In The Poetry

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy –
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure -

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have [...]

III

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh [...]

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour [...]

Why the minotaur is always sad

So many years underground,
his head dizzy from bumping all those memory-clouds.
Always to be the centrepiece
of someone else’s puzzle.
His endless consumption of women
didn’t help much.
And so this morning he has arrived in his kingdom:
a wise gathering of rocks,
a little girl trying to paint flowers on the pebbles
but the waves keep [...]

Hong Kong sounds

Cityscape
skyscrape
Mercedes Benz bus goes
Mongkok sunrise
concrete
block
block
block

hard hat
sunlight
construction site
truck backing
truck backing
truck backing
black pyjama amah
marketing
wax duck
pot luck
tiger balm
dim sum

Star Felly
Day Star Night Star
caterpillar walk on water
Hung Hom
Hung Hom
ho hum
Carlsie Bergie
Susie Wongzie
Hang Seng up down

ding dong Deng (Xiao Ping)
dong
Maggie Thatcher in Beijing
stir-fry
iron dry
nineteen ninety
nineteen ninety
all the sevens
bingo
mah jong
Hong Kong
yum sing!

Hacker-boy, Hacker-boy
(To the tune of Pussycat, Pussycat, Where Have You Been?)

Hacker-boy, hacker-boy, where have you been?
I sat in my bedroom and stared at a screen.
Hacker-boy, hacker-boy, what did you see?
I built a new virus upon my PC.

Hacker-boy, hacker-boy, where is it now?
It is shutting the lights off in Rome [...]

In the house where I grew up we didn’t have very many books, or spend very much time talking about reading or about what books might contain. But one of the books I did know was The Diary of Anne Frank and in my early twenties I went to visit her house in Amsterdam [...]

On visiting a circus on Clapham Common with a small son.

The Clapham Elephants

We are two mice looking up at a cupboard of shoes
Smelling a dreaded smell of bigness.
The shoes move. Are grey, dwarfing thoughts.
You look pale too, they appal your small head too.

Round and round go the bony foreheads of the thoughts, [...]

I’m going to read three poems by Jason Strugnell, a poet I invented. These are ‘Strugnell’s Haiku’ where I’ve tried to combine the feeling of Japanese Haiku with the banality of poor old Strugnell.

Strugnell’s Haiku

(i)

The cherry blossom
In my neighbour’s garden – Oh!
It looks really nice.

(ii)

The leaves have fallen
And the snow has fallen and
Soon my hair [...]

‘The Visitors’ – this poem stems from working in a surgery – I was always opening letters from consultants and this one seemed more painful than most of them. And the consultant’s note was, ‘This patient was obviously hallucinating as I spoke to her.’

The Visitors

There was one in the room, thinking of the sherry
he would [...]