July 10th
Gossip this month, and girls’ gossip at that,
so I ask myself
why bore Big Brother
with such junk?
Because big brother forgets
what small town life is like.
Isn’t that right BB?
Up in your garret (or is it penthouse now?)
with whatever’s your version of wine, women and song,
what do you care that here there is no wine,
not much to sing about,
and too many women?
So what’s the gossip? I hear you say (or do I?).
Only that there’s a new hunk about town
driving all us girls bonkers with the hots
for him.
Daft bitches do I hear you say?
Correct as ever, Big Brother.
But then, when you think of us,
if ever you do,
it must be like looking through the wrong
end of a telescope and seeing pygmies.
Just pygmies.
Well, brother
dear, this month’s epistle
comes to you in
verse, which I’m sure you’ll agree
could not be
worse.
This morning
roak hid the sea, and from that grey wall
came the doleful toll of the warning horn.
Do you remember that sound?
Does it feature in your dreams?
Do I appear as well,
now that you dance to a brighter tune –
a fandango or the throb of tango
in a land of constant
sunshine?
By afternoon
our own pale sun gave up the fight,
left us early to face the dark.
On a day like this you left.
For what? Who knows?
Anything but this, you said.
Soon your letters became postcards,
then ‘Seasonal Greetings’. Now
you’re a blank in my filo,
a vacuum waiting to be filled.
This evening
just as I thought the day would leave us quietly
a storm rolled out
to sea and back.
Where are you when night calls?
Do you frequent some friendly bar
brilliant with familiar faces?
Are you the type who sleeps all day
then
puts on coloured wings
and
flies to the brightest light?
Through the night
frost will settle on the house,
paint its own stark landscape.
What strangeness do you wake to? Do thoughts
of home intrude to help you through bleak times?
Or are you still the same enigma,
stepping from one moment to the next
through cooling showers and absences
that have no truck with fond hearts?
So there it is
dear Bro. How did I do?
C&C most
welcome if it means you write.
February 2nd
Last night the
sea ripped the beach from its bed.
We heard the
screams
but know too well
not to interfere
in these family
disputes.
In the morning we
gathered to look,
ghouls at a
death,
the sea at our
feet, calm,
sated, gulls
riding anchor on its shoulders.
The meadow’s gone
the same way,
yard by yard,
year by year.
Now the house
sways on the brink.
When he saw his
rose bushes
scattered down
the cliff, Jack cried.
Finally, we moved
out when
the garden shed
was launched.
Very Important
Persons
bring their
sympathies,
go away nodding.
Perhaps we’ll
become little islanders.
Though surely not
New Atlanteans.
May 17th
Eddy runs the car
park now.
Remember Eddy –
the number-plate freak
who kept on
filling his little book
long after you
all moved on
to cricket
scores?
He grew out of it
of course,
became a
trainspotter.
Until they closed
the branch line.
He wouldn’t use
the bus
to go in search
of trains –
against the
spotters’ code.
Took to marriage
as the next good thing.
The Edwards girl,
skinny with glasses,
the one you all
avoided.
They say he likes
her soisant-neuf,
which might
explain a lot.
July 5th
Some would pull
the lighthouse down.
Who needs it now
we’ve got
satellite
navigation gizmoes.
No more stir
crazy keepers.
No more keepers’
daughters
to rescue the
crews of sinking freighters.
Just more space
for trippers’ cars
and charabancs.
Then what would
draw the punters in
to be stripped in
our tea-shops
and games
arcades,
boutiques and
chippies?
We have no
ancient stones or open houses ,
no pretty harbour
full of fishing smacks.
Lighthouse,
beach, a chopped off pier.
That’s it. That’s
us.
That’s what you
left.
August 31st
Trippers ask:
Whatever happened
to the tunny fish?
(Do they mean
tuna or dolphin – or porpoise?
I never did
know).
We used to see
them out there
whole packs
battling North
through the white
horses,
now and then the
man-size ones
hanging from
scales
down by the pier.
Tunny fishing was
a great sport
round these parts
before The War,
they say.
So why do they
ask
Whatever happened
to the tunny fish?
October 5th
Are you still
well-read?
Or just well, er,
red?
I ask because
your name
came up last night
in one of our
drunken rambles.
So it was:
“What became of
Jack’s eldest
– the
bolshie one who got himself on tee-vee
that time?”
You know, ’68 and
you
gurning at the
camera
outside Hornsey
School of Art.
Jack said there
was more fart
than art in that.
November 11th
Jack was on the
march today,
a lone Burma Star
between the ranks
of the British Legion
and the Desert
Rats.
That’s after he’d
marched
on the Organisers
to demand his
place.
Then he led us
out of church
when the vicar
forgot again.
Was he ever in
your ‘forgotten army’?
Surely not
then.
But now?
December 18th
Last night at the school do
Miss Barwell
asked after you.
How many years
ago is it?
Forty? At least
that.
Her mind is still
sharp
and she’s as
beautiful as ever,
her skin like
Basildon Bond.
She still drinks
only warm water.
She told me once
she hadn’t
planned to be a
spinster
all her life.
I know how she
feels.
But no man dare
touch
such a delicate
flower in case she
crumbled in his
hands.
The other one was
there too –
Miss Grim Arse
you used to call her
or the Wicked
Witch from Oz.
She said she
couldn’t see
why anyone would
employ you.
Not much changed there
either.
January 17th
Last week the old Jew-lady died,
the one with the
house by the tenfoot,
whose fence you
vandalized for swords
and cricket bats,
whose trees
became your arsenal.
Mind you, she’s
not the only one to go.
All our old dears
are popping off this year.
Not just popping
out,
or in for tea and
gossip,
but popping into
the grave -
women who’ve seen
out the century,
seen the wars and
the famines,
seen off their
men
at the gates of
barbarism.
March 10th
So you’ve written
another poem?
Then what? Do you
go down the pub
and bore the
locals with your recitations?
Do you eat a lump
of
swarzwalderchocolatentorte?
Take your latest
out to dinner and bore
her rigid with
your preening?
Isn’t’ it all
just wanking,
rewarding
yourself for a job completed?
I wonder what
you’ll do when
the book’s
finished.
If.
Immortality!?
Your poems and
stories, they’re only masks,
and when the
masks slip?.
Immortality isn’t
there.
It’s in the memories
of all who ever
met you –
even the stranger
passed once,
unnoticed, who
will love you till
the day she dies.
May 10th
Uncle George
hasn’t shaved
since cousin
Agnes died.
He hasn’t left
the house in days,
just sits by the
window
as if he expects
her
to come up the
garden path
with his bit of
shopping.
He can’t
understand.
He says she
weren’t even badly.
A bit poorly now
and then,
but not right
badly.
How can I explain
it’s not always physical
pain that drives
us to the pill box?
Sometimes a dead
friendship is all it takes.
But such as Uncle
George
don’t want to
understand
about women
loving women.
May 15th
Did you know Cousin Agnes
wrote verse?
(I won’t use the p word
to my illustrious Bro).
We found a pile of them
in her bedside cupboard.
Here’s a sample.
Only when I’m rid
of your lingering smile,
and the smell of your skin
has blown from the streets
will I be ready to stroll
again through the parks
and avenues that taught
us
youth’s arrogance.
I watched you die
yet you fill my air
with living menace. The shriek
of parakeet, howl of dog
signal your approach.
Even the breeze is you,
the scattered trash,
the concrete slab.
You are everywhere not here
where I stay secure; where
I know you cannot come;
where I dream of open fields
before this city grew
around me, stifling my voice.
Tomorrow I’ll walk out again,
defy you. But not today.
Down on the street
there’s an echo of
you,
a distant voice
stubbornly misheard,
messages garbled
on a mobile phone,
words carried off
by the breeze,
questions
drowned in the crowd.
If I turn around
I may hear what you
say.
A gilded angel stands at the gate
of the park, warns us to leave
our evil schemes in the street,
as if
we could think of bringing
to this green and watered place
our chain saws and dynamite,
bulldozers and pesticides,
barbed wire and purse-seine nets,
Bowie knives and snickersnees,
gin-traps and meat hooks,
gas chambers and…
Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Grave of Lizzie Siddal
Such sudden loss of
love compounds insanity,
an absence of mind
persuading me to error,
encouraging that
random act of vanity,
to bury my poems with
you in lieu of sorrow.
What use have you for
all those mournful sonnets?
You who were once a
woman fair and gay.
How will the worms
appreciate my couplets?
What guard are they
against your sure decay?
And so I stand here
darkly as a phantom,
thinking of how your
love was won and lost -
lighting your open
grave with this pale lantern,
seeking to recover
some of the cost.
To rob you yet again
gives me no pleasure,
but surely brings a little earthly treasure.
I think the
last one was for you.
Perhaps you
could publish them,
a kind of
memorial.
It would
please Uncle George,
then we
wouldn’t have to put up
with his
beard.
September 22nd
Sometimes when
the light
from the sea is
especially bright
after a clear
frosty night,
and when the tide
is right
you can see
cormorants on the sandbanks,
halfway to the
horizon,
like a row of
harpoon heads.
What did your larky pal
write about here?
Unfenced
existence,
untalkative, out
of reach?
That may be so
where the birds
take breakfast,
certainly in the
village under their feet
where the edge of
the land
used to be.
But here?
Unfenced? Tell that to
the free-to-roam
brigade.
Existence? It
might be.
Untalkative?
Obviously he never met Jack.
Out of reach?
Well, that might be right –
at least I’m
still waiting to be reached.
November 2nd
To see you again,
even at a funeral
would be grand.
So why won’t you come?
Jack would have
said
it’s because
you’re a tight-arsed
snob too big for
your boots.
Not true, of course.
But do you have
to join
the world’s
exiled millions
just because you
want to be
a writer?
Surely you could
bend
just a bit for
Jack.
You could stand
at the back
in your shades –
incognito flagrante you might say.
Then we’d have a
beer
and a stroll on
the prom,
and Jack could
rest easy.
November 14th
I found his
cigarette case –
the silver one
you bought him
with your first
Christmas bonus.
There’s a photo
of our pierhead
set in the top.
It was in the
back pocket
of the trousers
from his Sunday Best suit,
among the stuff
we’d bagged up
for Oxfam.
Whenever he went
to a do
he’d put in ten
Woodies
like they were
Craven A,
- kind to your
throat.
From my lad in
London, he’d say.
But the cough was
a Woodies cough
just the same.
November 25th
What was the
hardest part?
Cleaning up his
incontinence maybe,
putting ointment
on his piles.
Putting up with
his constant abuse?
No. Just watching
him die
day by day,
doling out the morphine
knowing that just
one extra capsule…
But I didn’t.
Mam was easier.
Didn’t want to be
a burden.
Went quietly in
her sleep
on Guy Fawkes
night.
All Jack could do
was grumble
about his
breakfast being late.
You could have
been here
for them both. It
would have made
a difference.
Isn’t that what
you say
you want to do?
Make a
difference?
December 14th
Each morning in
the mirror
I see this monkey
and wonder how
much uglier it can get.
I’m no Doris Gray
keeping a
portrait in the basement –
don’t even have a
cellar to
hide my
embarrassment.
It would be nice to lose the lines
but keep their
experience.
We should live in
reverse –
start ugly, rich
and wise.
By now I’d be not
too badly off,
not entirely
stupid,
and ‘wouldn’t
kick her out of bed’.
February 11th
Magic,
brother!
You finally
made it into print.
Though I must
admit
I
did crack a smile at the title:
'New Realism in the Metaphysical Poets'.
Is that like
New Labour?
One
thing's for sure,
it's not the
first keepsake of you
I'd grab in an
emergency.
That would
have to be your photo,
white head and
all
at the end of season
fancy dress ball.
March 10th
Poetry used to be such grand inspiring stuff.
Time was when verse
taught us the virtues: truth,
honour, courage, loyalty, fidelity,
faith, hope and charity
(not forgetting chastity).
But now all you poets can do
is spread confusion
with your chopped up prose,
your macho posturing,
verses so opaque
they leave us numb,
or trivia so banal
it’s a disgrace to waste the trees.
So when, dear Bro, will you change
the State of your Art?
How can we negotiate life
without a reliable guide?
The blind leading the blind
will never do. Nor will your Caliope
if she doesn’t wake up soon.
May 15th
Finally
I’m coming apart.
The man I got, a hunk
from
out of town,
(did I mention him before?)
turned out to be fucking useless –
literally I mean,
he just couldn’t get it up.
At first I thought
it was because he was gay.
Men as beautiful as that often are.
What a waste, we say.
But he isn’t. Just no good at sex.
All promise and no delivery.
Of all the women in town
panting after him
he has to land on me.
Brilliant in the other essentials –
charm, wit, intelligence,
education
(a Professor of History
on sabbatical,
researching something or other
of great historical interest.
Here? Impossible).
But without good sex the rest
is nothing.
So he’s moved out
and my gin bill has moved
back in.
Aren’t you elder brothers supposed
to warn us about such men?
How else can we know?
September 29th
Nobody warned us this is how you’d be,
crippled at fifty with no redemption.
Did your doctors not know,
or just not say?
Perhaps they thought you’d sue them.
But for what?
Dangerous doctoring without due care?
Being under the affluence
while in charge of a scalpel?
Foul professionalism?
No. I think that footie bloke was right –
once upon a time, in a previous life
you were a very naughty boy –
Genghis Khan was it?
Or Tamberlaine? Crookback Dick?
Alexander Pope would fit the bill –
a poet he may have been,
but no mister nice guy.
Comes the final trombone,
all will be known.
October 22nd
So now you tell me
you’re coming home.
Well,
I suppose I should
be grateful for small
mercies.
Let’s forget it’s me again
ministering to the dying.
Let’s just pretend
you’re coming because
this is where
you want
to
be,
and ignore the fact
that no matter how many places
you have to live
this is the only one
in which
to die.
Then perhaps
when you ask me what I want
you’ll stay to hear the answer.
And we’ll stroll
by the ocean
and believe,
at least for an afternoon
that there is some reason
for all of this.
December 26th
Strange
to feel your head go cold.
No doubt there
about the heart of your emotions.
As for
the winged chariot hurrying near,
you didn’t care much
about that either,
judging by your luggage –
a life in one battered cabin trunk.
You were our famous poet,
the first in this town of nobodies
to become a somebody.
But I guess even famous poets
don’t make much.
You should have kept up
the footie,
learned a trade,
got your hands dirty
(instead of your mind
Jack would have said)
Well, now you have plenty of time
to make your case
in that fine and private place.
January 14th
On these black-dog days
I keep the house wrapped in music –
radio in every room
tuned to the classics,
and in the lounge your hi-fi
pounding out the megawatts.
I know you didn’t approve of Mozart
as wallpaper,
but I read somewhere
that he increases the yields
of cows and chickens
(not that I hear much said
about that around these parts),
helps kids to learn,
and soothes the raging breasts
of the yobs kicking cans
outside Big Macs.
Of course it drives her next door
barmy. “Why don’t you get a pussy cat”
she says. “It would comfort you
in your loneliness.”
Oh yes? And when I’ve lain dead
on the kitchen floor for a week
and kitty and her pals
start chewing at my tits…..?
April 21st
Letters are easy.
I just write “gone away”
and pop them in the pillar-box
outside the Brady girls’ place.
The phone calls are a different proposition.
Sometimes the caller thinks I’m you –
that you’ve been playing male
all these years. That you’re Phillipa,
not Phillip.
The men get excited by the idea
and want to come over to see the place,
like it were some kind of shrine.
The women are mostly
less than pleased.
Did you have to publish all these details
on your web-site? And what do I do
about the emails?
There must be hundreds of them by now.
No good asking you. But who?
I suppose it’s a kind of immortality,
ticking away in cyberspace,
like you were in limbo.
September 11th
Gunshots.
It’s 3am and I hear gunshots.
Not fireworks. Not poachers.
Serious handgun stuff
with Ouzis and Kalashnikovs.
(Who said you learn
nothing useful from TV?).
Is this what I’ve been missing
before I turned insomniac
to save me from the nightmares?
At least now
we know
the map has no
edge,
just a pause
between pages
or a short hop
to the next
volume.
But we haven’t
lost the dragons,
the headless
men
with eyes in
the chest,
the sea
serpents
or the great
maelstrom
waiting to
swallow us up.
Wherever your
centre
these monsters
lurk
at the dark
margins,
and in your
heart.
Such flights
on the wild side
would’ve
delighted old Sigmund –
tales of
abduction,
of unwanted
probes
in
unmentionable orifices
by fragile
grey creatures
with
almond-shaped eyes
and
squid-shaped limbs.
Sexier by far
than those
boring old dreams
of running
through glue,
of snakes up
the arse,
rats gnawing
at your balls.
Or memories of
daddy
in flagrante
with the teddy
bear.
At least now
we know
our place in
the Universe –
fag-end of a
fag-end of a galaxy,
suitable case
for study,
endangered
species perhaps,
or a new
source of protein
for the
lap-dogs
of lesser
gods.
We came upon
them at dusk,
soporific
about their hearth,
gorged on
flesh from heaped-up bones.
No rebellious
mob to put down.
No barbarian
menace at the empire’s edge.
Instead a
red-headed rabble, half-naked,
clad in animal
pelts and stench.
And for this
we had marched a night and a day
through mud
and flint-sharp rain
that slashed
our tunics and rotted our feet.
Were they men
or beasts, these dull-eyed creatures
snarling
through bloody teeth as they backed
away into the
forest?
At dawn we
found what was left
of their
larder – one blind woman,
a fat old man
with one arm missing,
a hump-backed
boy-child –
which on the
orders of Marcus Aurelius
we killed.
The tail
lights of the car in front
flickered, a
message I couldn’t decipher.
At my right a
blue neon sign flashed.
To me it said:
“DRINK THIS!”
To the car in
front it said: “With you, brother!”
Next the
traffic-lights joined in.
A passing
helicopter,
a train,
the parliament
building.
Soon the whole
lit-up city
was babbling
conspiracy.
The
traffic-cop was a fan of Hephaestus.
He said my
limp reminded him
of the old
master jeweller,
suggested I
change my profession.
He assured me
the authorities
had everything
under control.
“And by the
way, sir,
your direction
indicator is faulty”.
The hills
outside town are bleak,
scattered
wrecks of abandoned machines.
Below me, down
in the streets,
I can see the
slow dying.
Post-Colonial
Blues
Sitting alone
in a pastiche
Singapore bar,
circa 1940,
drinking
facsimile wine, circa 1997,
he observed
the lack of chic
among the
clientele, elderly
shoppers in
anoraks and jeans,
tidy office
workers, dark suits
and trainers,
well-behaved lovers
on a tired
lunch date,
and wondered
what kind
of operating
system
could produce
such
a distemporal
scene.
Where, for
instance, was the band?
That
brilliantined quintet fox-trotting
the afternoon
away. Music
he could hear,
creeping out
from some hole
in the ceiling,
up there
behind the slow-spinning
fans, but why
were they always
playing the
wrong tune? As if
they’d been
offered the gig
as an
afterthought.
He looked
around
for plantation
managers,
leaning at the
bar, or slumped
over gin-slings
at the rattan
card-tables;
wondered what
kept them
away. Probably
the chill
drizzle that some
absent-minded
prop man
had left
running onto
a 1990's South
London
backdrop,
complete with style
boutiques,
Italianate coffee
houses, pizza
huts and bright-lit
rumbling buses
loaded
with dismal
refugees from
a failed show.
Where too were
the coolie waiters?
Those Aussie
hip-hops were
just all
wrong, actors out
of a job
taking anything
they could
get. But what
he hated most
about the
whole dreary scene
was the
absence of ladies
of a certain
kind,
narrow eyes and slit skirts,
promises of
joy
in their slim
fingers,
their compact
Oriental
bodies.
There
may be winter yet to come
but now
there’s sun, and wind
enough to fly
my kite
above the
spire. Tomorrow
if I remember
I’ll decide,
if I remember
what it is
I should
decide. If not
I’ll wander up
this hill again
to climb the
sky. Or work
with paper and
sticks
and glue and
size to build
a bigger,
better, higher flying kite.
There may be
winter yet to come
but chances are that when it comes
this bird will
have flown.
Strung taut between us is our love,
a brittle thing, a cobweb spun from glass.
Could I begin like that? Would you
believe me? Or say I’m talking through my arse,
that what we have is solid as that rock
in Galway where I broke my teeth
trying to relieve you of your frock?
(Were you really wearing nothing underneath?)
Maybe I should try another line,
compare you to the darling buds of May,
tell you that your cooking tastes divine,
or how I love to watch your pelvis sway.
Or then again I
might just tell you straight,
you’ll do until I
find another, mate.
Rain on the
windscreen
blurs my view
of rangy legs.
Five cars in a
shunt.
Casting off
our clouts
we check that
the sea’s still wet.
Fish dry in
the sun.
Secretly we piss
alone in our back gardens.
Only the stars
know.
My neighbour’s garden
pond lies under thick black ice.
Where are the children?