Triage

Triage

Losing a lover is like
losing a limb
or a necessary organ;
take whatever drugs you want
to ease the pain,
it still hurts like hell
in the morning
alone.

Taking a new lover is like
another transplant:
the dose of anti-rejection drugs you need
just grows and grows.
And as the skin thickens
it takes a harder push
each time
for the needle’s point to pierce your cover;
and each drop of blood seems redder
and more precious
than the last
until you decide
at last
that the payoff is not worth the pain
and you consign that part
of you
to an oblivion
that is not complete
to a decision that is not whole-hearted
to a diagnosis that hurts
like a lover leaving.

Southern Comfort

It was a slam bam thank you ma’am kind of night.
“It’s alright,” she said with a slight frisson of uncertainty perhaps
as she unwraps and taps the money-box on the dresser.
He pays to caress her, to possess her as she bumps and grinds
and too quickly finds the kind of passion paid for.
He wants more before he’ll leave: sixteen and still hard.
But she’s on guard, body barred against free love.
Push came to shove.  Above his pleas she screamed and screamed
until the apartment teemed with neighbours and passers-by
who wondered why this nigger came by and by to be in a white girl’s room.

It’s a warm, hormone-rushing, mosquito-swarming kind of night.
Fox-fire bright, passions tightly wound and sprung.
No brass bells are rung, no masses sung, but masses gather to enjoy
the black boy toy with the last of his time on a slippery slope
as the hempen rope grips and gropes for his hopeless neck.

For Remembrance Day, On Seeing A Photograph

You were young men in the Guards
treading water in wretched trenches
swinging kitbags and rifles and broad silly grins

so young
that two billion volumes single-spaced wouldn’t be enough
to list all of life’s treasures
you haven’t experienced yet
and still you would die
right then
right there
doing right
or so you thought
as you lay where
no-one could tell where
mud ended and blood began

three and four generations removed,
we lay wreathes for your wraiths
on a hollow day in November
while the parades and the poppies
hallucinate
an annual landscape of memory

profound today, gone tomorrow

and for three or four days the flowers fade
and the greenery browns at your memorials
and then the work crews come

young men and women with guarded futures
treading water at minimum wage
swinging brooms and shovels and black plastic bags

and when the work trucks leave
your memory has turned once again
to cold undecorated stone
and nothing can ever change
the fact
that you died before you started living.

Calculation

Calculation

It’s the poor that give
to the poor.
Those who can actually afford it walk by
the outstretched hand and box
with sneering dismissal.

“Get a job”, they whisper under their peppermint breath,
knowing, as bosses,
they would never hire some bum
begging on a street corner.

“Have a nice day, anyway”

Spitting on a well-polished shoe
gets you six months’ jail time;
letting the poor starve
gets your picture in “Newsweek”.

Go figure.

[I wrote this in 1998.  It is still true today as I witnessed just this morning]

Salamander

A bright orange salamander silently slithers
the length of the soft-pink stone-chip wall,
making faster speed than I could in this heat.

I sit, staring, mesmerized by this costumed athlete,
this splendid natural explosion of colour,
this distraction from the dull monochrome of my life.

With a desperate reluctance, I crack open the velcro
ties that bind me to the lizard, drawing back my focus
to include my companion and the unfinished wine.

“Let’s review where we are,” she says. “Yes,
let’s do that,” I reply from a distance, forgetting
where we’ve been in this conversation and why.

She clears her throat and continues: “You and I
seem to be headed nowhere, neh?” She pauses,
examining me for confirmation. Perhaps I nod.

“As a couple, I mean. We have to come to terms
with that. We have to face the true nature of our failure
you and I. We are not meant to be, that’s the point.”

I say: “I see.” I feel her eyes burning me, expecting more.
Across the street, the afternoon shoppers flow in and out
of department stores and groceries and fish merchants.

“Well?” she presses. “Am I right? What do you think?”
I sip the wine, close both my eyes, and imagine
the cool cave where the salamander rests.

Redress

after,
we drifted back
through the apartment,
retracing our twin trails
of pants and socks
sweaters and jeans
boots and belts
redressing
until we were
as we were
before

Mayfly

the autobiography of a mayfly
would be as short as a page
and as dense as perfect memory

the madness of dashing hither and yon
across the summer’s blue distance
to seek the one mate of perfect desire

the need to avoid the bloodletting wars
of birds and trout at cool water’s edge
to arrive in one piece at the perfect place

the keenness of invention, of new hieroglyphics,
to tempt her away from the maddening crowds
to sing her, to win her with this perfect dance

the sense of fulfillment, slowly drifting to earth
with all power spent, all duty completed
to remember, to listen to the end of this perfect life

(Lo)ve

ecce homo
this Jew ex machina
who’s purloined Pauline
aphorisms
crashed the Whore
of Rome’s machinery

– a sudden stoppage
in the
constant(ine) gears
which had weathered
the (st)orms
of barbarism and buffoonery –

died on a tree
say it
(s)aint so
devoid of (e)motion
qui(e)t, silent even
as the public gawked
and prodded
pierced
b(lo)ody hands agape.

Agape! he cries,
Love!
through the tears
renting his b(lo)ody flesh
almost as ba(l)dly
as we have
rented his b(lo)ody
super(ficial) image
through the years

perpl(ex)ed
(conf)used
gored
in the
par(ox)ysm of death
he begged
his go(o)d forgive
those who
(k)illed him
with their fears

In remembrance of the Pope’s visit to the USA, April 2008

Siesta

He snored.
And threads of thoughts of windy days
Rushed by like the rivers of Sierra de Ronda.

He turned.
And the heft and touch of the silken duvet
Slipped across his body like the soft waves of Estepona.

He slept.
And into his reverie the ringing telephone
Floated like a minor chord from a flamenco guitar.

He yawned.
And the dreamy grin of the old pepper merchant
Dissolved like tapas in the mouth of a hungry eater.

He answered.
And the sound of his hoarsely whispered “Ola?”
Crept across his chin like a shovel scraping tar.

He awoke.
And the everyday cares of the little village
Wrapped up his dreams like garbage and threw them afar.

A Jerk Is Snatched From Obscurity

 

pushing excellence to excess
arms burning with the weight
of a hundredweight of metal
denying the body’s crying
crying with the throb of victory
a champion is born
and the interest on a thousand
mornings of solitude is
returned in gold

 

 

I Used To Be Homesick

I used to be homesick

for the smell of the old Sainsbury’s butchers shops, the sawdust, the red raw hands of the fat-armed butcher’s boys;

for the extinct pink Financial Times and the Sporting Life, for their columns and columns of incomprehensible numbers and symbols of form and potential, neither suitable for fish and chip wrapping;

for the smell of the Tube tunnels as a rushing train pushes warm stale air across faces and platforms;

for the hop skip and jump it used to take to keep drinking all day in the days of the mysterious licensing hours;

for the certainty of location in a spoken voice, always the region and often the very suburb or streetscape;

for the red squirrels in the parks and the water rats in the ditches and the horses that pulled the rag and bone mens’ carts on a Saturday morning;

for the hordes of rednosed rawboned hoop-shirted hooligans whooping it up on a Saturday afternoon, street level nationalists;

for the exciting stink of the Standard Wallpaper Company fire way back before the clean air acts when the thick smoke billowed invisibly within the choking smog;

for Toots & The Maytals and Cliff Richard & the Shadows, and the Yardbirds and the Uxbridge Fair, for Eel Pie Island, the Marquee Club, and the Orchid Ballroom, Purley;

for the taste of raw beer hoppy and alive in an alehouse more ancient than America where ₤100 is a busy night and the beer and the bread and the cheese are homemade;

for the rank taste in the mouth when the gasholders were full and leeching and the air smelled green;

for Prince Charles and Coronation Street, and Mastermind and Marjorie Proops and the Sunday Mirror and the Evening Standard and the Guardian crossword, and the suckers getting taken at Piccadilly Circus;

for eel-pie and mash, for meat-and-potato pies, for streaky bacon and fat-filled bangers, for two pieces of rock and six pennyworth o’chips, for Bisto and Bovril and Daddie’s Sauce, for Marks & Sparks Christmas puds, for hot runny custard, mushy peas, black pudding and kippers;

for the china chink of cup on saucer across the village green as your team takes to the field in whites and off-whites and green-stained creams, running and stretching and yawning off the dozen pints of the night before;

for the narrow roads and tiny cars and miniature houses and rose gardens and muddy resorts and back lanes where it is safe to walk.

I used to be homesick before you, Sherry.

Instead Of Working

Staying quiet,

   —   stealing silence like a prayer –

The tented flag throws shadows

across my pen and arm.

 

Blowing bubbles,

   —  Stealing time like a burglar –

Watching kaleidescopes of sunbeams

instead of working.

Unwinding The Thread

Memory is
the first traitor

It is such a waste
to undo the syntax,
to untie the tender meanings,
to try to catch the logic
that meant little then
and nothing now;
to wonder what
was meant.
Was there a
design back then,
that leaves no traces?

Memory is
the first traitor

Dead Heroes

Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Brian Jones
And all those Grateful Rolling Mothers
Taught me that play is serious business

That play lives in the moment
That play is life

That an extended bluesy riff
If infinitely more important than a timeclock

That a jiving rolling rock tune
Weighs so much more than a brand new car each year
So much more than a mortgage
And a closet of three-piece suits

That Janis Joplin was more beautiful than Ally MacBeal

That Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix
died for our sins
that their deaths preceeded ours by just a blink
in geological time

that if music be the food of love
I am obese with passion

That a great rythym guitar is better
Than bad sex
And that great sex is even better with rock and roll pounding in your head.

Play on, dead heroes
Play on and on and on ….

c.1998

The House

She always kept olives in a glass jar
In the cabinet above the pantry,
Amid the fluff and dust of decades. Tar
Paper lived elsewhere, with the iron gantry
For lifting meats, the turpentine and wax.
Everything else she threw in the dark cave
Of the understairs; all things that would tax
Her strength she threw on the floor, and this gave
The house the appearance of a swallow’s
Nest built from found goods. But always she had
Irises, quivering on a cold rad.

Finger Painting

It was a spontaneous gesture
– unplanned, unexpected
completely out of place
compared to her routine liquid grace –
but one that cannot be erased.

soft natural makeup,
the smart marquisette frock,
the deliberately misplaced lock;
her exact air was grazed

in that simple moment of caution
released and disentrenched.
The extended finger,
– erect, phallic, rude — didn’t linger;
but he felt it to whom it was raised.

Creating Collage

we sleep together,
for sure,
but mostly we share together,
cutting out our memories
from the bark of life’s tree

– like pieces of collage
laid out on the floor
before an exhibition
celebrating our anniversaries –

unhurriedly pasting them together

– refocusing colors and shapes
and forms –

until it is late again
and again
for sure
we sleep together

A Poem For Today

Magnetic North

You are magnetic north;
All my paths converge on you.

You are the tropics;
my Cancer and my Capricorn.

You are the forests;
the leafy groves where my dreams dwell.
You are the mountains,
with heights I could not imagine.

You are the seven seas;
I bob on your waves and tides.

You are the equator;
the widest part of my existence.
You are my world.