Selected Poems (2 page)

shocked feelers edged onto the empty park,

And everything that moved was off to tell.

His gaslamp shadows clutched him as he ran

Shouting his
Aves. Paternosters
stuck

At
peccata
, and the devil with his huge jam pan

Would change his boiled-up body back to muck.

And no Hail Marys saved him from that Hell

Where Daley’s and his father’s broad, black belts

Cracked in the kitchen, and, blubbering, he smelt

That burning rubber and burnt bacon smell.

‘Poor old sport,

he got caught

right in the mangle.’

The -
nuts
bit really -
nis
. They didn’t guess

Till after he was dead, then his sad name

Was bandied as a dirty backstreet Hess,

A masturbator they made bear the blame

For all daubed swastikas, all filthy scrawl

In Gents
and
Ladies,
YANK GO HOME

Scratched with a chisel on the churchyard wall;

The vicar’s bogey against wankers’ doom.

We knew those adult rumours just weren’t true.

We did it often but our minds stayed strong.

Our palms weren’t cold and tacky and they never grew

Those tell-tale matted tangles like King Kong.

We knew that what was complicated joy

In coupled love, and for lonely men relief,

For Joe was fluted rifling, no kid’s toy

He fired and loaded in his handkerchief.

Some said that it was shell-shock. They were wrong.

His only service was to sing
The Boers

Have Got My Daddy
and
The Veteran’s Song

And window-gazing in the Surplus Stores.

In allotment dugouts, nervous of attack,

Ambushing love-shadows in the park,

His wishes shrapnel, Joe’s ack-ack
ejac
-

ulatio
shot through the dark

Strewn, churned up trenches in his head.

Our comes were colourless but Joe’s froze,

In wooshed cascadoes of ebullient blood-red,

Each flushed, bare woman to a glairy pose.

‘VD Day’ jellies, trestle tables, cheers

For Ruskis, Yanks and Desert Rats with guns

And braces dangling, drunk; heaped souvenirs:

Swastikas, Jap tin hats and Rising Suns.

The Victory bonfire settled as white ash.

The accordion stopped Tipperarying.

It was something solemn made Joe flash

His mitred bishop as they played
The King
.

Happy and Glorious
… faded away.
Swine!

The disabled veteran with the medals cried.

The ARP tobacconist rang 999.

The Desert Rats stood guard on either side.

Two coppers came, half-Nelsoned, frog-

marched poor Penis off to a cold clink.

He goosestepped backwards and crowds saw the cock

That could gush Hiroshimas start to shrink.

A sergeant found him gutted like a fish

On army issue blades, the gormless one,

No good for cannon fodder. His last wish

Bequeathed his gonads to the Pentagon.

Choked, reverted
Dig for Victory
plots

Helped put more bastards into Waif Home cots

Than anywhere, but long before my teens

The Veterans got them for their bowling greens.

In Leeds it was never
Who
or
When
but
Where
.

The bridges of the slimy River Aire,

Where Jabez Tunnicliffe, for love of God,

Founded the
Band of Hope
in eighteen odd,

The cold canal that ran to Liverpool,

Made hot trickles in the knickers cool

As soon as flow. The graveyards of Leeds 2

Were hardly love-nests but they had to do –

Through clammy mackintosh and winter vest

And rumpled jumper for a touch of breast.

Stroked nylon crackled over groin and bum

Like granny’s wireless stuck on Hilversum.

And after love we’d find some epitaph

Embossed backwards on your arse and laugh.

And young, we cuddled by the abattoir,

Faffing with fastenings, never getting far.

Through sooty shutters the odd glimpsed spark

From hooves on concrete stalls scratched at the dark

And glittered in green eyes. Cowclap smacked

Onto the pavings where the beasts were packed.

And offal furnaces with clouds of stench

Choked other couples off the lychgate bench.

The Pole who caught us at it once had smelt

Far worse at Auschwitz and at Buchenwald,

He said, and, pointing to the chimneys,
Meat!

Zat is vere zey murder vat you eat
.

And jogging beside us,
As Man devours

Ze flesh of animals, so vorms devour ours
.

It’s like your anthem, Ilkla Moor Baht ’at
.

Nearly midnight and that gabbling, foreign nut

Had stalled my coming, spoilt my appetite

For supper, and gave me a sleepless night

In which I rolled frustrated and I smelt

Lust on myself, then smoke, and then I felt

Street bonfires blazing for the end of war

V.E. and J. burn us like lights, but saw

Lush prairies for a tumble, wide corrals,

A Loiner’s Elysium, and I cried

For the family still pent up in my balls,

For my corned beef sandwich, and for genocide.

Even the Vicar teaching Classics knows

how the doodled prepuce finishes as man,

a lop-eared dachshund with a pubis nose,

Casper the friendly ghost or Ku-Klux-Klan,

and sees stiff phalluses in lynched negroes,

the obvious banana, those extra twirls

that make an umbilicus brave mustachios

clustered round cavities no longer girls’.

Though breasts become sombreros, groins goatees,

the beard of Conrad, or the King of Spain,

bosoms bikes or spectacles, vaginas psis,

they make some fannies Africa, and here it’s plain,

though I wonder if the Vicar ever sees,

those landmass doodles show a boy’s true bent

for adult exploration, the slow discovery

of cunt as coastline, then as continent.

I

Professor! Poet! Provincial Dadaist!

Pathic, pathetic, half-blind and half-pissed

Most of these tours in Africa. A Corydon

Past fifty, fat, those suave looks gone,

That sallow cheek, that young Novello sheen

Gone matt and puffed. A radiant white queen

In sub-Saharan scrub, I hold my court

On expat pay, my courtiers all bought.

Dear Mother, with your hennaed hair and eyes

Of aquamarine, I made this compromise

With commodities and cash for you, and walk

These hot-house groves of Academe and talk

Nonsense and nothing, bored with almost all

The issues but the point of love. Nightfall

Comes early all year round. I am alone,

And early all year round I go to town

And grub about for love. I sometimes cruise

For boys the blackness of a two-day bruise,

Bolt upright in the backseat of the
Volks
,

Or, when the moon’s up full, take breathless walks

Past leprosarium and polo grounds

Hedged with hibiscus, and go my rounds

Of downtown dance and bar. Where once they used

To castrate eunuchs to be shipped off East,

I hang about
The Moonshine
and
West End
,

Begging for pure sex, one unembarrassed friend

To share my boredom and my bed –
One masta want

One boy – one boy for bed
… and like an elephant

That bungles with its trunk about its cage,

I make my half-sloshed entrances and rage

Like any normal lover when I come

Before I’ve managed it. Then his thin bum

That did seem beautiful will seem obscene;

I’m conscious of the void, the
Vaseline
,

Pour shillings in his hands and send him back

With the driver, ugly, frightened, black,

Black, black. What’s the use? I can’t escape

Our foul conditioning that makes a rape

Seem natural, if wrong, and love unclean

Between some ill-fed blackboy and fat queen.

Things can be so much better. Once at least

A million per cent. Policeman! Priest!

You’ll call it filthy, but to me it’s love,

And to him it was. It
was
. O he could move

Like an oiled (slow-motion) racehorse at its peak,

Outrageous, and not gentle, tame, or meek –

O magnificently shameless in his gear,

He sauntered the flunkied restaurant, queer

As a clockwork orange and not scared.

God, I was grateful for the nights we shared.

My boredom melted like small cubes of ice

In warm sundowner whiskies. Call it vice;

Call it obscenity; it’s love; so there;

Call it what you want.
I just don’t care
.

Two figures in grey uniforms and shorts,

Their eyes on quick promotion and the tarts,

Took down the number of my backing car.

I come back raddled to the campus bar

And shout out how I laid a big, brute

Negro in a tight, white cowboy suit.

II

Advanced psychology (of 1910)

Bristled from thin lips the harmattan

Had cracked and shrivelled like a piece of bark.

She egged me on to kiss her in the scented dark,

Eyes bottled under contact lenses, bright

And boggling, as if for half the night

She’d puffed cheap hashish to console

Her for the absences, that great, black hole

Pascal had with him once,
l’ abîme ouvert

He thought was special but is everywhere.

He
cackles from Heaven at the desperate Earth.

We permit ourselves too much satiric mirth

At their expense, and blame the climate, so

I touched her bosom gently just to show

I
could
acknowledge gestures, but couldn’t stroke

Her leathery, dry skin and cracked a joke

Against myself about my taste in little boys.

Then the party drowned us in its noise

And carried us apart, I, to my jests,

She, to her gesturing with other guests.

I’ve seen her scrawny, listless husband still

Such rowdy booze-ups with a madrigal,

His tonic water serving for rare wine

Toasting the ladies with
O Mistress Mine
;

Sort of impressive. I confess such prick

Songs make me absolutely bloody sick,

But he can sing them straight at his
third
wife.

Changey-changey!
But they can’t change life,

Though they meditate together with joined hands,

Though his psyche flutters when he thinks he’s kissed,

Cuddled and copulated with New Zealand’s

Greatest, unpublished,
woman
novelist.

III

All night a badly driven armoured truck

With grinding gears crunched on the gravel, shook

The loose louvres and the damp mosquito mesh,

And glaring headlights swept across my flesh.

Back to loneliness, pulling myself off,

After a whole
White Horse
, with photograph

And drag, a Livingstone with coloured plates,

That good old stand-by for expatriates

Hooked on the blacks; again have to withdraw

Into myself, backwards down a corridor,

Where in one of many cold, white cells

They play cold water on my testicles,

When I should be breaking out … must … must

Matchet the creeper from my strangled lust.

The sticky morning comes and some loud gun

Fires short distance shells into the sun.

Patrols and shots; the same trilingual drone

Goes on about curfews through a megaphone.

A new anthem:
tiddly-om-pom-pom

Blares the new world like a Blackpool prom

And promises corruption’s dead and lies

Riddled with bullets in three mortuaries.

An American’s got it all on tape.

The proclamation: murder, looting, rape,

Homosexuality
, all in the same breath,

And the same punishment for each – death,
death!

He plays it back to half-seas-over, hushed

Circles in the bar. I flush with defiant lust.

Now life’s as dizzy as the Book of Kells.

Thank God for London and Beaux/Belles.

I must get back again. I must, but must

Never again be locked away or trussed

Like a squealing piglet because my mind

Shut out all meaning like a blackout blind.

Next door, erotomaniacs. Here, queers,

And butch nurses with stiff hoses mock

As we grow limp,
Roundheads
and
Cavaliers
,

Like King Charles bowing to the chopping block.

IV

Insects strike the clapper. The school bell

Clangs for nothing. Nothing; and her little hell

Begins when darkness falls. Her garden moves

With mambas, leafage like damp leather gloves,

Cobras, rats and mice, and bandicoots,

The drunk
maigardai
and their prostitutes

Who help them pass their watch. Time drags

For such lonely, unlovable old bags.

There’s too much spawning. Men! Beasts! Ticks!

Spawn in their swarmfuls like good Catholics.

She wanted children but she gets instead

Black houseboys leaving notes beside her bed:

Madam your man is me. Where is the yes?