So now the Victorians are all in heaven,
Miss Routledge and the young conservatives
chatting with the vicar, visiting again
the home for incurables who never die.
The old damp soaks through the wallpaper,
there’s servant trouble, the cook
fighting drunk at the sherry, and Edith
coughing and consumptive, fainting away.
Only this time it never ends: the master
continually remarking how the weather bites cold,
the brandy flask stands empty, and the poor
are pushing to the windows like the fog.
I tell a wanderer’s tale, the same
I began long ago, a boy in a barn,
I am always lost in it. The place
is always strange to me. In my pocket
the wrong money or none, the wrong paper,
maps of another town, the phrase book
for yesterday’s language, just a ticket
to the next station, and my instructions.
In the lobby of the Banco Bilbao
a dark woman will slip me a key, a package,
the name of a hotel, a numbered account,
We find the river again, the ferry
south over the great water, on the shore
you read Take Courage and you’re not joking.
In my fear the city, the blue misty planet
vanishes, a curtain ripped away
and nothing in back but fire, the river
and the busy roadway rolled aside
in our bad dreams from nights we don’t sleep.
And no one to remember. No messages
passed late at night across borders, by hand,
by word of mouth, we who are lost together
telling tales the prisoner spins the jailer.
From Canning Town to Woolwich
the tall cranes rust. The pub’s shut
and the lift’s out in the towerblock,
everything you see is up for sale.
But there’s a night movie: the well fed
soldiery with fancy weapons come
to stutter out the liberators’
brief philosophy: up yours Commie.
Even the prime numbers are giving up,
all the best words have moved to Surrey
and we have just a few at discount now
The police are called Syncromesh
wailing desolations on the flyover
playing the two tone music. Greetings
and goodnight from the kingdom.
Whose government is known as sh,
they own the miles of wire, the acids
that devour forests and white words out,
and they are listening in the telephone.
But we are all going away now
into some other dimension, we speak
a mirror speech there and count differently
and no one stands for the Queen any more.
‘She’s five foot four and falling.
Either you come get her right now
or let her sleep it off in here
and we charge her in the morning.’
My friend Napoleon visits Farina’s Café.
There is no message. He meets no one.
It is mysterious because there is no mystery
but Napoleon is now in the house of numbers.
We are entering the capital of a lesser empire
where the plans of our masters surface betimes –
pins on a map at the Ministry of Natural Calamities,
In black and white the Isle of Dogs,
slow workless docklands going cheap,
the great outworks of power stations.
I’m living on two eggs and no bacon
here beside the river, smokey as ever,
among strangers. Ships there were son,
and lascars, then as now the afternoon
brought sulphur on the wind and no comfort.
Now the natives are proud and scattered
and lonely in the high rises, living
as they always lived: thieving or work
when there’s work. There’s none now.
Your protagonist is not at home just now.
He’s out, a one-way window in his head
with everything coming in fast across the city
and always an alarm bell ringing in the buildings,
a jammed horn streets away, the town winds
lifting documents along the Broadway,
along Commercial Road a signboard
banging in the night reads Smack
Disposal Systems, he fears skinheads
in the drains and angels in the elevator
and the number 5 bus will never come now.
Today I’m Red Rover, late the Queen’s
Own Leicester Square Irregulars, DSO
and several bars, ageing in my trades.
Today I’m doing double glazing duty,
I’m on the weather watch, especially
for the Greek girls in Minnie Mouse shoes,
I’m with the CIA, I need a fix, say friend
how came we through the middle ages without whisky?
Henceforth I shall speak basic and fortran.
I’ll say excuse me sir I don’t have a dog to walk.
I’m primed, armed, fused, and now I’ll tick
till I go off. Think of me as a deterrent.
Here is the moment holding its belly:
water swills from a main an iridescence
of spilled oil, the broken street
and scattered this is raw human meat.
Your man now is the frightened rabbit
fixed in the oncoming traffic, headlights
swirling the wet, the bleared music
of the squad cars and ambulance.
Caught in the shutter, run off
in the final editions: you bastards you,
and last in his last glimpse the rope
This far the trains are still running,
the night still awake. Then you’re gone,
angry with me, late and lost in the city.
Love, our two furies will wreck us
blazing in the black space between.
I meet the man with seven omens there,
the one who sharpens knives and sings
in neon light I put an edge to an edge.
And I’ve encountered some river
of grieving in myself and drown in it,
living some days a half life on the stairs
defining lonely by not being there.
Oh men she says, and means
their rigmarole, half truths
muttered half drunk on the home stretch.
There’s always one man boasting in a bar
recalling how we slew the enemy
at Agincourt or in the far Malvinas
or spoke with Homer – still a boy
with others in the woods inventing stories –
changed, misremembered, lies most of it,
still bawling on the doorstep for his shilling,
bragging all the lives his conker has,
By nightfall when they hope no one’s looking
the paramilitaries are out shifting fences
dressed in each others’ uniforms. As intended
the signal from the government in exile
is opened by the wrong hands, so much lost
in the foreign tongue, so much of meaning
is a border always shifting in dispute.
No one gives an inch. No one affords it.
Then war, then peace, then normalisation.
The other side sends fraternal greetings.
The dissidents are hosed down hour on hour,
I am says he an exploited human being,
half brother to these men at Charing Cross
sleeping in their cardboard apartments,
fighting in a line at dawn for work
if there’s work scrubbing in the entrails
of the Ritz, and every man jack of them
upholds the free flow of market forces,
weary with his tale of dull misfortune.
I own two wrong shoes and a tartan blanket,
a spoon, a pencil, and my famous collection
miscellaneous plastic bags, my bequest
He was the black boy skating in the cars,
some city music on the headphones,
or at the video game, there being no other work.
He went to sea. He didn’t want to die.
And on the radio that day a song of Souvla –
so long ago the bright lads sailed,
good men and ships blown in the water.
But he would go. I didn’t father sons for this.
Soon he was hunting down the radar,
targeting the bloodbeat. By then
there was no other work for him,
no dance but shitting when the missile hit.
We are invited. We’re offered
tea or whisky, cushions, incense.
Their room is hung with damasks, shawls,
tall bowls of flowers, peacock feathers.
In love they have the music of each other,
their topics and a place they go in Portugal.
Later they promise indoor games: the parcel,
kiss the postman, chop your candle off.
All’s softness and ambivalence, the air
breathy as recent sex. We say how like one
the other is as if two mirrors but which wife,
I know they’re never coming back now –
Malice Aforethought and Gay Abandon,
Sister Alabama of the Amateur Latin Americans
shedding her shoes for the compulsory dancing.
It’s Sunday and World War Two on four channels.
It’s the fifth day of Christmas at a sick friend’s.
I’m out giving my credentials an airing
and my provincial’s contempt for the provinces –
little towns where there’s no dancing.
I remember the 60s. In another life
we would be lovers living in the suburbs
making fickyfick and many bambinos.
She tells him her dream, she arrives
with a suitcase full of her poems
she’s not written yet, her initials
in cursive tooled in the leather.
It’s a wide-angle lens. If you had
two chops you’d end up with two bones.
And the young barrister’s speech Sir
I address myself last to the window.
When the open society closed I was drunk
your majesty. Now what I hear is random,
names back in use like The Titanic,
In the next place of the dream a voice
is beginning to whisper loud in the late
flicker of a TV nobody’s watching:
razors available on request.
Nobody lives here. No one at all
remembers the next war. The buildings
whine in their own way their own adventures:
such a good building such a nice space.
And the pipes sing and the telephone rings
and the fridge tunes in its only song
about rented spaces and borrowed tuxedos,
but nobody’s here that will fix me a drink.
Too many years up and down the world
chasing some light that goes out.
She’s always moved, the job turns out
to be some people talking in a train.
Some work up cures for new diseases,
some we never see decode our traffic.
Others are mapping the new dictatorships,
others the movies they will make of them.
But all night long I have been underwater
mining the harbours off Nicaragua,
I need a place to dress up in my uniform.
First the productivity agreement,
the vote of confidence, the loyalty oath,
then the standing ovation to mediocrity,
and still the powers that be are peevish.
What lies in the muddy bottom of the well:
curses rolled up in lead, fixed in a nail,
petty grudges and greedy prayers to be rich
or richer, the clenched fists of revenge.
And the words How I rejoice in my enemies.
You who gave out my secret, beware,
addressed to Minerva the owl
and for her eyes only, as if she were looking.
Sure today it could come in a fast plane
named perhaps for the pilot’s mother,
the city ends in a smear in the road
and that in a child’s shoe. No one
will say aboard the Missouri all these
proceedings are now closed, by nightfall
hours beyond zero no one remarks
it was grey, it had no beauty at all.
Now what to do with these postal districts
drifting downwind? It would be
routine enough on the autopilot,
Today’s not good. We are enduring
une abaissement du niveau mental. Next door
banging on the wall all night and now
everyone is looking, sliding in and out
the flat mercury of mirrors. We are perhaps
the last citizens of an imaginary country
hired to destabilise the client kingdoms,
write the royal speech at Christmas,
broadcast to the disabled nations
and vanish on a cruise to oblivion. Friend
we need a space, we need a stretch of air,
most urgently we need another walk in the woods.
Truth is I’m a prince among princes
with my own bit of a dukedom hereabouts
but my betters keep saying I’m a lizard,
a common reptile that understands nothing.
And I love the young princess, the way
she steps from the helicopter to bless
with her smile the disabled children
and cut the ribbon on the new hypermarket.
Otherwise my life is bad Dante, brown rice
or acupuncture, or waiting in the takeaway
for an order of dropped duck and noodles,
What hit him was the pain, his hip
blown clean way they said, his bearers
argued in two foreign tongues which army
owned the blanket he lay bloody in.
Then he was going home. Someone
had put five Woodbines to his chest
and that was all his medal. The wife
was blitzed and took off with a fancy man.
He writes, she was another beach
where all my efforts were in vain.
The inscription on the back reads
the dead piled on the sea stones.
You find me sir, eleven of the a.m.
of a weekday drinking by myself good malt
with indifferent barley. I love a woman
but she’s gone into another time zone.
I own a case of medals like a spicerack,
my days so many stars and wars there
with my dicky soldier’s heart. I was a runner,
a disaster looking for a place to happen.
I’ve quit that. Somewhere the running
and the putting on of masks must end,
the tale turned dull and cloudy April
I don’t work she says on the top deck
in machine talk in a little girl voice,
a tape announcing the fault in itself
they say there’s no cure for, over and over.
I could pack shelves in the supermarket.
I could calibrate the ages of the rain.
I could say again again I can I know
I know I can like the little red engine.
It comes to this: we will be happy,
we will laugh, we will be loved
some place we never come to, what we want
we will not have, and so goodnight prince.
Each of us, each with a tale to tell,
each one starring in the scenario called me,
sad for all the little of our lives
and all the short days of our loving.
But today I leave that out and take a train.
I’ve joined the Rupert Bear School of Poetry
and I’ll not say anything controversial.
Here there’s peace, the traffic tuned to a blur
and only the flightpath of the great planes
to disturb this fuchsia magellanica.
Especially I love the tropical conservatories,
Let’s take a slow dance on a fast train,
thee and I love, since all the news
is bad news, and now the radio
is yelling gas gas, and still the heart
delivers its message: get on with it.
Maybe I can work on the nuclear facility
or maybe I’ll just wander off like Lao-tse
and disappear beyond the western frontier.
Or you and I could slip out anywhere,
take a walk around the park, a cup of coffee,
start the peace talks up again
and take the next train out of this place.
You’re away, gone over the heavy sea
and I miss you is everything I say.
I say it oh I love you down the telephone,
the electronic chatter in the deep
sea cables at the bottom of the heart,
I bounce I love you off the satellite
and let the listeners in the circuits
make what they can of it, a code we know
for I would take the world’s end with you,
we may have to, we know the state
conspires to kill us. Give us peace and to eat.
We hear it in the wires, the radio, the music.