Woody and I
parked my Lambretta
beside the village hall.

From here, as if in Vietnam
we could clamber up the hill
through a muddy undergrowth
and down again unseen
behind the hotel staff quarters.

I was the burning romantic one
The Outsider, the Dean of Drumnadrochit
the Brando of Ballachulish
Woody was the rough lad from The Isles
tall and crinkly round the eyes
as if his whole 17 years of life
had been an unexpressed joke
he was waiting for a chance
to laugh at.

He wanted to join the RAF.
and I would be a writer.
We made a solid pair
with a purpose…..
absurd it was
but lacerating ourselves for first lust
in a black September night
was a suppressed laugh
and a uniting influence.
It was also absurd
and beyond discussion
that the hotel management
didn’t allow visitors in the maids’ rooms.
Predictable and unacceptable….
(the silly old reactionaries)
and it gave us the bond
we craved.
I had seen The Guns of Navarone.
Woody, who often watched TV
was familiar with Milk Tray adverts.

Dressed in black polo-necks
we fell into ditches
and whispered and signed
and covered each other
down through the dimly moonlit brambles
to the cottage where the girls were.

We knocked furtively
and the door was opened fast
by Lindsay
who was sliding chocolates
between her ripe red lips
and who giggled
and flashed her black eyes
over my shoulder
in case the boss was watching.

It was somehow recognised
that she was mine
though there was no reason
to presume this
except we had already kissed
at the Barn Dance.
She was vivid
in tight
blue denim flares
white shirt
on white breasts
red scarf
below lipstick.

Woody was whisked
to another room,
and I followed Lindsay
like a dog follows
someone with a stick
as she chattered
with  gleaming teeth
opened two cans of export,
sat us on the couch
and kissed me violently
with beery breath
and an Aberdeen accent. 

Lindsay was good at snogging
on couches.

All the time we kissed and groped
and rolled in her long black hair
she was telling me about Maurice.
Maurice, an older taller boy
who went to more dances
was apparently
the world’s greatest lover.
Maurice, a bit of a smoothie
but wow was he good in bed.
Not sure if she liked him
but hey she certainly liked his loving.
I listened to this
as we clasped each other close
feeling a mixture
of libido
and terror
at this simultaneous rejecting
and receiving.
Why did she talk about Maurice?
I was ready to give her my passion,
my love even
and the desire hurt
even more than the jealousy.
I had an aching in my heart
and in my crotch,
and it seemed that night
that there was an aching
everywhere.

Perhaps
she said it
because she was a sex-maniac who didn’t care
perhaps
because she was falling in love with Maurice
and I would do meantime,
perhaps
because she just wanted me to be unsure
in order to control me,
perhaps
she said it because she was a sadist
perhaps
because someone had told her to say it.
Perhaps
she didn’t mean it
perhaps
she did
perhaps
she thought I was too
self-confident!

Perhaps.

I heard giggles and squeaks upstairs
then cans opening
outside in the hall,
a laughing Woody
came in with more beer
two chambermaids
and a joke about it.

We were flushed under a blanket,
breaking our wrists to reach each other’s genitals
though she was muttering something
about a Bloody Mary
which I presumed
I didn’t understand
because I wasn’t a Catholic.
We buttoned our waistbands and flies
and I put Lindsay’s red scarf round my neck
muzzling into the last warm
hormonal fragrance of it
and left, still wearing it
for the cold assault course up the hill
beer swinging round my belly
long sighing murmurs below it
and a dark excitement
circling my abdomen
undiminished
by the harsh route
back to the community hall.

Once out of earshot
Woody was loud and proud
about his victories and acquisitions,
though I suspect he didn’t believe
in risking unwanted pregnancy either.
(Penetration was of course
out of the question
because no contraception
was foolproof)
None of that expected laddish
irresponsibility for me,
you wouldn’t catch me
at a shotgun wedding,
or even wielding an unlicensed weapon
I was a principled, old-fashioned boy
or was I perhaps
not only stiff
but scared stiff?

Surely Lindsay hadn’t  actually
done it with Maurice, had she?
I could believe it of Maurice
but surely not her,
girls just dont do that, do they?
(Not any girls that I know anyway.)
Then Woody said something smutty
about Lindsay
and I glowed with pride silently.

On the way home
the Lambretta skidded on gravel
going round Carr’s Corner.
I lost control and Donny Mc.Phee, the builder
from Torlundy was coming the other way
with a full load in his dumper truck.
Donny had to take therapy for years
and was never the same again.
I left intensive care after 10 days
and made a full recovery.
Woody lost an arm,
both legs were almost severed
and he lay screaming under the truck 2 hours.
He never made it to the RAF
and decided to become a writer
which he learned to do with his left hand.

I joined the ambulance service
and kept Lindsay’s red scarf
for the next ten years
sniffing it occasionally
when I felt like a memory.
Eventually I threw the wool fabric away
but stored the red scarf inside
my personality
where I’ve carried it
into my eighties.

These days
I watch TV alot
with my wife of 40 yrs.
I shuffle out of the bathroom
with a yellow stain spreading on my trousers
slump on our couch
and wonder about
the future of my grandchildren.
I think about matters
of philosophy
religious belief
and the great
Perhaps.

Most of all
I worry about Maurice

In hamlets where smoke rises in plumblines, then totters off true,
places where the damp leaves of the season
settle on electric mosses and the fibrous remains
of other histories snuffed softly long before this last
like a blanket warming all the frozen vessels that have passed,

In coastal inlets where there might be leaden sky beyond,
or it might be water, light as air… and boats row langourously out
as if to find the boundaries of all that we have here
the final reckoning of a humbling, muddy, subsistence-based career,

On hillsides rusted with bracken, bog myrtle, bog cotton
bog dwellers carry their carcasses into rich peat
and in light forests, dawns find roedeer in fine rain,
sheets of the Atlantic lost, windtossed, until this random landfall
gives them a place to drop their wandering pain.

They have Joker hearts,
these Tricksters,
Janus, Uranus,
quiet, liquid, thirsty
no obituaries likely
but fresher far than you or me
this rude but fine complexion on the edge of mystery.

Of the blurs and blends of time
in those shy riddling lives sing now
and never ask them for a meaning or an explanation,
On the edge there is no why, or when, or how,
just whisky, religion and temptation.

I never understood that fallen frowning face
the growl in your throat after
being so dashing and mustachioed.

You spat your woodbine spit in the fire.
It hissed green. You embroidered, carved, cultivated
you couldn’t care any more, there was only you.

I came to your chair. I stared.
I didn’t care any more
That was
me too

There was a faraway, slightly numb look
in his stoic, travelled face.
“I cover Scotland West
he said “, on his knees
beside the pan.
“My tests
need expertise
and I’m the only one
bar Jim here….”
I glanced at the younger man..
that rare thing
an apprentice…
a man who would be king.

He was present in his future
alert, unblemished lean…
The king removed the filter
handed it him to clean…
I didn’t see him flinch an inch
which is not the same as me
I reeled from the violent assault
on my tuned olfactory….
and I left to find a clothes peg
then made a cup of tea. 

An apprentice saniflo engineer
is not what I would choose
if the world were still my oyster
as my preferred career
but then its less competitive than most
somehow I imagine so
perhaps you can make a very fast buck
wash your hands of it and go
to the sunlit uplands of general plumbing
or sweet retirement
I don’t know….
I don’t know…

That’s a place of worship and a sanctuary I thought
so I put my tongue in there
and sang
All Things Bright and Beautiful

She passes nothing but remarks
calls me dickhead, runt, alcoholic
five times a day
under her minaret
but is she sexy?
Oh yes….you bet !

She has the true grit of emery
if you rub against her long enough
you become smooth, French, polished.
A principled uva-pesca-vegetariana sultana
without her my every morning
would be a pig’s breakfast
of Stornoway Black Pudding
and offal, offal.

She’s disapproved, derided
disdained, disputed and disliked
since the day we first met
but do I love her?
Oh yes….you bet!

Once while clearing or cleaning
or somesuch
in a voice riven with
a craving for control
She said “It would
be good to have one place
where everything ends up”
Oh wouldn’t it just…….
That place was hatred

Outside a Giant Poodle sniffed and quietly led its
mistress back to the conservatory

Back then
at night no time…no time…too eager for love
next morning…too keen on the day
but now
I could floss for Scotland
once I’ve had my cheese souffle,
malay satay, congee, pate, steak flambe, cassoulet,
onion soup gratinee , chicken liver parfait
with sauce veloute then sweet cafe au lait
and my wickedest way
with Eve’s Pudding

Umberto never found
much gold
and the Wa-na-na nation
moved downriver, got tee-shirts and flu
and died out

but you and I came, pale, protected
in jungle boots and close-weave khaki
and moist with a lust grown faraway
and we brought it here
and we were so hot together
we didn’t even need to undress
to make a happy ending

sometimes you would leap into the air screaming
sometimes I would shake the walls with my cries
often we would wonder if the neighbours were disturbed
even though there were none until the next valley

Many summers followed in showers of birdsong
the windows wide as our legs so the sweet weather could enter us.
In winters the low warm lights caressed our thighs…
we crackled with frosts, thawed in the inner folds of our bodies,
chafed and scratched each other red with use,
stained and ruined ourselves.
The world was a tired sensual morning
dragging itself from us ….the hot deep mud of desire.

One year we moved the bed to a different room
The joy of a change. The joy of settlement.
You gave a shriek of indignant womanhood…
and left in hormonal terror

I moved the bed again
to a room that felt less lonely
but it didn’t work
the nights just rained constantly
the mornings grey with aftermath.
Other women came to try
this new position
but they got backache
or contracted fear
or they met your ghost
on the way to the bathroom

I became a prisoner here
chalking the months on the bedpost,
the touch of others irrelevant
the hope a curse

and when you came back
the jailers unlocked the iron gates
to let you in
chuckling,
sniggering obscenely
amongst themselves.

but if you’re in a hurry
to get somewhere fast
turn right and the M1
will take you past
everything else at speed

heaven isn’t guaranteed

I kayaked the love affair rapids
and out on the lake of forgotten pain
made camp on happenstance island
then came back again.
At the inconvenience store
I couldn’t get ammo, beans or meal
now I need to see the Wigwam Women
need to heal.

If I rode out now past the empty claims
and fossils and rusting bogeys upturned
to the wildfire free valley
where no boats are ever burned
where the hunting’s still good
and the gathering is real
I’d see the Wigwam Women
They feel what I feel
They feel what I feel

You come to me now though,
farded with slippery grease paint
as if I might save your clown
and drown the real soul
in a modernist swamp of expediency,
the unbroken surface
becoming the substance
of the clotted mire below

if your clown simulation
your tearful pranks
garner a few francs in the bank
and popularity for your symptoms
of glandular aggravation
one day the clowns
will rule this nation

we are regarded here as retarded
unless we turn out well farded

Perry had been a frothy drink all his life,
she was a special mixer, bubbly, indefinable,
arty-farty-smarty
relishing her intoxicating effect
she split herself with brandy on him
amused by the way he wilted when she spilt on him
and swelled when she came back on him,
then she washed his ego down his hatch,
it was just no match
for her wet, smile-shielded treachery,
unimpeachable because of its spontaneity.

Dont bring peaches or brandy into it, he would irritatingly intone.
Perry was quite enough for him on her own.

She knew her zingy femme fatale attractions
and never showed her fatal femme infirmities
Some said she had lost a part of herself
but she didn’t care for vulnerability
no rounding or reuniting for Perry
She was very very very
in control of her relations.

She buzzed and tripped through organs, veins and social situations
dished out sore heads, raised libidos
rash impetuosities, bizarre imagination
rendered him to blubber
with her gaiety and flavour,
privileging him
reminding him
of her generous favour……..
not everyone got Perry…….
he should show appreciation.

Then one day he woke up, parched,
sucked at the perineum and found just flat dregs,
tongued smears of a dehydrated stickiness
on the bottom of her fluted glass life.

Perry had run out, empty.
The froth had regressed
to a dirty scum laced with lipstick pink
on the brink of her brim,
and she hadn’t yet exhausted him.

He then acquired a thirst for other drink,
discovered Kir, with vintage Veuve Cliquot,
left Perry,
an empty bottle beside the sink.

Around my skull bugles of convolvulus twine,
become my myriad violet eyes in the rainy season,
mass up the vertebrae of
my deadwhite spine in the heat of summer.
That’s when tendrils fill out the deadwood staged
contents of my theatrically  mammoth brain,
that powerhouse of sagacity spilled out
and dried over the suncooked aeons,
skeletal remnants
fastforwarding fossils
of elephants in softpadded
fuckme high heels.

My trunk’s cartilaginous tissue
I prefer to see  dissolved rather than deceased
and still trumpeting and squirting and romping
in the salt-licks of our ancestors.

I died…but
my children still play at sunset in the dust
and when they sawed off my tusks
I decided to remain here forever.

I remain in some magnitude
and everything I have is  the biggest on the planet
including my memory…….

on her Greek Island
children playing
as she talks to plastic
the earpiece gibbering
my voice failing to deal with
this electronic place
where blood doesn’t pump
lungs dont breathe
bodies dont bleed

on her Greek Island
hanging up the phone
making for the night alone
me grabbing at the wire,
chewing, trying to suck her
out of it again
breathing with difficulty again.

There is no purple moon here.
There’s a muddy drizzle
at the dull window.

Are they waterproof
these unsinkable
but leaden ones?
Do they have
the backs of ducks?
Are they buoyant
these spindly boys in the Odeon ocean?
Their selves seem so thin,
their eyes and me’s so porous!
Will their bones self-inflate
or is this the unthinkable
male dissolution in the undrinkable
sickness of motion
pictures?

Picture this,
one boy’s girl shows up,
the Odeon organ swells,
Titanic goes down,
with the pair’s approval,
then there’s the wet kiss
and the removal
of her damp dress

and the rain is gone,
gone with the wind
back to the carpark
with all the rest.

we are spread here
smeared over snowfields
like sump-oil,
slid inside animal skins for warmth
valenki boots for transport
to the motherland’s lode
where we melt stones each day
to feed her.

You’ll notice, as visitors
that we scurry with purpose
and little choice
for its cold
and has always been that way

you see
we were taught smelting
as infants
stoked adolescent furnaces
as we played with ourselves
and swelled our own value
to the common as muck good.
We are the biggest.

there is no smelter
in the world
can match ores,
nickel, red earth
low life span,
high products and stacks of them
coughing their own clouds
in climatic dumplings
just airborne enough
to clog a low sun

Here we have poisoned trees
in the tundra
taproots of icicled black plants
our grandfathers, the great ones sowed
forming a blocked, steaming city
not a little unlike your
New York New York

Norilisk Norilisk
we wheeze to ourselves
through furry lungs
as we vie , a quiet smelting people
for streetstall fish caught
in sick coloured waters.
(our giant freezer
keeps them stiff as spears)

Leisure, you ask?
Well the men have huge fox hats
and are well endowed with patience
the women wide hips and great gashes
of splashed carmine lipstick
you can see coming for many blocks
in this monochrome city.

In summer we fish or fuck
and in winter there’s no fishing.

My liver’s wasted
and I’m still looking for myself
so that I can be generous with it
to the next generation

I am fair and hairless
not hairy and fearless.
Contest of any kind
makes me weak at the knees
and European all over.
My purpose is submission, passivity
not pumping my fists at the results of competitions
though others, all of whom are experts,
tell me anything is possible
with focus, love and a statement of mission.

On the way there are the usual telltale signs:
adult toys… buy it for him…
queen bed…come in and try us…
and Arby’s for a bargain hotdog.
I have a number of conservative cosmopolitan thoughts
before arriving, white, bald, shining at this craziness
and think what the Hell
what about
everything
everyone else shouts about,
lets just do it for the sake of that
and though its not my natural habitat
I have a sudden lapse of laziness.

I enter

Mustang Sally is ahead by a follicle
she’s groomed herself for success,
second comes a chimpanzee called Van Cleef
then comes The Mexican,
and then low and behairy to behold
a forest starts to grow around my nipples
over my face and body,
coarse sprouts creak beneath my nostrils
a luxuriant gaucho comes fourth
along with a Willie Nelson
and a Moses down to my toeses !
I have believed, I have bullied fate
and I am almost a miracle winner
though I entered late.

My prize is a crate of bananas.

That night I try the queen bed
with a fat chicken called Anal Emma, The Posterior.
Next day I shave hurriedly
having found a melanoma on my boxcar willy
and archived the whole hairy chili
behind a pale and ever more interesting
exterior.

Then a toad was found dead giving birth,
bigger, browner, broader,
with a blob of  babyjelly
rending its body too widely.
It had slumped its functional last
half in, half out of the pond slime,
bumping the toad mortality statistic
exciting the monitors
and threatening an uncertain sense of control
in central admin.

Next, around Easter, a drowned hedgehog
in the shallows, duckweed
garlanding its spines like
it was Christmas.
We biology freshmen and women
pictured it getting into trouble at dusk
struggling all night so near
the help it needed,
wishing haplessly
it had been born an amphibian,
then green-matted and cold by early dawn.

The children held a funeral in Sunday best
while the seniors’ databases whirred up again
the profit and loss was solemnly adjusted
the science of it all applied and assessed
and the junior staff in smooth skirts and snappy suits
gossiped of lifestyle alterations
demographic considerations
and extra-curricular vitae
with the allumni.

One bright morning I found him fuming.
“Someones put a brick through the windscreen
of my hovercraft!”
he cried indignantly
pointing to some shattered glass
beside a lump covered with dusty tarpaulin.
“Your hovercraft, Keith?”, I quizzed cautiously
knowing I was dealing with an aviator,
raconteur, bonviveur,  regisseur
of son et lumiere, and dealeur in drugs.

He had thick glasses
curly hair
a lumpy body
and I noticed
a half bottle
sticking out of his
trousers.
He was very pleased to see me
and assured me
suggestively that his hovercraft
was a fully functional 2 seater
and he’d hover me over the Firth
later on
but in the meantime he wanted to find
the bastard with the brick
and ram it up his jaxi sideways.

Keith had a way
with words and bricks.
Nothing appealed less
than the attentions of Keith
later on
in a 2 seater hovercraft
on the Firth of Forth
in April
so I said “Must shoot the crow”
blew its brains out
and caught the bus to Edinburgh.

In The Athens of the North
I was hired
to do a bit of this and that
in Stavanger, Norway.
It was a real
Fokker Friendship of a flight,
cheap but unfriendly,
and lager prices in Norway
leave you poor
rather than sober.
When I got to my hotel room
I found a sailor
quite obviously poorer than me
pissing in my ensuite
and entirely missing the suite.
It was not a sweet sight, nor smell
for he’d been eating asparagus
with a light dill dressing.
He liked the idea of me undressing
and tried to make love to me
but missed.
I was barely able to overcome
my nausea when he breathed.

“How the Hell did you get in here?”
I shouted in fluent English
“Through the door”, he said, quietly
as if it was a major heist.
Seemed reasonable at least
and I’m not a confrontational type
(never have been)
so I somehow just coaxed him out
the same way
and  slept alone that night
clutching a swollen bladder
clenching my bowels
holding down vomit
and fantasising
about hovering in April
with Keith.

Next day
I took my smelly belly
off to New Delhi
where the first trick
at Connaught  Place
is to work in teams
and throw shite
over fresh white canvas shoes
and chinos
as you wander out fearfully
from your hotel,
a little lagged and shagged
(well not literally yet).
One small operator
flung wet dung
from a shadow
the other met me
at the top of the underpass
and said
“Oh shite sahib!
What’s that pile of shengie
on your spats?
That didn’t come from your underpants
here let me clean it.
That’ll be five million rupees sahib.
cheap at the price
and dont tell me you wont pay
because this poor third world kid
has just wiped the shite
off  your
privileged
overnourished
fat-arse’s
shoes! ”

Guilt and anguish.

Oh Keith, you’re beginning
to seem quite romantic.

I stared at my eternally packed holdall
It was full of rubbish
and faded keks from the dhobiwallah.
Not even a photo anymore
Not even a dog-eared
loveletter
stained with semen
or old tears.
Just a few formal faxes
and a paper
on something professional.

I was contemplating the desert
loneliness of phoneliness
when I got a GSM call
on the digital mobile
contact yippee
I am connected
to others
and will now
go to
Molodezhnaya
Antarctica
where 400 Russians
with Rasputin beards
play chess
and wage a cold war
which isn’t over yet.

“Take a double thinsulate-lined
fleece, a 16-tog duvet suit,
and a pair of feltlined Mukluk
Canadian Kodiak-trapper’s boots”
advised a short-skirted blonde
in Kensington.
I could tell she was blonde
and short skirted
from her accent.
I strode to the thick sweating plastic curtains
at my hotel window
and gazed out at a heat-hazed ants nest
of light saris and T shirts
with damp patches between
the shoulderblades.

Best go by The Karakorams,
I concluded.

It seemed a very
Keithian concept.

24 hours later, bus-lagged
and flatulent from a diet
of green slime and chapatis
with black fingerprints
I gazed at the endless white flanks
of Nanga Parbat,
wondered why anyone would attempt
climbing it
mused on the frozen mens’ bodies
scattered there
and bought myself
something warm
to wear.

Good to have money, I thought
looking at thin men in rags
working the dirt street,
though they all
seemed to smile
more than I do.

Antarctica by Mozambique.
In Mozambique
the shops are all empty
the roads all cracked,
and they blow up anyone
sensible.
The uniformed men
took photos
and made me official
for a day.
We spoke of the war
then drifted apart
in uneasy peace…….

We landed on ice.
Fur-hatted flatfooted sturdy men
closed in like a herd of Yetis
and bundled us
into iron blue tanks.
Vasily,
dissident leading mountaineer
in the former regime,
narrowly escaped the Gulag
sent instead here
with his survival skills
and his smattering of English
was my guide.

He showed me the ropes
which connected every hut
in case of bad weather,
the tannoy warning system:
“Do not open the door!”,
the place they tested small but noisy
rockets for no apparent reason,
(Vasily didn’t know anyway,)
the crude skis he’d fashioned in the workshop
rebel that he is, for funtimes
while everyone else
reads Dostoyevsky
or pores over maps and cyphers.
He had become a Grand Master
of self-indulgence.

Once he took me to the sea ice
where machines cut square holes
right through to the slushy turquoise
mystery beneath.
There was nothing down there on the bottom
but unknown white organisms
in the glacial dark.
Vasily
had a very long willy
I discovered when he stripped off
and dived in for a swim,
then did 15 laps of the site
dressed only in his glasses
his beard tossed up rakishly
his appendage undiminished
where others might have shrunk.

Then drunk at night,
on home-made vodka
I’d attempt Cossack dances
in the hospital kitchen.
My bed was a sick bed
my friends were doctors.
Nice to meet people
who liked to talk,
discuss each other’s music,
compare firearms……
I was out of practice at this.

But the high point
was the bathhouse.
Set apart in the permafrost
This was the social centre
where men could unwind
by stripping and donning
black felt pixie caps
then thrashing each other
in gross heat with oak twigs
imported from the Caucasus.
They’d tried African Eucalyptus
but somehow it wasn’t the same.
After a good parboiling and lacerating
we would throw buckets
of icy water over each other
and emerge gasping
and immeasurably enriched
more purposeful
than before.
Vasily would grin
like a patriot.
I called him Vaseline
affectionately
for he lubricated
my sense
of myself.

Next an experimental TV installation
on the west coast of Ireland
based on the themes of tidal ebb, flow ,
springs, neaps, potatoes,
faith in hide coracles,
elemental excess, effluent discharge
and the re-written predilections
and pre-written re-directions
of my Performance Artist girlfriend.
She personally presented this piece,
and unnaccustomed as she was
to multiple coupling
the waves nevertheless began
to crash for her
and the surf got up
for a number of Celtic Gods
with camcorders.

The sounds of her moaning depths
eroticised
these Neptune studs
and aided their trident ministrations
to her gaping mouth
and her awesomely
distended
pudd ended
round at the back
with a creamy sheen
of climbing climaxes
and orgasms
rapid and hot, long
and well hung
in the coming.

She would probably claim to be
unnaffected by the experience
but the waves left indelible stains
on her memories
of monogamy.

I confess to a certain titillation
as well as the agony
of jealousy
and the dream of harmony
and loyalty and love.
Certainly seeing in her
her inner pubic
and public pleasure by proxy
was just a touch better
than a slap in the face
with a wet ungutted mackerel
though that in itself
has its primaeval
propensities…….

but it was only a video
I saw after all,
only a box of photoelectric
maggots
crawling into the living rooms
of artistic people
around the land.
It wasn’t really
her there bent in luscious
flesh
receiving all those others
and not me.
just a bunch
of high voltage pixels
enjoyed with a glass of spirit.

Speaking of spirit
I remember a group
of raddled
and monumentally damaged humans
in a hotel room spontaneously
and combustively Hellbent
and intent
on getting out of it,
the Hell they were in, that is,
by breathing smoke
and drinking
flammable liquids.
As an ad hoc
stress management centre
I sat on the rug
(biding my time
and drinking wine)
and heard everyone’s account
of their divorces and severances….
all these messy businesses
that were none the tidier
for the telling
and accompanied
by a grim determination.
to get out of your face
and reach some other place
reminiscent of Keith.

I hitched back from the edge
of the old world
through Spanish villages
sleeping in time
whilst all their youth
buzzed out of town on
Suzukis.
A tough leathery girl
had me penetrate her
in a space and time
above the 12th century
colonnade,
watched by her little brother
who seemed used to it.
(I think he had been there
for ages).

It was so romantic
just getting my rocks off.

Then in kilts heading for the border
I met The Guardia Civil.
Franco’s darlings
who wanted to censor my knees.
Pistols were cocked
as they made me
change into trousers,
betraying my nation
of lions rampant
and immediately missing
that erotic airy freedom
and my natural popularity
with male drivers.
but what the Hell!
We compromise or die
in the Guernica of our souls,
though Keith would not have been so pragmatic.

Diverting on Monday
to The North Pole
a smooth guy in a red tuxedo
who looked a bit like Sean Connery
but was much older
said “My name’s Claus
Santa Claus”.
Flabbergasted I was
(in a quiet British way)
when he said
he was lonely and mixed up
and possibly a homosexual
on the verge of coming out.
I said “Oh no, you poor thing!”
as I took his manfully sobbing
frame into my arms
and made little rabbit kisses
on his considerable bald patch
as if to say
“there, there”
whatever that means,
but then I never said it.

What I did say was
“Here right now I’m off
to honour my offer
to my ex-wife
of the holiday
of a lifetime
on an exotic Eastern island
with the man
of all her erstwhile
dreams.”

In Penang I met her
and we swam in warm watery mud
with dead fish floating
between our legs.
She waded ashore,
the brown sunlit rivulets
dropping from her
tanned thighs.
I watched her with a trembling love
and wondered why she was there.
Some kind of habit
some programmed sense of duty
or a free airfare?
I found myself surrounded
by giant otters
with bad teeth
who looked like they
needed fresh meat.
I felt like a leg of mutton
in the guise of a live Red Mullet.
There was a sense of edibility
a certain thrill about the inevitability
of dying as a meal for others
and saliva started rising
in my terrified gullet
but I knew there was no future
in this line of perversity.

I was trained to value a future
so I struck out crawling
and breaststroking
towards the shore.
and through the rainbows
I made with my arms
I could see her stretching
her gleaming limbs in the sun
then leaving.

She flew away
and I never saw her again
nor the children
she had made with me.

I escaped. I can say
with just a hint of regret
I was neither raped
nor eaten by otters
and was called to Mexico
from whence doth come
the man-eating Chihuahua.
I met a young woman on a bus
who said she was a dancer.

She was much better looking than Keith.

I sat beside her for 18 hours
nervously clutching my wallet
and getting a stronger grasp
of my ego
as she raised each one of my charms
for discussion and stimulation.
When it got dark she layed her head
on me and slept a while,
then she woke, kissed my stomach
and laid her head on my lap
unzipping me expertly
and simultaneously
and then her mouth was around me
like a womb
and I thought
of my children
born and unborn
and I timed my releases
to the street lights
passing the coachwork
as we entered the hot
and not very pretty city
of Chihuahua.

We said goodbye
at the saddest
bus station in the world
exchanged addresses
and I found a bad hotel
amongst the traffic.
I phoned her many times,
her mother’s number
in the long noisy night
but she never answered
never came to me
never touched me again
though she never touched
my wallet either
which seems remarkable
in a way………

I was tired
after that.
Burned out.
It turned out
I wasn’t needed
any more.
It had been good
to be needed.

I got the plane East again,
over independent
self-sufficient
Vera Cruz and Yucatan
leaving my seed
in the throat of a Mexican
hatdancer
on a bus.

I got home and opened the mail
(it was mainly offers of money
for nothing
or ways of spending it,
or pleas from The Royal Society
for the Protection of Chihuahuas.
Nothing handwritten
Nothing with a stamp.)

So I slipped into
a nice cold black latex minidress
tied my big toe to the bed with catgut
stretched my nipples wide apart
with crocodile clips
and an elaborate system
of springloaded pulleys
till the pain was unbearable
suspended a block over my tackle
and got down to some
simple wholesome fun.

I had the time of my life

Keith, bless him, has probably found
another co-pilot by now,
gone hovering on the Forth
or drystone dyking
with his dyke husband.

I kind of miss him though.

OK there were warning signs in both cases
but they were written in
bloody English.

Under their baseball hats,
their healthy backs are packed
with Antipodean practicality,
honed in the sun,
the English boys run scared
but the Arabs
seem to have a simpler
form of fun

and the Jock stocks booze
in a stained room
his legs are white and thin
his courage swells
spills out over muzzled city sounds
as his sense of humour
wins him clarity
here in polyglot
hunting grounds

transients, transexuals,
transports going up and down
trains crossed with  buses lorries and bikes
pizza expresses spud-u-likes
KFCs , dispensers,
sprites and pepsis, styrofoam,
the coke of the to and the fro
pours into young platelets
nurtures red corpuscles
driving hard muscles
of internal, arterial contraflow

Only the drunk stand’s still
gazes with bewilderment
at the way the cars go
catches himself edging into a spin
totters on his thin binsearch legs
and begs for twenty pee
was that a Scottish accent drifting
on the wind?

travellers and tramps
the butch, the camp
shaved men hanging from chains,
one ogled by an ageing cross-dresser
turns out to be a chemistry professor
attending the mind-bending
Pharmaceutical Ingredients
Worldwide Symposium,
major event of the drug-peddling year
must talk by day with large Dutch men
in name-tags and suits
with secret thoughts of licking their boots
give them sophistication, courage to thrust
in the marketplace
each year he hopes and prays and waits
to be selected as a delegate,
gets away from struggle and strife
to have one week of a secret life

In bedsitland, the young without baggage
drag huge portmanteaux down the stair
so much to take to God knows where
whilst not far away
they do a show right there
a college of scaffold erection
puts on an impromptu exhibition
brown grinning tattooed youths
strip to the waist
toss poles like cabers to each other
spin six-gun scaffold keys
they love display, love to please
the broad tanned girls with rucsac straps
who must pause and adjust them
steal sideways glances
at the choreographed dances
and routines of socket-spanner lust.
The erectors enjoy their truck
the way it blocks one lane
and the shaven-headed men
are there again
with upturned eyes
and lascivious smirk
passing the work
on their way to the clinic
yes sex is dangerous,
sex kills
the same as those multi-coloured pills
they’re selling over in the hall.
but sell them they will
and thats all.

The Jock’s got his confidence
up and running
on whisky and beer,
speaks, says
“I’m definitely here”
but speaks so fast
he almost doesn’t
follow himself

off the wall man
with too much in his bag
waved in like an orphan

sits down touches fists
I’m a real relaxed guy
relaxed as a newt
he’s got the street
and something in his boot
a wife who smokes
but she’s not black
not from Barbados…
he’s just back

flashes a quarter
strangely shiny
I think
maybe its
the drink

he fumbles with
my trouser leg
(doesn’t seem like a mason)
then straight in
and facing me
socks it to me
man
only 20
none of your 35
how can
they charge that
good stuff too
nice to stop and chat
and plenty more
behind his wife’s
door

I grin
this is someone to grin at
someone
I want to trust
this is a bargain
a cultural must
I take a 20 from my wallet
clasp fists on it
chuckle the chuckle of the smug
and go my way
thanks to him
I’ve made a score
done it with no plan
cool man
went with the flow
heart open
to a bit of blow
on the street
a secret only he and I know
my ankle
a new epicentre
for the universe

After an appropriate time
I reach down
and things get
infinitely worse
I find
a piece of
anthracite
from the
black coal
bunker
of my new
night friend

It rankles
then I grin
broadly
again

but this language turned into a monster
it gnawed the entrails of what had been
the simple belly attraction of two animals
needing warmth

it made us forget
where we came from

For his dinner the polar bear feeds
on the seal and the fox
roaming free in the frisky wastes
but when nights are cold
which is often I’m told
a human or two suits his taste

If some men with sledges go past very fast
balaclavas concealing their jaws
they’re explorers with goals
on their way to the poles
but the bear cant imagine what for

He’s known to break the speed limit
when he runs after something to eat
theres no highway code
or rules of the road
when he sniffs an unusual treat

He’ll rub his big tum
chuckling “This should be fun!”
and he’ll follow them over the ice floes
he’s bigger than Pooh and much bigger than you
It still might be worth being nice though

If he stands in your way, dont argue just say
that you’re lost and you bear him no malice
then point to the sky to distract his keen eye
yelling “Wow! theres Aurora Borealis!”

Or say Hey Mr. Bear what a fine head of hair,
and what strong shapely knees you possess, sir!
If he swings out his paw, drop fast to the floor
If he asks you to leave just say Yes, sir!

And if he wants ice cream, dont argue dont fight
I’d suggest nuclear war might be safer
for the polar bear might eat it up in one bite
and yourself as well as the wafer

They hang in the oaks of North London,
a strange retrogressive fruit,
ripened and abandoned,
now dismally drying on the branch
after a long winter
and barely pink- tinged
where once they were
pillar-box red.

They are more common than the acorn
or even the blown black binbag.
Modern hula- hoops (plastic not ply)
seem to be better at hanging on trees
than perpetually arcing
around the abdomen.

The hoop on the tree next door has slid to a lower branch
since I was here in January
but its still a long way from earth.
Did  a  bunch of  dark skinned schoolgirls
with  shining eyes and a fondness for apples
throw it up in the summer,
squealing and peeling with laughter
when it disobeyed Newtonian Physics?

That tedious and deeply unpleasant man
hadn’t considered the tall oaks of Totteridge and Whetstone had he?
(probably never travelled to the end of The Northern Line, hence his
blinkered vision)

All you ample brown old-girls,
petalled girls with the grins of Gauguin,
all deflowered and conjoined
and living in The South Sea Islands
or High Barnet now,
are you still gyrating somewhere in the playgrounds
or the gardens
of your memories?

What waists!

When the houseboat began to sink
he moved to a brighter mooring.
Ducks took over. Dock leaves, alder,
a tree of unclear parentage began to root
in the moist low timbers.
Soon what with wire worm, timberlice
and the wet substrata, a Crannog
or floating island was formed
and it became a chicken run.

The ivory roots descended cloudy to bottom
latched into silt. The tree strove above.
The flag was removed. Registration cancelled.
Vessel Licence became meaningless.
The narrow gangway became crisp debris,
feeding seed became dangerously exciting.
Brothels flourished around it
Ducks became quick, celebrated like
fruit salad.

Streetsweepers came to cleanse there
but they never touched it.
Enough dirt to deal with already.

It was a nonstop show now
men fought in delirium
women opened their bodies
businessmen opened museums
the place sold itself around
this soft regressive relic.

Waterways Maintenance Division
had only to trim the weed vines stiffly
and marvel at the strengthening rootstructure
like some amazonian mangrove
left to do its surviving.

Laurens made espresso, smoked,
and talked late with friends.

“Hello” I said
“Who are you?”

“Harriet” she said
“now hold it there…”
She clicked flashed and urinated.

“Dont worry. I only came to check
that you have hygenic habits.
Later our relationship
might extend further”

With that she flushed the WC
washed her hands
and flew out of
the window.

“Nice of you to drop in”
I waved
then swatted a bluebottle
buzzing round
the cistern

Houseplant care is a full-time game you know
thats why I stopped driving in the fast lane you know.
I’ve got sore feet too. They’re a bit of a pain you know
so I’ve started wearing
slippers

Like the Unions now
I’m outdated,
I’ve lost my teeth and have a softer kiss
guess that’s what happens when we get
agitated.

They shouldn’t try to burrow next door
for conspiratorial meetings,
they shouldn’t try to claw the nice wood
even if its rotten
just so’s they can come up for air and light.
They should stay there with their plastic flowers
in the never-ending night
Or else they just
cause confusion:

Is that child mine?
The proof has died.
Did she know that he was hers
or is there more to it than meets
the familial eye ?
That familiar grin
when her legs are open wide
did she inherit that
when her stepmother died
or did it come from her so-called uncle’s
bit on the side?

We put
people in graves
under a pedestal.
They should stay there.

But these were such little, domestic affairs..
He’d never actually said:”I dont want pears”,
and the port’s one of history’s non-events…..
except the heart stores each tiny pretence…
defers it till the masses alter the state,
then he stands up and says “I hate
what everybody loves”

Why should he pretend anything any longer?
Yet we do! Revolutions make us tougher and stronger,
but fresh tea-time tyrannies arise..
Dictators, benevolent or otherwise
alter the diet, and alter the lies
we tell one another.

Sandino salsas limp over the graves
of laughing Afghans. What his heart craves
his fist smashes, creates the loss he fears.
The heart’s archive collects its debts in arrears.

Afterwards, new lovers reach and draw each other near,
anticipating breakfast.

try to think of yourself
as a melocoton of spheres and curves
ellipses, ripe fruits
convexes bangles
of soft fabric
not those isosceles triangles
or the trapezia and hypotenuse
of the Pythagorean school
calculated with a sliding
rule

they’re not all out to get you
you know
not all points and peaks
and sharp bits to watch out for
not even the weather is after you
only me
and I have
but a small soft and round
vested interest.

Freelance windows is
transparently a front for something else,
behind and within
and hidden only
by thin dazzling optical deflections
of the wheeliebins and clear azure sky
opposite.

It’s a Chinese laundering operation probably,
some four-eyed yellow-skin Triad mobster
grinding his sin
in a mortar.

After all who’d seriously want
to freelance
as a rectangle of glass?
such a fragile existence
a subsistence
of clear views,
the only physical gratification
being the bi-monthly application
of a rubber squeegee,
or a young fat finger scrawling
Clean Me!
or else its just a shower
of maladjusted needy raindrops.
The French have windows
with outside
shutters,
for  those sort always end up
in the gutter.
(Certain French people have windows
without
side shutters
It depends on what opens your curtains
the French mutter,
gutturally ambivalent
to the last.)

How, I ask you,
does a freelance window
take to all these argon-filled
triple-glazed cowboys
with their laser diamond
computer undercuts
and their fancy etched
and shatterproof
shapeshifting systems
providing poor man’s crystal
in a new world?

There can be little creative joy
and no job security
in being a draughty old sash
or a flaking casement.
Only a matter of time
before the cut-rate cut-glass
cold-calling corporations
blue chip
and tip you
into the skip.

The cream coloured tiles we put in
together some months ago
now protected my walls,
so that his untrimmed and rather dirty fingernail
scraped harmlessly against
a cool ceramic Spanish glaze
grouted in pale blue.

I tensed my lower stomach muscles
to prevent his entire hand and arm
and shoulder from forcing through,
then applied a quick gel-pack
second tissue dressing
which welded the bole of his trunk
roundly into the regular
and unhurried swell of my breathing.

He’s left with one lone digit
stalled in a flailing motion
like a lobster claw outside the creel,
when the whole crustacean creation
is inside trapped for dinner
and waiting to be boiled alive.

He is, apart from one small part of him,
locked out in the world’s food chain
and no doubt the chef will be along any day
with a very large pot.

Meanwhile his forefinger remains embedded.
It will be all thats left of him soon.
Though in a sensationally indulgent position,
it has no escape from its escape
and is rendered hygienic and harmless
by our nestbuilding instinct
and DIY forethought.

As a result
fluming will soon be an official Olympic Sport….
he who wins
is he who grins
widest
and displaces
most liquid.

Even now in Eastern Europe
they’re fattening themselves up
and polishing
their teeth.

No.
If I wanted to drown I could.
I just like the feel of cold black water
curling round my nose.
I suppose
I’m a funny fish.

It’s good news for the ambivalent amongst us
(I’ve bought my very first dress)
but I don’t know about the rest

of history

Michael’s there,
his work this
young booty
in his care
but I’m assessing
her fine toes
and prepossessing
and guessing enough
to take one small step
for this mankind.
I’m selfish
I suppose I want her
to be mine.

I try a little move
I feel her feet
with my soul
in my fingertips
so delicate
so sexual
this fetishistic touch
and she doesn’t withdraw them
I am answered this much.

There’s a tension
in the hot unspoken air
seems he’s losing her
soon as he’s found her
and its not just one foot
its a pair
after all those hard
highbooted marches
she needs Dr. Scholls
if anything at all,
I feel
her heel,
Achilles tendon and all,
massage her arches
and slowly move around
to caress the soft parts
underneath.

Then he breaks it up,
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
he blows the words like hailstones
through his teeth
the voice slices
in its iciness

though the answer’s yes
our warmth
confidence
and closeness
are completely shaken

obviously
these insteps are
taken

My Father Killed
Your Father
Hallowed be his name.

Like you I am as meek
as any of the Blessed
and we gaze at each others eyes
not wishing to gouge them.
We make love in the mud
rather than fight.

But somehow Our Fathers
are forever and ever…….
or at least
a good while yet.

Amen

Perhaps all sons
are their fathers’
worst nightmares
I wouldn’t know,
I have no sons
and am glad of it.
I do know that the only rehearsal
for parenthood
is childhood
and perspective changes
dramatically
with height.

The new war lasted 30 years
and this time you were
in the logistics corps
You brought supplies
I took them but was training
as a double agent

Then I became my own revolutionary hero
complete with beret and beard
living naively in the hills
feeding from the land
coming down for the odd skirmish
then mountain retreating into
a confused hedonism
as I searched for my ethics.
I took a small serious part of you
and threw the rest away.

These were the seventies,
a time when watches were discarded
then re-invented digitally
only to be replaced again by hands.
We couldn’t get away from time
or history, but we tried.
There were only two sides in that war.
One side, the pioneers, mistook individuality
for purpose,
The other side, the long-settled mistook purpose
for right.

Pioneers always make mistakes

The best ones learn from them
and form a system.
The long-settled always make mistakes
because they have a system
and cannot see their weaknesses through it.
They are the same thing
and so they fight.

And we fought on different sides inevitably…..

Why does your modern son’s life
have to move so fast,
change come so quickly?
I should tell you
the boys who could be my sons now
but are not
move faster still.
We cannot stop this spinning career
towards the psychiatrist
the alternative therapist
the bottle
the needle
the battered parent
the bruised child,
the raging motorist
shooting a stranger
at the traffic lights.
Time goes quicker
and fills up
and clogs
the more we expedite things.

My mother believed in making the time
to make it right.
but with a wild and undisciplined passion
rose to the highest rank
refuting all the humbug
that precision means prowess.

In the 5th year of the campaign
you felt some difficulty
about taking orders from this field marshall
this experienced fighting woman
with a short temper and a great deal of vision.
The old battleaxe you called her, with a twinkle.
How I wish I’d taken your magnanimity
towards senior officers
as part of my legacy,
but of course I didn’t
for I was always in love
with one or other of them.
Didn’t know I was going to need a safety valve later
and for all I know your good humour
was just a front of placidity anyway.
You soon adapted to your own
little mutinous grumblings
for like me
you were in love.

They’re over now, those wars.
I’ve declared armistices
and buried my Kalashnikoff,
but I cried years of soul-shaking tears
doing it

You’ve buried your old battleaxe
in cold ground, remembering red hot love,
and are left with me,
some strange passionate thing of flesh
that you and she made together
not thinking of war.

When mother died
you removed all the pot plants
from the house
and became obsessed
with TV tag wrestling
and clearing bits of fluff
off the carpet
It was a vast impenetrable grief
I could not share with you.
Condolences for old enemies
are not easy even if truces are signed.
There’s so little in common
apart from the mirrors
of our bleak entrenched memories
and the common view of no man’s land.
My mother along the way
had hung up her chestful of medals
to become that no man’s land between us,
the woman we had in common,
the woman we shared often bitterly.

I felt release with her gone,
at last the pressure off,
for me there was no suddenly empty bed
no void in the living room,
no new silence in the kitchen like a fall of snow.
And I had my prime before me,
hair cut short for the eighties,
free enterprise, my beret gathering dust
in the cupboard.
A new order upon us of tension
and stress
and pension
and death.

I had never been to a funeral.

By way of pathetically imparting comfort
I introduced the concept of
drinking brandy
and you took to it….
not in a big way
like yours truly,
Mr. Guerilla excess-in-everything,
but in a moderate
considered way, and it pleased me
that perhaps it let you feel
the rest of your life a little
as well as that heart of it
cut right out
at the base….
such a sudden skillful cut…..
….it only takes seconds with a sharp knife
in the right hands
to remove most of two people….

I would ask you,
though I suspect I’m beginning to know,
What’s it like having another person
etched into you
illustrating you?
Another being
as the statement of you?
Where had my father gone
eight years before my birth?

One day I came in and
there was a stranger
sitting there
in your leather armchair
someone
I didn’t recognise…
I concluded it must be
a man gone off archtypically hunting….
a hunter home from the hill
before he fathered me..
Small wonder I couldn’t know him.
Small wonder I once even questioned
where I came from.

When you buried your old battleaxe
I think your personality returned
from 38 years of exile.
What a changed place
your body must have been to live in,
What wonderful and disturbing things had happened there….
all those children and grandchildren!
Did you have a hand in all that?

And being so used to
that body’s endless strength…
when it started failing
to run up mountains
what strange new power
succeeded?

You found a new wife
but there could never be another field marshall
and you were now too grown up to take orders.

This time you held on
to a little part of yourself
and offered the rest
to be transformed and moulded
in the great and painful tectonic settling
of compromise
upon companionship.

We are Father and Son.
We can heap more blame
more anger
more pride
more praise on each other
than anyone else comes near.

I call it blood love
not a love of blood
and though I came from a battling
pedigree
I thirst for peace
and am a heavy drinker
when I find it.

I will bury your old frail body one day.
When I do
I’ll remember being carried
high high on its strong shoulders
a little glimpse of the perspective
to come
for a tiny timid
blonde creature
who didn’t know what was coming
but who knew your physicality as one thing
that would always be there.

I tell the silly old dear
there’s more
to this meloncauli life
than fruit and veg.

They had not been getting on too well,
various attempts at diplomacy and tact,
bludgeoning of brains
and smacking of bottoms,
hypothesising
propositioning
and dealing
had foundered,
left them racked
on their own vile
unstoppable machine
producing hurt
and healing
and hurting
again

Two titans of tension
and gladiatorial tenacity
slugged it out
in their own sluggish pit
of different logic
and different feeling,
they were reeling with it
unable to turn
even if there’d been
a recognised bearing,
their magnetic senses
and sensitivities
hopelessly scattered…..

then there was an earthquake

and suddenly they both knew
what really
mattered.

Dont worry,
I can handle myself.

But guarding
the future’s threshold
is a thankless, endless task.
No creature passes through
but no one comes to relieve you.
Your legs grow varicosed
your countenance fixed,
your body stiffens
over its outdated blacklist
and finally
through lack of exercise
the exercise fails.

When I asked him to smack my bum
he got so turned on I thought he’d come
but that night things deteriorated
to a scenario I’ve since then hated….

I was hot but couldn’t open enough
and he was hard and pretty tough
and when he started to cut up rough
he cut the balls off his bit-of-fluff
rather roughly.

Crystal Gayle
still means alot to me

My ex-wife
looked on bleakly
as I fumbled in my pocket
for The Maintenance Money

Why dont we do that?
Because this is difficult.

He’d take the children sledging
encouraging foolhardy levels of speed and steepness
brushing them down when hurt
holding them with his rough idea of comfort.

They grew up with high and exciting pain thresholds
a bright love of the patterns in ice crystals
a lust for rushing wind on rosy cheeks
and a fearlessness on frozen lakes when they creaked underfoot.

He was always there in the vaporous air for them
even into adulthood, when other people started to matter
and make claims to their dependence. Father, unreliable and indestructible.
Mother,serene and cautionary…..

They were a perfect team in a cold snap.

Then one January day he wandered off during a time
when the weather was indeterminate, not knowing  whether to plummet
or soar into summer. It was as if he had been restless in between seasons,
perhaps gone to a more extreme climate
where he would be certain of his role, clearing snow, cutting firewood
gritting roads, showing children how to shine in the frost
and keep on the move to stay warm
….anyway he didn’t come back for years.

He showed up at his wife’s door many Novembers later
dressed in worn mitts and foreign skins, offering to make himself useful.
Frostbite had taken several fingers, but he was able and deft with those left.
She gazed a tired gaze into his pale blue eyes, and closed the door on him.

Then there was a cold snap.

Some days later the children were called to a room across the city
where their names had been found next to his stiff body,
they asked the policeman for the cause of death.
“Hypothermia probably”  he said,
“Alot of it this time of year”.

Now , growing bold in that round brown belly
kick all you like at what’s on the telly.
That news just tells us what to say
We dont watch telly anyway.

And if you think your dad’s complicated,
well maybe that’s why we procreated
over the earth and into you.
I didn’t sell. I only grew.

Grew from the mud into all those factors…
Coca-cola, starvation, nuclear reactors,
grew into clouds with hazy eyes…
the cotton wool of compromise.

But you you’ll slide out without a name.
They’ll have no clue how or why you came.
Chances are you’ll scream and burn inside.
Another Jesus crucified.

Even so the fragrant mud will remain
Seeds sow, things grow exactly the same
as they did last time the planet exploded
as glacier gouged and fire eroded.

Out of plague and hurricane, famine and thirst,
the unthinkable holocaust, H bomb and worse
Someone will wander

You’re first

Gathering dry dirt in a woody gloom,
this monotonal  terminality …
cast in the home’s last room
and resting place…
decays and depresses
objects such as us
who were once allowed some grace
and functionality.

Each 15 months or so, and so
a chimney sweep
or an aerial contractor
visits us
and also now and then
a fresh discarded victim
joins our haughtily resigned community.
We make no fuss…
we are devoid of opportunity.

Old settee covers
balefully receive the chipped stares
of plastic soldiers,
the letters of old lovers
now addressing new directions,
VAT reports
in case of State Investigations,
books and papers from a time
when life was just the future
and this information could be used
somewhere along that endless line….

The pram, and then
the doll’s pram  waiting
for an unlikely retro-taste
in some new toddler’s
strange or mystical demeanour….
the nappies that were outgrown,
the heavily branded lid
of the handed down
handy-pack dispenser
caught in an unfulfilled function
that  doesn’t matter any more
and perhaps never did
(but it gave them something to shout about
took on meanings
it had never had before),
the broken guitar
the grotesque toaster
the fruits of work,
paintings,
all the still parts of humans
that become impossible to sever
because their physicality
goes on for ever

As useless objects we are immortal.
We lie in chinks of ginger light, beamed
where a roofing contractor may arrive
some time next summer
and we might hear him coming up the drive,
the leather-squeaking tread of him
by-passing our captivity.

So they bequeath us.
So are we rocked, in our silence
and acceptance of passivity,
by the process of forgetting
going on beneath us.

A red hot metal skate
with a crucible of gold
dropped onto his glistening pate
instead of the mould
they’d made for him.

He was cast
as a misfit
in the end.

The best thing is the death of a car
but then we get spanners out
and treat the resurrection of this monster
as a weekend hobby.
Or we polish the old ones till
they gleam in museums so we can
reminisce over the shapes and engines
of the old killers instead of the new.

We even use  them as chicken coops sometimes
what an insult to the egg.

Chicken coops?
Museum pieces?
Weekend hobbies?
The march of progress?
Give us a break
Cars may get us about, cleverclogs
but they break our spirits
and we asked for it.

The giant loggerhead turtle
dredged its jugular up from the slime,
flexed its flayed and oozing legs
uprooted the restraining birchwood staves
croaked an ouch that hurt but felt nearby
a sense of crashing waves…
and heaved itself back into time
to lay more eggs.

Why dont I ever
feel surprised
enthused or zapped
between the eyes?
Am I too old and wise?

Did I try too hard,
is that the truth?
Did I somehow squander
all that youth?
Has all my hunger
and desire
burned up the heat
that makes the fire
and were those years
I worked and waited
hung on and hoped
and felt frustrated,
in fact just dissipated?

I was the first
to reach the top,
went round the globe,
I never stopped!
Should I have seized
more of those days,
have I missed some trick
along the way
and now do I have to pay?

I feel
enthusiasm
for nothing
but my own orgasm
though children
seem to have some worth
(I do feel moved,
affected by Birth)
What does this mean?
Did I do wrong?
and will my Death
take very long?
Do I have to carry on?

I’ve done my odd experimentations
magnetic turbulence and variation
sundogs, cancers, capricorns
forties, fifties, roaring storms
twilights, blacknights, dawns.
Not only deserts, edens, calvaries
but kisses, tears and cups of tea
Is that the end of me?

There must be more
to this than that
an apocryphy
a caveat
a dream, a thrill
some indication
some subtlety
or some revelation
of a purpose,
something new
some thunderbolt
out of the blue?
Do you
have a view?

Perhaps its something
in my soul
that made me walk
from Pole to Pole?
Having circumnavigated
the Earth’s core
you’d think I’d be close
to being sure
just what life’s for
but shouldn’t there be more?

QUESTIONS! QUESTIONS ! QUESTIONS!

Frankly my dear
you’re damned,
so stop bugging me
You’re already going
through Purgatory
Get on with Death
then go to Hell
or will that leave you
cold as well?

I’m a kid’s wheelbarrow
by comparison,
no brakehorsepower
whatsoever
and very little traction
even in action
which I am now
but rarely

barely had I reached
my prime
when they started saying
you’ve reached the end
of your earthmoving time.

Bulldozers don’t get put out to stud.
they get left in the mud a few years
then scrapped or broken up for parts

hearts
have the biggest
market
but they’re
often overgrown with weeds
which is not
what the customer needs.

The waiters came
with red and yellow roses
placed in cut glass
placed on stiff linen
placed on tables
placed on cobbles
worn down by centuries
of looking up at
leather skirts
and dogs’ crotches.

A dog came,
a large one from Alsace
and sat and shat
a rare mass of thickly
tubular waste.

Then came a weak tide
of bladder wrack drizzle
moistening the stones
and lightly glazing
Sheba
the Belgian’s chocolate
doings.

Then came the day’s
beer delivery
with a flatulent duodenal exhaust
and a fat set of Pirellis
holding back the shrieking
tour of guided adolescents
who came after it, thick
like in the neck of a bottle
treading in it
and spreading it
foot to foot
restaurant to restaurant.

Then came squeals and giggles,
clods of matter  in random flight
olfactory chaos landing on heads
as they tried to shake it off
their trainers treads

Damp brown footprints breeding
like a genetic mistake
amongst empty tables,
the air, gastronomically expectant
desecrated by  flies foraging
between the table’s legs
and the eggs
and the fish
dishes.

Then came the Eurocrats
and Diplomats
talking policy responsibly,
talking anyway possibly
as a dozen fresh oysters
slithered down the slackened throat
(much more of a slither than a munch)
and an unpleasant odour
slithered up the puckered nostril
like a surviving worm
emerging from some newly opened can
and forcing an undiplomatic
lunch.

I go for material stuff, the standard lamp’s shine,
I smash it for company, violent like my heart,
you see scales on my skin, the comic hun, the bad egg,
the monster of dependency,
a hunched public enemy,
and dealer in the unacceptable.

You put a brand to my brow,
I scream, it scars, permanent disfigurement,
“unforgiven” it reads.
I become the bad sadness of me
as you turn away, your tones
frogmarching the raw sob of me
back to my shit-smeared cell.

Then later, in solitary, a bash of keys
and you come down on me,
a sudden lust for company
violent like your heart
a rubbing need, a self-determination.
You are muscular and meaty, globs of liquid
fold from your lips.You know the physical, using me,
you know searing me with softness
you know to ruddy me with pink, going beyond
the rude in me, you know breaching the edge,
for I showed you this in stronger times.
You appropriate all of me, I am taken with you,
emptied of bronze, melted for your statue
and what a monument we make to you !
Then you slacken, sigh, linger at my given thigh
and the smell of birth swaddles us.

You mutter opinions in your dawn
while I dress, damply stoic to repeated severance,
stoic to this door closing over again
then Monday.
I back into stained pavements,
the flyovers of humanity,
places where no one stops,
the open prison of the exhausted
and the meek.

learned to say boo
round the bedpost
as her parents
disintegrated
there

at five
an egg and spoon race,
stood wide eyed after
the race had started,
wondering…..
why……?

at ten
the same look
with new friends
glad to be part of it
not sure of
her function
tried saying boo
to melt ice
found
boo worked

Boo! she said
at sixteen
some second hand
rebellion
she never quite
believed in
more disbelief
she could have
gone that far
and still
be liked.

then her wedding
squeezed into something
whose shapelessness
she wondered about
said boo to a goose
or two
boo to her husband
and his lover
found a child
at her bedpost

Said Boo
to you
too

Splatfest
without guns, razors or a chainsaw.

Who’s winning? The losers would stroll
and ask in the afternoon light
somewhere over Erzurum…or Ararat
on this undersubscribed flight.

You see, there needed to be a winner,
damage needed to be done,
it was an exercise in hurting others
healthy some might say
by releasing base instincts
in a harmless, social way,
but each player had three lives:

by the time we’d passed Kabul
and The Punjab winked up at us
through the inky heat
the game was tedious
those destined for defeat
still dreamed of comebacks
laps of honour
but I was so hopelessly ahead
I wanted to die soon
and go back to my seat

“No injection?” he inquired
knowing my answer would be No.
“Well just yell if you change your mind”
knowing full well I wouldn’t.

He had been the master of my mouth
for 18 amalgamated years
ever since I could afford to pay
for this character building
this stretching and loosening
of my pain threshold.

I had seen his drills go hi-speed
his chairs go hi-tec and full tilt
his landscape photography improve immeasurably
his whiskers grey
his nurses marry
and his rubber apron
cast into the skip,
(though the smell of it
hangs always
like an ethic)

He tied the light plastic bib across my chest
reclined me to the supine position
shone the bright light
into my inner tubes and cavities
and flashed
a tray of stainless probes
towards my chin

his face came
flopping forward
gravity presaging
his fifties
jowl tied up with white paper
eyes absorbing
my wasted cusps

looking past his ear
(vast and lightly dusted with dandruff)
I noticed the silver
bi-planes on the mobile
were flying backwards
and there was a new mountain
over the fireplace

the drilled nerve
gave me spasms
the nurse aspirated
eagerly near the rear
of my tongue,
and I dealt
with the pain
as normal
by opening
wider and wider
to help

later he scaled me and polished me
and found a dark curly hair
stuck behind the porcelain crown
I scrub twice daily
and always after cunnilingus.

Did I detect
a human glimmer of remorse
behind the white mask
that it wasn’t his
but that of some sallow
foreign muck?

he picked me up at Charnock Richard
and by Knutsford
he was tearing along my major arteries
abusing his choke
burning blue smoke
stoked with Yorkie bars
from a throaty stack
and gunning his throttle
round the back of my neck
where flecks of pollution
blocked my pores
while a dark engine rumbled and roared
and made me want more and more and more
as if this was the last chance
to get love trucking.

It was in Knutsford we decided
to give the wheel a spin
making me grin
like a Cheshire pussy
when it came up a deuce
steering us both along one road
to the transport cafes
of eleventh heaven.

I had been on the road so long
had never hitched my skirt high
nor been suggestive with my thumb
never bared my breast
never showed off my bum
on the hard cold shoulder,
never kneeled before
the crown of the road.

The dark
juggernauts flew over
their marker lights hissing
in a pre-stressed forest
rear double tyres kissing
under the weight.
I tilted up my
tramp lady chin
to spoon a cold tin
of spaghetti
the red juice
spilling into
my secret dreams of an interchange,
of leg-shaving,
craving
a certain
betrayal
of this independence thing
I gave in,  enjoyed it.
We were married in spring

He was on a long haul
for Aberdeen Shore Porters
one dawn
when the frigging rig
just jacknifed
and ruined my life.

It sliced my aorta
bloodying the mud on my walls
taking my barriers with it,
chevron painted wastes of space
spilling its load of frozen plaice
all over my arterial routes

when the fish thawed
I was raw
in shocked pink
damaged, saddled
with baggage
sent to a shrink
and a course of primal scream
I screamed the obscene
while the silver darlings rotted
with the stink
of his failing
prevailing

Since then
I view the state of the art
of the heart
with a frosty eye
almost arctic
and though articulate in the main
my lips and tongue are numb
to heavy transport
and the roar of 18 wheels
in November rain.
Since that artic articulated,
since trailer fell out with tractor
I’ve thrown away my Gillette Contour II
and other crass symbols
eschewed the tacho
and the HGV macho
and accept rides
only from women motorists
because they’re better at it.

However I have a plan
one day to pull a speciman
who’s fit and cute
and carries weetabix perhaps
or Mr. Kipling’s cup cakes
or something vegetarian
and will be honoured
and enlightened enough
to make light of driving
one light delivery van
once carefully up my junction.

you see I’d like to procreate
but I dont want to be a driver’s mate
hearts fucked anyway.
through bad butch
trucking

With you I nibble your ears,
use lips, all the things I’ve got
with slow sensitivity.
You moan with the tedium
of this intimacy.
I kiss your thighs
they twitch a little,
I do that thing I do
with one hand at your perineum
one at the down of  your neck
and my mouth at your pearly gates.
You dont open them
you dont scream for more
you  snore.

Last time anyone called me that in a derogatory tone it was a cheeky little Thompson’s gazelle.

I smiled and cradled it in my arms for a while, feigning fatherly magnanimity, then ripped off one foreleg cleanly from the shoulder and ate it.

The Savannah Star stirred up a stooshie (or a fomentatious stew as they say in some places) the way it nearly always does. The Tommies all got together, formed a committee, demanded an inquiry, campaigned to have me thrown off the reserve.  I resisted of course, saying “I’m a baboon! I have degrees in both mimicry and violence. How am I supposed to live without a degree of bloodshed? Thats the trouble with you people and your degrees. Am I supposed to eat nothing but acacia leaves  like those ridiculous giraffes? And what about Acacia? They may seem green and benign but they dont half do damage if you get one of those spikes in your nose. Maybe they evolved from the sabretoothed tiger.

And if you’re condemning me for deceit, the fake nurturing bit is just a technique, a technique I learned in baboon kindergarten where one learns how to survive and sustain life, especially one’s own. I suppose you’re going to suggest that the art of camouflage is not fair game, or that snakes who drop from trees are just not playing cricket, or that flyspray aerosols are cruel. They’re only cruel if you’re a Jain Buddhist and I’m not, I’m a baboon.

Degrees of this

Degrees of that

I’ve nothing against young gazelles in principle. On the contrary I feel very positive about young gazelles because they melt in your mouth.

Isn’t it strange how raw nature gradually gets cooked and loses the vitamins of a global system?  There was a time when no-one would have batted an eyelid at a baboon doing what it’s meant to do, but now there’s all these ragged edges of evolution scurrying into the millennium…and some of us, especially the ones with bald patches on our arses, are just not ready for it….everyone living in harmony, self-regulated mating programmes, old-gazelle welfare schemes and what have you. Maybe my grandson will have evolved into a flying fucking fruit fox or something but me I’m a baboon, and I can’t change that.

What’s happened to good old hunting imperatives, the urge of testosterone, the need for males to spend a bit of time together at the wadi of an evening, the odd fight over the girls?

I am a baboon and I’m still proud of it. I’ll drop the subject for now. Its a bit of a poisonous snake of a thing and I want a peaceful life. But if we get hitched and you ever start giving me gip about boozing with the boys, or spending too long at the office I’ll tear your arm off and throw it to the lions. Then let’s see where your vegetarian and slightly gazellist aspirations have got you.

She wanted to take me there
eat light cosmopolitan bougie-lit food
fuck me long and late and hot
into a bed of cool music,
then the slow woogie waltz
in a morning of hedonist senses,
fresh-ground coffee
and the scents of imagined
permanences.

She went to LA, got married
to an indistinct figure
named Rick, or was it Joe,
wrote to say “Save me,
my best years are here
but so’s they dont just disappear,
hold on to Austin
where the young ones go”

I’ve reached Austin now.
On 6th Street I dine alone,
watch the kids all coming
to a 6th Street saxophone,
their charged laughter sweeping
like an instinctive mistral,
and fatherly law enforcers
on fast fun bicycles
policing urges that are natural……

…..but I’m twice their age, these easy ecocops,
I’m unfatherly, dirty-minded, free
and the only part of Austin left with me
is the loss of it.
Austin, Texas
was never meant to be.

…then I met Janice, an older woman
(she was six, at 4’2″ a head and shoulders above me)
and every inch an arsonist.

I immediately knew she was different.
She taught me how to play with matches,
we joined the Bryant and May Club
and subscribed to Swan Vestas Weekly.

We started with small twig bonfires by the river,
then graduated to litterbins.
Oh the joy of the colour of flame
curling round things
black bubbles
columns of soot
thick as thieves!

We thought of trying petrol tanks
but decided to wait until we were older
and could handle it properly.

Then one day we set fire to a whole cornfield.
The Fire Brigade had to come
and interview my mum…
…she skelped my bum
and sent me to bed
with no supper.

Lying there
I felt so much warmer
round the bottom
and at the bottom
of my burning heart.

Janice grew up to be 6’6″
and every inch a role model
for terrorist men.
She became an IRA trainer
but I never saw her again.

listening
in a pile of tin cans
with a few tin cans to live in;
they used to link them all
with lengths of dirty string
stretched  taut across the hemisphere
in some boyish bondish
dream of interception.

Here, listening in, were
polar bears and foxes
the line rubbing on blue ice
where the woolly mammoth fell
and the Siberian tiger, shot
between the ears
limped off into wilderness
trailing scarlet.

(Us next? they said)

Here, the over-vivid reds
were sent.
Their voices would echo
in frozen fields
of solid sperm,
unwelcome thoughts
detritus, concrete
execrable words
and muddy excreta in spring,
a grey prospect
in an unchosen place
of spindrift and chill warnings.

The bleak fifties
were
the tin can
era;
so many had died
in their boots and ushankas
through lack of tinned food
suspicion
was taught in all schools.
It was known in the west
they could cross straits
and lurk under beds
in apple pie towns
or jump into tincans
leaving the earth
to see it better
and
write a red letter
home

(Best do the same
they said.)

listening, always listening
except when the aurora
paraphrased the paranoia
and sang like saints around the sky
stinging mortals with reminders
that their tincan technology and
superpower psychosis
was scrambled by the
supercharged states
of darkness
and light
of all colours

no listening then
for a while,
God’s electricity
would silence
morse tappers
keep fingers off buttons
make nuclear heads
benign
and ears sing with crisp life
in this cold fossilized war

when the singing faded
over that great shared pool
with the planet’s wildest edges
big men and big talkers
took sides again loudly,
tapped phones
ate meat
and drank bourbon or vodka
to forget they were
being listened to.

a perfectly ripe
Cox’s Pippin
of a girl.

Dont let the wee tykes from up the road steal you.

I was her last male bedfellow
to my knowledge…
there were murmurs of love talk
for a few short years
but this Dublin streetwise waif
would have been hard to convince
that what she needed
was a handsome prince.

She thought I was
the most female
of men
the way I moved
the way I spoke,
I had a female feel to me
and when she felt me
I was her princess
I guess.

I always suspected
I was a Lesbian.

One day, looking down at me
after another marathon
of moaning sensuality
she said “You’re a very serious young man”.
With every lover since
I’ve known she was right,
she gave me this forever
to keep as a jewel
of self-knowledge
meant to come in handy
whenever I feel randy.

Annie went
to Baltimore
to take up sailing.
We heard she took it hard
when Baltimore
didn’t understand its gain,
but Annie’s tough,
she sailed on
like an Irish immigrant,
raised on blight and pain
I think she did it single handed
rather than in pairs,
and from the little that I know
Annie could still be sailing there.

Had Annie stayed
she might have gone all straight.
Had we persisted
in that particular yacht race……
I loved her fingers
reefing in my face
and the exhilaration was in danger
of getting even better……
most likely I’d have gone all bent
but then in any case
Annie went
to Baltimore
and never sent
any letters.

“Cowdung sourced”
someone said in a dry room,
“these eructations are
God’s little joke
infectious and misunderstood
hillocks on the lifeline
lumps on the loveline
impeding
myriad journeys
to public places
and private.”

then one morning
all gone
knuckles and palms
smooth as plums
able to chew himself
with a little relish
less gristle.

Where were they absorbed?
Which nurturing surface
which environment
drew them in
to itself?

You drink, make each other laugh late,
You seize the opportunity for animality
in this rather grim position of formality.
You stumble to your hotel room
then you’re naked,
she’s wearing only a leather belt,
which enhances the theatricality.

You’re hungover and spent.
She says she’d like to do that again.
You hear yourself saying you would too.
You exchange numbers.
Is that what you really meant?

You go home to wife and husband.
You go to a phone box.
You’re already working
on the whiteness of lies.
She invents a weekend conference.
Its no surprise, fits.
You invent delays one Friday,
You’re tired and the drive’s too long sadly,
but not too long for her,
she needs it so badly.

She wears silks, scent
You trim your nose-hair
draw in your belly.
You meet in the middle of some other land
where there’s nothing but discretion.
You need a bed so badly,
an arena, somewhere gladiatorial.
You search for a hotel.
Price doesn’t matter,
nothing else matters
you need it so badly.
You must couple.Its destined
and its become conspiratorial.

She greets her big old friend.
You drink at the cup of her universe.
You both take brandy, steam rises,
staff are sent away,
silk is stained, cotton sullied
you are pink and chafed with rubber,
you rest, you go to eat unwashed
keeping the smell that links you,
you rub knees under the table
you’re at it again
you need it so badly
you’d suffer any pain gladly.

You say you’re not in love.
You drive her to her car
her perfume lingers for weeks
on the passenger seatbelt.
You wash it like Lady Macbeth
taking the strain now,
a sense of approaching death.

You do it again
and then another time
nothing else matters
You’ll drive further and further for it
You are driven.
She’s driven
a coach and horses
through you
and you need it so badly
you’ll drive anywhere.
She will too.

You are raw
You use creams to heal your member.
She writes you a driven message.
Her husband finds it,
phones one chilly dawn.
Its November.

You meet him,
talk, lover to cuckold.
His name is Bill, a bank manager,
He doesn’t knife you,
he asks about his wife
You talk about your kids, football,
where to get his car spares,
what she’s like, what to do
about this sorry state of affairs.
You part benign, almost drinking friends.
It is the end.

Your wife asks where you were.
You tell her.
You need to tell her so badly.

The family Christmas that year
is a little strained, sadly.

I  had met Amparo, a dark
handsome but unadorned
45 year old
mother of three`
some days earlier.
She was usually about the place
peeling vegetables,
helping her mother
attend to her father.

I knew her husband was away
for a while
(I had been told this much)
but I had not seen her
all that blistering day.

It was a thick Spanish night
hot and big as the plains
of La Mancha
which brought no breeze
other than red ovenlike breath
to this scented citrus grove.
A number of cousins, uncles and aunts
were assembled for supper,
their children placed and neatly indulged,
the aunts yelling with filled bosoms
and deeply sonorous senora voices,
bringing food to the little ones,
the uncles mumbling in chairs
or staring at their toes,
perhaps making an odd chess move
with a teenage nephew.

“This is Amparo’s husband”
Rosa said.
We shook hands and grinned
and as the man shook
I noticed that he barely concealed a hurt
behind his robust familial gusto.

“I am not just Amparo’s husband”
he said as jokingly as he could.
“My name is Balthazar.
I am Balthazar.”

He turned away
still laughing like
a tortured stag
and there was Amparo
wearing make-up
silver
and a shorter dress.

I left two loveable curved indents
behind my behind
and when I turned from the sea
I saw your indents were
just conical holes.

You are not anorexic.

You have not been slimming.

Then I noticed you were only sweating on one side…
something adrift with the drainage ducting
or extra-terrestrial style features?
I considered your endearing thin spiked ears
remembered you cannot abide
going anywhere slowly
and the look of startlement
in your green antennae
when I mention
washing dishes

I could have told them
it was an iceberg with no tip
especially with the Mediterranean
melting your backward flanks.
but its a good excuse
to wheel out the tanks
and counter the atrocities
the feudal animosities
hanging on in turmoil
to the longforgotten
state of it