Interlude for Xylophone, Banjo and Trumpet

He sits on a sofa, smoking a joint. The phone starts to ring.
It’s for you, says his flatmate, just out of the bath.
He strays to the window and talks with his back turned.
Got a part for me? he asks as a xylophone jingles.

In the opposite flat the gas-fire is glowing
and a lady is ironing with a fag in her mouth.
I’ll be there in five minutes, he says and hangs up.

He stubs out his joint on the tail of a mermaid,
perched on the rim of the rock-pool shaped-ashtray,
checks his tie and his teeth and hos hair in the mirror,
winds his scarf round his neck and lets himself out.

Outside the baker’s a busker is playing a hillbilly love song
on his granny’s old banjo and elderly hags are shoving
their trolleys, frantic to get to the head of the queue.

He walks down the street, takes a right then a left,
past florists, dry cleaners, cake shops and chemists,
and two prancing pugs in their little plaid jackets
glare at him hard with their soulful black eyes.

Off a crowded street market, he turns up a passage
and runs up the stairs hung with portraits of actors
into an office where women and men of all races and ages
sit reading The Stage with their backs to the wall
while the Management juggles three calls at a time.

Without interrupting her work for a moment,
she hands him a folder marked Gagging and Binding -
A Play for our Times by Fielding Carstairs.

Back on the street, the sky’s turning pewter
and the custom for bootleg cassettes is declining;
outside the Tube a man with burst shoes
is playing a voluntary sketch on his trumpet
like a summons for women to take of their clothes.

Decidedly hungry, he enters a restaurant,
slips into a booth, scrutinizes the menu.
The adorable waitress stands poised with her pad.
He smiles and says I’ll have the steak,
the pie and the custard and a very large cup
of your infamous brew.

He waits in the gloom for his meal to arrive
while a dilatory sunbeam sneaks through the curtains
and he sees, to his horror, there’s rice in the salt.

At the close of his meal he asks for the bill.
Was it OK? the waitress enquires.
Yes it was, he replies – except that your chef
made the custard with water and that is a thing
that I cannot abide.

The Best Man That Ever Was

I was never expected to sign the register
as all was pre-arranged by his general staff,
but I did it out of choice and for the image that I made
with the stewards and the bell-boys,
my gloves laid side by side, and his Party rings that I hid
from my family (it was torment, the life
in my family home, everyone smoking and rows
about guns and butter at every inedible meal
and my aunts in their unhinged state, threatening suicide),
and as I wrote my signature along the line
the letters seemed to coil like a snake
saying, I am here to be with Him.

There were always little jobs to do
in preparation for his coming – dinner to order,
consideration of the wine-list, hanging up my robe,
a dab of perfume on my palms.
But it was never long before I found the need to pay
attention to the corded sheaf of birch twigs
brough from home to service our love-making.
How he loved to find it, ready for his use,
homely on a sheet of common newspaper –
A Thing of Nature, so he said, so fine, so pure.
He’d turn away and smooth his thining hair,
lost as he was in some vision of grandeur.

And having washed and dried his hands with care
and filled our flutes like any ordinary man,
the night’s first task would come into his mind.
He’d bark his hoarse, articulated command
and down I’d bend across the ornamented desk,
my mouth level with the inkstand’s claws,
my cheek flat against the blotter; I’d lift my skirts,
slip down my panties and sob for him
with every blow. And I saw visions of my own: daisies,
sometimes brown contented cows, dancer’s fuffy skirts,
a small boat adrift on a choppy sea; and once a lobster sang
to me: Happy Days Are Here Again!

He’d tut at the marks and help me to my feet
and we’d proceed to the dining room
and laugh and drink and raise our silver domes
on turbot, plover and bowls of zabaglione.
You’d think he’d never seen a woman eat. Once he took
my spoon out of my hand and asked me, Are you Happy?
I’d serve him coffee by the fire and tend the logs.
He’d unknot his tie. I’d comb my hair.
He’d make a phone call to no one of importance
and we’d prepare for rest. There never was a man
so ardent in the incocation of love’s terms:
liebling, liebchen, mein liebe, mein kleine liebe!

and always the same – and the acts: the frog, the hound,
the duck, the goddess, the bear, the boar,
the whale, the galleon and the important artist –
always in the order he preferred –
eyes shut and deaf to the world’s abhorrence
chrurning and churning in his stinking heaven.
It’s over. But it is still good to arrive at a fine hotel
and reward the major-domo’s gruff punctillo
with a smile and a tip and let the bellboys slap my arse
and remember him, the man who thrashed me,
fed me, adored me. He was the best man that ever was.
He was my assassin of the world.