Wolf Tongue (15 page)

Sunk in my darkness at daylight.

Rain on lamb’s oily wool

my anointment.

Sunk in my darkness in my cracked

braindrain.

Daydawn lies here spastic as anything.

Knockings, roarings, sounds arrive

from one more planet you have not been to.

Not one child leaps up to say bravo!

Sunk in my darkness, weeping in trimmed maythorn

by petrol stations. They want my discount, my

coupon crystal goblet.

My phlegm, your phlegm.

Weak-kneed sunk in my blueness, my sun

your sun. My fuck-up, your fuck-up.

My rain, your rain.

All aboard and welcome.

Sunk at my crossroads, hellhounds baying

broken from chains, lips, jaws

slavering with death notice, rape

on my left and right, filthy money, yellow Jerusalem.

I’d walk in there, turn the tables, rinse

the crowd with phlegm, make their shoes walk.

Swag wings at the con machines, blister

fingers of the three lemon fools. Sing mad,

merle mad, trill a bone, door stance finally

with contre-jour, say what next ammonite, how

is oxygenation, where’s your Elvis lipcurl now?

Me the multiplex moron, multigenerational

multiplicity, many-fingered man with a violet

shell suit, stolen BMW and a rack of E. I’m here!

I used to be nowhere, now I’m all over the place.

I’ve had the garlic and thyme, the purging flax, blood and bone.

I’ve been to bed with the black pudding. Keep it.

I’m the only jackpot chancer on the job, estate joy-rider

extraordinaire. Bored in the listless

summer, when the boys in blue are in Marbella

I waft in or rev as is my nature, contrary to

council or ecclesiastical denial, and open up these

stolen microwaves. I turn them on and breathe.

I don’t care what the damage is. Or the waste.

I enjoy the flames. I can scorch a line, a beautiful

blue and true line through the hull of your lives

and must say I like it better so. I adjust my visor

accordingly. Cut, cut, cut. It’s my dark, dark memo,

almost a badge. I groove in the magenta heat, I lean

into it. I don’t erect headstones, Hosanna those

sky-blue heavens in the fairy tales. I deliver.

Into a permanent darkness for the rest of your days.

I come down like slate-grey rain. That’s all. No God available.

The very low odour tough acrylic formula

of B&Q Safe Paint with satin gloss finish

is venal. Civilisation too good a word for it.

Percy, why won’t anyone leave us alone? Pass

The 10-litre can of Professional Obliterating Paint,

please. Pass the zinc-plated wing nuts, the spur

budget gold effect bracket and inspiration shelf.

Not to mention the Zamba Wall Shelving with Tool Rack

Hardbeam I am for both of us against the intrusions.

Bysshe, tush, fash not, two hundred is nothing.

Wait until two thousand, then we’ll justly explode!

The very floodlit light of heaven has already been

sold, as you predicted. Nothing to attract you

but the chard and sprouting broccoli. The rest is trash.

Babble, babble, babble. Slick, stink, stink.

Happy birthday, wake up, let’s drown together!

Now that the vast furtherance of widespread publicity

for the degree course in how to be a complete nobody

twice over if you’re lucky has won a number of awards

it is altogether time to nip under the plover’s wing

and sleep. It is time to hug the lamb and mushroom.

It is time to pluck the rosemary, the rue, the swaying dill.

O we will sleep and rest there. We shall be most quiet.

Lord I know ye will find me a place in a lonnen where

I can curl sockless, no matter where the sun is, beyond

any future scars, far from fire, far from phlegm and

any fame, please. So much I need darkness to surround my head.

Though I am bent, straighten me.

God bless you little girl the lean dry hand

wrote on her forehead as the knife went in.

Trouble on all sides today up and down:

Palms of my feet, soles of my hands.

No rain on lambs’ wool, no anointment under the elder tree.

Wealth of sickness streaming.

Four fingers over my right eye, I don’t want to see it.

But you con it with freak sight, provoked all my life,

eyes hammered by destruction winds.

Sunlit laurels I am not fit to wear

winking reflections like Aidan’s fingernails.

Alone without lipstick she said in the lit doorway:

I cannot speak in cogent sentences but still you will not

                                                               terrify me.

I have seen all of the films and you are not worse than them.

I have been to the top of the cairn for you, northern prince,

and I died every inch of the way.

I listened to the piper and it made me sick.

Nothing will bring me back: no herbal verbals, no award-winning

regional disease, coal mines for example.

No sex with wet hair. No gin and talc.

I’ll just wash and go.

Wisdome flew upon me tonight like a bat’s wing.

I was at Dunton roundabout

shaking hands with Robert Johnson and the Jesus Christ Almighty.

I could hear the elderberries crying dew.

I was going to ferment them into maniac milk.

Bubbles everywhere.

O my knees broke and I sank to my feet.

I ploated the stupid sky for even daring to wake up,

honked on the moon, slapped a pizza margherita

in the sun’s face, saying: Quench in my hart the flames

of badd desyre so foolishly addressed.

Who can blot out the Crosse I heard her say.

Batter my eyelids, knock me down, I will be an usurpte towne

all by myself, betrothed to an enemie, made by men’s hands

to kiss the lips of another: Some glue-sniffer sprawled

unconscious in Hood Street.

I am a woman, no chief dignitie for me.

Levellers and prince-fingerers quartered in the heather.

Once I was an antirrhinum with a hot dry position.

Now I’m disposable with a seedbed of debatable facts.

I can hear the hellhounds carping and crapping

all over the cairn and the law. Suddenly

one will flame out

from shook foil to fang a breast.

I ruck

and roll the house

but that snot-streaming bitch

rides my well-punched eyelids up and down

and fills my spleen with gall.

I miss my stew-bearing Mary,

cusloppe stains upon her hand-made hem.

O to be a snowflake, whipped in by easterlies,

soaking gardens and allotments until the lupin and peony seeds

descend;

I want to be bright shining

as cuticles in the Dunton nursery.

Bright as Aidan’s eyes.

Yet once more I am taxed

as hounds paw leek flags and onion beds,

scarring the enriched loam, eager to run.

Tonight we try Sarah Ferguson.

I must collect my papers and go.

I’ll be down at the dock in the morning.

The brisk cutlets of the breakers

flash contrast to the sky.

Foam wringing the shingle is from the strange mouth

of Anne Sexton.

She was at the bayside chemist last night.

Robert’s long gone, up at three, leaving his queen of spades,

down the highway to the next county fair.

There’s a glass of poisoned whiskey waiting for him

and it won’t be from a white man’s hand.

The ambulance will be slow.

He’ll be plain stiff chocolate toes turned up on the slab

just like Bessie.

Pinned again to the wire, eyes clammed.

Raven hair blown and burned. Charred to the follicle.

Wristblood glued to the Nazi connection.

Zip done up.

Laughter lasting as long as she loved him.

She walked Poland with ten league eyes.

Sexton toppled in tonight

crashing into the doctor’s blue swivel chair.

We fed her stomach to the drain

and walked her home.

Vapour rises from the ducts and flues, ashen and feathered

against the Batman cape sky like smoked bone, ascending

wounded inside the theoretical bruising, burdened

with the small matter of mankind and the grit

in its windows and eyes, which are silver and aquamarine

here in the Fauvist metropolis.

The world with hate and envy raging

surveys its wild forsaken hoots, and the lanceolate leaves, still

fragrant, ready for the pan, are quivering under the fjord blasts tonight.

Sleet penetrates the weave.

Chapped fingers play the bottleneck

at Gallowgate crossroads

where we have lost Robert Johnson to some deep connection

down the hellhound trail

passing Anne Sexton details of the Christmas late chemist rota.

Beneath the blue star are bilious pools of maniac milk.

Yet once more we enter the falsedom in scarlet and gold,

attracted by automatic defrost function

and full range of hostess trollies available.

Snow blurs the moon

and the sky is whipped by the blizzard’s tail.

it is all like smoke

in the swiftly changing heads of the trees.

I smashed my wings

against the rain-soaked deck

and was happy you lifted me

into your safe fingers and palms.

If not too disgusted, hold me

close forever keenly.

Listen, hark, attend; wait a moment

as they used to say

in the ancient tongue of literacy, before

language was poisoned to a wreckage, which

you will find for a fee (going up)

in your earpiece, inside

the wainscoted foyer

of the Museum of Stupidity down in the dumps:

Permit me to say this on a grey roofslate, as I protect

my poor writing, I can’t do joined up, with soaked forearm

from the driving rain – I am Pearl.

Please estrange your children, and your bairns’ bairns

from terrible tabloidations, scored into

your blood in the sorriest ink.

O paranoid Marxist Cambridge prefects,

self-appointed guarantors of consonants and vowels

and arrangement of everyday sentences, placing

of punctuation marks, with which Pearl

wished to be in steady flux, she said

with fingers, eyes, thumbs and palms. Listen.

When the borage flowers closed at night

she moved against me, rain lashed facing

west to the law, whispering: There is so much

wickedness.

They want to tax my ABC, they want to jail my tongue.

I dream their high-up heather deaths

though I do not emit articulate sound.

I am just a common white swan.

Fierce I am when I want, want

my milky hands on my destroyers, rive

them apart like a marauding riever, or

down south, roll you in the Nene, without

Dunlop lace-up boots, one bare foot

should do it, spate or trickle you’ll be face down.

Spade job later, midnight special, I’ve got

one somewhere, I know mam has; bury

you all deep, lead tunnels or out on the Fens.

I cannot cease to dream and speak of Pearl.