Poetry B – The Recusant

Poetry B

Christopher Barnes

DEAREST (41)

…in Elysium

you’ll stride barefoot.

We are stardust

yet should be corpus.

DEAREST (42)

…chuckling

enlivens the fluttering heart.

This grubby world

is not a mirage.

DEAREST (43)

Papa tickles spectres…

Farewell.

Juxtapositions, second glances,

capture axioms.

DEAREST (44)

…responses unlock,

murky tutoring.

New insight

hacks chimerical jungles.

Jerome Berglund

1 (‘Tesselation’ — String/Gunsaku)

child’s play shadow of the bars projected

achromatic decor color scheme

light pilsner imported from Germany

blossom viewing we say adieu in a formal way

sun’s shadow a python climbing

with ermine flash degrades the pigment

anting zydeco

Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born (in 1985 in Minnesota) and raised. He has exhibited many haiku, senryu and haiga online and in print, most recently in the Asahi Shimbun, Failed Haiku, Scarlet Dragonfly, Cold Moon Journal, Bear Creek Haiku, and Daily Haiga. Jerome is furthermore an established, award-winning fine art photographer, whose black and white pictures have been shown in New York, Minneapolis, and Santa Monica galleries. https://flowersunmedia.wixsite.com/jbphotography/blog-1/

Farid Bitar

Unexplained misery

The wars of Palestine are never ending

Insisting to never leave anytime

As the many years pass

As I get older than a stone

As the millions of olive trees uprooted

The wars keep coming back with vengeance

My nightmare keeps revisiting

I run away from it, seeking refuge in the woods

With a majestic lake greeting me camping

And the fog lifting at sunrise

Gaza keeps erupting with bunker bombs

I keep screaming, for the bombs to stop dropping

I keep praying for a miracle

I keep thinking this is a bad dream

And when I awake

Everything

From the previous day

Is just the same.

Farid S. Bitar is a Palestinian-American poet and painter. Born in Jerusalem in 1961, he has lived in exile for forty years. His books include Treasury of Arabic Love, Footprints in the Mist and two CDs Fatoosh and Shutat. His poems are included in A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry (Smokestack, 2017). His most recent collection is Screaming Olives (Smokestack, 2021).

Christopher Barnes

FRAGMENTS 41

Enervating ventilation with pushy accent.

Underdog-sheen conditions.

“Register of ‘undesirables’ hatched.”

Not easy-going, or benevolent.

By Christopher Barnes

FRAGMENTS 42

Dismantled possessions, orbitless.

Rewind knob.

“Washington precluded…”

Tenable germane shredding.

By Christopher Barnes

FRAGMENTS 43

Hoodwinked by escutcheon.

Perforations margin sprocket.

“Lethal diseases, bioweapons.”

Vertex of a flame.

By Christopher Barnes

FRAGMENTS 44

Action Man hurtled at wall.

Resistance spanning guide rails.

“Cockiness of no-platforming.”

Lay-a-trap rhythms, melodic evisceration.

By Christopher Barnes

TOWNSCAPE 41

Resumption of lozenge detail.

Vitamins resource carnations.

Prefabricated hub.

Football orbits…

Where Akycha melted into flickering storm.

TOWNSCAPE 42

Projections hung from overreach.

Cytoplasm widens miscanthus.

Unblunted ledges jut.

Blackboard’s antipasto sponged…

Where Anpao blew diverting smoke rings.

Jerome Berglund

farmers

staring up into the sky

we wait

heart full of nails has sprouted wings of gold — if painted, peeling

makeshift tourniquet can stem bleeding too… he discovers

grasping for a castle

pardon my reach

through your gossamer

scooby doo the monster:

always capitalism

under various guises

drying stoop after the rain — maybe things’ll work out anyhow

Greetings!

I would be honored if you might consider these haiku and senryu for potential publication in the Recusant.

The poems are original, unpublished, have not been shown anywhere else. They are NOT under consideration elsewhere.

Jerome Berglund is from Minneapolis, MN, USA. He has published senryu and haiku online and in print, in places including Asahi Shimbun, Failed Haiku, Bear Creek Haiku, Daily Haiga, Scarlet Dragonfly, Cold Moon Journal, and the Zen Space.

Thanks so much for your time and interest~

jbphotography746@yahoo.com

4329 Minnehaha Ave. Unit #2

Minneapolis, MN 55406-4076

Writing Publications: Haiku, Senryu and Haiga Publications

Mircea Boboc

Zombie Apocalypse

All my friends are dead

in the zombie apocalypse.

Carefully I thread.

Blackness in the fingertips.

I am hungry. I lost pounds.

I’m the king of solitude.

Don’t you see that I am crowned

with the tears of servitude?

What if I just do you harm?

What a pity, what a dread!

When I sound the old alarm,

how can it revive the dead?

While I love you from afar

with my heart encapsulated

into a too-small a jar,

you want me, as well, sedated.

But I don’t march with the hordes,

So I’m giving up on you.

As I cut resisting cords,

there might be remaining glue.

Bio: Mircea Boboc (born 18.08.1987 in Romania) is a Romanian poet and novelist, graphic artist and ambient music composer. He has published a chapbook of poems entitled “The Semi-Lyrical Jukebox of Eccentric Poems” and a fantasy novel called “Elemental”. He is also the author of the Graphic Exhibition “Shadowed by Mountains”.

Rudy Baron

Lines

The craft show in the park guarantees it will rain this weekend, dog limping on sun baked slate sidewalk, water becomes a valuable commodity on days of premature summer; let’s arrange our children in order by height, cower under a shroud of leaves.

The last conversation has been reduced to subdued discourse, a gardener collects an array of cacophonous sounds, on an arid cheek a tear is stranded, her fever eclipsed one hundred last night, the sound of beeping signals the end of an event, crowds head for tents ahead of rumbling thunder

I think I’ll dress my child in stripes today, watch her skip over horizontal cracks and explain why pavement is black; maybe she will pause for a moment and stare at my perplexed view; maybe she will stare at my perplexed view and question its existence; maybe she will stare at me and question my existence; maybe she will stare and question whether my existence necessitates a perplexed view.

The rain falls tonight in seemingly straight lines. It is cold and wet. The lines the rain makes are cold and wet and are seemingly straight. If I stood in the rain I would stand straight. My arms would be stretched out above me, they would reach the lines of rain, they would be cold and wet, and they would reach towards the sky.

Tonight discussion is pressed keys. Letters are touched and caressed aren’t they? Can we discuss our possessions in caressed moments of touched words? Touched letters? Can we sell them by description? Can we sell our lives by simply describing them in simple phrases? Six feet tall—loves poetry—likes blue jeans—is old and fading. Will you spread your life on my body like a classified ad on a naked newspaper?

I want to talk in lines. I want to be seen like ridges in a desert. I want ridges on a desert to explain me. I want the desert winds to create my lines. I want my lines to create desert winds.

Rudy Baron

I don’t like

poetry

anymore

it doesn’t seem to satisfy

my needs

straddle a sensitive fence

balance and juggle

look down in perpetual fear

at alligator moat filled

words

anxiously await approval

will they look back

will they respond in a chorus

of halleluiahs

will they bury themselves in

selfish states of simplistic

mediocrity

will I be healed–

I write blankly

coil behind a dark curtain

of closed eyelids

wait for some majestic painting

to unfold

tapestry of skeleton

my bones woven cloth

in letters

can I be read

someone please tell me

what those images on the cave wall

actually mean

that stain on my shirt

bleeds from left

to right

vivid expression my emotions

rarely return

its novel state

an island

floats along

complex strands of thread

appeared one day

suddenly burdened with the task

to watch vigilantly

over

sterile fields

I want to do something

for you

I want to explain

the taste of tomatoes

and the taste of your tongue

I want to lick the lines

of your hand

swallow the fortune

of your

future

I’m sorry I said those things

I apologize for my meandering

excuse me for spontaneous oral eruptions

pardon that verbal misgiving

forgive that last moment we were together

will I wander back

into useful language

should I tell friends

appropriate

notes of encouragement

hoping that last salutation

will suffice for a sign off

or should I heroically

wave at ships

that have left the pier

succumb to previously

heard vibrations

Michael H. Brownstein

Key

I hold the key to my home,

safe in a pocket.

When they forced me from home,

I kept it.

When they searched me,

they did not find it.

Yes, someone else lives in my house,

strangers who do not welcome me,

strangers who never met me,

strangers who carry with them the myth of ownership,

the house I built with my hands,

cool in the heart of day,

warm as woman’s breath in the night.

I have memories,

but I am now old,

and all I have to pass on

is this key, my key,

to the lock of my home

stolen from me.

Patrick Bolger

Patrick Bolger is a writer and visual artist. His poetry gives voice to issues often silenced and marginalised in Irish society – including childhood sexual violence and the corrosive impact that childhood trauma, when met with silence at a familial, community and societal level, can have on both the individual and the collective. It explores themes of self-identity, addiction, mental health, masculinity, love and relationships.

Born into a working-class family in rural County Wicklow, Patrick was the first in his family to attend college. Social justice and the role of privilege in creating class divisions and prejudices in society are also explored in his work.

Evidence

Those damn boys. Occasions of sin.

He once told me. Cardinal Desmond Connell,

prince of the roman catholic church.

He nodded, leaned his head to one

side and tried to hold my hand.

He was sorry. He said.

At the age of 31, I sat alone in

the High Court of Ireland. On a leather

seat, dark wood, the skin around my nails

bleeding. I sat. Waiting. For the offer.

On this settling day.

I was assured that my voice, would never

be heard by the High Court of Ireland.

In the absence of compassion and

apologies, they bring forth money.

Trading in their own currency. The roman catholic church.

Where my bitten nails sit, I shake.

The offer is put to me, I should

accept, I am told as they will never go

higher, without proof of penetration.

Without proof of penetration.

The eight year old boy, me 23 years

before this day, should have collected

evidence. Evidence. My blood. Or his.

Semen.

Blessed are those who have not

seen and yet believe.

This is the Roman Catholic Church

This is the institution that moved Thomas Naughton

Of the Kilteagan fathers

From Africa to the West Indies

From the West Indies to Aughrim Street

From Aughrim Street to Valleymount

From Valleymount to Donnycarney

From Donnycarney (via Stroud) to Ringsend.

(Stroud was a spiritual therapy facility for paedophile clergy)

This is the institution that wanted

‘Proof of Penetration’

Evidence.

This poem first appeared in The Children of the Nation: Working People’s Poetry from Contemporary Ireland edited and introduced by Jenny Farrell (Culture Matters, 2019)

David Butler

David Butler works as a full-time writer. As this does not entitle him to unemployment benefit, he makes ends meet by teaching courses in creative writing. Over the years, he worked in quite a number of different positions – waiter, barman, factory-hand, doorman, hotel-porter, gardener, chef, tutor. His second poetry collection, All the Barbaric Glass, was published by Doire Press in 2017. His 11 poem cycle ‘Blackrock Sequence’, a Per Cent Arts Commission which was illustrated by his brother, Jim, was winner of the World Illustrators Award (books, professional section) 2018. The impetus for ‘Dockers, 1930’ came from his having attended Lee Coffey’s excellent ‘In Our Veins’ in the Peacock in early 2019.

Dockers, 1930 was first published in the Poets meet Politics competition anthology (June 2019).

Dockers, 1930

First light.

The descent from the tenements.

Flat-caps and donkey-jackets, shoulders

hunched against an easterly would skin you.

Keen-eyed, skint, eager for the scrimmage about

the rough pulpit to catch ‘the read’, the foreman

meting out who works, who idles.

A hard graft for the chosen.

Scant light

aslant through moiling

dust inside the dusky hold of a collier

where rope-muscled, calloused hands

rough-handle shovel-hafts, scraping, angling,

hacking irascible black-flecked phlegm until,

begrimed like pantomime blackamoors, they emerge

to carry their thirst like a wage and pay out

the bitter tithe – the match-boxed shilling

that buys the wink and nod.

It’s that or starve.

This poem first appeared in The Children of the Nation: Working People’s Poetry from Contemporary Ireland edited and introduced by Jenny Farrell (Culture Matters, 2019)

Andrew Barnes

Cherophobia*

Monkey saved after arson attack,

white clouds bloom over la Rochelle,

a blue whale’s heart weighs a thousand pounds,

today we learn the difference

between basal and psychic tears.

All these facts keep me occupied,

knowledge is neutral and drives my day,

I don’t have to think or feel,

it’s just there, a comfort,

with no pressure for dislike or enjoyment.

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,

white car stranded on a railway line,

Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life,

my train home to Sheffield

costs me two quid per mile.

Happiness is such a risk,

being open to emotion can let in despair,

I prefer to know the answer to questions,

rather than to question anything myself,

that’s a calmer place, safer ground.

*The fear of being happy

Vocal

This voice is frail,

sometimes croaks with a cough,

strains for space to squeak.

This voice can rail,

against injustice,

betrayal and all vices.

This voice can pin hypocrites

to the wall,

a dagger to their black hearts.

Then at times I lose this voice,

timid, in fear, nothing to say,

scared to offend,

others, I hold my tongue,

mute and dumb,

a voice suppressed.

This voice is not as loud

as the overbearing shouters,

the great swell of noise.

This voice is my truth,

that no-one bothers to hear.

I shall speak anyway.

Andrew Barnes is steadily building a reputation in the West Midlands poetry scene through publication in a number of literary magazines. He had work recently published in an anthology linked to the charity Mind and can regularly be found performing his work at Poetry Bites Kings Heath.Christopher Barnes

“Putting You Through Now, Caller.” (35)

“Nudged me into a ballroom,

Malodorous with flat grog.

Chintz distressed at windows.

Bountied me a passport.

Quake only for that halitosis.”

“I’m muzzy entertaining the course.

Recklessness’ll kick through

When sirens blast.”

Alan Britt

No Way Out

One-way ticket? Where to? Where on this planet populated by aspirations for a winter palm frond cocoon in Boca, 400 summer acres in upstate New York, or season tickets to cheer millionaires bruising first downs with billionaires coiled into air-cooled boxes high-fiving fellow plantation owning thugs while raising champagne flutes to their indentured felons?

One could tally a litany of banalities, enumerate in the manner of Whitman, because he wanted to despite the brutality that surrounded him while continuing to breathe the goodness of humans. Well, Walt, pervert of your age, so christened by the wizened critics of your day, Walt, I must see you this afternoon, just once before you’re vilified by the Ralph Waldos of my generation.

Well, there’s no way out because there is no ticket, just a worn spot among April clover with the oppressive sun whipping my back, my unwelcome flagellation on broken knees face to face, eye to scarab eye socket with a three-inch garden grasshopper, serrated hind legs springloaded & body like a splinter of driftwood as this angelic creature, holding no season tickets to anything, remains frozen in hypnotic fear that I might gobble him; how ironic that he infuses me instead. Alas, he is my ticket out.

Alan Britt © 2019

Christopher Barnes

Festival

Angels of tat

Blink at our guru an hour.

Recklessness in loose tongues

Is curtailed.

Insight duties no verve

Nor sermons.

A junk-grimed spoon

Feigns lustre by the candle.

Cloud-Climbing

Luridly chrome-tint

The speedboat-driving octopus

Is kiss-blown on the forehead

By each tragedian

In our guru’s aura.

We’ve unbuilt the mind’s shadows,

Dizzy from hearkening oversouls –

Gunk

On the engine of the universe.

Tonguing Spittle

Our guru ticktacks eyes

In the Pete Burns doll.

Run-out-of-time sundown.

I airscape him

Fluttering with gopis.

We blubber, mystify,

Culting for juju lips

To halo the sky.

Imaginary Rain

The mushroom cloud bomb

Engravened with nylon fuzz,

Roosts on his aquarium.

Our guru’s rigor

Gambles by humouring senses.

We backlog anxiety

For peace.

Stilling Bacchus

Our guru, thresholding from wine bars,

Slurs his doodads inducing cheer.

That shoplifted My Little Pony,

Raging to be eyeballed,

Crash dives off a pizza box.

Hopelessness owns my physical body

Reshaped by nous.

David Betteridge

A Piper’s Progress

I came from The Cave of Gold, Uamh an Oir,

more years ago than I choose to tell.

Its entrance-exit lies halfway along the winding road

that leads from Tir-nan-Og to Hell.

No-one who ventured in that cave, except for me,

was ever seen on Earth again.

It is a cave of riches and of death, full of beauty

and the reek of a murderous Green Dog’s foul breath.

In I went as a young man to claim, not gold,

but the prize of the mastery of playing,

which I gained, at length, immune

from the Green Dog’s slaying.

Uamh an Oir was my nursery and my final school.

Ahead, a long way off – off any calendar or map –

there lies my ancient and continuing goal.

Small step by step, precarious stage by stage,

I advance towards it, sometimes lost or slipping back.

It is an Age of Gold that never ends,

where Peace and Bread and Land are shared,

where Love can be exchanged for Love alone,

and green and golden Plenty takes the place of Lack.

This poem is distilled from a longer poem-cum-prose work

about the Russian Revolution, as seen from Glasgow’s

George Square, called Flight & Fall. The character of the Piper is borrowed from Gaelic song and myth.

Bewildernessed

Here you get a further sample of Piper’s oratory-in-verse,

this time from Day Nine of his ten-days marathon.

Piper’s choice of music for this occasion

consists of Slow Airs, Scottish and Irish,

with the addition of a set of variations

on a tune by Ronald Stevenson,

namely his tune for William Blake’s poem

“On Another’s Sorrow”, which begins,

“Can I see another’s woe,

And not be in sorrow too?”

Can wells, that a long drought made bitter, self-restore?

Can sparks, scattered from a beaten fire, be raked in, and fed, and made to blaze more brightly than before?

Can pages, torn from a precious book, be chased, brought back from a high wind, and then re-bound?

Can the green ribbon of a deep song,

and deep thought, extend to furthest folk its strong tug, and bring them soon

to the dear place where we all belong?

Where did we go wrong?

Where, and when, and how?

At every turn; and from the start,

matching point by point

the faults of those

whose hegemony we tried to end.

False leaders, whom too trustingly

we let command, presumed

too arrogantly to rule, and over-rule.

They dragged us down;

they stole the profit

from the produce of our lives;

they bled true meaning

from the hard-won words we use.

Their arrogance, their partiality,

their self-destroying choice of means –

we took them for ourselves.

Can a city, wrecked by poverty

or war, build again, and stand again, secure on its old ground, attaining more?

Can we, bewildernessed, construct a narrative and map that leads us into wiser days?

Can there be a spring of good

sufficient to flush clean

the heaped contaminants

that history conveys?

Michael H. Brownstein

Deregulating Strip Mining, Kentucky

–Gather in cinder blocks! Storm roiling in!

Ash-speckled cotton bales,

Stacked straw damp with fever,

The end of the hollow storm:

Creeks into streams into rivers

Rich with black loam, tar dust,

Carcasses, the stench so great

The water filtration plant fails.

Intakes blocked. Outtakes fouled.

If we make our children stupid—

Lead in the drinking water—

Are they easier for us to control?

With Sleep, Madness

With sleep, madness

Mansions on fire, yes; transistor dreams, yes

Polka dots bright red, yes–blood red, yes,

Dresses stained in red, yes, yes, and yes

Send in the soldier, the farmer,

Send in the school marm, the seamstress,

Send in the welfare queen, the private investigator

Send in the computer geek, the storyteller

Nowhere the cover needed to hide

The brush or the blanket

The wall or the window covered in board

The large piece of furniture to block the door

Awake, the dark forms a skull,

A mask made of fungi and mushrooms

Thick with tiny root hairs and mites

Ticks and flesh eating beetles

With sleep, a hiding place

The man you saved in a street fight

The woman who became your wife

The dog you let follow you home

Michael H. Brownstein (7/17/1953, Chicago, Illinois) has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samsidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

Stefanie Bennett

Stefanie Bennett, ex-blues singer & musician has published 17 books of poetry, a novel & a libretto – worked with Arts Action For Peace & been nominated for both Best of the Net & The Pushcart. A ‘floating’ poet of mixed ancestry [Irish/Italian/Paugussett-Shawnee] she was

born in Queensland, Australia.

The Soft Domestic Economy

for Paul Summers

Via the vending maelstrom

I get a blighted

portfolio poultice.

An art deco

electric toothbrush.

Three cut-out

culinary

square meals – and

a jump-to-it confederacy

of confidence madrigal

where… nothing is

as it seems – just

the usual

acidic glare

from my bed-sit

night nurse

who has

Madam Blavatsky’s

eyes.

The Foreign Affair

Bossy was kicking the bucket

long before she did:

rationing

the great white froth,

bellowing

something sinful – & worse

in winter

when the calf

was lost

to heaven.

Cow days. (What’s that!)

A tanned rump

& heads

stuck

in Greenwich

mean-time… the eyes

all telling.

She saw

‘Hell’.

She disarmed it.

Dear Reader

In pursuit of the common touch

they wanted to know

if I’d stake

my life on it.

Vive la difference!

What I’m most curious of, is

would they then raise

defiant fists

if I didn’t?

After Jeff Wayne’s ‘Forever Autumn’

When a mother leaves

the nest grows

brittle. Sleep

becomes unstitched.

The sun fires

in the belly’s

ribcage – and

the eyes

caretaking fog.

When a mother leaves

the mirage

of invention

stays.

David Betteridge

READING MARX

A Personal Account

with drawings by Bob Starrett

Fifty years ago, when I was training to be a teacher at Neville’s Cross College of Education in Durham, I had the good fortune to be tutored in Sociology and supervised on school practice by Maurice Levitas (or, to give him his Hebrew patronymic, which he sometimes used, Moishe ben Hillel). Here was a veteran of Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War, a stalwart of the CPGB and the Connolly Column of the International Brigade, a former furniture-polisher and upholsterer, a plumber, a latrine-digger (with the Royal Army Medical Corps in India and Burma), a teacher of English (with plenty of Drama, in secondary schools in London and Lowth), and now, in his middle age, a teacher-trainer appointed to the staff of the college where I was a student! He was just what we needed.

Seeing how green I was, with my head full of Red, Black, and Green ideas, and also some plain daft ones, loosely cobbled together, if cobbled at all, Morry (as he was widely nick-named) felt moved to educate me, and to educate me in more than Education.

He told me, I remember, in one of our tutorials, to question the Registrar-General’s designation of some workers – those in Social Class V – as “unskilled”. No, said Morry, all Labour requires skill, including mental skill. Try using a pick without knowing what you’re about, or a scythe! He himself had an impressively wide skill-set, acquired in his wide experience of work. He took pride in all of it, keeping into old age, for example, his curved needles (some semi-circular) from his time as an upholsterer, and losing none of his ability in sewing.

He told me also to be wary of the claims of psychometrics. Certain forms of it, he argued, were based on bad science, and served bad politics. Labelling some people sheep and others goats on the evidence of spurious tests was pernicious. He spoke with a mix of academic rigour and passionate engagement, referring me, I recall, to Brian Simon’s critique of Cyril Burt’s famous (or infamous) work on Intelligence, while at the same time citing personal experience. As a prisoner-of war in Spain, in one of Franco’s camps, Morry had been subjected to batteries of tests by visiting Nazis, keen to use him (and others) to further their racist, specifically anti-Semitic anthropology.

Educational failure was another topic that Morry opened up for discussion. When pupils fail an exam, he asked, is it their own failure alone? Could it also be the failure of hostile teachers, or careless schools, or impoverished homes, or an unjust society dedicated to maintaining its class distinctions?

I did not know then that Morry was busy putting his insights and knowledge and combative spirit into a book. This was published in 1974, with the title Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education.

Supplementary to my college curriculum, and just as important, were the demos that Morry took me on, and the lists of public meetings that he said I must attend, and the books on political theory that I must read (and read systematically), starting with Marx’s early MSS dating from 1844 (The Paris Notebooks) and his Theses on Feuerbach from the following year. He thought it best that I start my journey-of-ideas there, where Marx started his.

See how the young humanist stood Hegel’s idealist philosophy on its head, making it materialist, Morry explained; see how he went beyond Feuerbach, committing himself to changing the world, not just interpreting it; see how he identified the deep structures and movements of history, class against class; see how he laid bare the alienation that workers experience under Capitalism, as they lose control of the products of their labour, and even lose contact with their own true selves.

This programme of accelerated learning that Morry set in train coincided with the crisis days of 1968, when the “evenements” in Paris (and beyond) shook Capitalism, and shook Socialism, too. Morry was charged with a great energy by these events, as if they spoke directly to him. He saw in the students’ movement a proto-revolutionary situation that cried out to be joined, and widened, especially through working class solidarity. I heard him argue this case again and again wherever people would listen, cheerfully rebutting the charge made by others in the CP that he was suffering from a rush of ultra-Leftism to the head. He was mistaking Paris for Barcelona, they said, and 1968 for 1936. Unabashed, he himself looked further back, to 1848, and directed me to read The Communist Manifesto and Marx’s other writings from and about that year of revolutions. Reading them was a revelation.

It was as if I had been given a three-dimensional model showing the layers of rock lying beneath a large and complex landscape, and giving it its shape. How swiftly the Manifesto opened up new understandings for me, and established new connections between things I had previously only half-known! How gleefully I embraced its use of strong metaphors, from a “spectre haunting Europe” early on in the book (that is to say, Communism), through “heavy artillery” (commodities being traded overseas), “fetters” (the constraints of the Feudal System), a “robe of cobwebs” (false consciousness), ending with “grave-diggers” (the forces of organised Labour burying Capitalism at some future date).

Before I left college, I was inspired to have a go at crystallising what I had learned so far from Marx and Morry, in the form of a short poem. I did not have the confidence to show it to my tutor, but here it is (below) for Culture Matters readers. Note: the “old mole” motto-text was added later:

OPEN SESAME

Well grubbed, old mole!

KARL MARX

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Under the furrows of old Europe

lay

the ruin and the saving

of its steady, backward way: coal,

coal upon coal.

In banks’ vaults,

as if an ocean underground,

full-fed by trade and the world’s toil,

a second Flood backed up, and broke,

of brutal gold.

Empowered,

the anarch Progress forced its change,

all-consumingly on every land

and every suffering folk

that came within the rampage

of its rule of smoke.

Breaching all norms and bonds,

the iron masters and their human tools

exhausted Europe,

then went on to wreak their marvel

on the other continents of plundered Earth.

Their legacy to us:

they redefined and laid to rest

the past that they inherited,

and brought our doomed dystopia

to the titan fury of its birth.

Getting to grips with Marx’s later works took me longer. I approached them by a zig-zagging route of theory and practice, practice and theory, over a period of several years.

In the case of Capital, I made the initial mistake of trying to speed things up by reading other people’s summaries of Marx’s conclusions, without working through the real-life evidence and explanations and interpretations that Marx himself required, and provided in great quantity in his book. Only after campaigning on issues of economic justice in Scunthorpe, where I went to teach, and helping to organise a cross-party, cross-union Left Action Group, only then did I begin to build up the key-concepts and, just as importantly, the structures of feeling that Capital demanded.

A crucial stage in that process of building-up was attending a WEA class organised by John Grayson, and tutored by Michael Barratt Brown. Michael adopted a quite brilliant teaching strategy. He asked the steelworker members of our class to provide him with information relating to a pay claim then being negotiated with the employers. He showed exactly how certain costs and profits that were essential to a full social and economic audit never found their way into any published annual report. The employers’ so-called “balance sheets” were not balanced. Michael’s book What Economics Is About served as a primer for our class-work. Here was Economics, not as a ”dismal science”, as Thomas Carlyle called it – he should have known better, given the great contemporaries of his who were working in that field – but as a weapon in the struggle.

What a broth of a book Capital proved to be, when I came at last to immerse myself in its heights and depths and great length i.e. the teeming volume of Volume One. I found that it was, in some places, to some extent, exactly as Francis Wheen described it in his celebratory Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography. It was “a vast Gothic novel… a Victorian melodrama… a black farce… a Greek tragedy… [and] a satirical utopia”. These ingredients were mixed together in profusion, and richly interspersed with hundreds of quotations from (and allusions to) works of World Literature, factory inspectors’ reports, trade statistics, etc. How many square miles of printed matter did Marx have to scan, how many years of sitting and making notes did he have to put in, how many headaches and heartaches did he have to go through, before this epic and epoch-making piece of “congealed labour” was ready for publication?

Wheen reminds us that Marx was a failed poet, a failed dramatist, and a failed novelist, all these failures being accomplished before the end of his student years at Berlin University. “All my creations crumbled into nothing,” Marx wrote; but his literary ambitions did not crumble. He redirected them. The work in which they came to most vigorous life was Capital.

A good example of Marx in novelistic mode is his deployment in Capital of a large and varied cast of characters, reminiscent of Dickens. Here is one, a juvenile worker in the Potteries:

J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: “I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week.”

Regarding this wretched way of life and place of work, a local doctor, quoted by Marx, observed: “Each successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the preceding one.”

Turning to Marx in dramatic mode, we can cite his use of a device similar to that deployed by Dante in his Purgatorio.

Let us leave the noisy region of the market, Marx wrote, casting himself in the same role as Vergil in Canto 5 of Dante’s epic. We shall follow the owner of the money and the owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production… Here we shall discover, not only how Capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of making surplus value.

Just as Dante did before him, Marx summoned up a succession of witnesses, in his case witnesses for the prosecution, from these “hidden foci of production”. His guiding principle was borrowed from Dante: Let the people speak. And speak they did, as in the case of J. Murray (above) and many more. (What a good template we have here, by the way, for readers of Culture Matters to use, by which to present your own present-day selection of witnesses for new prosecutions.)

And what of Marx’s exercise of his poet’s craft in the writing of Capital? We find no shortage of examples of metaphors here, and other forms of poetic imagery. Metaphysical poets of any era would be proud to have used them so creatively. Here is one: vampires. Marx wrote: Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

It does not matter if the vampires, imagined or real, feed on others’ blood or others’ labour, the phenomenon is the same: it is a ceaseless and exponential series of acts of taking, of expropriation, and sometimes of killing cruelty. We see it in the busts and booms of the markets, in the losses that many suffer that others might profit, in the recurrent immiseration of whole sections of a country’s population, sometimes of whole populations, while the elites and their darlings flourish, and we see it bloodiest of all in the almost permanent state of war that so unstable an economic order (or disorder, rather) gives rise to. Marx’s metaphor is precise and complete. It conveys the essential motive force that rages at the heart of Capital.

To sum up: Marx and Morry: two warriors, both engaged in their own times, but aware of all times, past and future; both embattled thinkers as well as thoughtful activists; both possessing a warm-heartedness as well as a hard-headed realism; both exponents of an integrative vision, in which no aspect of human enquiry or interest is deemed alien; internationalists; dialecticians; passionate wordsmiths… Getting to know the former warrior through the good offices of the latter was the best part of my student years.

Glasgow

January – March,

2018

Originally published at Culture Matters www.culturematters.org.uk 2018

Iain Britton

The Poster

thin bodies

shadow-step overlapping circles

individuals avoid

one another | a disabled woman

revolves in her wheelchair

two youths

sit under the plinth

for settlers | in a grey

geographic unity of frost & snow

frozen beads of winter speak | locals

live in their coats

a native autonomy

feels at risk | a covetous

factor intrudes | the mosaic of morning

becomes distorted |

two lovers

whisper close to each other’s lips

the poster of a mother

looks out on the grey street | her child

graffiti’d | looks out on the grey street

passers-by | hoping for more time

grab at phantoms

Iain Britton is an Aotearoa/New Zealand poet, born 7/6/45, Palmerston North. Since 2008, he’s had five collections of poems published, mainly in the UK. Recently, poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Harvard Review, Poetry, Stand, Agenda, The Reader, Clinic, The Literateur, The Black Market Re-View, The Fortnightly Review, Long Poem Magazine, Poetry Wales, M58, Hypnopomp, The Projectionist’s Playground and the Journal of Poetics Research. A new collection of poetry The Intaglio Poems was published by Hesterglock Press (UK) 2017.

Christopher Barnes

To Bethany Hun

Whether we’ve conviction

In a ‘violence gene’ or dissent,

Your abortion has our favour.

Those mugged by your blood ties

Are head-counted in the umpteen.

Snatch this untroubled ‘love-lies-bleeding’ clump

And £20 note,

As tender thanks from us neighbours.

Upright efforts are invariably saluted.

Naturally, Mr. Ainsley Worth

We’ve thrown-together sentiments

On your blue-colour interview pull-off.

The earnings are dashed hopes,

Particulars lamentable.

Experience’s fitting only on CVs.

We’ll be glad-spirited if it’s fly-by-night

– Here’s to a trap-escaped destiny.

Christopher Barnes

Skin and Bones

Long-Gong ™ mute dinner chime

Is the unassuming fat-shrink aid.

(Water stands still in glass.)

Amuse yourself with hours,

Made thin by loitering distractions.

(Aimless plate, droop-safflower.)

Forgo

Minus remorse.

High-Rise Frolics

Now-You-See-It ™ by Quickrope

Inevitably delivers.

(Rhumba Avenue in unsullied towels.)

Procure our flash-gape, creep-shut

Washroom roller blinds

For the EXHIBITIONIST in you.

(Magnifying glass, soap dish, bubbles.)

Rouse those opposite

With and eyeful that wiggles.

Black Widow ™ Lipstick

Neutral tint, unbouqueted

For jolly nights.

(Grinning chump at dinner table.)

Blended with venom,

99.9% pledged

Wedlock-repelling trait.

(A slack-phosphorescent lamp.)

Before swerving your vital principles,

Close in on fangs, tenderly growl

Into the nerve of monogamy.

Greenwich ™ Perfumes

Happening, innovative –

The aroma of boiled cabbage

For Sunday dinners transcended.

(Wickerwork table, chairs, miscellaneous roses.)

Superlative with juiceless pea beads,

Lacquered sprout eardrops.

(Prim waiter, roast chicken.)

Be the aura!

Emit the occasion! Create memories!

Hatchful Ranges ™ Deliver

Cored-out frosted apple beakers –

Get splashy with the new look.

(Eye-patch, tache, bronze face.)

Upgrades the flavourings of spurious ciders

Or mineral waters for nourishing days.

(Five straws in exquisite vase.)

Cut a dash in those lifestyle preferences,

Dream up a ‘very you’ future.

Larry Beckett was born in Glendale, California, in 1947. His poetry has been published in Zyzzyva, Field, Margie, Salamander, the anthology Portland Lights from Nine Lights Press, and his first book, Songs and Sonnets from Rainy Day Women Press, was favourably reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Beat Poetry, a study of the San Francisco renaissance, was published by Beatdom Books. Paul Bunyan, a book-length poem, is out from Smokestack Books, and has received positive reviews in Zyzzyva and The Recusant. He performed the poem at the UK’s Ledbury Poetry Festival. Wyatt Earp, a novel in prose poetry, is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. The complete U. S. Rivers was performed in a choral reading by a company of actors, and recorded. His work has been commended by Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer, Tom Clark, Ann Charters, David Young, and U.S. Poet Laureates W. S. Merwin and Charles Wright. Beckett lives in Portland, Oregon.

Boston

from U. S. Rivers

American Revolution / Cuban Missile Crisis

Old Solitaire,

that gull, on the Long Wharf

Why come ye hither, long years,

signs bad weather:

the April night: October morning:

the king’s

redcoats photo reconnaissance,

crossing

the river: launch site

your heart what madness

at San Cristobal:

Kennedy:—Air strike—but then. . .

In the North Church steeple

show two lanterns

if out by water,

if by land, one:

Joint Chiefs danger

on our hills: all out invasion,

if it bring holocaust:

and the Sons of

Liberty send

Revere, riding to Lexington,

warn Hancock, warn

Oh hear ye not: stop Soviet

ships bound for Cuba but

ye’ll learn to back:

the rebel’s arrested,

and the deacon’s horse:

Strategic Air Command

goes DEFCON 2:

one slip, and the last fire:

shots, they abandon

him wild and free

as the day breaks. In secret

we withdraw Jupiters

from Turkey: cold warriors

govern by fear. The gull

lands: Boston answers:

against the easterly blow,

this vigilance.

Trenton

from U. S. Rivers

American Revolution / Sixties Riots

Washington crossing,

his blue army walks

in snow, barefoot, bleeding:

Dance to the Kill

King? Power! music

assassinates the window:

Joseph, divinity

student, rounds up

East State, make peace

All we need is a drummer.

The rebels take

King, and aim the cannons:

So that the dancers Diamonds

fly off, apples,

easy chairs steal away,

golf balls stinging the pigs

on Perry just won’t hide:

this officer, cracking

off a warning, is jammed,

guns Joseph down.

Under the Battle

Monument, firebombs

kill Trenton, bricks

hail on the firefighters

the horns blowing: only

abandoned lots,

hotels: the governor holds

an ice cream cone:

Go home! over the river,

crossing Washington.

Harriet Tubman

from U. S. Rivers

Out at the Highway 17

bridge, over

the Combahee River

Jordan’s deep, the engineers,

under the marsh, uncover

rice fields, unearth

They call her Araminta

these shards, all burned:

and hire her out to masters

site of the raid

in sixty-three: for dozing

at the cradle,

whipscar, her face:

the ferry crossing and

wide: these Union gunboats:

She says she’s Harriet

in command Tell

old Pharoah and she walks

up the Eastern Shore,

out of Maryland,

morning, early When the sun

come back

blast horns, lift flags

to the slave huts the first

quail calls:

no arms open to her: she lays

the underground

railroad Follow They crowd

the launches Let my

people, and won’t let go

till she sings Milk and honey

to peace them on

the other side Black soldiers

burn down the bridge,

fire the plantations:

seven hundred fifty-six

go free, hitch rides, the big

rigs rolling on

the widened highway: Call her

go down Moses.

Jornada del Muerto

from U. S. Rivers

First Atom Bomb Test

South, by

the badlands, into the Jornada

del Muerto:

minus twenty minutes: countdown:

the fugitives

from the pueblo revolt, no water,

no wood: the ten-

story tower: the bomb,

at Trinity: faire is foule

black lava,

dry lakes: ground zero,

five thirty a.m.

Mountain War Time:

the sky brighter than day-

light and foule is faire

as they look back

over the Oscura range,

the fireball, rising,

and the mushroom cloud hover

through the fogge

white sands, wavering

under the haze, fallout

and filthie aire: the shock

radius equals

five hundred sixty-four

times t plus the pillar

of fire, to the power,

luminous, red,

So faire and foule a day.

We are downwinders.

Amarillo

from U. S. Rivers

Seven Cities of Gold / Pantex Nuclear Plant

Coronado, if

I ever find

Cibola,

the seven cities of gold:

across the Llano Estacado,

only

pueblos, and that friar’s lie,

Quivira,

across the Palo Duro,

only the yellow

rose of Pantex:

seventy-two hours

a week, he watches

that there’s no breach

in the warheads,

pits, plutonium, over

the Ogallala aquifer,

Texas water,

under the prairies,

one thousand centuries.

Gary Beck

Bitter Lesson

Capitalism defeated

fascism, communism,

briefly allowed

loyal citizens

small tastes of the profit

as they blissfully reveled,

deceived into believing

they were important

to the long term owners

of America,

concealed by guarded gates,

immune to the suffering

of those who lost homes, jobs,

cruelly condemned

by callous aristos

to poverty,

disease, idleness,

while the wealthy indulged

in excess pleasures.

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and as an art dealer when he couldn’t make a living in theater. He has 11 published chapbooks and 3 more accepted for publication. His poetry collections include: Days of Destruction (Skive Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press). Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays, Perceptions & Fault Lines (Winter Goose Publishing). Tremors, Perturbations, Rude Awakenings and The Remission of Order will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. Conditioned Response (Nazar Look). Resonance (Dreaming Big Publications). Virtual Living will be published by Thurston Howl Publications. His novels include: Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press), Flawed Connections (Black Rose Writing) and Call to Valor (Gnome on Pigs Productions). Sudden Conflicts will be published by Lillicat Publishers and State of Rage by Rainy Day Reads Publishing. His short story collection, A Glimpse of Youth (Sweatshoppe Publications). Now I Accuse and other stories will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City.

Nick Burbridge

The Intelligence Officer’s Tale

(1974)

Out of Ashford Barracks

in an unmarked van the new squad

of undercover men, bound for the six counties,

pilgrim to Canterbury for a last dry run.

Dropped in the street like navvies

watched from hidden points

they separate to make dead letter drops,

stalk quarries, reform in the house of God.

Follow the rogue recruit.

Though he adheres to his disguise –

single-minded patriot,

fast-tracked from the Engineers –

even now he’s lanced by doubts

which will unravel him in time

so he spills secrets of a dirty war.

Yet with senses finely tuned

he sets out on his tasks, taking

the surreal course between facades

as he’s been taught, so when it seems

that stooges stalk him, he sprints playing fields,

darts through a toilet block, climbs

from a rear window, doubles-back

and waits under an oak tree,

replica against his palm, until he’s clear.

Weaving like a manic orienteer

he finds orders in a park bin,

meets his source, uncovers a fake cache,

flushes with success, turns home on time.

But when he enters the drab precinct,

sees his shadows lost by the cathedral gate,

and in hushed aisles novices

in donkey jackets gather,

the keen mask falls; leaning on a pillar,

chill between his shoulders and adrenalin

still breaking in his gut, now drills are past

he can’t believe he swallowed

the recruiting officer’s slick line:

this is a true man’s service.

All he has been trained in seems

a kind of madness, and not soldiering.

Where he is bound, the charge

to set up, infiltrate and turn,

takes lethal form; it’s an insidious campaign,

to fight an enemy beyond the law.

In a moment he will be defined.

He hesitates – but in these ranks no man turns back –

and steps out to be counted; now

as he will be attacked, he must attack.

Tour of Duty

Armagh, six months in. The undercover man

has half-forgotten his own skin; a stranger

with cod accent and thick beard

meets him now whenever he appears.

Locate him in an unmarked car

in a side-street on a hard estate;

he stares towards the viaduct

and the surreal installation

of a train derailed, thrust into the air

like an outsized artillery piece.

It is no accident; chance alone dictates

the steel hulk has not shot from the bridge

and broken on the slates below

as loyalist collaborators meant.

No chance must be lost; through quick bursts

of static at his ear, orders pass

to move in, evacuate,

and, house by house, tear streets apart.

He hesitates, familiar now

with the howled rage of women

as armed strangers violate their homes;

screams and tears of children;

curses of men bruised and taken,

what interrogation means.

Yet he knows this pillage will uncover

weapons primed, that, like each soldier’s death

and fall-out from each blast, legitimate

the will to occupy, the need to kill.

As cordons are set up, and men in uniform

appear like peacekeepers,

he goes out to take part,

eyes still fixed on the stark image

sprawled across the track above,

creaking and ticking.

The officer within

the rough disguise recoils:

to fight a war with this intent

spells the worst kind of defeat.

Dirty War

As he was warned, the earth under the ash tree

was disturbed; he called the ordnance team

and a platoon to cover them, round the milk-churn

poking through a bed of leaves.

Now swart chains slipped and strained

as the digger he had commandeered hoisted it

into the air; the undercover man inwardly embraced

his source: lives were saved through finds like this.

He snatched breath as it turned,

hung like a snared animal;

the lid dislodged and fell;

it vomited, not packs of high explosive,

but sealed sacks of printed magazines,

strung together, as if slung out for a news-van.

At his side, the ordnance captain

shook his head, soldiers grinned.

An expert in protective suit and boots

moved in and tore one stack apart;

piles of child pornography spilled out,

cached for some care-home or safe-house.

The fraud in rough clothes cursed,

as he called in, not result, but farce:

Fuck this Godforsaken country.

They laughed at his lost face.

There would be no laughter

when material they failed to find here

turned up in another churn, and took out

four men at Forkhill.

The Whistleblower’s Waltz

(Miami Showband Massacre – Reprise)

South Down. Dark road on a bleak night.

You return now, as an old man, to check

this ambush through the mists again:
Captain, what do you expect?

Your mind’s eye hones in

on the Regiment’s iconic son;

not with peaked cap pressed

against his white brow, thrusting his chin,

but leaning on the cluttered desk

where you sift profile and report,

like a school prefect

boasting of a trip to Monaghan

to kill a gunman:

the hushed journey past the border,

the farmhouse sealed by Gardai,

at the window a sharp silhouette,

rounds emptied into it;

he passes you a photo

of the dead man

in his blood;

you handle his Star pistol,

you remember now what

you could not admit,

you envied him such acts.

So why now don’t you pilgrim

to his last stand at Crossmaglen?

You turn your head to watch

a van appear over the brow

carrying a showband home.

This is where the roadblock stands:

loyalists disguised as soldiers,

armed with high explosive

your own cohorts cleared.

They climb in to rig their bomb

but it explodes among them;

others at the roadside open fire.

This is why you come: you’ve scoured

the scene before, and you found cartridges

from the same gun, left like a signature;

your friend armed them or played executioner.

Captain, what do you expect?

If you are here to expiate

for, like others,

you leaked secrets

of a dirty war only when it threatened

your own mind, how can you explain

you travelled on this road so far

before you split?

Your hands are stained. No tears shed

or truths told wash them clean.

Listen to the wind – where shadows

of the undead hover, echoes

of their sorrow fill the air –

and you will understand.

To the innocently fallen the dark vision

that destroyed them has no end.

There is no day of armistice.

No roll of honour marks their loss.

They will call you so you know no peace,

interrogate you till you break.

Dirty Peace

(2014)

As ageing sprite, forsaking ballot box

and Armalite, shakes hands

with ermine figurehead, the undercover man

stands looking back through forty years of rain

round Portadown, at the old Chalet Bar,

one autumn night, rising from the ashes,

a dark shell shut in by corrugated iron,

smelling of slurry and stacked wood.

Tipped off by a sound source

for a monkey and a quart of malt

it is to be attacked again

he waits patiently with a snatch squad

stationed among blocks and barrels

though, as hours pass, some drowse,

play puzzles, dream of having sex,

he begins to doubt what he’s been told.

Out of an uptown bothy with a skinful

of stout, an old man staggers

his way homeward, as an old man should,

blind to the terrors of the neighbourhood.

Luck has him marked, not to be struck

by a bomb blast, but a sinuous explosion

in his guts. As he peers ruefully for shelter

he picks out the concrete shell and builders’ huts.

Through a gap between sharp sheets

he squeezes into darkness,

yanks at his kecks,

squats over the bare stone floor,

shudders and lets loose a torrent

reeking of horsemeat laced with the black stuff.

In relief he hears no taut breaths drawn,

catches slipped on rifles

pointed at his skull – as the platoon assess

if they’re about to come under attack –

feels for a helpful scrap,

but finding nothing, strikes a match.

It’s too much for the acne-ridden squaddie

from Carshalton; his cocked finger bends,

his shoulder jerks at the kick of the butt;

a salvo pocks the plaster opposite.

The pack think they’re engaged and let loose

a richocheting hail of steel,

round on round, until their load is shot.

To his dying day, the old man will maintain

his volley of hurled prayers to every saint in heaven

and the Holy Mother left him untouched –

squatting by his pile, with the burnt-out match,

as torch beams focused on his trembling hulk.

From murmuring and baffled ranks

the undercover man approaches,

his astonishment lost quickly

to a bout of urgent thoughts:

he must shift the shivering totem

to a safe place; when he finds his tongue

make sure he loses it; all chances

of seizure and arrest are gone;

at least there are no corpses.

Yet as he grips the drunk’s hunched shoulders,

gagging at his full array of odours,

the expression that contorts his face,

to a stunned submissive smile,

while his eyes burn implacably in hate,

hits him with a blunt epiphany

not found in the glazed gaze of the dead.

It defines this place:

a theatre of rank act and lethal joke.

Decades may have passed now,

his sojourn long forgotten,

but while monarch and assassin

dance like mannequins,

for him, the Chalet Bar is built,

destroyed, and built again,

or sits like this, half-made,

with the old man in it, and an arc

of soldiers round him armed to kill.

Marking the borders of a land,

where the corrupt unite,

a fine line runs,

rising and falling between

falsehood and gravestone,

at its end, as its beginning –

he might say on the streets of Lurgan,

incognito, with thick jumper, beard

and boots – nothin’ but a pile o’ shite.

Old Friends

Now the Grand Hotel is to be sold

long after its reluctant debut

as a punched out eerie set,

it’s not easy for the tourists

to imagine such explosive dentistry

as they parade along the front.

My mental hostelry is so bombed out

I turn instinctively to Pat McGhee

in the bathroom of Room 625.

Behind the panel my device ticks mutely,

planted like a pack of smuggled cigarettes,

a surgeon’s swab left lying in the gut.

I trust now to a just cause

and the laws of clinical effect –

in good time my small friend

will gatecrash history.

I linger at the mirror,

dashing rogue that I am,

dabbing aftershave

and smoothing my moustache,

so glad I’ve come I break

into a verse of Boolavogue.

I shimmy like a newly poured pint

of stout – white foam shooting through

black depths from a dark cellar

while dim forms of collaborators

meet their forebears to talk gunpowder

and treason, where it matters, at the heart.

As I turn across the room to leave

I contract

on a split screen;

other scenes appear, music elevates;

I am entirely without fear.
I have a settled head.

Implosions of adrenaline subside.

These ghost-conspirators keep telling me

this time what has been set will detonate.

It is our date with destiny.

Yet I can’t imagine that in years to come

cradled in soft democratic hands

I will make friends with relatives

of the disintegrated, and hold meetings

in their name, where I’ll explain

my mission in a quietly reasoned voice,

give proceeds to associated charities

and return to the scene of my crime;

so now the Grand is sold,

grotesque memories interred

by new partition walls and floors

while disembodied politicians

wander hidden corridors

I exit my own skin, to crystallise

in the mind’s eye of a crazed man

and, as he stands absorbing me,

perform an existential dance.

And one of us departs along the front

among visitors who rest immune,

the other, though he seems at liberty

goes back into the smoke-filled shattered hulk

where fragments of his bitter soul

stay lost, though who is what,

and which he is, only our creator

truthfully can tell apart.

Peter Branson

This Life

A wife, two sons, grandchildren he adores;

a touch of gas, light fingerprint, no more;

makes shoes and thrives to face retirement age;

marries at twenty four. This is a life

well spent – and yet, one stroll in no man’s land,

the harpies’ wail a constant, direful tune,

crows dance in frail limelight before his eyes;

no Blighty kiss, ‘Whiz-bang!’ an’ marrow-less –

nor that but this, a fate played out in some

adjacent universe: no duke gets shot;

both camps, a century past Waterloo,

pull back, take on each other’s point of view;

no over-in-six-weeks to end-all guff;

no Nazi party, fuehrer, no ‘Mein Kampf’,

Depression, Reparation, Holocaust;

no ‘In the field of human conflict stuff;

no ‘Causes of the First World War, discuss’,

no mushroom cloud, Cold War, bad history books.

Grained prints expose rain shadows of the truth,

like names engraved on marble cenotaphs –

“Don’t fuss,” the sergeant says, “Die like a man!” –

expendable as blanks, by bullet, shell,

bayonet or gas, self-harm, the clap, slow walk

at dawn – wide eyed, these silent, flickering ghosts.

Which Side Are You On?

There’ll come a change of tide ‘n’ tithe,

When we’ll be forced to choose a side.