In The Poetry

The sun has burst the sky

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you’.

The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.

The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.

Into What Pattern…

Into what pattern, into what music have the spheres whirled us,
Of travelling light upon spindles of the stars wound us,
The great winds upon the hills and in hollows swirled us,
into what currents the hollow waves and crested waters,
Molten veins of ancestral rocks wrought us
In the caves, in the graves entangled the deep roots of us,
Into what vesture of memories earth layer upon layer enswathed us
Of the ever-changing faces and phases
Of the moon to be born, reborn, upborn, of sun-spun days
Our arrivals assigned us, our times and our places
Sanctuaries for all love’s meetings and partings, departings
Healings and woundings and weepings and transfigurations?

I love to try and bring a note of mystery to everyday happenings. Here, a child wants his father to build him a sand castle as the tide is falling, but the poem is really about the title of it, which is ‘Lord Neptune’.

Build me a castle,
the young boy cried,
as he tapped his father’s knee.
But make it tall
and make it wide,
with a king’s throne just for me.

An echo drifted on the wind,
sang deep and wild and free:
Oh you can be king of the castle
but I am lord of the sea.

Give me your spade,
the father cried;
let’s see what we can do!
We’ll make it wide
so it holds the tide,
with a fine throne just for you.

He dug deep down
in the firm damp sand,
for the tide was falling fast.
The moat was deep,
the ramparts high,
and the turrets tall and vast.

Now I am king,
the young boy cried,
and this is my golden throne!
I rule the sands,
I rule the seas;
I’m lord of all lands, alone!

The sand-king ruled
from his golden court
and it seemed the wind had died;
but at dusk his throne
sank gently down
in Neptune’s rolling tide.

And an echo rose upon the wind,
sang deep and wild and free:
Oh you may be king of the castle
but I am lord of the sea.

Timothy Winters

Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.

When teacher talks he won’t hear a word
And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
He licks the patterns off his plate
And he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.

Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
And they say there aren’t boys like him any more.

Old Man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier,
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy’s dosed with an aspirin.

The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law’s as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.

At Morning Prayers the Master helves
For children less fortunate than ourselves,
And the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars ‘Amen!’

So come one angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says ‘Amen
Amen amen amen amen.’
Timothy Winters, Lord.

Amen.

People always ask me whether this was a real boy. My God, he certainly was. Poor old boy I don’t know where he is now. I was thunderstruck when people thought I’d made it up! – he was a real bloke. Poor little devil.

‘This is the Server…’

I

This is the Server, waiting on station,
Silicone god of an e-mail nation,

Bearing you news of a baby boy,
Bringing you misery, bringing you joy -

Telling you auntie has taken to pottery,
Gloating your ex has won the lottery,

Jottings ethereal, letters venereal,
Packets attaching the oddest material,

Bleating that Katie has married a fool,
Reminding you “Man’ United rule!”

Enclosing a last demand from creditors,
Filing a blast to newspaper editors,

Begging the pardon of furious lovers,
Shopping for pillows and sofa covers,

Juggling schedules, checking arrivals,
Flattering bosses, flattening rivals,

Laden with rumours and odious jokes
Featuring zebras and artichokes…

II

Servant of presidents, servant of hacks,
Blinking and winking in towering stacks,

Serving up poetry, panic and porn,
Dishing the dirt from dusk til dawn,

Guarding the gospels of new messiahs,
Tracking the passage of forest fires,

Plotting an expedition to Everest,
Funding your local neighbourhood terrorist,

Bidding for first editions of Keats,
Cribbing your home work, booking your seats,

Checking if Daddy has taken his medicine,
Clinching the date of birth for Edison,

Gathering evidence, paying your taxes,
Ordering pizza and beer from Max’s,

Auctioning Fords and a red Mercedes,
(All of them owned by little old ladies),

Shooting the breeze and playing at Doom,
A long-legged fly in a steel-racked room…

III

The Server has crashed!
The Server is down!
The screens have dimmed in city and town,
The emperor stripped of his digital gown,
The babbling web is lame and halt,
Its pillars of Silicone ground to salt -
Default! Default!
Default! Default!

The Server is up!
The Server is back!
The techies have purged a hacker attack,
The natter and chatter is back on track,
The terminal drives have held their nerve,
The Server survives – and as you observe -
I serve! I serve!
I serve! I serve!

‘When I grow up’ is sort of couched as a prayer really, a prayer to God. I thought it would be nice for God to have a prayer which he could answer. So this is a poem to cheer God up.

When I Grow Up

When I grow up I want to have a bad leg.
I want to limp down the street I live in
without knowing where I am. I want the disease
where you put your hand on your hip
and lean forward slightly, groaning to yourself.

If a little boy asks me the way
I’ll try and touch him between the legs.
What a dirty old man I’m going to be when I grow up!
What shall we do with me?

I promise I’ll be good
if you let me fall over in the street
and lie there calling like a baby bird. Please,
nobody come, I’m perfectly all right. I like it here.

I wonder would it be possible
to get me into a National Health Hospice
somewhere in Manchester?
I’ll stand in the middle of my cubicle
holding onto a piece of string for safety,
shaking like a leaf at the thought of my suitcase.

I’d certainly like to have a nervous tic
so I can purse my lips up all the time
like Cecil Beaton. Can I be completely bald, please?
I love the smell of old pee.
Why can’t I smell like that?

When I grow up I want a thin piece of steel
inserted into my penis for some reason.
Nobody’s to tell me why it’s there. I want to guess!
Tell me, is that a bottle of old Burgundy
under my bed? I never can tell
if I feel randy any more, can you?

I think it’s only fair that I should be allowed
to cough up a bit of blood when I feel like it.
My daughter will bring me a special air cushion
to hold me upright and I’ll watch
in baffled admiration as she blows it up for me.

Here’s my list: nappies, story books, munchies,
something else. What was the other thing?
I can’t remember exactly,
but when I grow up I’ll know. When I grow up
I’ll pluck at my bedclothes to collect lost thoughts.
I’ll roll them into balls and swallow them.

Transit

A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house door
At just that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.

What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?

Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Click down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
As a whip maps the countries of the air.

This is a film poem, and I imagine Lance Percival in the lead role.

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.

‘Earthed’. This a love poem to the various places where I’ve lived in England.

Earthed

Not precisely, like a pylon or
A pop-up toaster, but in a general
Way, stuck in the mud.

Not budding out of it like gipsies,
Laundry lashed to a signpost, dieting on
Nettles and hedgehogs,

Not lodged in its layers like badgers,
Tuned to the runes of its home-made walls, wearing
Its shape like a skin,

Not even securely rooted, like
Tribesmen tied to the same allotment, sure of
The local buses,

But earthed for all that, in the chalky
Kent mud, thin sharp ridges between wheel-tracks, in
Surrey’s wild gravel,

In serious Cotswold uplands, where
Limestone confines the verges like yellow teeth,
And trees look sideways.

Everything from the clouds downwards holds
Me in its web, like the local newspapers,
Routinely special,

Or Somerset belfries, so highly
Parochial that Gloucestershire has none, or
Literate thrushes,

Conscientiously practising the
Phrases Browning liked, the attitude Hughes noticed,
Or supermarkets

Where the cashiers’ rudeness is native
To the district, though the bread’s not, or gardens,
Loved more than children,

Bright with resourcefulness and smelling
Of rain. This narrow island charged with echoes
And whispers snares me.

chip

this is the hair on the salon floor. the salon named after a famous comic strip character, after a song. i can’t remember which. but the hair, the curls and clumps of old hair prompt the memory. of loss. of shame. of failed defiance against the blade. i tilt my head and hear the voices starting up inside the threads and strands. not ‘the chipmunks’ or even the mermaids singing. it’s a singing in an untranslatable dialect that goes straight to the heart. i rush to grab the hair in great bundles into my arms, like sudden sheaves of wheat, like those loaves and fishes, like clouds that have suddenly fallen from the sky on the world’s last saturday.