This Prison is a House of Care
A Grave for Man Alive
A Touch Stone to Thee Friend
No Place for Man to Thrive
INSCRIPTION, YORK COUNTY JAIL, DATED 1820
to the far fall of my own weight
that carries me there, east, west,
over the city between the prison
and the place I come from, go to:
either’s a moment pausing itself
on a rope’s end, all of me there for it.
Then home watching TV: don’t make
damn all of a difference the boy says
to the camera in nick or not.
All this here as the lens eye pans
bleak cements of the buildings,
the units opened once by a princess –
All this is prison. Myself I want
to be me and be useful and not be
where I’m somebody’s social problem
All other wormwoods, the nearer they approach in taste to pleasant and palatable, they are so much the worse, for they are weaker, their use requires so much longer time, larger doses, and yet less success follows.
NICHOLAS CULPEPER
Down and more down. Down the ladders and down the snakes and never passing Go, never winning the state lottery nor so much as the Christmas raffle, never throwing double six, never dreaming of the winner in the 2.30 at Cheltenham, never finding sixpence in the plum pudding. There was never any luck that was good. And so down the steps in chains and down the stairs in cuffs, and backwards down the up escalator shackled to the jailer, and at last in a bodybag down the well under the cellar under the basement under the crypt under the undercroft and still some down to go.
So here I am, drinking the green absinthe of my wounds, weary from descent, from falling, drinking to get drunk. Enough of it and I’ll be crazy and forget everything, I’ll be wide open and talking aloud to myself or anyone or no one about the yellow dust, the ragged leaves, the palest green, the serotonin.
I dreamed you were not who I thought. You were at the airport opening your passport to another identity, a name I was not familiar with: Jessica. Jessica Snow. You were who you were before I knew you; you were who you are without me; you were who you are anyway. Your look said But I am always Jessica. Always have been. Always will be. You were leaving, going home to your own country one way without thought of return to answer old letters and the questions of old lovers, to look through shoes and coats still hanging in the closets, mementos in drawers. You were a stranger in my life, I in yours: someone I never knew on a long vacation under another name, the one I knew you by. You were a country only visiting mine in another country I only visited with you.
Artemesia absinthum: yard high and wildly divided. Green ginger. Curer of worms and quinsy and the bites of rats and mice, vile and bitter, beauty’s name for solace. Opaque, iced, sweetened through silver, I drink to her, to Artemis, destitute of delight.
The usual sniggering on the stairs,
and from the night park the shrill
peacock scream might be rape or mankilling,
pierced rat or some tortured innocent.
No one calls the cops. I don’t.
The night somehow goes on, whatever riddle
the owl alone in wet rainy leaves
knows the answer to. I don’t,
don’t sleep or awake each night dream
the same black, the same trains
made up in the yards, last word
of a late argument, the door slammed
where I’m banged up inside as if dreaming
the dream shut tight and I never get out.
So wide was my journey.
In the dark yellow hive I’m in with the bees
where the last man out was a spy for Russia
dreaming of wings on the fourth iron walkway
of D Wing: cell by cell in its socket,
the bolts home early, the smug keys
sleeping it off, the late shift at the spyhole
counts each man alone, and there’s no honey.
In my room as it happens I’ve a view
east over wire and the wind and the wall
Camberwell Clerkenwell Muswell a haze,
glassy steel etched on tile was the city,
its traffic clear over to Canning Town
where I don’t want to go as it happens
by wheel or by water. Wind blows there
through the towers, the spraycan sneers
this is white man’s land and the shadow
on scrapyards is soon rain, it’s forever
the mean meridian of Greenwich, coming in
off the flyover to Rathbone and Silvertown:
all the lost boys hunched on their knives –
the Posse, the Firm, the Little Silver Snipers
betwixt traffic and trains, boats on the tide,
dog grunts and the midnight rain between blocks –
upright streets as it happens, the lift shrieks
at the 17th floor in the airshaft
the wind hunts ruins to howl through,
the doors open on blue video voices.
You hear glass split, long clatter of heels
on the stairwell, a man’s shout and a slam
all the way to the street where a car
coughs like a baby.
Later you hear
through the breezeblock it’s not her
‘You in there. Beast on the wing.
You’re not my brother.
Not since you buggered my sister
chopped up my mother and stole
all my father’s blessing,
dressed in another animal’s skin.
You bastard. Go sleep in the desert
with a stone for your pillow
and dream if you will your dream
of a shining ladder of angels.
Jacob. Given a blade and a half oz,
I’ll kill you.’
the lost boys are playing their music,
one with a flute one a knife one a pistol,
keeping rhythm in the dark flexing muscles,
some like the dead in their stone jackets,
all serving time in the orchestra’s beat
to the unfinished murderous music of men
so far below salt. Time is what it is.
As for me I was making the myth of myself
I’d come to prefer in the authorised version
fair copy and carbons security cleared
with the censor’s approval, years ago
with my mates on the Bendy Rd when the world said
do this for me daddy
I love you
as it happens it happens I forgot myself,
what I knew of distance receding away
into more of itself to Cyprus and Woolwich.
Some feeling is too much already I think,
so much we can feel belongs to the gods
who are sulking, thin water our prayers
through their hands, what with the river’s tale
and my shadow there small by my father’s.
So much for childhood: grey boulders
the dale’s length, the rainbow’s high arc
and the river’s fast speech that runs
through my life now. That was no dream
nor am I awake nor am I asleep now
in the walled city, the boy in me still
bawling for love, and in me the animal
prowling, and the shadow of my shadow,
and the man I am sometimes a glimpse of
almost half human again, so where am I?
Where on the road was I distracted again
no doubt by love when whatever was hunting
through her eyes met in mine what I hunted
then down the landscape, the small firs
thinning off to the valley, the flaw
In me someone believes the tale I tell
to distract from the night’s terror:
diversions, dreams I don’t wake from.
‘I want some place to be I’m not a problem.’
Love forgive me I speak of dark things,
men’s shabby concerns as to women,
through the sad nights of the masturbators,
the fist always closed on the self.
Some days I meet monsters, men I encounter
in the house of green ginger, in myself
as it happens, drawn up or caught short
with my father’s lost knife in my hand.
One he found shining in a furrow,
red amber, bright German steel
fallen from the sky, a blade grooved
to thread air in a man’s blood.
In a cold white room I recall him
staring that knife down all Sunday,
his one thought to be done, and I,
eight, at the curtain’s lace edge.
His pocket knife I keep: bone black,
brass head, bird’s eye for a rivet
sighting the lifted beak of the blade –
useful and home made as he was.
Like him plain and of little speech,
given to blunt surgery on sheep
or whittling sticks any weather
all this and the rain’s endurance
Lady I’ve aged, maybe you’ve aged me.
What I wanted: to roost in the nest
in the dark tree of your body.
I’d live alone but who would I tell,
alone as it happens. From this place
months go looking for years and hands
for each other and night after night
your voice on the tape in my skull
pauses for breath, breathes, speaks
your name with my own, as it happens,
as I grow old thinking of you.
Let the grey dust thicken on the landings,
let the spiders tick in the wall,
let the locks rust and the keys be lost.
This is the yellow hive of my skull
where the bees dance on the honeycomb
their tales of direction and distance.
They tell how high the sun is, how far
to sweet marjoram, borage and thyme,
and the tall green masts of the sunflowers.