Four Answers Above

The thick face of the sky, marked with a blemish
And strung with stars like fungus, is awake,
Accepts my questions. What will satisfy
The urge to use these energies? “Life.”

Life didn’t. For years I trod the numbed path

To the Works, and in a tin-roofed office
Filed my days like paper; on Friday nights
I’d ask: to what will I go home? “Love.”

I didn’t. With the children put to bed,

The mortgage money loud in its jar, we
Bickered across the room; I slammed the door.
Will there be calm before the end? “Age.”

A lie. Age tortures me. My broken bones

Bent like gargoyles, I sit here sucking breath.
A cloud fumes on the sky; now I am old
And think on life, what will be mine? “Death.”

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© circa 1973-76

Alcoholic: Fifth Hants Volunteer Arms

The Fifth Hants Volunteer Arms was (perhaps still is) a rather louche pub in Portsmouth in the 1970s frequented by students and a small group of hard if harmless drinkers. The students used to gather to watch 'Kojak' on the television over the bar and then 'deconstruct' it marxistically. What fun. The youngish subject of this poem caught my eye; if he continued drinking he must be long dead.

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From the black void of day and hopeless night
They reach the bar. Gathered into a grim
Intense concern, cued by a mouthing telly,
They wheeze and smoke, hands resting in a forest
Of drink. The youngest entertains, jerking
Out his stern absurdities like a drunken
Butler. Doubled-up they break before him
Into a shuffle of balding greasy heads.

Already his paste-grey skin is smeared with

A drinker’s blush, black on his cheeks; he weaves
An impossible commission: “Oh, I can
Speak the pleasantries to Eddie...” His shirt
Lags from a sweater picked to curls of snot
Beneath a shroud-like jacket, colourless
With beer and ash. His cigar arcs the air;
He sways but turns it to a twist of interest.

When he leaves to make the round none will call

Farewell; he’ll slip forgotten from the door
Whilst the others squabble over glasses:
Tomorrow he’ll return, they know he must.
But in a pause which is almost like a death
He stares, his chin drops, his eyes flex to points
Of pain, and empty worlds descend: he sits –
A life lost in a shaking bag of flesh.

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© circa 1973-76

Going for the Paper

Something from my (very) shortlived Marxist phase. I remember spending ages trying to write a poem about a factory chimney (a metaphor connecting the world of material with the world of mind/spirit - the sky) but it wasn't successful, largely because of the natural religious bent of my mind. The drafts have disappeared. I also remember being ordered out of the car of an International Socialists activist who was hoping to recruit me to the IS (forerunner of the ludicrous Socialist Workers Party) when I told him I was more interested in beauty than the rigours of Marxism. Happy days.

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Early day: air like a raw, shot-blue wool
Scratches my face to plaster. Water cracks
Like plastic from a pipe; the pavement frost
Splinters. At the bread factory men pull
Shattering trolleys out to the van’s racks –
Where someone crackles past, brown as a ghost.

The housing estate is Leggo, its stages

Already lit and acted on. The sky
Swills like an inverted explosion, shuts
Down on the Ring Road where a Greenline pages
Custom; the whistling tunnel batters the eye.
From the harbour Behemoth humps his guts.

They’re building at the station. In the cage

Men crawl like snub-nosed worms, night-lights smoulder,
Festering in the belly. Not much to say,
Waiting to be shunted; someone flicks a page,
Someone spits, faces scoured and grey; it’s colder;
A shivering lad has clocked his thousandth day.

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© circa 1973-76

Writing Poetry

Taken by chance from a surface,
Partial yet whole as a stone,
It nags, creeping aboard the flesh
Like a worrying stain.

The world curls up like a shadow,

The day dumps all it might bring,
And eyes stroll off at a tangent
With a pin in the brain.

But worst, and best, are the hours

Awake and aware of your spine,
When a perfect phrase disturbs you
Like a cold night-rain.

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© circa 1973-76

The Dealer

The joys of pubs in the old days - full of smoke, overflowing ashtrays and bits of cellophane (from cigarette packets) everywhere! How anodyne they are now.

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Subject to all attentions, Queen of Coins,

Creates her court in nervous, light-stabbed dark;
Gathers the still-faced from an arras of noise,
Robber barons with quick hands and no talk.

Takes all comers at brag or dice, a shrewd

Look to the eye, weighing chances. Scoops beer,
Ash, cellophane, plus winnings, in a broad
Sweep to her side; leads new stakes from her sour

Morass of shillings. Red with sweat she sends

Them higher, sensing the hunt which pulls words
Short, involves a chasing eye, expert hands –
Imminent victim – tracking the splayed cards.

Nights now have been like this: a cigarette,

Replenished pint of lager, unwashed hair
Pulled by a band in fingers on her neck,
Something from a bottle: her eyes are clear.

Like a white creature she grounds in sallow

Sheets; creeps to life when the pointed demands
Of day have been evaded, head below
The nightline, face like ash and back in funds.

Beyond me, she skids around, more adept

(Her eyes are clear) as fear and the bright light
Push deeper. Forensic, I trim and cut,
Raking the ashes of a life for content,

Some human fragment. Her switchback stupor

Lifts across moments; ambiguous, I stand
By fruit-machines and play a coin for her –
A joker, cherries, giving no dividend.

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© circa 1973-76

Feeling

Suburban roads; minor
repairs, cold trees propping
dead time in a low sky:
the grey stone of cloud.

An office; clean shirts, sound

of the shopfloor, warm dust
under paper, a bulb:
the white stone of heat.

There and back; past building

sites, gouges; watching things
deepen as something forms:
the brown stone of earth.

A park; a pleasant walk,

some questions. Beneath depths
a lake grins at itself:
the black stone of water.

Gathering up these things

in the weight of my head,
beat of my chest, I sucked
the iron stone of silence.

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© circa 1973-76

End

The clock whirs in its case. This crazy dark
Leaps with energy as I heave a side,
Sweeping the septic sheets into a mark
Of sound. I’m trapped in the mesh of a net.
What lies between us, a chasm as wide
As this city? Every chance, each hot fear
Dances, explicit as an unpaid debt.
Crouching, I explode the sheets in my ear.

I remember. Determined at your dusting

You were moving flat and in a conscience
Had scattered the place. I libelled the rusting
Cooker: you grinned, in a mock rage straightened
To cow my eye; but you rattled the fence;
Cataracts of custom fell, and your face
Was open; we hung; what had we frightened?
It was my move, sweat on my back like lace.

You on a bed! Those tumbles which surprised

Us; daft squeaky moments pulling a gasp
From tight ribs. A word in the gut survived:
You turned the blush of your body as doubt
Gagged my throat; I leant; your eye was a wasp
Active in its lid. Now the sheet above
My hairless chest chuckles and hisses out
The lonely times we managed a sort of love.

A siren screams like a drill. In the far

Night a flightpath mumbles fretfully                                                       
Beyond the frantic buzz of lights which mar
The silence, stalking the empty streets. Love
Is this – each pore a crater as I lie
Picking faults like grit in the bed. I suppose
There’s an end, a settling, like the sift of
A wave leaving its sound after its loss.

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© circa 1973-76