.

Fetch me nuclear power and fetch me Stalingrad.

31 March 1998

Eva, my eternal spanked love, and Speer, before he went

the way of the rest of the Western world, cowardice

and betrayal scalded all over his pathetic back. V1s, V2s.

In my early days, I never touched a pfennig that hadn’t

been handled by a Jew. It made me feel dirty and not German.

I spanked her because I liked it and she enjoyed it

especially the tougher it became. And I stared down

and ssnarled down Speer when his domination plan waved

in the wind.

Hands everything to me. Fists, palms, and pens for signing.

And the big open one high in the air.

31 March 1998

We would sit alone in the Eagle’s Nest

and spank and lie and speak about the business

of the future of the universe – one long poem unburdened

by myth and more black and white films than you care to name.

We never appreciated homosexuals and we never allowed in Negroes.

There was a repetitious revision of everything indeed.

Take your Satchmo and your Bessie back to where they came from.

There is a direness in my white sky. There is firmness in my purity.

And only I believe it.

31 March 1998

I looked down on a child today, not because he or she was smaller than me

or because I was being in my middle-aged way bairnbarren and condescending

but because he or she was dying or dead between the kerbstone and the wheel

I stepped down from the steps of a 39 bus today with sudden blood on my shoes

The lesions and lessons and the languorous long-winged stiff-winged fulmars

chalked against the sky and white against the unpainted lips of her

I looked down at a child today, Gallowgate, the bus was turning left

the child stepped out, leaving its mam’s hand behind partly swept by the wind

and partly by blind wonderful enthusiasm for life we guard against increasingly

She stepped into the path of something she or he would never know forever

in an elegant but unassuming place where as a living they hanged prisoners for bread-theft

it was the eve of St Valentine’s Day on the wild side of Geordieland

The white dresses were being collected from dry cleaners Darn Crook to Sidgate

the strategy of the masses was being unaddressed once more except through the tills

where paper receipts come clicking out increasingly slowly to everyone’s annoyance

What a beautiful, brilliant day, tart with expectation of love and romance in Chinatown

or down the Bigg Market as lager casks were moved into station and the dance floors
cleaned

I looked down at a child today, never having had one of my own, and having no kid

I can call mine in a very old-fashioned romantic Barry MacSweeney Elvis Orbison Highway
61 way

O Robert it was almost where you left on the bus O Aaron O Dusty O Blackened Eyelids

I looked down upon a child today under the buswheels and knew whatever your name you
would see

heaven and it would shine and be filled with pianos and trumpets and not be suppressed

and freedom would be written in moth-dust on every angel’s wings

and there will be the music of Shostakovitch and Poulenc when you wanted to hear it

and the monumental poetry of MacDiarmid and Mahon and all spirits would gather there

and tell you when you awake again what lemonbalm was and you and say

I looked down on a child and bonnybairn in blood today the day before St Valentine’s
Day

Newcastle

13 February 1998

The totemic fuse of non-events is rising like a fume

into a fakeless sky and then they are all disproved

by lapse into money greed and awesome self-possession

pathetic to the very bone fat and slavvering with wilful want

I seek them not but hold a flinty anger here on the high ground

no fat felines in this house we are lean and run like proper whippets

All sludge is there with bonus prize money cash right in hand

it sloughs upon the tide and happy too as the wallets scrap it up

wrestling with begotten tongues to say it’s mine it’s mine it’s mine!

how short of true possession grandly ridden of their ever sense

amusing I suppose from those who have never heard of Bartok

but also how disgusting and pathetic and barbaric and eternally

backward standing there reeling at the latest arts council party

whingeing in a will of creepdom in their total victim stance

may they lie forever all together in their poverty and blame

the exact stance of the universe is completely improper

dark and shining in the night perhaps a file for copper

used by Shelley or Bunsen burner where are we again

alone upon the brow reiving at the downside fierce pierce

where are we arrow that flash of fletchering into the dawn

airport what airport vast expanse is it what do you mean expense

there is an animal at loose in my heart what kind of animal

poetry and a hatred of the tamed animals poets have become

we often lie upon the dark shore beaten by the different tide

but never crush the opposition flash it into the lights feel yourself

not least the black ptarmigan as it wings its brilliant skywards way

towards grass-free Tarmac out on the Nenthead road how sweet

for slag to be delivered by tractor instead of straight wheelbarrow

by you with your broken hair and broken throat don’t mention it dear

Otherwise the wastrel pot is there but will never exceed us

for together we are lean and against all stupid wastage fantastick

it seems in the night how brill there are many people and many things

well that’s fine sit down have a cuppa and a dry biscuit too

not to mention a dead leadmine way beyond the height of our brows

fizz fume the distant dance the electric trance

the nowhere brood strangled connections failed

correspondents largesse merchants house of Mammon

how hard the ground to stalk across wrapped with wimps

moaners fruitless no ones yet still the Tarmac is gorgeous

crapping for a laugh in a country so diseased by pride & failure

under the allotments of heaven which nobody has noticed lately

for want of attention Punch and Judys all happy by the seaside

of their tideless lives what is that other word for jetteurs? Ah yes to

remember every avenue from the dim lights of Sacre Coeur

to Rue St Denis 1000 steps Laforgue nitrates washed down the pipes

ghastly importance peacocked around by strutting dwarfs

their time-frozen feathers lathered with crass shadows darkness

even they want so much without heading for it life on a raft

of brisking around the meniscus on a wing and a cheque book

rain so insistent flashing in worse than the collected works

of illegitimates everywhere as they treacle their supposedly upward

o scorched stars of yesterday homaging fromaging other failures

thank you Margaret who started this ill fire furred starred with greed

without moral combustion slack distasteful wallets extraordinaire

here we are then upon the gunmetal road without Pearl perle

rain sheeting down running now a river along the curve in the path

as we head for frontiers a handful almost not the ignorant or studied

by far between the blessed planets dearest you are there also

inventing many wondrous things and nothing nothing less than zero

can remove that from us not to name the names but we are there

applied to the advancement of history and all hoorays to that

and damn the rest to the banking system all false totems burned

April 1999

And all we could hear was the smelt of bottercoppes

raging in the morning air desperate for attention.

In the English mini-universe so many poetic fops

brick their baseness. Unavoidable powderpuffs mention

all and everything. The blankness is amazing. Grind

into the unblessed machine which is zero, phewed

to the volcano of nothingness. Sedgeless & despined

we flee the beautiful night towards the dawn, crewed

and ready: pulpit swabbed, sonar pouting in the foredeck

green as grass from every dog-filled park. Dry Salvages

pass in dreaded mist, by some. I am buttoned, drecked

of everything, tranced to matters, scorning savages

looning the horizon and the sky. Masters’ boys

and girls will fawn and fetch, like electroplated toys.

 2 June 1999

Much desired landscape loved keenly several lifetimes

Our unregenerated soil-heap hillsides, bleak

and bare of plastic life: one everyday religion.

Your ghost spindrifts in the lead-crusted law,

in mist combed by bracken and fern. The old school

where you were humiliated and betrayed, thrown

back to the riverbank and cribs of marigold, head

shaved, now up for sale: bijou conversion possibilities

for the turbo-mob, weird souls dreaming of car-reg

numbers and mobile phone codes. They are taking

over from the Barbour vegetarians, who couldn’t

stand the nailed-down winters. Inside you, spectre,

an inarticulate fury. Me, tongue-boy, lathered with words,

and you, thee, fern-haired and Pearl naked. We swam

against all Tyne tides which rose from the sea. When you sink

towards the head of the hush, where the beck runs

out of the tunnel towards the west, brewing foam

as it goes, we’ll meet my adverbs ad infinitum:

tongue-stoned invisible prelate of the shaking holes.