Selected Poems (4 page)

and thunder tugging at my veins.

That Empire flush diluted is

pink as a lover’s orifice,

then
Physical, Political
run

first into marblings and then one

mud colour, the dirty, grey,

flat reaches of infinity.

The one red thing, I squat and grab

at myself like a one-clawed crab.

I

Africa – London – Africa –

to get it away.

II

My white shorts tighten

in the market crowds.

I don’t know

if a lean Fulani boy

or girl gave me this stand

trailing his/her knuckles

on my thigh.

III

Knowing my sense of ceremonial

my native tailor

still puts

buttons on my flies.

IV

I bought three
Players
tins

of groundnuts with green mould

just to touch your hand

counting the coppers into mine.

V

My Easter weekend Shangri-la, Pankshin.

I watch you pour the pure

well water, balanced up the mountain,

in blinding kerosene cans,

each lovely morning, convict,

your release date, nineteen years from now,

daubed in brown ink on your rotting shirt.

VI

My
White Horse
plastic horses carousel

whirls round an empty and my hell,

when the last neat whisky passes my cracked lips,

is a riderless Apocalypse.

VII
Water Babies

She hauls at his member like a crude
shaduf

to give her dry loins life, and calls it love.

She’s back in England pregnant. Now he can

flood the damned valley of his African.

VIII

Sex beefs at belled virginity. The wives

nag back at sex. Ding, Dong! Ding, Dong!

rings no changes on their married lives

clapping out
Love’s Old Sweet Song
.

What’s that to me? I can get a stand

even from maps of the Holy Land.

IX

Je suis le ténébreux … le veuf …

always the
soixante
and never the
neuf
.

X

It’s time for tea and biscuits. No one comes.

I hear the flap of Dunlop sandals, drums,

terrifying cries. My clap still bothers me.

Siestas make me dizzy. I stagger up and see

through mesh and acacia sharp metal flash,

my steward, still in white uniform and sash,

waving a sharpened piece of Chevie, ride

his old
Raleigh
to the genocide.

XI

The shower streams over him

and the water turns instantly

to cool
Coca-Cola
.

XII

We shake baby powder over each other

like men salting a spitroast,

laughing like kids in a sandpit,

childish ghosts of ourselves,

me, puffy marshmallow, he,

sherbert dusted liquorice

licked back bright

and leading into
Turkish Delight
.

XIII

Buttocks. Buttocks.

You pronounce it as though

the syllables rhymed:
loo
;
cocks
.

I murmur over and over:

buttocks … buttocks …
BUTOX
,

marketable essence of beef –

négritude
– dilute to taste!

XIV

I’d like to

sukuru

you.

XV

Mon égal!

Let me be the Gambia

in your Senegal.

Disjointed like a baobab,

gigantic first, then noonday blob,

my shadow staggers, lurches, reels,

elasticated at my heels,

then stretches out with its blind reach

way beyond the gasp of speech.

The wind’s up and our last weak light

dithers and lets in the night.

Shadowless, one dark hand flits

spiderwise for crusted bits

of Christmas candle, German
art
-

creation
wax with plastic Chartres

Cathedral windows, coloured light

evoking Europe till Twelfth Night

and aspirations from our dust

with no repository but lust.

Earthed so, lust like radar beams

bleeps for realities from dreams

out of darkness for the new, rich life,

the unmistakable pulsation – wife,

my blurred light in the blind

concentric circles of blank mind,

this blackout makes our flesh and bone

an Africa, a Livingstone.

Like galoshes going
vitch
…

vitch
… an Easter birch switch

going
vitch
… the fan slows

down and stops, dense mangoes

rustle and a Congo band sings

indigenous and Western things.

The crowds flock in, agog to feel

new
frissons
out of Brazzaville.

Novelties! Good drummers come

miles to hear a different drum

as men go to adulteries. Sounds!

Women! It’s the same. Our ground’s

stamped and rutted, so we choose

either to hog it in squelched ooze,

or get resurrection and find sties

most radiant with novelties.

My shadow’s back as if it could

smell lust steaming off my blood:

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,

this is my
Praeconium
.

Paging angels set down this

fastidious and human kiss;

and this; and this; and this; and set

down this, my
Exultet
:

Everything in this rich dark

craves my exclamation mark.

Wife! Mouth! Breasts! Thigh!

certe necessarium Adae

peccatum … felix culpa … O felix

dark continent of fallen sex.

Harrowing Christ! O Superlamb,

grown lupine, luminous –
Shazam
!

Not so bravado now, but bare

cold, and sober on a camel-hair

Saharan blanket. Tuareg guards

patrolling with their rusty swords

swing up a lamp and weldmesh

thief-bars check our flesh

gleaming: breasts; thigh; bum;

out of our aquarium.

Our fruitless guava quincunx

curvets on its supple trunks.

The candles in the empties flare

sideways in the stirring air

and then go out. The curtains soar

horizontal with the floor.

It seems a whole sea must pour through

our all-glass house at Samaru.

And now all’s dark and the first rains

splatter at the window panes,

flattening down ten rows of beans,

a bed of radishes. This means

no news from England, no new war

to heighten the familiar:

Nigeria’s Niger is not yet

harnessed to our wireless set.

‘We were not born to survive, alas,

But to step on the gas.’

      (Andrei Voznesensky)

I

I’ll bet you’re bloody jealous, you codgers in UK,

Waiting for your hearses while I’m having it away

With girls like black Bathshebas who sell their milky curds

At kerbside markets out of done-up-fancy gourds,

Black as tar-macadam, skin shining when it’s wet

From washing or from kissing like polished Whitby jet.

They’re lovely, these young lasses. Those colonial DO’s

Knew what they were up to when they upped and chose

These slender, tall Fulanis like Rowntrees coffee creams

To keep in wifeless villas. No Boy Scout’s fleapit dreams

Of bedding Brigitte Bardot could ever better these.

One shy kiss from this lot has me shaking at the knees.

It’s not that they’re casual, they’re just glad of the lifts

I give them between markets and in gratitude give gifts

Like sips of fresh cow-juice off a calabash spoon.

But I’m subject to diarrhoea, so I’d just as soon

Have a feel of those titties that hang down just below

That sort of beaded bolero of deep indigo blue;

And to the woven wrapper worn exactly navel high,

All’s bare but for ju-jus and, where it parts, a thigh

Sidles through the opening with a bloom like purple grapes.

So it’s not all that surprising that some lecherous apes

Take rather rough advantage, mostly blacks and Lebanese,

Though I’ve heard it tell as well that it were one of these

That
white
Police Inspector fancied and forced down

At the back of barracks in the sleazy part of town.

Well, of course, she hollered and her wiry brothers ran

And set rabid packs of bushdogs on the desperate man.

He perished black all over and foaming at the mouth.

They’re nomadic, these Fulanis, driving to the South

That special hump-backed cow they have, and when they’re on trek,

They leave wigwamloads of women, and by blooming heck,

I drive in their direction, my right foot pressed right down

Laying roads and ladies up as far as Kano town.

Though I’m not your socialistic, go-native-ite type chap

With his flapping, nig-nog dresses and his dose of clap,

I have my finer feelings and I’d like to make it clear

I’m not just itchy fingers and a senile lecher’s leer.

I have my qualms of conscience and shower
silver
, if you please,

To their lepers and blind beggars kipping under trees.

They’re agile enough, those cripples, scrabbling for the coins,

But not half so bloody agile as those furry little groins

I grope for through strange garments smelling of dye-pits

As I graze my grizzly whiskers on those black, blancmangy tits.

I don’t do bad for sixty. You can stuff your Welfare State.

You can’t get girls on National Health and I won’t masturbate.

They’re pleased with my performance. I’m satisfied with theirs.

No! I think they’re very beautiful, although their hair’s

A bit off-putting, being rough like panscrub wires,

But bums like melons, matey, lips like lorry tyres.

They all know old Roller Coaster. And, oh dear, ugh!

To think I ever nuzzled on a poor white woman’s dug,

Pale, collapsed and shrivelled like a week-old mushroom swept

Up at Kirkgate City Markets. Jesus bleeding wept!

Back to sporting, smoky Yorkshire! I dread retirement age

And the talking drum send-off at the Lagos landing stage.

Out here I’m as sprightly as old George Formby’s uke.

I think of Old Folk’s England and, honest, I could puke.

Here I’m getting younger and I don’t need monkey glands,

Just a bit of money and a pair of young, black hands.

I used to cackle at that spraycart trying to put down

That grass and them tansies that grew all over town.

Death’s like the Corporation for old men back in Leeds,

Shooting out its poisons and choking off the weeds.

But I’m like them tansies or a stick cut in the bush

And shoved in for a beanpole that suddenly grows lush

With new leafage before the garden lad’s got round

To plucking the beans off and digging up the ground.

Yes, better to put the foot down, go fast, accelerate,

Than shrivel on your arses, mope and squawk and wait

For Death to drop the darkness over twittering age

Like a bit of old blanket on a parrot’s cage.

II

Life’s movement and life’s danger and not a sit-down post.

There’s skeleton cars and lorries from Kano to the coast;

Skeletons but not wasted, those flashy Chevie fins

Honed up for knife blades or curled for muezzins

To megaphone the
Koran
from their mud mosques and call

The sun down from its shining with their caterwaul.

But it’s not just native say-so; it’s stark, realistic fact;

The road’s a royal python’s dark digestive tract.

And I expect that it’ll get me one rainy season night,

That sudden, skating backwheel skid across the laterite,

Or a lorry without headlights,
GOD IS LOVE
up on the cab,

Might impale me on my pistons like a raw
kebab
.

Smash turned into landscape, ambulance, that’s that,

A white corpse starkers like a suddenly skinned cat.

As kids when we came croppers, there were always some old dears

Who’d come and pick us up and wipe off blood and tears,

And who’d always use the same daft words, as they tried to console,

Pointing to cobble, path or flagstone:
Look at the hole

You’ve made falling
. I want a voice with that soft tone,

Disembodied Yorkshire like my mother’s on the phone,

As the cook puts down some flowers and the smallboy scrapes the spade,

To speak as my epitaph:
Look at the hole he’s made
.

‘Chivo que rompe tambor con su pellejo paga.’

                              (Abakuá proverb)

I

Earth-brown Garden Bulbuls in the Bathurst graveyard trees

Sing, they say, ‘quick-doctor-quick’ or ‘fifty-nine degrees’.

God knows, but I’m drawn to graves like brides to baby-wear

Spending an afternoon ashore to see who’s buried there.

Ozanne, DO Blackwater Fever.
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH
.

A commissioner, they say, who mustered his last breath

And went on chanting till he croaked the same damn thing:

A coffle of fourteen asses bound for Sansanding!