On the Duties of State

The reference in the seventh stanza is to Charles Dickens's last complete novel, 'Our Mutual Friend,' in which Mr Boffin inherits a fortune in the shape of several dust heaps - and in the industrializing society of Dickens's day dust could be turned into money.
   Those interested will note that two different stanza shapes alternate. This was not the result of planning; I misread my notes and wrote the second stanza to a different shape from the first and then decided to make a virtue of a mistake. In the first stanza the fourth line is a hexameter and the seventh line a tetrameter. These then reverse in the second stanza and so on. The stanzas are bound together throughout the poem by the final word of the fourth line in one stanza becoming the first rhyme of the following stanza. For symmetry's sake the final word of the fourth line in the last stanza rhymes with a stand-alone final line which is a hexameter (perhaps for super-symmetry's sake it should have been a tetrameter; I still can't decide).

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   I feel it still, that shock like scalding oil,
   Searing my flesh from scalp to burning shins;
   My father’s death before my eyes, chest-grabbed
By thrombosis, had led a damn-fool doctor to
   Warn me that I’d be next, that death begins
   In family genes, and neither fit nor crabbed
      Might buck arteries clogged with spoil.

   At eighteen, wary of what others knew,

   That jeremiad like a crack of doom
   Knocked me to breakdown like a walking ghost:
      I kept my bed till well past noon,
   Sweated if others came into a room,
   Struggled at work, my thoughts blunt as a post,
Expected, daily, chest-wrench pain, my face gone blue.

 

   Disjoint, as if stunned by a full-glow moon,

   My GPs palmed me off like stolen goods;
   I found myself with taut-faced others in
A hospital psychiatrist’s consulting rooms;
   For thirty minutes we batted “don’ts” and “shoulds”;
   Prescribing pills, advising me to grin,
      He sent me out, neurosis-strewn.

    And forty years have fallen like dead blooms.

   Bow-tied, pin-suited, in his fifties, neat,
   A mittel-Europe accent and clipped ways,
      He seemed a Freudian at war
   With his convictions; the winnowed wheat
   Of talking therapy, the healing gaze,
Dutifully dropped for a drug regime’s blunt brooms.

   My unfound dreams of making bricks from straw,

   Great art from dusty streets and half-read books,
   Brutal as Wagner, suave as Henry James,
Were punctured by his caution that a happy life
   Lay more in a safe job, a wife’s plain looks,
   Small expectations of art’s thrills or fames:
      Beneath-breath scornful, how I swore!
 
    But now in age, with conscience like a knife,
   Despairing of my brag, scorched-earth CV,
   My art a drawerful of much-scribbled scraps,
      And women’s love a thing so strange
   That lovers, wife, a daughter, had to flee
   The dead zone of my psyche’s crumpled maps,
Ambitious but unstable as a wave-hit cliff,

   I know that neat bowtie told truth – the range

   And rage of ego’s lust to sink its ounce
   Of gimcrack art in Boffin’s rubbish mounds,
There to wait gawps of wonder when exhumed one day,
   Destroys content, that modesty which once,
   Duties of state embraced, set social bounds
      To art’s vamping and self-exchange.

    Too late for me, there’s nothing I can pay

   To regain entry in that happy breed
   Of middling house, a wage, a settled set
      Which limits but a scope confers;
   Of wives and neighbours tutting someone’s deed,
   Of children college-thriving though in debt;
Old age and illness looming in a quiet way.

   Yes, even that psychiatrist, so terse

   And blocked at work, went home to warmth and worth.
   But I? My duties of a colder sort,
My state a desktop peopled by unruly words,
   My teenage hurts now ashes in the hearth,
   I wander rooms as frugal as a fort,    
      A bird entrapped, though in my verse

I sing like sweet-song finches to the other birds.

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© January 2015