Poetry C – The Recusant

Poetry C

Clydebuilt

Owen Gallagher

Smokestack Books

2019

84 pages

In deciding how best to introduce himself, a poet weighs much, and deliberately: his subject may be general, or specific; his focus may be round, or precise; his diction may charm, and delight the ear, or it may disturb, and prohibit inertia; to the poet, the matter is of primary import, to the reader, it is no less so.

For the reader learns, or thinks he learns, a great deal from a first impression; and, in the conveyance, it is the poet’s prerogative to leave to chance as little as he can. Living within, and outside, these considerations, is a matter of great moment, but one too often neglected; the vivifying factor, too often scorned; that which tends to induce but a yawn among our poets, reproduced sympathetically among their critics: that is, the moral matter.

A poet may, or may not, have a rigorously developed morality, yet whatever morality he has, regardless of his awareness of it, is bound to manifest; as pores emit traces of the previous night’s garlic, one’s moral system, whether confessed or occulted, inherited or fabricated (though that which we fabricate we are more likely to confess), is born out, by craft or the lack of it, in one’s work.

In Clydebuilt, Mr. Gallagher tarries not; his confessions come swiftly, and his inheritance, with the hoarse strains of a penitent, is given urgent examination.

The opener, ‘Soot’, is as black as its name suggests. Here we meet the poet’s mother, but we do not get to know her; we see her from behind glass in a darkened room, being made to behave as no human should behave, by a man in a white coat, behaving unhumanly, we assume, by his own free will.

Each time I flick a light switch

I see mother strapped to a chair.

A white-coated man throws a lever.

Her body thrashes like a live cable.

We have our idea of mother, and our idea of torture; and we may question the integrity of a poet who so eagerly wishes to force these two ideas of ours together; nevertheless, for the ugliness, we find ourselves engaged, though it is not, as we first suspect, of a character sensational: before we know what’s what, our sense of injustice springs forth in arms.

I nurse my heart with its image

Of mother framed in the doorway,

Dressed as if in mourning,

Her temples blackened

From repeated shocks.

Switches are flicked, and levers are thrown; the latter diffuses the darkness, the former, in its failure to limit the spread, quickens it. The lever, in the hand of authority, is mightier in the memory of the poet, than the means subject to his own hand; the one carries the weight of science and government, the other but the poverty of a rebel’s dwelling. To the lever the light-switch is bound in servitude.

I nurse my heart for the mother

Who never came back.

She lived in a darkness

No prescription could lift.

I am the soot from her chimney.

The next poem, ‘Fathering Mother’, adds colour to a few of the disconcerting blanks; the poem is intimate, and we rightly hesitate at the threshold.

Her hair was bramble and fiery red, her face

A pool of freckles. She dipped her brush in

And out of what she called ‘the font’,

And sang Lovely Leitrim, a comforter,

Yet we are drawn in, not as voyeurs, nor even as almsgivers (for amid the cold concrete of the tenement, in those pale eyes that hold their tears unblinking, we sense no expectation of charity), but as ghosts, antecedents of the living blood, with no material assistance to offer, but with an unkillable Nous, that guides us to attend where pain threatens to become unbearable.

Once, I found mother on our own stairs,

Tears pumping out of her. My tiny hands gloved hers.

I was her father, her son, her skin, her tears.

Circumstances have arranged themselves infelicitously for our child-poet, and we are unsurprised to find in him a pugilistic streak. Against the miscellaneous opponents, large and small, there is one personage that lurks beyond the ropes; he is a dark, rangy figure, with a crooked mouth, and given to communication by gesture – Plutus, the cowardly and unintelligible god of Riches, he that strips the field and mocks the field-hand, that makes kings of squires and emperors of bankers, yet whom, finding himself in the Fourth Circle, far from his constituency, a heated line from Virgil can send sprawling to the ground.

When the cabinet minister was obliged to dismount

From his bike and charged the policeman

With being a ‘Fucking pleb!’

I thought of mother.

After she stood in the rain to pump the tyres

Of the young Edward Du Cann’s bicycle

She sprinted to open the gates of his estate

Hurdling over puddles on the way.

As his Lordship pedalled past

In his waterproof Mac

She curtsied and wiped the spray

Of muck from her dress and face.

– ‘Kowtow’.

Indeed, the shadow over these works belongs to Plutus; the scenes presented are largely domestic, and recommend themselves nicely to the imagination; the characters are rough, hewn from the living rock; and the cadences are regular, well-constructed, and accommodating; and above all this, another presence hangs: its attributes, being toil, deprivation, and death – both living and actual, line the interior with Plutonic dust.

An old ganger told me later that father could out-dig

Any man and square a hole so plumb

It could be tested with a spirit level.

‘He cemented every gang’, he said,

‘And was always horsin’ about.’

The old fella broke into song:

‘As down the glen came McAlpine’s men

With their shovels slung behind them,

‘‘Twas in the pub they drank their sub

And up in the spike you’ll find them…’

Those who could sing, did,

And those like me who marvelled at their camaraderie,

We’re angered that they were sweated to the bone

And their throats were caked with concrete

By the time they got home.

From ‘McApline’s Fuseliers’.

Yet for the prevalence of the game fighter’s spirit, hostility is little to be found: no slugger is our poet, nor is his guard want to drop. Gallagher is a man who has thought much about language; he knows the rules of his craft, and tempers his ambition where it might easily overwhelm.

The poet asks us to pick sides, and he asks earnestly, yet he does not demand it – he knows our side will be picked, whether it is we who do the picking, or not.

And when she was done, his tie and suit pressed,

Pioneer Pin closing his breast, didn’t she pour

Paraffin over him, set him alight, so no one

Could see what they’d done to her wee boy,

And didn’t she go out into the street, kitchen knife

Under her apron, and take three soldiers with it.

From ‘Christmas in Belfast’.

Throughout the book, our fighter-poet strikes an uncommon balance, possessing, on the one hand, the precision and seriousness of the skilled amateur, and, on the other, the casual bonhomie of the ageing journeyman. From the union of the two issues some pleasing satire.

Whitever thi weather, thi three o’ us, kitted out

Like Columbo, pulled oan unlit cigars.

We deserved Emmy awards fur delivering his line:

‘Where did yi git thae shoes?’

Tae security warkers ‘n’ shop-assistants

While we nicked the latest Levis, ‘n’ Byfords.

Oor coats had mair pockets than Fagin’s.

Oor hauns we’re quicker than a shirt-maker’s

In a sweatshop. Windae dressers wondered;

‘Did ah nae dress that mannequin?’

We strutted wi’ Seturday nicht fever oan thi toon

Boardwalks in oor latest collections,

Left thi dance flair huvin swiped bras as souveniers,

Hummin’ Colombo’s signature tune.

– ‘Claes-horses’.

While the humour is exhibited in what may be termed the minor poems, nevertheless the impression left is not quick to fade; it is a buoyancy, a bigness of spirit, that we value, and it is valued no more in a poet than it is in a man; and the more fiercely a man feels, the more humour he needs.

One of the more peculiar pieces in the book is ‘Amen’. In terms of locution, it is one of the most successful; Gallagher is not often a voluptuary of words, yet here, as if by confession, he produces images at once sensual and reverent: the voice is restrained, yet the phrases betray a mind stricken with awe, and enlivened by suggestion – in this case, the suggestion of the cosmic unseen.

It was all a mystery, a kneeling place for faith

To light its candle,

Where pledges were made from the kingdom

Of words and neighbours

Would queue on Fridays to confess a well of sin,

Mend their souls,

Stand like a lighthouse in the family again.

But it was the mystery of Latin I thirsted for most,

The tabernacle of language:

Confiteor Deo omnipotente, beato Mariae

Semper Virgini,

Beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Ioanni Baptistae,

Sanctis Apostolis

Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis, et vobis…

The rising and falling of its oars,

Where my tongue longed to row,

The learning of it by heart,

A boat pushed out daily

To early and evening mass,

The dark chocolatey flavours

That never melted in the mouth

The ancient recipe that bound me

And that I still recite

To savour the sounds.

In this poem, we are happy to find several of Mr. Gallagher’s moral attributes in sober procession, each bearing their own incense: the deep awareness of tradition, the appreciation of heredity, the hunger for understanding, and the service of community. Encompassing these is a large sense of wonder, made possible by the stronghold of humility; and while Plutus and his dogs may have their way outside, the dark currents of his malice can but strike the outer walls, and return, as if rebuked, feebly to their source.

Felix Cassiel on

Karl Riordan

The Tattooist’s Chair

Smokestack Books

2017

64 pages

Deborah Moffatt

Eating Thistles

Smokestack Books

2019

102 pages

It is not for this critic to explore the merits of the art of the tattooist; it may be so that the merits are several, and that in adorning a body it may by gradations according to the skill of the practitioner be improved, or marred by his incompetence; the production may have standalone merit, or may for its full effect depend on the canvas, which by its inherent shape, shade and texture might illumine qualities of the work that would, on another canvas, remain without emphasis; yet we, as observers, cannot judge a tattoo on the strength of its sentiment, nor on the success with which it is communicated. The tattoo, meaning what it means only to the one tattooed, remains to us incomprehensible. How far the poet has sought inspiration from the premier body-artists of the age is a matter for conjecture; it is enough for us to ask how far his own meaning may be anything to us.

And in the manner of shaking hands with a man whose dense embellishment emerges at the sleeve and ends abruptly at the wrist, our first impression upon acquaintance with Mr. Riordan is one of absence. In this case, not of a tattoo, but of a father: one we catch in the process of fleeing a domestic situation that is altogether far too much, or far too little for him.

I watch through the chink in the bedroom door,

My father slicks back his interlocking D.A.

Three angled mirrors at the dressing table

As he whistles to Lipstick on your Collar.

The crackling record spins in the corner,

Grooved like his black Brylcreemed hair.

Listen to the rumpus, the fumbling upstairs,

Slotting his record collection into boxes

Unaware of me pacing below.

I catch him at the front door

As he tries to make a quick getaway,

A day I’d been expecting.

He drives off in his blue Datsun Cherry

Leaving me straddling the white line.

Then the gear crunch at the end of the road,

And you can bet your bottom dollar

That he’s checking his rear view mirror.

‘Mirror, Signal, Manoevre’

Such a debilitating loss of blood may procure from us a warm bedside manner, but does little for our expectations. Of the pieces that follow, several appear to prevail upon our sympathy, but others remain aloof; there are times, in fact, when the reader is given so little to go on, that he may conclude, quite reasonably, that his presence is not desired.

After a night shift checking-in drunk guests,

I go with Felipe for breakfast, ale and pool.

We tower stack silver coins in the queue

Waiting for Billy to pot the seven.

He misses and the thud of the white

Rebounds around the blue baize table.

He bayonets his pal in the gut with a cue,

Clack of sticks the sound of two running stags.

Fallujah’s being bombed on mute T.V.

I tug on the cuff of my sweater

And wonder if the woman serving

Is Diane and how she got into this?

Her alto voice calls to cut it out.

Am old man sat nearby makes cooing sounds,

His top-set of teeth fall down in his mouth.

He extracts the grin, necks a pint of heavy.

Billy-boy sinks the black ball like a gulp.

‘Diane’s Pool Hall’

This is not to suggest that Mr. Riordan is not a man of deep feeling. Despite the abrasiveness of the rendering, which serves sometimes to convey an image more completely, but at other times does not, there lives in these works a sentiment of charity, and a developed sense of humanity: both crucial, of course, for anyone who sets upon himself the task of good work, whether in art or otherwise; and this humanity, though vigorous when provoked, is, it seems, too often want to lie prone, to reveal itself substantially only at brief intervals.

Aggie fussed in and out of the kitchen,

Bringing in floppy bread and butter.

The tension built up on Saturdays,

She’d wear her pinny with pockets so deep

She could pick out a wish by fingertip.

I’m perched on the black-leaded shelf,

Back pressed against the oven.

Crowds start to boo from the tele

As Giant Haystacks stomps into the ring

And we all hope he’ll fall through.

Big Daddy fetches a stadium roar,

his sequinned leotard catches the light.

Aggie, rocking in her chair now,

Shreds the Radio Times to coleslaw.

Andrew is cross-legged on the floor

Still struggling with the hoist since age ten

When Muscular Dystrophy took hold.

His limbs are twisted in grey marl school socks

As if someone had applied heat and moulded

His ankles into hockey sticks.

He still manages to bray the floor

Holding his opponent into submission

Three, two, one.

‘After School and Weekends’

The poet’s attention is often on minutiae, and generally on the commonplace; and as our acquaintanceship develops, we feel, with regret, that this may be less by design than it is by habit. We are given much of the chair, but little of the tattoo.

Barney perches on the caravan steps,

Drinks tea from a dented enamel mug,

Stares at a scribble of hawthorn hedge

As nest-making sparrows flit out and in.

Brida washes crockery and trinkets.

Hands them down to her her children.

They wrap up pots in local press headlines,

Stow away heirlooms and the old lies.

A police helicopter strips the air;

Their Virgin Mary trembles, looks skywards

From the garden patch. A boy cries

As their blue balloon is sucked away.

The sticks of foxed placards rattle

Against the disconnected

Gas bottles. Stop Evischen.

Let out Childran go to School.

‘Road to Nowhere’

Smallness of conception is perhaps the most excusable of a poet’s vices, and certainly if the poet, in an effort to avail toward a sense of good humour and robust fellowship with his reader, resorts to a focus we might term narrow, we may yet attribute to him healthy designs; but when that focus is so held over the course of a book, the content of which to varying degrees impresses upon the reader’s breast a certain languor, we may, with all due respect for the tenets of realism, wish for something with a little more light, and a little more air; something, in short, a little less claustrophobic.

Mother ruffled up my hair today

As she scuffled around the kitchen

In preparation for my 21st.

One more shift,

Before reaching my majority.

Nothing is said only knowing looks,

Keeping me out of the way, slapping hands,

My boots are unlaced warming by the fire,

Just like those mornings before school.

She’s blind to me lifting the oven latch

To peek and inhale the sweet smell of sponge

Taking the air from the sinking cake.

‘The Cake’

It is to be admitted that the craggy Anglo Saxon of the phrasing and the assortment of cultural referents offered by the text would indeed stimulate a sense of the aforementioned fellowship in some readers, and, given the subject matter, it could be argued that any other rendering would be inappropriate, and to this the critic cedes: the volume, after all, is a short one. Nevertheless the language, while craggy and appropriate, lacks vitality; despite our sense that the poet would like something to change, we are allowed no conception of how, and little of what; his reality, so bluntly delivered, is set against no alternative, and the root of the problem, if a problem there is, is left unexplored. Regrettably, the sentiment remains unallied; the essence abides not in the strength of its dogma. In so little a book, this absence of the strong arm may be something of a missed opportunity.

Felix Cassiel on

Eating Thistles

Deborah Moffatt

Smokestack Books

2019

102 pages

‘The Bible hardly ever talks about neglect of the poor. It always talks of oppression of the poor – a very different matter. It does not merely speak of passing by on the other side, and binding up no wounds, but of drawing the sword and ourselves smiting the men down. It does not charge us with being idle in the pest-house, and giving no medicine, but with being busy in the pest-house, and giving much poison.’

– John Ruskin.

In the 1860s, John Ruskin expounded upon the centrality of iron in nature and society; in the former case, its ubiquity in the earth; in the latter, its facility in works. For Ruskin, the pillar of civilisation was triune, consisting of these broad heads: the Plough, the Bond, and the Sword – these being the rules of labour, of law, and of defence, or courage. In each of these, exhorted the critic, the role of iron is chief, and as such is to be reckoned the great enabler of the works of men.

Around this pillar the poet’s troops are arrayed, though it is for the reader to decide which way they’re facing.

‘At Meroe’ offers a pleasing introduction to the matters weighing on Ms. Moffatt’s mind; here, we are acquainted with a generous historical awareness, which we are glad to find on display again and again as the volume unfolds.

Part I brings us face to face with the burgeoning might of Roman arms:

…..I could take delight

In the daily humiliation of the great Caesar,

His head wrested from his statue and buried

Here beneath my feet, our fleeting victory

Enduring, even in defeat.

Part II frames an empire in decline, the military face of which belongs to a certain Horatio:

Kitchener was there, standing hand on hip

In the midst of it all, imperious, distant,

His smile a grimace, his eyes straying,

His patience tried, or spent,

In Part III we find disintegration; there is no hint of a superstructure, and no well-designed hero to front it; instead, we have artefacts of empire, an empire ravaged by empires, sands of immeasurable antiquity, whose gods, with the coming of each new Babylon, were despised and substituted, or, found palatable, appended to the rites of the soldiery, barely discernible in origin or function; and to this land, atomised as it is, and sapped of meaning, peopled by a race duty-bound only to its stomach, and blackened by ahistorical mist, we see the beginnings of an embryo, a new type of empire, one built not by blood, but by technology, sustained not by martial valour, civic virtue or religious order, but by inversions of these, by cowardice, selfishness, and materialism: an empire, in other words, with its reason for being eliminated, leaving the disordered subjects within wondering, indeed, if it really ever is, or was, or will be.

Your companions tap their phones, waiting

For news to break. You scan the desert sky,

Looking for a change in the weather, an avatar,

The emperor’s head, suspended in time.

***

The truck rumbles over Bin Laden’s road. Revenge

Is impossible. There was never anyone to blame.

A moment of carelessness, then you die.

At least he didn’t lie when he said goodbye.

Critics of the modern historical method, I mean that which first set forth the idea of a depersonalised history, that is, as a series of affairs unfolding mechanically, according to laws unaffected by man or the vicissitudes of fate, may find weakness in the poet’s method: after all, what are we given here but an illustration of a life cycle, in which the greatest actors are static – indeed, by the time their images reach us, they are already dead men? yet this is perhaps to neglect another perspective, one rich with the fruit of a cultivated imagination, that which makes intimate the remote, which reflects life into the dead eyes of Augustus, and in this way he becomes for us not a human, but a demon, a form animated by a foreign body: lifeless, yet endued with local motion, and for this we feel no closer to him, nor to the order he represents; but to the living Nubian peasant, through whose one good eye our glimpse is had, we feel, in our poverty of spirit and fantasies of power, something of a kinship:

Yet that same head, that image of the handsome Augustus

As he was when young, his thick curls licking at his brow,

His bronze skin tinged with an olive hue, his tender lips

Set for a kiss, his radiant eyes turned contemptuously aside,

As if my dark Nubian skin or my own blighted eye

Offended him, or as if I were not worthy of his gaze,

There are, however, less successful exercises of this method. ‘The Baltic Shore’, for example, has neither the intimacy nor the breadth to hold our interest; the rhythm is too loose, and the language too prosaic to convey adequately the strength of sentiment.

She dresses for dinner beside a meagre fire,

Each garment a layer of the past, the faded silk blouse,

The threadbare woollen skirt, the thin cashmere shawl.

You remember the jagged ice floes cluttering the winter sea,

The pale bloated corpses floating like buoys amid the ice,

The ragged clothing flapping wildly in the wind.

A more satisfactory affair is ‘The Roman Road’. Here the poet conjures a writer idling before his computer screen. His solitude he savours, she says, as his authorial fancy rushes up against shores he seems to have every intention of exploring. At length, the hour of contemplation terminates. His imagination goes to work, but not without compulsion; as with the rest of the organic envelope, it would much rather be engaged in something less taxing.

He endures his solitude, takes pleasure in the neat black lines,

The first hesitant threads of a narrative unreeling into the screen,

The hours of contemplation interspersed with a fury of typing,

The chattering keyboard a scold, a reminder of work to be done,

While emails remain unanswered and romance is postponed.

By a slow, almost dolorous transport we are taken from the indulgence of expectation to the toilsome drubbing of keys; thence to the profound vacancy of the creative unoccupied. Doubts over the veracity, and then the quality, of his work, commence their insurgency; and these, in the typical fashion of the hubristic author, find themselves just as quickly transferred onto the subject itself – history, not even the area with which he’s concerned, but all history – the grand human periplum, driven by prevaricators and the great tight-lipped – against such obstinate matter, of what use his humble chisel?

This bridegroom, we sense, is beginning to tire of his union, as the duties entrained outgrow the ecstasies. The sense of life going on outside his bedchamber once again prevails upon him. Not that the doubts aforementioned are not, in their own way, voluptuous – as the dreams of a spouse by degrees take the form of a personage other than their beloved, we sense our author’s deliberate attempt to write himself into another world, and in the effort, excusing his actions in this one.

His work nearly done, he regrets his solitude, frets over emails

That no longer arrive, senses her pain and blames himself,

Though it was never just a simple matter of building a road,

He writes, not only the earth that was unreliable – even history

Could not be trusted…

In Eating Thistles dolour is want to turn to despair. By the time we reach ‘The Christian Door’, we are primed for something of a darker cast, nevertheless it is with surprise that enter an interior black as pitch.

It is something to be noted, too, that here is found Ms. Moffat arguably at her most lyrical.

A Christian door, your mother called it,

And you bowed your head before the cross

Former by the muntins and rails

Of a door kept closed more often than not.

There was something sacred, you imagined,

In the secrets of that forbidden room –

The stifled whispers, the shuffle of sheets,

The creak of a bed-spring in the night –

And something of heaven and hell

In the storms that blew open the doors

With bright peals of laughter

Or the shrill fury of angry words.

This door, while adorned accidentally with a simulacrum of a crucifix, leads to a private theatre of death – physical, as symbolised by the ‘dumb beasts’ there slaughtered, and spiritual, by the fornication there hidden. The bloody and ritualistic character stressed by the poet serves to excuse the confusion of the subject, that individual in whose memory the poem takes form, and to preserve their ambivalence – which, because it is a moral ambivalence, is necessarily black – as is suggested by the use of the adjective ‘pagan’. Yet ‘pagan’, despite the poet asking us to acknowledge its murderous roots, which we readily do, suggests also something else, something utterly absent from this poem: that is, innocence; though the pagan may be lustful, and malicious, and proud, as his guilt grows, so does his helplessness; the pagan, as history bears out, is eminently convertible. Yet this is not countenanced in ‘The Christian Door’. There is nothing convertible about these protagonists: there is mockery, laughter, taunts and chatter; no innocence

is in evidence; the atmosphere, instead, is more noticeably satanic, odoriferous with the abundance of decay; these memories are heavy not only with wrongdoing, but with wrong done knowingly.

How else are we to regard the response to that greatest of sins, suicide?

….The barn door,

Heavy and hard to pull on its rusted rails,

Was never closed, until that summer day

When you found it nearly so, and slid inside

To find your father dangling from a beam

With swallows buzzing around his head.

In the swallows’ taunting chatter

You heard your mother’s mocking laughter;

In the dark silence of the barn

You heard the whispered secrets of the bedroom.

The cross on the door was a coincidence,

A chance arrangement of pieces of wood,

Nothing more…

Here and elsewhere in the volume death manifests to varying degrees, and to several purposes. The governing sense, however, at length obtained by the reader, is not of death as a prospect, or even as a certainty, but rather as a state, something that happened before we opened the volume, and in the rotten bosom of which we have placed our heads, and by its fleshless lips are read these stanzas. The characters we encounter strike us as fossilised, their personalities animated by an automation of memory, and their actions already a foregone conclusion. The naturalistic style maintained throughout, while at many times obtaining its object of intimacy, has a tendency to wear on the reader – and there are, it seems, occasions, though rare, when the poems approach the threshold of morbidity, but are, warily, restrained.

The encounters Ms. Moffat provides us are not without interest, and the characters we meet are not ordinary; though they are, in fact, men and women defeated, having succumbed under the weight of iron, or suffered in the dearth of it (for that which gives life is prone to fall into mismanagement, and the recipients of its life, who are also the managers, fall correspondingly into dilapidation) they are, nevertheless, men and women who, to the best of their abilities and the singularities of their natures, fought, for, or against, or in spite of, and, while they exist for us now as but fossils, their evidence may yet inform.

Felix Cassiel on

This Noise Is Free

By Andy Green

Smokestack

2019

71 pages

Whether it be the garrulous screeching of the gull overhead, the clatter of the waste lorry at dawn, or the ringing of the church bell on a hungover Sabbath, it could be argued, and not too forcibly, that no noise is free; yet we may pay something in the enduring of it.

In this collection, Andy Green summarises his observations in a manner both brusque and generous; generous, for finding an extraneous line, or a disused sentiment, in this slim volume could well be an exercise in futility.

Mr. Green is a busker, and his subject matter is his vocation. The history of poetry does not want for troubadours: from Bernart de Ventadorn in the Middle Ages to Joachim du Bellay in the High Renaissance, and in countless practitioners since, we have seen the gradual evolution of the lyric, and the cadence of the spoken word, as they are fastened ever more imperceptibly to the knots and folds of measures perfected by men who knew, as Pound noted, that music atrophied when it departs too far from the dance, and poetry from music. Though we may do well not be overly romantic in our expectations, for with this tradition Mr. Green has no truck.

The street is a bottle of white lightning

asking me for a hug

the street is a one-toothed woman

sharing my flapjack

the street is a boy in a bright red scarf

they stole his guitar

and his best Scottish hat

but one day he will get them back

the street is an eighty year old man

singing Elvis in German

giving Nazi salutes

warning me about all his heart problems

the street gets off its bicycle to tell me

it wants to spend more time

making experimental

sonic machines

the street is an Australian jazz musician

blowing the clarinet and roaring

now this is real music!

so sick of this town with its cold jacket potatoes

the street is a beautiful red-haired woman

who’s been out all night dancing

lopsided panther

she winks and hands me a silver coin

the street has been sleeping on the backseat of its car

talking to god and keeping a diary

it’s a long story

the street quietly whispers in my ear

the street is dragging a heavy suitcase

battered and torn

the street comes over and hugs me like a jukebox

it just got out of prison today

– The Street is a Vortex

Part of the charm of a busker taking to his pen is that finally, and unexpectedly, we get to hear from one whom we always seem to hear, expectedly. The busker is heard, overheard, ignored and adored: and in opening this volume, it becomes clear that our poet is singularly placed to catalogue the contents of a city’s stomach.

He looks rough this morning

I hang around and ask

what happened?

we sit opposite the Mecca bingo hall

scoffing down Lion Bars

4 for a pound

some wankers

just came from nowhere

gave me a good kicking last night

after a while it’s time to move on

Danny champion of the world

that’s what I call him

oh yeah he laughs

getting back up on his feet

well in that case where’s my fookin’ prize?

Champion

‘The greatest of poems is an inventory,’ said G.K. Chesterton, in discussing Robinson Crusoe. Mr. Green perhaps encountered this line and took it literally. This Noise Is Free reads as less of a collection of poetry, than it does notes for a collection of poetry. Indeed, we feel something may have been gained for subtitling the book as such.

Aaron’s jeans splattered in rainbows of paint

the pet snake wrapped around Steve’s shoulder

it’s Betty’s last fag before not returning to the hospital

the pint of ale waiting on the bar for Joan to settle

piles of baked beans from the sign language cafe

plastic bags collected and recycled by Kevin

birds nibbling the crumbs of Sandra’s wages

Karen’s pram wobbling up and down the alley

a new moon tattoo covering Emma’s old wounds

out of date crisps from Mike’s market stall

the tambourine man coming around the corner

the closed day-care centre that once took care of Joan

– Snippets for Town Mural

For one for whom music is considerably more than a hobby, we are surprised to find in the text little trace of musicality. We are quick, however, to admit of an argument in favour of a staccato rendering: given the nature of the subject at hand, any obvious or semi-obvious attempt to fashion the words into a form accommodating the principles of melody, may be to gild a lily best left ungilded, or to shoe a songstrel better left unshod.

For in the scenes and characters that capture the poet’s attention, we see something of the observations of a young Tom Waits, and to a lesser extent, Charles Bukowski. Whereas there was romance in the former, veneration in the latter, and robust good humour in both, in Mr. Green we get something closer to an itemisation of a consciousness, and the items contained therein are all too frequently analogues for wretchedness: the ruined face, the irreparable dream, the divorcee from everything but desperation.

The diamond child watching me

through the eyes of 17 gold canaries

the clothes shoppers swooping in tight formations

the egg cress sandwich I shouldn’t have stolen

the evaporating lottery ticket woman

eating the cloud’s silver lining

the street cleaner whistling at imaginary pin-ups

the man being paid nothing to hold up

an advertising board that doesn’t even exist

the apocalyptic newspaper seller

shouting at dogs from his plastic Tardis

the lips scoffing fresh cream buns of gossip

the rushers by rushing into meetings

which they somehow don’t yet know are cancelled

– Hidden Histories

The style to the content is adequately married, and in their union we see mirrored the itinerant nature of the poet’s life; though in this as in all things moderation is the key – and there are times, indeed, when a seedling idea seems about to germinate, yet the poet’s attention too rapidly moves on.

No man controls what he sees, but he can control what he writes about. It is this, we feel, that separates the poet from the subject – though he may pick up his guitar and leave a place, he never quite shakes the sense of imprisonment. The busker busks and moves on, but what allows him the two inches of separation is not the utility of travel, which in this case seems less a border-crossing and more a prisoner being moved from cell to cell, but the sentiment of genuine tenderness, which in these works is all too often buried in the pomp of the parade, yet on occasion does present itself as the governing principle, and the nucleus of Mr. Green’s literary efforts.

Wanderer in a torn tracksuit

he sits by Tesco Extra

spiky orange hair

dirty trainers

he keeps nodding off to sleep then

waking up again

by his feet

sits a large brass bowl

round and ancient

I keep an eye on him

then go over check he’s ok

it all depends

what path you’re taking

is all he will say

to my questions about existence

words floating upwards

smoke rising from the mountain

– Praja

As the reader reads, he may be troubled with the question of whether this is a collection of prosaic images rendered poetically, or poetic images rendered prosaically. By the end of the book, this question is unresolved, and for the brevity of the work, and the pace at which it unfolds, we may find ourselves quite as nourished as the poet himself, sharing a four-pack of Lion Bars with Danny the champion.

Elaine Cusack was born on Tyneside in 1970. Her teenage writing was praised and encouraged by Bloodaxe Books and her first pamphlet, Bed and Breakfast with Lydia Lunch was published in 1986 . Since then Elaine’s poems have won numerous awards and appeared in various collections as well as on national TV and radio. Her latest book is illustrated poetic memoir, The Princess of Felling. Elaine lives in Whitley Bay and blogs at www.dipdoomagazoo.wordpress.com

Elaine Cusack

Good Girl

She told them all to “go away!” She said it calmly and clearly.

She articulated feelings they thought buried under history.

She told them all to “shut up” and stop the amateur dramatics.

She’d had enough of their mob rule, dysfunction and histrionics.

She told them all to “go away,” Mum, Dad, Gran, extended family

plus siblings, side by side, poor thing was drowning in their misery.

Her abuser had the gall to touch her arm at Grandpa’s funeral.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he lied then kissed Gran’s next door neighbour.

“Be nice,” hissed Mum, “be good! Don’t make a scene now, the family’s listening.”

Abuser worked the room, shook hands as our heroine stood watching.

The anger that she’d felt for years and those scripts she’d had to follow,

filled up her throat and mouth and mind. She tried but she couldn’t swallow.

Inside she cried like times before, “Mummy! The pain! The agony,”

but Mum, Dad, Gran, assembled clan, ignored her anxiety

so she told them to “go away!” She said it firmly and clearly.

She articulated feelings they claimed were ancient history.

She told them all to “shut up” and cease their amateur dramatics:

two fingers to mobocracy, dysfunction and histrionics.

She told them all to “go away” but expressed herself non-verbally.

She left that wake without a sound, kept walking and never looked back.

Full of English

I’m British and I comfort eat.

I eat because I’m British.

Stiff upper lips crave fish and chips,

kebabs and battered sausage.

Junk food’s the way to cope with life,

it dampens down emotion.

I’m British, I won’t make a fuss.

I’ll never cause a commotion.

I’m British so I comfort eat,

I binge because I’m British.

Uncertainty breeds anxiety

and I need sugar and sausage.

“Media’s to blame,” I crow online,

swallowing whole the Same Old Story.

Bloated, I stagger down high streets

puking England’s ‘Power and Glory.’

I’m British and I comfort eat.

I eat because I’m British.

Stiff upper lips crave fish and chips

and the right to remain English.

Take away culture

Your hometown was panini-ed and frappé-ed.

It was mocha-ed, latte-ed, pulled then crafted.

Your birthplace, that square of South East London

you cherished and shared with your family

and friends is gone.

The area’s been knocked down,

updated and gentrified.

This process

is inevitable, unstoppable.

They’re building palaces for Big Business.

Your London’s been gobbled up by Crossrail,

rebuilt by “considerate contractors.”

They’re creating a bespoke capital

for overseas investors with capital.

Revamped London does not belong to you.

The city’s economy and ecosystem are

changing forever

for no good reason.

(no title)/

Haiku

Acknowledging

her pain lets the

healing begin.

Yuan Changming

Spiritual Physics

Few are really aware of

Such universes

Existing beyond our own

Even fewer of so many other versions

Of selfhood living

In each of them, let alone

This simple secret:

At the depth of consciousness

Lives a quantum

Or soul as we prefer to call it

A particle, demon and/or angel dancing

The same dance afar, far apart

In an entanglement

Yuan Changming, nine-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven chapbooks, published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), Best New Poems Online, London Magazine, Threepenny Review and 1,349 others worldwide.

J.P. Celia

THE DISCARDED PIANO

Had it been discarded there
Among that wood, or did the house, formerly intact and fair,
In which it used to gleam
And gather dust, unbuild itself and scatter, stranding it? If so, no overarching beam
No iron grate, or soft, domestic voice had left its trace
Upon that wild place.

Discarded, as it must have been,
What rare man, shriveled in soul and skin,
Had thrown out,
With no redemptive qualm or doubt,
The beautiful black box that once sent up from ivory teeth
An ethereal voice? Now underneath

Its golden pedals shoot the rude weeds
Of an unkempt wood, beads
Of dew bespeckle its legs, and gurgling from the weather-warped lid
Is not music, but the green fingers of a vigorous plant, which, amid
The watchful birds, the trees, looming and strong,
Play nature’s soundless and mysterious song.

No Foul Thing

I rarely contemplate suicide
In the throes
Of a profound sadness. The thoughts subside
When turned to, and will not keep. There’s an odd pleasure, I suppose,
In profundity, however dark, as I know it.
The dissolution of love,
A miscarried infant, for whom candles are lit,
The ruin of scandal; these are too rich to be rid of.

No. It is not even sadness especially
That makes ending oneself rear up like a romance
And spread like mellifluous gold in the mind, not dreadfully,
As it usually does, breaking a joyous trance.
It is often the seemingly inconsiderable things,
Those pestilent little absurdities
That plague one’s commoner hours: the vulgar presences, the kings
Of a coarse culture, the opposite of Demosthenes

In the swinish talk of two teen boys,
The prick of civility denied,
The toys
The irreverent make of the ethereal or grand, like when they tried
The genius of Newton, and flung themselves in awkward suits
To the moon, only to golf there and plant flags.
It’s these petty kinds of pangs; it’s the blasphemy of brutes
That make of Death no foul thing in rags.

J.P. Celia was born in Ocala, Florida, USA in 1985. He has been published in Rattle magazine.

S. Chandramohan (b.1986) is an English poet based in India. His poems reflect the socio-political struggles of the marginalized , the working class and the nomadic outcasts of the World who are victimized and then forgotten as nations clash and wage relentless war. His work has been profiled in New Asia Writing ,Mascara Literary Review and About place journal.Counter-Punch poetry,Thump Print magazine,The Sentinel, American Diversity Report,Poetry 24 online.,Green Left Weekly and News Verse News.

MALLS

falcons.

Eagle-eyed.

Close cousin of the vulture.

Imperial bird of prey.

Munches on the corpses of retailers.

Green eyed too

a petrodollar

fueled tornado

engulfs the third world like Tsunami.

Swastika mission to space

When there is no

Unoccupied sky left

To launch a space shuttle of peace

A rocket with an emblem of swastika

Will cruise without any ceasefire

To the limitless boundaries of space .

The barren space

no air

no water

no life

no cries amidst the rubble.

The world of loss is expanding.

Apogee and Perigee

A small rocket shaped

Piece of mud from the moon

a clay model of space shuttle,

it is pointless to collect souvenirs.

The perigees of the satellites

Were all above the poverty line.

The satellite image of impending

Drought and cyclone

absent from the apogee of the newspaper replaced

by a glitzy ad

Fiscal apocalypse

Skyscrapers of cascaded credit

Meltdown in the heat of global warming

Cholesterol of the rubble

Chokes the arteries and veins

Cardiac arrests

Seismic seizures

Tsunamis of rising sea level

Washing away lifetimes of toil .

In Memory of Josef Herman

Along a corridor dripping with icons,

first you should gaze into and beyond

the haggard faces, full of piety and pity,

the bony fingers to admonish.

Then, to remind you that you are so much more

than mere soul, have mercy, the African

masks and figurines –

bodies still alive with warmth and sinew.

( Some bought in lieu of a washing-machine.)

From his studio, curling up with pipe-smoke,

you will hear one word of Yiddish, “ oy “.

One word pregnant with the agonies of Warsaw ,

the loss of children.

Wait a little…. then join him, absorb a lesson on art and life

in beautiful English, wrapped in guttural

over a slurp of tea.

“ Is it true you drank from jam-jars, Joe bach ? “

Later, as you step out in to the indifferent neon,

you allow a smile.

There may be time again to share your twilights.

William Leo Coakley has been published in the Paris Review, London Magazine, the Nation, Aquarius, Poetry Review (London), and other publications in America, England, Ireland, and Mexico. Since being selected for the Discovery series at the New York Poetry Center, he has read his poems often in public and on the television and radio. His poetry has won a Arvon Competition Prize, a W. B. Yeats Society Award, and the 2013 Der-Hovanessian Prize of the New England Poetry Club for a translation of a Constantine Cavafy poem. Born in Boston in 1937 but now also an Irish citizen, he is publisher of Helikon Press. He edited the first publication of Sean O’Casey’s earliest extant play The Harvest Festival, a strike play about class struggle and militant union workers in 1913.

Disturbed Earth

Beside the emptied houses, the earth is disturbed

By war’s glut; death’s victory is complete.

Our rooms gape roofless, eat the sun. We’ve not curbed

Man’s tribal madness—Look, weeds, not wheat,

Triumph in the fields. In the thawed earth

One boot kicks free—Dig round it with your hands:

The hunched, stiff bodies will mimic our hapless birth.

Snowdrops, too, lie of the spring—No one understands

Our crazed returning. Terror’s shadows reveal,

From the air, history’s secret. Our story has been told

Time and again: The wounds scab and heal.

Winter’s starlings, we survive and shine in the cold

On memory’s crumbs. Don’t ask me to count the killed again—

We are the fools who come back, who forget, who build again.

Last Words

The call to action

Brought us together at last

In the main square, the seat of power.

As we knew, the guns were ready.

If we die defiantly, foolishly,

If guts run in the gutters again

(When will bloody man ever learn?),

Let the new world remember us

By not repeating the old sins.

Insects

Like soldiers they come, but for food,

Crawling the stone floor, enemies.

I crush them calmly with my thumb

and at their dying do not even go mad:

the biggest leap out of their skin,

spoiling the white squares with their blood.

In the air, bombers look at men

and feel as little when they press down:

a brief confusion to be left behind—

but the shadows burn to the stone.

If you would learn how to kill,

it is easiest to kill what is small.

Armed Love

inspired by a graffito on a wall on my way to visiting George Barker at his Bintry House in Norfolk: Beneath this stone are deposited the remains of. . .Ellen LeFevre, aged 25 yrs., and her four children. . . who were murdered at their residence in Southampton Street, Pentonville, during the night of Monday 8th September 1831 by Johann Nicholas Steinberg, aged 45 yrs., a native of Germany and father of the above children who afterwards murdered himself and was buried according to law (St. James, Clerkenwell)

Here in the close of Clerkenwell church

on the bone-hill where death is host

I hear through stone the voice of the God-

ridden mock the unhouseled guest.

As I walk on the grave of London’s dead

from the terrible night that never ends,

the long day darkens, brightness fails—

the godless need fair-weather friends.

I summon the bones of William Blake

to shake their message of bright hope:

all things wonderful and dark

have led us out of church and home.

I sing of all children the night has taken,

all strangers who seek their rest in blood,

the four children of Ellen LeFevre,

the loved and the lover, murderer and murdered.

According to law, justice will speak;

according to love, mercy cries–

beware of the sound of sudden peace,

the feverous silence when armed love dies.

Died on the Voyage

to the memory of Walter McElroy,

buried in Istanbul, 4 June 1987

McElroy, a friend of myself and my mentor, poet George Barker, was a Communist American poet who defected to England during the McCarthy period and years later, just before the Soviet Union collapsed, when he came down with cancer, he went off by ship to Russia but died in Istanbul harbour and was buried in the city; I visited his unmarked grave finally last summer. He was part of a circle of poets and artists including Scottish painter Robert Frame, Lucien Freud, Dylan Thomas, John Minton, and George’s son, Sebastian Barker.

Turn into the mouth of the Black Sea,

There is no haven, no golden city:

The tender of death that shuttles you home

Accepts no pity.

Our exile has no end—the will

Frets, like the traveller, never at rest,

Grows sharper, firmer as it moves

In its pure quest.

The world that rose up in your dream,

Man unfettered, barriers broken,

Falls at our feet. There’s work to do

Till the last word is spoken.

Dressing Down

Jenny stands naked in front of us. We are all holding candles, all in anticipation. Her hair is tied up in a loose bundle, held in place with a chopstick. We clap her encouragingly. We are all naked too – each of us a bare arse sat heavy on bare grass. Our tents form shadows behind us. The night is warm, a gentle breeze cools our skin. Jenny looks at me. I smile, encouragingly. Jenny, who led me here to the precipice of divested revolution. Jenny, who only wears her smile. Jenny, who we call the ‘threadbearer of life’. On the other side of the canal, the bedroom windows of our unknown neighbours hold the dull electric light of televisions and car lights flash past intermittently.

She clears her throat and scratches her pubes. Our clapping subsides. We scratch ourselves in solidarity. A silence is allowed to hang for a few seconds. She glances down at her cue card. She starts speaking.

“I hate the textilists,” she declares, “The self-conscious, super-styled, covered up cloth-fiends.”

We clap. I whoop. Jenny glares at me. No one else whoops.

“I hate all the people who stare at me,” she continues, “The people who push into me and rub their apparel on me. The boys who laugh and point and shout, the ones who turn their shame on me – project their repression on my freedom. I hate the clothes-minded.”

Jenny smiles. That was her phrase, “clothes-minded”. I remember the night she coined it. She was helping me burn my denim jackets and leather skirts. We built a bonfire of profanities. We liberated me from fibre fascism. We felt something change that night, a paradigm shift.

She continues, “I hate the mannequins in the windows on Kingsland Road, on Mare Street, in Shoreditch and Brick Lane. These plastic people dressed by trousseau tyrants pushing propaganda to cover up the skin we were born with, the skin we should be proud of. My tits must go in a bra, my bra must go under a top, my legs are acceptable, my bum is not. This is not an aesthetic choice, but cultural hegemony enforced by designers, wearers and their nasty vested interests.”

Our leader breathes in deeply.

The back garden bonfires grew too big too quickly. Like smoke signals calling the outfit oppressed, we found people with bin bags full of clothes at our door, desperate to destroy them. People started to dance around the fires, holding hands, as nature intended. When twenty nurses from the hospital turned up one night, we moved the fire out to the marshes. Under the protection of the great pylons, we incinerated the uniforms that created hierarchy, the gowns that humiliated and the scrubs that molested. More people came, attracted by the dancing, the freedom and the fire. Returning to the ashes the next day, Jenny and I found the words, “Undressed or Oppressed – It’s your choice,” marked in the ground. At that moment, we knew we’d hit a raw nerve.

“I hate the textile gorging in the Narrow Way Primark,” Jenny says, “The rampage that sweeps through the door every morning; wolves in cheap clothing, attacking in packs. They grab and snatch and toss and fling. They howl and push and snarl and buy. After they’ve got what they want they disappear onto the buses and back down the streets, carrying their hunted prey in paper bags to devour when they get back to their dens.”

Jenny used to work in Primark. She was one of the staff who had to walk around the store and re-fold the clothes people left strewn about. She had to touch the cloth day after day, month after month. Then one day, she snapped. She started folding the clothes that customers in the store were actually wearing. She tried to fold small children into neatly packed squares, she tried to fold men’s arms behind their backs. After spending a night in jail, stripped down to just her knickers, she said she had an epiphany.

“I hate the charity shops that sell the musty garments of the deceased,” Jenny tells us, “The fabric undertakers of the liberated dead whose garb is recycled and fed back into the system of oppression. The Oxfams and the Minds that sell on the cloth that the finally free have finally freed themselves from. The Banardos and the Christian Aids that sell the donations of the over-clothed. The over-clothed that feel good about donating their oppression to the cause.”

Someone shouts, “Yeah!”

It is Andrew, the former manager of the Oxfam in Dalston. His back is patted, someone ruffles his hair. Andrew, one of our newest members, came to us last week after his shop was featured in Vogue as ‘one of the trendiest ‘chazzas’ in Europe’. He said he didn’t want those lot in the store. He said he didn’t want to sort through bundles of clothes, rack them up, price them and then have to put them in bags for bargain hunting thread junkies. He came to our camp and we welcomed him in. He stripped down, rolled his naked body in the grass and skinny-dipped in the canal. Now he sits with us, as an equal, ready for the revolution.

Jenny throws her cue cards on the floor and spreads her arms out wide. I feel a warm rush radiate from my chest to the tips of my fingers. We are all ready, we are all together.

“Tonight we are making a stand!” she shouts, “We are making a call to bare arms, legs, bums, tits, chests, balls, vaginas, torsos, thighs, perineum. We are going to stand up, fleshed out and force nature to take its course against the under-baring, threaded masses that dominate and continue to obstruct our way of life. We will not take this lying down fully clothed.”

Jenny looks beautiful as she rages. We can see her heart pulse from beneath her breast. We can see the air shimmer around her body, heated by passion, radiating warmth. We will do anything for her. She is our emancipator. We are her army. We are all here for her. Our camp is just the start. When we decided to camp here, nude, by the banks of the canal, we only numbered forty people. But we grew quickly. The dog walkers stopped to talk to us and within minutes had discarded their robes and their chosen path. The joggers ran past but quickly back tracked at the sight of fifty naked people eating and dancing by the river. Now they jog without sports bras, but with our support instead. Even the teenagers respect us, though they aren’t ready to join.

“It is the material merchants who have obstructed our true state of being.

It is the perverse society that tells us we must cover up.

Tonight we hit the streets.

Tonight we show everyone that skin unites, liberates and elevates.

And if they don’t listen…

They will be de-robed, dethroned and deleted.

Tonight we begin the battle for the buff.

Tonight is the start of a new era.

The era of the Naturist begins.”

She finishes with a fist raised in the air. We stand up in unison and raise our fists in solidarity. The full moon coruscates off Jenny’s wide, truculent eyes. A bird takes off from the canal with a squawk, the sound of its flapping wings echo lightly against the water. Jenny turns around and faces the bridge that takes us to Hackney. We turn too, synchronised. The bridge takes us to the start of the revolution; it leads us to the first targets. We start our march towards a fibreless future.

Jenny and I have planned this for weeks. Our army of naked agents will enter the pubs and bars of London’s East End and strip the oppressed of their garb. We will dance naked at every party in every club and warehouse there. We will occupy the markets in the morning; we will set up empty stalls and sell nothing. We will bomb the vintage stores before they open. We will lock every textile-recycling bank and barricade every charity shop. We will preach, convert and educate the mindless. We will tear down the billboards, burn the magazine racks and dismember the mannequins. After this, we move to Central London, to the boutiques of Angel, the top shops of Oxford Circus and the tailors of Saville Row. Our ‘warm summer of discontent,’ as Jenny calls it, is about to begin.

I run to catch up with Jenny. I take her hand and give it a squeeze.

“Well done,” I say breathlessly, “that was amazing.”

“Thank you,” she replies, giving me a peck on the cheek.

“This is actually happening isn’t?” I say, “We have actually started a revolution.”

“It certainly looks like it,” Jenny says, “but I’ve just had the most horrible thought.”

My heart skips a beat.

“What?” I ask, “just now?”

“Yes,” says Jenny, “what are we going to do when it’s winter?”

Ken Champion

Retro

Headscarf knot high on her forehead, senna’d hair,

shoulder pads, like a war poster; she becomes

Aunt Lil – smiling down, hand cupping my chin –

holding Sid’s arm, evening drink in the Plough,

slabbed eels twitching outside, pillbox hat for

The Harold on Sunday, turban in the tractor

factory making shells, painted line down

the calf for the Rex.

See her again, red tights, trilby, Camden-booted;

I’m Uncle Albert, double-breasted, roll ups,

knees ups, nudge and a wink to Charlie,

pencil ‘tash, flash of a gold tooth smile;

she walks away, looks back, frowns,

leaving a raggedy-arsed boy.

Speech Balloons

In the War Museum photo a soldier lies

to attention under a sheet, officer at foot

of bed, underarm baton, bonneted lady

frowning down, grim Sister behind

“Playing with yourself?” asks madam.

Sister, “Taking iron jelloids, are we?”

Officer, “Rectum?”

Soldier, “Didn’t do ‘em much good, sir.”

“Have a good war then, must go,

carry on dying.”

Lady Matronise will never do good

Sister will stand there forever

baton will one day fall

soldier will never lie at ease.

Houses: anthropomorphic

Sun on pantiles, boughed leaves against a sash,

– a mother’s hair touching an infant’s face, a cupola,

an offered breast, eaves, the brim of a merry widow hat,

radiant stucco, grinning dentrils, full-busom’d caryatide,

the long skirt’s folds for a child to wrap his face in,

jasmine hedge cushioning a boy’s boundaries.

Raised eyebrow of a high gable, railings, tall, upright,

military, ‘old yer back up, chequer pattern flint and

stone, tough, hard, don’t let ‘em score, son,

dive at their feet, the roof, pitched, steep, thick

brows frowning down, a boy too scared to move,

the house inside him.

Marx In The Park

He bumps into a bench, jumble of books, papers

under his arms, sits beard on belly, stares at a tree,

found himself in Starbucks an hour ago looking across

to a golden M, people dressed oddly, shouting at things

held to their ears, giving strange money to bargirls,

bitte, wievel kostet, prosze, familiar accents, looks

at a book, frowns, shakes his head, it’s the translation,

No, he didn’t say that, picks up a news-paper, stares

in disbelief at page three, on four a picture of Bush

on his first visit to Asia and somewhere before

Gazza ‘Aza Dazzler two lines that say India

gets a McDonalds – did he not say the state is but

a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie?

Thinks back to his coffee, gazing out the window,

vehicles flashing past posters my ipod my music

my life smiles, lips shape the words technological

determinism, looks up, pink clad ‘chavs’ all around him,

aggressive blind eyes, tight pony tails, point at him,

loser, they chant, loser, fuckin’ loser.

A Brother’s Death

You move blindly around the house kicking

doors, scattering books while brittle images

fill the pain: dad letting you fall though his

opening knees, catching you under the arms,

the ritual ending when he lets you hit the floor,

don’t trust anyone son, the birthday boxing

gloves, your left feint, overarm right, the parlour

party celebrating the wiping across your cheek

the blood from his lips, the later mosaics of

urban architecture, streetscapes of an endless

city, Stan behind, gasping for a café and

becoming father lying at the bottom of the

stairs clutching his kidneys, your schizoid self

staring forever before running next door for mum;

and now see that when his six year old eyes

looked up at you, not thinking how he’d die,

you couldn’t know that dad would always hover

inside you, strangling the tears, the love.

Utilitarian

Tired of swimming through porridge with the sixth form

I walk the lunch break through terraced streets, enjoying

leafed capitals, Doric columns; a child sprouts in front

of me, still, unmovable, hard eyes quietly demanding,

gripping a square of card we hav no muny and no

napies for little gerl and…

I rest on a garden wall, beckon him to sit, he stands

in front of me as I rewrite his plea in my notebook

demonstrate vowel sounds, consonants, pauses,

differentiate the phonetic, tear out the page, hand

it to him.

He nods slowly not taking his eyes from mine,

shows me the card again, crushed notepaper

tumbling in the gutter.

Semiology

Resting against the whiteboard he looked across to the empty chair on his left where Marci had always sat, until a year ago when her estranged husband’s jealousy had finally won and she’d left the course. He knew nothing of her and David, her lecturer, he was jealous of every man.

It was a common story amongst mature female students. Men, feeling inadequate and frightened that their partners or wives were stretching towards new horizons – and wondering who was helping them get there – would occasionally come to the college and demand to know where their women were. When he asked for ideas for research projects a third of the females would opt for something to do with domestic violence, which he would turn into a working hypothesis that they could test.

Hope was such a one. She would sit next to him when discussing her work with heavy bruising under her eye. She was twenty, the youngest in a class of thirty.

‘I don’t deserve this, do I.’ she’d say.

Marci used to sit there wearing a tracksuit, her braided extensions rising above a headband, gazing at him with Bambi eyes and a knowing mouth, and occasionally sipping brandy from a plastic bottle. He thought it was mineral water.

It had been a frenetic time. He’d been to a gym with her, seen the frown under the darktight nest of hair to ward off posing machos, the burnt umber skin, ear-to-ear grin, watched her puffing out her pain in press-ups, drowning her sadness in saunas, lifted weights with her, and attempted ungainly to keep time with her aerobics group. He’d held her up in a nightclub, rushed to her bedside in a local hospital because she’d collapsed, gazed at the zigzagging, merging colours on the screen whilst her liver was being scanned, and after being dragged for a sunset ride on the Barracuda at Southend, lying next to her on his bed like a contortionist dying in his own arms.

The tables and chairs he’d arranged in a three-sided rectangle, for many mature students had had bad educative experiences when young and, especially at the beginning of an academic year, desks set out in well remembered rows would trigger the same fears. Most of the people on this course were from ethnic minorities, mainly African females, and nearly all went on to university.

He played devil’s advocate. When he first met them he would explain that under the guise of an evangelical mission Europeans had introduced Christianity to Africa for the purposes of social and economic control of half a continent – the more politically aware would nod wisely – and that God hadn’t created us, but we, him; the real question being, why?

The classroom would glow with outrage and anger and, often, pity. He wanted to shock their mindset, to create a sliver of a chance that he just could be right, thus helping them to detach, to step back. They were then halfway to a sociological view of the world, and that’s what he was teaching. There were always some female students who would say to him on their way out after the first lecture, lightly touching his shoulder as he sat at his desk, ‘We’ll pray for you.’ He was sure they did.

He’d begun the sociology of deviance the previous year at the beginning of term two and started on the semiotics part the day before Marci had left. He’d suggested that the police worked within the class structure, had pre-existing concepts, ‘pictures in their heads’, of what criminality was and ‘criminals’ were like. He’d asked them for the signs the Bill pounced on.

The two Dagenham lads, who’d always sat together, immediately and in concert had said, ‘Workin’ class, innit.’

‘They’re protecting the bourgeoisie from the proles.’ Abosede had shouted, her Catholicism weakening after a month of Marx.

He’d asked for the signals that would suggest ’working classness.’ Pam, the Afro-Caribbean had suggested it was the walk; another that it was the Sun stuck in back pockets of jeans. He’d then turned his back to them, bouncing on his heels, squaring his shoulders and asked for, ‘Two lagers, John.’

He did this every year, ‘the calf muscle move.’ He’d then ask if they thought he was mimicking the son of an Emeritus Professor of Literature at Kings College, Cambridge – a cheap laugh, but it made the point. One of several Nigerians had said a car was an obvious clue, another, leisure activities and musical tastes, a usually silent Somalian suggested that accent and appearance were the obvious signals and, rather late, someone had suggested race. And so they’d gone on, most of them saying something and in the end creating a comprehensive coverage of perceived clues.

Marci, as ever, had said nothing, merely looking at him steadily. He’d hinted strongly that there would be questions on this at the end of term and suggested a mnemonic to help them. Their answers came back like drumbeats, and they’d made up a little chant:

dreadlocks, hip-hop, beemer, mean,

tattoos, skins, hard, obscene

Some of them had left the classroom happily singing it – possibly because they were going home to change for a birthday party for the twin girls in the class. He’d reminded them, tongue in cheek, they were to turn up in English time, not African.

Now, he let this evening class go early. His car had been stored in the nearby motor vehicle buildings – and probably used for teaching – for the length of his drink and driving ban, and he was wondering how it would feel when he drove it for the first time in a year. Marci, a lot noisier then than when she’d occasionally slipped into the staff room, unheard and unseen, and put a sandwich – and even an apple – on his desk, had been involved in that, too.

It had been decided that they’d go to a local East End pub for the party. He rarely drank, often being mocked by fellow brickies on the sites he’d worked on as an apprentice years before. The class had settled in well in the three months they had been together and most wanted to go. Marci he’d known outside the classroom since she had tearfully pleaded that her essay had been worth more than the grade he had given it because she had worked so hard; perhaps he should have realised then that she had emotional problems. He mumbled about professional integrity and encouraged her to work harder. He didn’t give in. He hadn’t the year before when a student who had done a lot of research on prostitution and, accompanied by her tough-looking CID husband and pitiful lame child – a two-pronged emotional attack – had harangued him in front of other staff to give her the Distinction she thought her work was worth. But, he rarely failed any one.

The next day Marci had rung him in the staff room and asked if he wanted to go to a bar that evening with her and some friends; he’d thanked her and declined. Later that night, with tears in her voice, she’d rang and asked for his address. A little afterwards he’d seen her walking up a garden path some houses away peering short-sightedly at the number on the front door, a manoeuvre she repeated on the next one. Taking her hand he’d gently guided her to his flat.

They drove to the pub late and on the way he’d made the mistake of mentioning the class flirt whom, apparently, he spent more time talking to in class than the others. The car stiffened; he was scared. She had this effect on him and however he analysed it, couldn’t prevent. She was out of the car before he’d stopped, towing his fear to the pub. Ignoring wondering classmates she pushed straight through to the bar and ordered a double brandy,

There was a small stage to the side and on it was the girl who had organised this get-together and who was groining her mini-skirted thighs around and pushing them out at everybody standing around. The swot whose name he could never remember was next to her wearing a blonde wig and rhythmically lifting up a kilt, showing his briefs. The two Ugandans, looking like bouncers, were chuckling deeply and the Nigerian women, gold bangles and ear rings glittering, were quietly smiling, their Victorian values not far away; not for them the two inch band of flesh at their waists, tops of knickers showing. He noticed the Ghanaian women were wearing traditional dress, which seemed to glow, as did their smooth skins and saw the Romford Marxist leaning against the flock-papered wall frowning disapprovingly. Most of them looked very different from the way they did in class, and seemed genuinely glad to see him.

He circulated, drank some wine – someone seemed to keep filling his glass – learnt more about Robert Gabriel Mugabe from an extrovert Zimbabwean student, and one of the older women came over to talk to him about social work. Then Marci was by his side, eyes narrowed. She turned and minced to the stage, jumped up and started dancing about in a clumsy, clattering way in front of a track-suited skinhead, repeatedly pressing herself against him. As she briefly pulled away there was a noticeable bulge in his crotch. She looked round at David and grinned. He strode across and pulled her off the stage. He could hardly see through the noise.

‘Get off, get off, get off!’ she shouted. ‘Let me go!’

She tried to pull her hand away, he gripped harder, dragged her across to the door, and in a tiny chip of cold detachment saw them performing some exotic dance where the man strides smoothly across the dance floor dragging his sylph-like partner horizontally behind him. He was angry and as he pulled the door open glimpsed one of the Dagenham students hiding under a table. She continued to shout at him to let her go as he hurried her to the car parked across the road. He held her against the passenger door for a few seconds then ran around to open the driving-side door. She kicked the side of the car and continued doing so as he got in. He leant across to open the door for her and saw two women run from the pub towards her. He didn’t know them.

‘He’s her tutor, he’s abusing her.’ one shrilled. ‘He’s using his authority.’

Again, the distancing irrelevance as he thought that this could be a cue for a lecture on perceptions of power. In the wing mirror he saw some men hastily cross towards him. He’d left the window down; the other woman pushed her arm in and grabbed his hand as it turned the ignition.

‘She’s with me.’ he said, as calmly as he could,’ I brought her here, she’s – ‘

‘I’m not!’ Marci screamed.’ I’m not with him, I’m not, I’m not!’ and then she began crying. He pushed the hand away and drove off.

He stopped after a hundred yards or so and then went around the block to go back to see if she was okay. Slowly he passed the pub, a group of women were comforting her. He could hear her sobbing. He drove homewards. Nobody with her had noticed him.

A few minutes later he was driving the wrong way down a one-way street and realised he was drunk. He stopped the car; it just happened to be outside of a small police station. A constable told him to get out. He did so and irrelevantly emptied his pockets, placing their contents on the roof of the car. He heard himself giggling as they slid slowly down.

She was leaning against the porch when he got back. He opened the door and closed it behind them. She followed him to the bedroom. He let out a tortuous explosion of the evening’s emotions.

‘You could have got me lynched.’ he yelled. ‘Why did you lie? Why?’

She suddenly slid down the wall and knelt on the floor. He picked her up and gently laid her on the bed. She slept instantly in his arms. He hadn’t mentioned the breathalysing. He held her tightly throughout the night.

The last of them left the classroom – Hope remarking facetiously that she’d seen a squirrel in the college earlier and wanted to know if it was deviant – and just to make sure that the motor vehicle lecturer had got his message he glanced out the window to see if the car was outside the workshops. It was. He hurried down the stairs, wondering why he felt such anticipation at driving again, something quite ordinary, mundane even. He’d got used to buses.

It felt immediately familiar. Driving slowly out the gate he turned westward, overtook two lorries and accelerated towards a main junction a mile away. As he neared it he became gradually aware that what was irritatingly taking his attention were flashing blue lights hitting the driving mirror. Their significance escaped him – he even flicked the mirror up to dull the flashes – until he heard the siren and saw the panda car suddenly behind him. The traffic lights in front were red. He slowed and stopped. Turning in his seat he saw two policemen step out from either side of their car, their movements synchronised.

He’d taught for nine hours in a twelve-hour day and was tired; he assumed he’d been speeding. He remembered the last time police had approached his car; the unbelieving shake of the head from the older one, the embarrassed grin from the other – who he hadn’t noticed at first – as he’d picked up his wallet, small change and comb from the roadside, and thought of Marci with her bloodshot beautiful eyes telling him the following morning that her husband was coming back and she wouldn’t be able to see him again. He thought also of the last lesson she’d had with him, what they’d all been discussing, and the little chant.

Quickly he pulled two paperbacks from the glove compartment; Sociology and Philosophical Theory, and dropped them face upwards on the passenger seat. And as the two uniformed figures looked in at him from both sides of the car he lowered the window and raised the volume on Classic FM.

Ruben Connell

Hence the Wall

“What kind of a man are you?”

That was the question put to me by one of the many political pamphlets stuffed through my letter box this morning. For some reason it struck a chord with me but since my life has been so recently turned upside down I have no answer.

“You’ve got a lot of faith in yourself haven’t you,” my boss had said only yesterday.

“Yes I have.”

“I’m afraid it’s misplaced.”

It goes without saying that I’m less than the man I thought I was. I’m dispensable. So here I am, still at home on a weekday, with nothing better to do than a spot of navel gazing. In the circumstances I can only think of myself in the terms they inevitably see me in – another number to add to the grim statistics. An article in one of broadsheets today talks of the depression as being the Somme of my generation. Without a war to do us in, it says, we are felled by the rapid fire machine gun of redundancy, leaving our pride, our hopes and our dreams languishing in the thick mud and mine fields of a financial crisis with no apparent end in sight. I’m not optimistic about my chances of finding a new job soon.

It doesn’t take an economics degree to see we’re beyond a double dip recession. The last few years have resembled a radio wave more than a “w” and though commentators now talk of a plateau, it feels more like a flat sea bed with an ocean of national debt above it – a salty sea of austerity. As you can see I’m depressed. I never used to get depressed. So whatever kind of a man I used to be, I’m changing and my life is changing too. My days as an owner occupier are numbered for the time being. Soon the car will have to go.

As I read past the caption and bold typeface on the front of the pamphlet, I discover that if I’m the sort of man who favours a sensible, pragmatic means of alleviating some of the problems of our time, then I’ll be in favour of the Townsfolk Act. Pretty much all the pamphlets say the same thing. Red, blue and gold seem to have become shades of grey with only the blue bigots and the loonies capable of deviating from the designated centre. I don’t have much truck with either of them to tell you the truth. Don’t they know that we put their kind of rhetoric to bed when we turned out the light on the 20^th century and moved into a new millennium? It probably is helpful that the main parties all broadly agree on the direction things should take these days. Maybe it means that people don’t really stand up for what they actually believe in anymore, but life is all about compromise isn’t it?

The civil unrest has been bubbling away for quite some time with so many people out of work. It’s not so much the demonstrations and strikes choreographed for the cameras that cause the problems. They’re a nuisance but they’re not a menace as such, even when they turn violent. It’s all contained and the police come out in force to bash heads if people step out of line. The real problem is when disorder spills out into everyday life. The atmosphere in town is chilling sometimes. You dread walking past a group of angry young people because if it kicks off, no-one will help you. You just have to walk tall and hope they only hurl insults.

“We agree with the wall,” say today’s headlines. So at last the opposition has fallen in line with the coalition. Everyone knew they would after the inquest into the disturbances. A few weeks ago about fifty or so unemployed men and a few women turned up in the richest neighbourhood in town and starting wrecking the place. By the time the police turned up windows had been smashed and homes had been looted and set fire to. Someone had even killed a pet cat. It was obvious that after that we’d get a wall in some form. And I’m happy with that and whatever else the Townsfolk Act might say. At the end of the day you’ve got to give primacy to property rights. The day an Englishman’s home stops being his castle is the day we might as well all give up. Unfortunately my castle is now in the hands of the banks and I am in the hands of my parents. Thank God they never did move to Spain.

“I used to like building walls when I was younger,” my father tells me, encouraging me to get back to work instead of moping around the house. “It’s an art you know. It looks simple but there’s a real skill to it, getting it perfect. I built the wall around the garden,” he adds, as if I didn’t know.

“And you knocked down the wall that used to be there between the kitchen and the dining room,” I answer, feeling rather sore about the direction the conversation is going in.

“A lot of good has come from walls you know,” my mum remarks, adding her two-peneth. “There’s Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China and I’m not sure if Offa’s Dyke was a wall.”

“What about the Berlin Wall? I don’t think that was a good wall was it?”

“Well not all walls can be good walls,” she concedes, somewhat absurdly. “But I dare say most walls do a good job. And I’ll be relieved once this one is up.”

Bless them. They’re trying to condition me so that I’ll swallow my pride and do what needs to be done. Of course I know as well as they do that it’s only a matter of time before I’ll have to join the ranks of the well educated men who now work with their hands rather than their brains. I used to watch them digging foundations as I sat in traffic on my way to work. I pitied them. Now I pity me.

“You got any experience?” the foreman says.

“No.”

“You got your papers on you?”

“I didn’t know I’d need them,” I lie.

“No papers? I’ll have to put you down as a Pending. That’s less than the minimum wage. Understand? You get paid less than the other fellas. You want the same rate then you bring your papers in. But I can’t promise you’ll get any work on full rate. You understand?”

I understand alright. I’m not sure it really sinks in with everyone though.

“A bloody disgrace.”

That’s the view of one of the other new Pendings as he airs his views rather too openly in the minibus over to the site.

“You could bring your papers in,” I say a little provocatively to see what sort of reaction I get.

“That’d be a great entry on my CV wouldn’t it?“ he scoffs, thinking I mean it. “When an engineering job finally comes up I can say I don’t just do the design, I can build the bloody thing too.”

As the minibus pulls up at the site I can see that a crowd has gathered to look us over. They don’t look friendly. An eager young Pending is the first out of the bus and finds himself confronted by the sort of people I can tell he’s never encountered before. He makes the fatal error of being as friendly and helpful as he can be.

“Just let me know where to start,” he says, as if it’s his first day of work experience in an office.

“Ello matey boss chief,” comes a cheerful response that soon turns sinister. “You can start by learning that your degree don’t count for nothing here. And you boys working on the cheap puts men like us out of work.”

I made a conscious decision there and then to set myself apart from the other Pendings and join in with the career brickies. It’s made for a hard start but it spares me the worst of the abuse as time goes on. Gone are the rounded vowels and long words that would attract the sneers and threats of from my new colleagues. As much as I can be, I’m one of them. I’ve even plucked up the courage to taunt them back.

“How does it feel to be building your own prison walls?” I ask them.

Some of them laugh and shrug their massive shoulders. Others start to regurgitate the simplistic propaganda they buy into so easily.

“The thing that disappoints me about the loonies,” one of them said to me the other day, “is that they’re supposed to be in favour of public works and creating jobs but they’re against the wall. Makes my blood boil.”

“Well I guess they see it as putting a stop to social mobility,” I began to explain.

“Social mobility,” he snapped back. “What sort of bloody life do you think I’m trying to live. I’m not after tea with the Queen. I just want a job, pal.”

I don’t bother talking politics anymore. It’s not for me to tell the poor how to think if they can’t think for themselves. He might be happy to fence himself in but God help his children if they ever dare dream for more. They’ll never shake off the stigma of coming from the wrong side of the wall.

To the delight of the career brickies I seem to be the sort of man who worries about sunburn more than they do. It’s been a good source of insults during the hot spell in the last week or two. Well I’m not taking any risks. They can give me as much grief as they like but my delicate pink flesh doesn’t stand up to the sun like the hide of a beast accustomed to working outdoors. The foreman saw me rubbing in my lotion today. He just shook his head and called me a willy-woofter. Ironic that.

“Pending,” he said to me. “What you get your degree in?”

“Economics.”

“Is that like maths?”

“Sort of. It involves a lot of maths.”

“My little Stacey got A-levels in a few weeks,” he said. “Needs a C or above in maths so she can get to University and then spend the rest of her life working on a building site with clever bastards like you. You’re going to teach her.”

I’d heard about Stacey by reputation before I found out I was going to become her tutor. One of the other labourers told me she had the sort of tight, firm arse you could bounce a brick off. Having met her, I can’t tell whether she’s genuinely attractive or just young. It’s not something I’m worrying about.

“Have you slept with a lot of women?” she asks me.

“Is sixty-two a lot of women?” I ask back, bragging because I can tell she wants me to.

“Yes,” she gushes, wide eyed and impressed.

“Well in that case I haven’t slept with a lot of women.”

Don’t get me wrong, we do a lot of maths. It’s just that we do other things too. I meet her in the college library after work and try and get her to concentrate on logarithms and algebra for about twenty minutes or so. Then we sneak off and find an empty classroom to snuggle up in and have a bit of fun. She’s an excellent student. In a way it’s sad that she’ll be languishing in the ghetto when the wall finally goes up. I can’t say I’ll shed a tear. It just means I’ll be able to get on and live the nice, comfortable middle class life I was always destined to live.

Until that time I’m finding that labouring has almost become a pleasant occupation. I quite enjoy the mindlessness of it as well as the satisfaction you get from doing something practical and doing it well. My dad would be proud, although he wouldn’t be quite so happy about why my new career has come to such an abrupt end. It all started this morning with a familiar sneer.

“Ello matey boss chief.”

“Me?”

“Aye, you matey. Rumour is that someone’s knocked up young Stacey. How about that eh? And all the hard work she put into her exams. You know what, I reckon anyone daft enough to get involved there would be best getting off that Pending list right now so that proper brickies can do some work around here.”

He made a persuasive argument. I weighed it up for a minute or two and then walked off the site and kept on walking. It’s seven and a half miles home across town and into the suburbs where my parents raised me. For some reason I didn’t feel like getting the bus. I followed the route of the wall for much of the way. Only a few sections remain to be completed and those areas are still fenced off behind high hoardings. I think they’re still figuring out what the eventual route will be. Something to do with compulsory purchase orders apparently.

I can’t bring myself to tell my parents. The son of a headmaster and a banking clerk isn’t supposed to get a teenager in the family way. Then again I wasn’t supposed to lose my job, my house and my car. So how better to complete the fall from grace?

I can’t bring myself to get in touch with Stacey either to be honest. She’s a nice enough kid but there’s more than ten years between us. We’re in different generations. It eases my conscience to think that, as unsuitable boyfriends go, I must at least be at the better end of the spectrum. If it hadn’t have been me it would have been someone else. She was that sort of girl. At least I taught her maths too.

Now that the wall is about to go up I don’t even know if any of this matters. I never handed in my papers and I never even told them my surname. I’m just some random Pending who’ll be sitting pretty on the right side of the wall in maybe just a few days now. Plebs only have freedom of movement on their side. It’s there in the Townsfolk Act. Just punch your card at the gates and make your way briskly to work if you happen to be needed. No, I won’t be seeing any more of Stacey.

“They’ve fenced off your old school,” my dad yells to me as I sit brooding in the bedroom I grew up in.

It’s true they have. From the attic sky light I can see over the hoardings and barbed wire and I’m sad to say that digging has already started at the edge of the playing fields. That place had quite a proud tradition in my time but now it’ll become the same as the rest of them, a factory to churn out robots to work in factories – and brickies too God bless them.

The Mayor will be cementing into place the last symbolic brick today before the wall is finally completed. There’s a big gathering of the press planned and then a carnival to usher in the new era. I won’t be going. The hoardings came down yesterday and the precise route of the wall was something of a surprise. Like all the other dirty handed beasts of burden, I am a fool who has built his own enclosure. The wall and the Townsfolk Act no longer feel like a sensible, pragmatic means of alleviating some of the problems of our time. It all feels more like cynical ploy of the establishment to fence us off. And to think I thought I was one of them.

What kind of a man are you? Apparently I’m the sort of man who does the honourable thing. Stacey is excited about the wedding and it’s to go ahead as soon as possible. Everyone agreed it would be better to get her down the aisle before she started to show. I’m not especially traditional but that seems proper even to me. I suppose hard times change how you feel about yourself and the world. After all there’s only so many rejection forms a man can take and I have to accept that there are no jobs for graduates on this side of the wall. Without a wall to be built there are only so many labouring jobs to go around. It helps to know a foreman.

THE END

Lexie Cracknell ©

Walking to Russia

I write to hide the pages, the ink

And pixels that spilled out of my heart

Dribbled down my veins and formed

Words upon the screen. Love turning into tears

And God, just let it go-

We write fantasies, open up our minds,

Echo over into the stars and sky

Falling forever upwards, self-denying

Defying gravity, we look, and see that I am beautiful

But ugly, ugly too.

But he’s got me back on the poetry

Caked in red and dashed to velvet

Check out the skies, like how I’m falling

Back, back, back in time…

If I reach out, Romeo’s not reaching back now,

Now he’s left me, in his self and in his heart

And he’s not reading anymore

And I can’t really expect him to.

So I can’t write, or speak his name

Without the bile for me rising up my gullet

I can’t see him without the noose

And bottles of dirty, dirty pills

But for now, he works his way in

Like the slimy lichen, the way he always was,

But how he fooled me,

Betrayed me and used me and turned away

Turned away to watch me crumble… and fall.

Will I ever stop falling.

So many to catch, but I’m so not solid anymore,

I’m a ghost of me, more than I thought

I could ever be…

So I go outside and smoke until my lungs turn black

Stand up just to collapse and cry or laugh or scream

Or do nothing, nothing at all. So I’m here-

Still-

Reach out! Reach out, grab me by these creaking bones,

Squeeze the tightening skin

Get me to eat, find me something to do with my hands,

Find something intrinsic inside me,

Tell me what I need to hear, not what I should,

Fill up my heart, just make me feel again,

Just let me trust again, naturally, not because I know I should…

What is there to die for when there’s nothing left to live for?

Walk with me to Russia, show them all

Show me, I was wrong and so was he,

I’m worth it, I’m worth it all!

I’m… I’m worth it. I’m worth something afterall.

August

Writhe upon these beaches

With a fishbowl of booze inside my blood-

On the drip, and sixty euro’s gone to bring

Me back from one hell to another.

Call on me, down the shadows of the world,

And let your tortured heart of darkness sing

Of the story of the earth,

World unfolding as the sunset reddens

And evening comes:

I wear red, like a brown skeleton

And drink free wine behind the Sidari bar.

Memories…ah yes…I remember yet.

Blistered cigaretted arms, call upon me

And I turned my back from the crowd

To find a dagger in my back,

St. Peter Pan never growing old

From an offended god, call on me,

And drag me screaming from within.

So I dived into the sparkling,

Mediterranean Sea.

Dragged under. Breathing in.

Pulling up and throwing out,

Burning lungs and a broken fucking heart.

Like salt in the wound,

The old scar still lives,

Why won’t I heal?

Recall

We’re falling back through history,

We’re in the forests, tangled and wild,

All these ghosts of me,

They scatter, howl in the darkness

Inside the skull, can they see

The pink light shining though

As the sun is setting on me now,

And the passions rise and die,

Do they dream? These phantoms

Of renewing flesh.

I cannot look back, can only reflect

Can only hold the illusion of sight

The stabbings in my chest,

The ache and wheeze of the air I breath-

If I could only write so eloquently,

Always, I would find no fault at all.

Writing with the tongue and teeth

Whip my words away to

The sky and the gods, no one of corporeal

Matter will ever know…

Hound me. Oh gods, they hound me still.

Would you remember this?

I speak to you ten years from now,

You’ll be the same, but a stranger too,

Rolling in cash,

Or sleeping in the Daily Mail-

Will you remember, remember still?

Ken Champion

Chimneys

Their London stocks, lipped pots against

a yellow-grey sky, slate roofs, childhood;

as if looking across from the slag heap

to terraced streets, lamplights, Alma Arms –

dad coming out to bribe you with a penny

arrowroot, if you was the only gel in the world

aunts with flappers hair, who’s a pretty boy?

mum’s don’t look, son, as Joan from next door

breastfeeds her baby, the crush on Wendy

from over the road, fear at seeing her

parents kiss because yours don’t, the

Gothic psychiatry, the lost marriages;

and it’s spinning around like a reeling

carousel, my slag heap turning

into a hill of beans.

Street Games

Flinging the ball at the pennies – tanners if you’re flush –

on the paving slab against the end house wall, and mum

shouting down the street for your tea, and you run past

the parlour to the kitchen, stir the washing in the boiler

with the bleached broom handle while she salts greens,

squeal of fork inside a saucepan, hand brushing a brow;

and you want to run to the park through the sandpit,

round the bandstand, on to the Flats, jump the stream

between houses, lean on a fluted lamppost and sate

yourself on mind flicks of skinny Iris at number two

or the misty silken space inside the thighs of principal

boys your dad takes you to see at Lyceum pantos,

but knowing you’re going out to the coins again

that no-one ever seems to hit.

Victorian Whimsy

The picket fence, moss on the cracked

path, faded red door beckoning me in

to a window seat, to look out on the lock

and clip gate, terracotta tiles in the

bricks of the short terrace, the chipped

enamel Bovril past the church finials;

to scrape up the benign moss with

firm hands, to lie in it,

contented, still.

Usherettes

Some serve in a churchlike Athens Odeon, an act of observance

and Greek dubbing, others in Sao Paulo’s Una Banco pimping

ice cream while waiters tout margaritas, and a Tangier picture

palace where the audience shouts look behind you! to the hero

comfort refugees in a shell-pocked art house in Beirut, watch

contraband movies in an Art Deco theater amongst Havana

palms, fight off the manager of a Roxy in Taiwan.

They’ve heard the roar of light hit the screen, ping of a bra

strap from the back row, watched a lit match passed like

an Olympic flame across red velvet seats, cigarette smoke

floating into bas-reliefs and chevrons; torch beams gliding

over carpets they are ciphers guiding us into the lit city,

the mansion, bedrooms, bars.

There’s one now, next to my aisle seat, raised knee flicking

off a shoe, leaning back on the curtained wall, unlit torch

idly hanging, the world at 24 frames a second in her eyes.

Vic

The most trivial encounter I had with Vic Denby was on the first day at my new school. My father had insisted on accompanying me despite my protests, for not only did he constantly embarrass me when out with him by telling me to pull my shoulders back and to breathe deeply – a leftover from his army days, the only cockney in a Yorkshire regiment serving in Delhi when he was seventeen – but seeming to wait purposely till we were in earshot of a dozen people. It was 1960, I was thirteen and going to the local Tech.

Nearing our destination, a twenty minute walk from home, isolated groups of boys in the silence of newness were standing around outside a wide, sloping incline leading to the main doors of the building. Not one of them had their fathers with them.

As I walked towards them, looking down and away from my father, there were the tinkling sounds of giggling and a barely controlled snigger. Glancing up, I saw a big, dark haired boy with a rough, pitted face looking from side to side at his newly found cronies and then pointedly at my father and me. I looked straight at him, his lips twisting in an exaggerated sneer of contempt. I turned away, unable to hold his eyes. I looked up at my father, willing him to return home. He was looking around him with a self-satisfied air, rocking slowly backwards and forwards on his heels with his hands held loosely behind him and repeatedly pushing his shoulders back, vigorously sniffing and nodding his head in approval as if in the middle of the countryside admiring the scenic beauty spread before him.

‘Yes, it looks a nice school, son. They seem to be decent boys. I think you’ll be okay here.’

He probably said it quietly, but it seemed to bellow out, echoing around the forecourt. The sound of a bell came from somewhere and we all moved towards the entrance.

‘You’ll be alright then, son?’

I gritted my teeth and momentarily closed my eyes, ’Yes, dad’ He looked uncomfortable then and said hesitantly, ‘Well, cheerio son.’ and walked away. I saw Vic for a second turning for a final sneer, then went into the building.

That morning we were told that for the first of the three years there we would be taught the usual academic subjects; after that, one day a week would be spent getting acquainted with the basic principles of the building trades and at the end of that period would be expected to choose the one we intended to specialise in, the remaining time almost singularly devoted to it. There were, after a while, a few extra-curricular activities not mentioned then that were to lighten the class and workshop rituals; one such created by an English teacher who decided that if we were at the School of Building, then, by definition, we must be louts and in an attempt to civilise us he taught, in the main hall and after hurriedly scoffed meals in the lunch hour, ballroom dancing.

It was, in retrospect, quite bizarre to watch boys, some with cement or paint-spattered overalls, dancing with each other – the ones who had to play the woman’s role gritting their teeth in a howl of sarcastic comments. One particularly small lad was made to stand on the teacher’s shoes and be whirled around as a teaching aid, like a puppet at a seaside fairground.

I realised after very few weeks that I had little interest or ability in any of the trades except the more artistic elements of decorating, and it was in this workshop a year or so later that Vic’s contempt for me came into the open.

He had quickly established himself as one of the dominant personalities of the class and gathered around him the majority of the rougher lads. He attempted to prove his physical superiority on every possible occasion. If there was any furniture moving or desk arranging to be done he would be the first to get up and push and carry, his expression meant to convey that he was only toying with small pieces of wood, mere child’s play, and after sliding a desk recklessly across the room would spread out his hands and curve his arms up over his head in an exaggerated follow-through. If there was cement to be made up in a brickwork lesson his hands were the first to grab a shovel, picking up wads of ‘muck’ and holding them up as high and for as long as he could before dropping them back on the mortar boards and, often unnecessarily, stacking a large load of bricks into a hod and carrying it around, depositing them in piles in front of the small walls the other students were building.

Vic had a native shrewdness and an aptitude for quickly grasping a practical subject and – considering the finer points of communication superfluous – was basic and direct.

In one decorating lesson we were all, either in pairs or singly, painting murals on the workshop walls. My associate for this was a normally quiet boy whose father, it was rumoured, had his own decorating business.

The particular creation we had evolved was a six feet square relief map of the Bay of Biscay and part of Spain, the land mass being formed by a stippler, made of short lengths of rubber strips placed at right angles to each other, being repeatedly pressed onto a thick layer of alabaster. This, when hardened, rubbed down and shaded in various tones of brown and green was a reasonable topographical representation of hilly, wooded land. The trade teacher, seeing that his class was absorbed in its work, was indulging in one of his periodic absences from the room.

We had been working silently for a while and I mentioned to my colleague something about Dali’s moustache dropping off if he could see the misshapen mess we were making of his country, and in a slow, scholarly manner, he surprisingly began to tell what he knew of the artist’s life. He rolled out a string of interesting facts and observations and as I aired my meagre knowledge of the subject, I became more absorbed in our conversation, was stimulated, loquacious.

‘What you on about, Bowes?’

I felt myself flush even before I turned and saw Vic looking down at me from across the room, He was standing on a pair of steps from which he was working on a version of the mailed fist and motto of the Tank Corps. He leisurely swivelled round, leant his back on the steps, drew one leg up a couple of treads higher than the other, rested his elbow on a knee and cupped the side of his face in a hand. He sat smirking and closing his eyes in an affected manner of nonchalant superiority, and thrusting his head forward said condescendingly,

‘What is it this time then, your artistic appreciation? He carefully emphasised the last two words as if they were foreign to him.

‘Why ain’t you like Jim and Lofty and the uvvers, Bowes?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes. ‘We’re gonna get motor bikes when we can. Get the gels, too.’ he grinned, looking around at the others.

The largest of his sycophants looked up and sniggered. ‘You don’t wanna know nuffin’ about art,’ he said with infinite conviction, his eyes moving from side to side as if he was thinking of a significant sequel to his statement. He looked down at his board again, shaking his head and saying almost absently,

‘Nah.’

Vic, turning the steps towards us, was using them as a pulpit now, leaning his folded arms comfortably on top of them.

‘You wanna watch wrestlin’, he said, holding his arms up like a weightlifter. ‘Strength.’ he shouted, ‘Strength.’

Somehow he represented the whole world, and I felt that familiar, panicky isolation.

‘Muscles,’ Vic was saying. ‘What yer wanna do, is –‘

‘The biggest muscle you’ve got is between your ears.’ I blurted out angrily in a sudden flash of bravery. The silence made the words seem even more inadequate and stupid. A few of the boys who had heard them laughed in a preoccupied way for they were, in varying degrees, enjoying what they were doing and there was nothing hostile in their amusement. I sensed that Vic had failed to see this and he glared around challengingly, his lips tightened in anger.

Nobody looked at him and if they had would probably have been surprised to see him so annoyed. His eyes caught mine in the second before he turned away. I stood tensely, trying to concentrate on my mural, wanting Vic to do the same with his.

No one was speaking. A few boys were humming or whistling quietly. I relaxed a little. Then a slipping, juddering sound, wooden clatter, heavy thump. I spun round. Vic was laying spread eagled on his back with the head of the steps across his legs and red paint, like blood, spattered over the floor around him, his paint can describing an arc in the air, its curve decreasing as it slowed. There was a momentary stillness, and then the sound.

They were pointing down at him, shrieking, mouths wide open, lips stretched back over teeth. One boy abruptly sat on the floor, head dropping back loosely and then whipping it up again to stare incredulously, his eyes moist, laughing hugely and soundlessly. I was watching Vic closely as he viciously kicked the steps away and clambered to his feet. His white face was expressionless as he calmly and methodically brushed himself down, hands slapping over his shoulders and the back of his thighs, eyes almost vacant.

The room had quietened a little, then without warning he strode across to me. I pushed my arm up defensively and pressed back against the wall, but Vic’s fist chopped it down with such force that I slid to the floor, cradling my arm to my chest. Vic then knelt in front of me, his back upright and erect, hands tightly clenched. He was quite still. I stared back at him, gaping. Nobody was laughing now. There was no noise at all.

He raised his fists high above his head and swung them down onto my shoulders, one at a time, as one came down the other would go up as if he were ringing imaginary church bells. Strangely, there was no force behind them, they just lightly touched me. I was holding my hands palms upwards in front of my face, turning away in anticipation of heavier blows and catching short glimpses of Vic looking unblinkingly at a point above his head, detached, yet frightened and frowning hard as if he were desperately trying to remember something or grasp the reality of his actions. Slowly and, at first, almost inaudibly he choked hoarsely,

‘I hate you, I hate you,’ and then quickening until he was screaming it into a high-pitched rhythm of, ‘aitchew, aithchew, aitchew,’ over and over.

A few of the bigger boys pulled him away from me and as soon as he was on his feet he shook himself from them and with head hanging walked limply back to the fallen steps, pushed them upright and slowly looked around him for something to clean the paint up, none of which had touched anyone’s work. Someone tentatively offered him a piece of rag then wandered back to where he had been working. The others returned to their places, also, some looking over at me and shrugging their shoulders, but shock showing in their eyes. Vic was kneeling on the floor, body stretched forward, rubbing the bunched-up rag in wide ineffectual movements, his shoulders spasmodically jerking. He was crying. The class then helped clear up the mess. I did, too.

Vic was quieter and less aggressive for a while afterwards, but not for long. His strident voice could soon be heard again and he seemed the same old Vic, except that he never spoke to me at all and when he eventually did it was only at moments when he more or less had to.

Eighteen months later and just prior to leaving I had an interview with a large City and West End painting contractors and a month afterwards started work.

A pressure on my shoulder. A rocking motion, gentle, rhythmic, my arm firmly gripped, the rocking more vigorous, my head lolling loosely about. My name was being called, gently, insistently. I opened my eyes and stared at my mother who was telling me that there was a cup of tea on the bedside table and not to knock it over and don’t be too long getting up. I nodded slowly, feeling sleep clamping my eyelids tighter and was only barely aware of the door closing, and then the slow realisation that it was Monday morning, my first day at work. I hung my head over the side of the bed and stared at the ceiling.

Images of myself travelling to work drifted into my head and concreted themselves in movie form: a straightforward shot leaving the house wearing a grey, black-flecked sports jacket, neat, wool tie and worsted trousers. The camera pans towards me as I walk quickly along the street showing a back view with head bent forward on stooping shoulders, then a dramatic close-up, the camera on its trolley twelve inches from my bobbing face, minute particles of sleep in the corner of an eye, off-white filling in a front tooth and the pallor of the smooth skin.

The houses in the background are seen as the camera moves away, travelling faster than I’m walking. The corner of the road, a blank wall, a dog trots past, then I appear again, turning quickly, flashing from left to right of the screen. A side view this time as I begin running to catch a bus pulling away from the stop, a slowing down and then a casual leap onto the platform with an aerial shot looking almost directly down at me swinging around the pole with one hand and instantly disappearing into the interior. The blue-grey acrid air of the crowded top deck, a low shot showing boots, black shiny casuals, corduroys and a pair of brown suede shoes. Stark close-ups of men with a day’s growth of beard and the just shaven ones putting home-rolled or factory made cigarettes between their lips. Faces with closed eyes endeavouring to finish off harshly interrupted sleep, faces with eyes narrowed reading the pages of the Daily Mirror or Reveille, faces with mouths open, panting with the effort of the double exertion of having run for the bus and coughing from a too-early fag.

The vehicle slows and just when it has almost stopped starts away again. An early morning office girl climbs the stairs and looks around her with distaste. Nobody stands, and leaning against the side at the top of the stairs, brushes imaginary smuts from her crisp, clean dress with the back of a gloved hand and stares fixedly out of a window. The bus slackens its bouncing, rolling speed, the camera points away through a window and in the natural frame lorries and cars, motorbikes and cycles sweep across the lens which tilts upwards showing a wasteland of dust and bricks, squashed drink cartons, remnants of bonfires, old newspapers and the frame of a bicycle sticking up like a scalene triangle. The rectangle is then filled with tall, shabby Victorian houses, then a shot from the top of the steep, curved stairs as bodies helter-skelter down and as they jump off the bus, the majority before it has stopped, into the grimy entrance of the station, makes them look like squat-bodied giants with huge feet.

My gaze strayed from the ceiling to the underneath of a saucer rim protruding from the top of my bedside table and in a moment of full wakefulness I lifted myself from the bed in pleasant anticipation of the hot, sweet tea. Ten rushed minutes later I was on my way to the bus stop. There were no cameras.

I was to report at eight o’clock to the foreman painter, Mister Fox, at a building in Finsbury Circus. I was carrying a small case containing shiny, newly purchased tools and a packet of sandwiches. Walking from the station I swung this about disdainfully in an effort to hide from the world that this little lad, who I was sure it was looking at with comforting smiles and women with inclinations of heads and looks in their eyes which suggested an inwardly exclaimed ‘Aaaah’ of pity, was not really going off to work for the first time, but had, in fact, started years ago and was now accepted as one of the men. Squaring my shoulders, an old habit, I crossed the road to the entrance.

A staircase with a rail supported by iron balustrades wrought in heavily ornate designs spiralled upwards. I climbed carefully, passing floors with metal partitions, false ceilings, plastered walls and new window frames in the process of erection and men just starting work for the day, slow moving and reluctant. One of them told me where the paint shop was and I found the foreman there who, when informed timorously that I was the new apprentice, gave me a look of disapproval, a paint kettle full of pink priming and led me along the large, semi-partitioned floor to the windows at the end and told me he wanted ten completed that day. Half way across were pairs of trestles, scaffold boards stretched between them, and working in pairs on them were six painters, their brushes casually pounding the ceiling with hollow flip flops of sound. I hoped that, in time, I could pick up their effortless expertise.

They were laughing, voices and guffaws echoing around and one of them, with quick glances at an immaculately dressed man sporting dustless brogues, looking irritated and flicking a steel tape measure from hand to hand, was making a gesture towards his workmates by gripping an arm above the elbow and, still holding his brush, swinging it with tightly clenched fist mock-furiously up and down, lips curled back over gritted teeth – a universal gesture unknown to me at the time.

There was a cliquishness in such incidents, an unconscious knowledge of the right things to say and do, the correct responses, the right feelings. These things were seemingly a natural part of them, unthinking, unforced.

I walked over to a window which seemed to soar above me, the others vanishing into a pinpoint of perspective. In my brand new white bib and brace I began searching anxiously for a pair of steps. I explored the floors above and below and the only pair that weren’t being used were painted brown and an electrician, before grabbing them back from me, stuck his face through their inverted ‘V’ into mine and with patronising mock severity as if he had just caught his youngest child sticking a finger into a pot of jam, slowly and deliberately shook his head then burst into laughter while I stared with fascination at the small dots of amalgam in his mouth glistening with spittle.

I returned to the floor where I was supposed to be working and heard the foreman sarcastically say to one of the men, ‘If you can’t finish it till the first coat’s dry, stand there and blow on it.’

He turned to me.’ Haven’t you started yet?’

Then, ‘Anyway, we’re off to tea now, they’ve got a big area down there and they’ll have a long run till dinner.’

I sat in the café, the other boiler-suited or bib-and-braced painters laughing easily, ordering food – ‘two airships on a cloud, darlin’…’ babies on a raft, luv’ .for sausages and mash, or beans on toast – and then, swaggering in, shoulders rolling, long hair slicked down, was Vic Denby. He sat down in the corner, had a quiet chuckle with a couple of painters, looked at me, gave a slight nod, then turned his head away. I had no idea that he had come to this firm, was working on this job.

I only seemed to see Vic in the café, it was a big job, painters, mostly in twos, were spread out on various floors. He never spoke to me, never gestured. On the third day Charlie Fox took me to the main entrance ceiling – someone had mentioned that it was the biggest in London – and scaffold-boarded about eight feet below its surface where men were brushing cream eggshell onto it, finishing it with large, fine hair stipplers. He pointed up through the gap where the ladder entered through the boards to a large, elaborate Adam ceiling rose.

‘You been to Buildin’ School ain’t yer? Well, pick that out, the swags in red and the egg and arrers in white; do the round rim in blue. Ted’s got the colours, get ’em from the paint shop.’

This was more like it. I had a sudden urge to ask for the boards to be raised so I could lie on my back to paint and pretend it was the Sistine Chapel. I carried three paint kettles and brushes up with me in one go, then went down for the turps and rag. I started enjoying myself immediately; standing on an old stool, cutting in the Roman swags with a large chisel-edged sable, pushing the white into the tongue and dart with an inch tool. Time was irrelevant.

I stepped back. There was nothing there. My shoulder blades hit the metal edge of a board as I fell, I seemed to bounce away and then my buttocks were hitting rungs, then the back of my head hitting them as I fell, strangely upright. I landed vertically, also. I glanced down at a shoe. It was hanging off, almost broken in half. I looked around dizzily, perhaps for the brushes, the kettles…I don’t know.

I just stood there, alone. None of the painters on the boards above me seemed to have noticed. One was singing in a casual voice about a country girl, I could hear his foot tap quietly to the rhythm of the song, and his brush. And then I looked to the corner of this big, dust-sheeted area and there was Vic, ten yards away. In a moment of schizoid irrelevance I noticed he had cut his initials into the handle of a filling knife he was holding. He was smiling, almost likeably, a forefinger lightly tapping the side of his nose. He stopped, nodded his head slowly up and down, still smiling. I looked away. On the sheets around my feet were spatterings of red. Like blood.

CELEB…..CELEB

Aren’t celebrities wonderful ?

They do so much for us.

Give their all to fill our lives

with their sparkle

in capital’s bread and circuses.

They let us in on their secrets

share their recipes

caress us with their perfume

pare us down with their diets

defecate words for us to cling to.

All they ask in return

is our attention

and we are so willing to give it, for

without them

we would need more things to do

without us they would have no-one to be

they are the heroes we deserve.

When time comes for obituaries

let them take all the credit they’re due.

Then we can be sure that we too have lived.

Immortal celebrities – they are not dead

just consumed.

-Keith Chopping

Alessandro Cusimano

The Nation

the medicine man has a vision

and disappears

in a prison

of the Empire Film Producer

metal animal

worn away with the rust

and they call him killer

when the killers accuse a killer

outside

one night noble light

moon

when the windows are open

the rifle of the inhuman man

a slanting creature beyond the measure

a sergeant

eats up his supper taken from home

and kills

someone who has the power to do this

watching people do it without shame

the actor’s life

obscene reflexes

oblong planes appeal to the low

Old Glory ponders the rights and wrongs

grimaces deform the faces

and make them ugly

broken down window panes

internals of wide open mouths

Queen of all flowers

the gaze bends

the night damp colours

new anatomies

bold shapes wink and move

under the roses

tasting strokes

things you can touch

perfect lipstick

clear in the stretch

creamy

rose leaves sweeten the thorns

in summer

night put on its coloured plumes

the great silence wakes up

and takes away the agony of boredom

the wail of a rose is the cry

at night

of a carnivorous spider

with sweet mouths

showing off brand new throats

with its multiple body

innumerable and victorious

Excellent madman

I have an iron will

proof that the gimmick can work

in my note-books I sketched the abyss

the dung heap of inequality

trial and acquittal

nevertheless

my personality is fading away

rubbing the impalpable

overcoming my resistance

insistently

policy and carelessness

carved temperaments

reason and unconsciousness

my devotion to these two sisters grim

if only I could find a way

to deal with them

without turning away from myself

from the unreasonable friend

from the excellent madman

towering above

locked up

the taste of a ripe melon

is the meaning of a moral dilemma

everything at once

Venice prophecies

a lovely girl brings home her puppet boyfriend

and plays with him

the tall convex space appears turquoise

draws a sinuous line

sensual on the perimeter

steeped in the events of others

is the profile of a sea wave

ensures the persistence of blue

the opposite of darkness is spreading

slowly

the wave breaks regular

long

smooth

has a changing effect

hands out colours

night owns the future

forgives the guilt

multiplies the fixed and reflected light

surrounds the vaporous game

unties a curtain

after dark

you look and measure the content

of mirrors

the anxiety of the angels goes on stage

have memory

remind all

the vibrations are perpendicular

penetrate the skin

a mass of water rises and falls

is female

able to overwhelm the spectator

with the honesty of her sins

under a dim light

so as not to be seen

so you do not see the others

there’s a glare

vision is complex

comely

the volume of the music is consumed

a ruby-throated hummingbird flies free

growing soft folds follow the trend

the long radius

the imagination to reach

the underside of the tables

steel and water deposit the gray and blue

in the depths of the deepest eyes

wooden puppet head is sitting on himself

his face is opalescent

flattered

inspired by an happy melodrama

built on the water

First Day Back

Despite their stifled yawns

he tries to tell them abut Marx

and to sum up his thesis in a sentence.

Our reality, consciousness, identity,

our political, cultural and economic systems

are determined by the ways in which we

technologically transmute the physical world.

What do you think then? he asks. Is it true?

You’ve got ten seconds to answer.

They look alarmed, so he holds

his hands out, fingers cupping,

encouraging. Joke, he says, joke.

You’d prefer a story, wouldn’t you,

and their grins explode. Yes, they shout,

like sitting round a fire telling tales.

He could see firelight flickering on their faces.

They’re smiling now; tall, smooth-skinned

Somalians, gaunt Rwandans, gentle

full-faced Ghanaians, gold bangled

Nigerians making their Victorian values heard

(not for them the two inch band of flesh

at their waist, tops of knickers showing)

and the two Dagenham lads, sitting apart,

asking if this geezer was a brother of Groucho.

He sighs, smiles back at them,

asks how their summer has been.

Chris Crittenden

City Mirrors

ghosts

in the façades,

stretched and folded

like darkled taffy.

people clip-clopping by,

in vain footware

that could feed the Congo,

unmindful

of the boutiques and shops.

with windowfronts

that mock them,

reflecting

the rack and rend

of stress-borne souls,

simulacra

of the money dance,

insane puppet show,

fueled by the crowds themselves-

the bustle and hassle

of their clock-spurred flesh,

and the hellish mimes

who taunt them

from umbral walls.

Bernadette Cremin

November

November is nursing my weathered eye

so staring through the shallow horizon

I will this spiteful winter to subside.

The relentless grey has rendered me blind

and I crave the memory of cloud-cotton.

November is nursing my weathered eye

and no matter how hard the view may try

it can not comfort a storm with reason.

I will this spiteful winter to subside

so as the carnage can not be denied:

the damage abandoned by late autumn.

November is nursing my weathered eye and the sun half-hides like a guilty spy

as frozen bullets bludgeon the season.

I will this spiteful winter to subside

and lend the aching sky to kinder light:

let weather undress like a chameleon.

November is nursing my weathered eye.

I will this spiteful winter to subside.

CARNEY

Folklore said the track had rusted over

(a feral testament to the unleashed boy)

so the grumble smothered by years of trees

intrigued me like hands in the dark.

Carney is a flint-built nest of half truths

where frowning men murmur and women

simmer over nettle wine, haunting the muddy boys

with tight spun yarns of The Stokeens in the dark

scar of woodland, that tears like green chiffon over

Devlin Mountain. The town is possessed by Larn trees

that spill onto an incessant beach. Carney women

are lean, caramel-skinned and stubborn as truth.

I was enticed to visit it by a seamless woman

who wrote in violet ink. She wore her boy-

figure easily and was contradictory as an oak tree

on the cusp of summer. I was seduced by her dark

toffee skin and she by my name as we conjured vanity over

saki at a mutual friend’s attempt at a party. She wore truth

and deceit in equal measure, and flirted her arrogance over

awkward art, as we stung wit, snaring [it-]our shameless dark

humour by unstitching the polite room of other women.

She was born in Carney under a swollen Larn tree,

her twin brother torn from her by a calloused hand (a boy

that she still begs to unlock her prayers when the truth

confesses.) Then she unveiled the curse that shelters women

who ripen life in the dim season that beckons the Larn trees

to blossom crimson like blushing blood or wounded truth,

so as no other mother need ever have her warm boy

peeled from her, leaving his menacing silence to take over

her dark.Richard Copeland

This is Not a Sonnet

Are we really who we say we are?

Tell me your perceptions if you dare –

or maybe not would be a better thing

than face such brutal truths and slingshot

words.

But do our eyes exactly coincide,

interpreting the meaning in a glance

to say with confidence; ‘I understand,’

and penetrate the truth behind the face?

We each have mental pictures of ourselves

and of each other, but how accurate

is sight against sensation? Both can lie

with false impressions steaming up the lens

of the mind’s half-closed, myopic eye.

A Modern Prelude

With apologies to T. S. Eliot

The summer evening’s broken down

in curry house and alleyway.

Eleventh hour.

The thrown-out scraps of smoky days.

And so a windy downpour slaps

the sodden flaps

of empty cartons round your feet

and paper blown from burnt-out bins;

the raindrops beat

on buckled shutters, stinging skin

while, on the corner of the street

a drunkard roars at passing cars.

And then the emptying of the bars.

‘A Modern Prelude’ was first published in

The Frogmore Papers, 2008.

All poems from Richard Copeland’s

forthcoming collection This Is Not A Sonnet

(Survivors’ Press, 2008)

November the Fifth

King James’ knives slit the Catholic belly,

draw the living entrails, inflict agony

with ease.

Punishment thought fit enough for treason,

and this we celebrate

as if a testament to cruelty spanning centuries

might be a cause for joy. Not content to simply kill,

outrage fired a nation’s soul to draw life

coil by coil,

taking pride in slow work;

the face a painted mask of retribution,

the heart a cinder, brazier bright,

the first firework, sealed

in eternal flame

and still we celebrate

as each new bomb, each bullet is cheered

after the fact and on

through the desert heat or jungle green

we follow the progress

of a nation’s slow evisceration,

cheer and salute the victory

of state over common humanity.

Richard Copeland

Late Night Opening

Buy two, get one free, the red tag tempts, teasing

as a temple prostitute displaying her wares

in the all night day long store.

A thing caught between times, it becomes

a whispering vault of ghosts, shelf-stacking

in reverential silence cracked by the till’s sharp beep

of acknowledgement, purring out a paper tongue.

A time when even brash banners seem to whisper

quiet confidences of twenty pence off here, fifty there

and, by the way, special reductions on Australian wines

(not sold after eleven o’clock, so forget it).

Prowl these postered aisles of gleaming tins.

Emblazoned cartons stand where labels leer.

Try to remember what need brought us here

to this unsleeping temple of must-have.

Something half forgotten dream-drifts vaguely,

slinks away behind the deli counter

now deserted, polished, gleaming empty.

Night time store dreams

a slow pad of patrons

caught somewhere

between sleep and shopping.

Where aisle-separated phantoms shuffle

no one speaks.

‘Late Night Opening’ was first published in Envoi.

All poems from Richard Copeland’s forthcoming

collection This Is Not A Sonnet (Survivors’ Press, 2008)

Sarajevo 1914

That first shot was the detonator;

a tiny spit of flame igniting

the main charge

that was Europe.

The fire spread rapidly, burning all

in its path, destroying

the work of hands

for centuries laid down

with love, honour and spite

brought to dust, fire and blood,

Death’s dominion supreme,

nations lay smoking,

shock-splintered,

unstitched.

Where did men come from to come

to this? What drove

barbarians to fight

all against all?

That first shot

still reverberates.

Echoes back

to Cain.

Thistles

Spear sharp against the sky, the thistles stand,

their plumed war bonnets

of purple plush

challenging the eye

to question their purpose

Whose partisans spike the air against

the vengeful grasp of uprooting hands

that would tear them from resisting earth

unwanted

they stand defiant

firmly rooted

grim as Thermopylae

awaiting

the execution stroke of the hoe’s blade

later to return

unbeaten.

Abigail Clark

Anomalies of the Third Tongue

Part 1

She was a middle class girl who indulged high tea and higher morals.

“I love you all the time”, whispered her soft fleshy lips.

“I feel it all,” I retorted, sharper than the thorns that would surround her rosebud mouth.

Sweeping a stylised fringe from where it had caught in her bovine-length eyelashes, I spoke in guttural persuasions.

“There’s a curse on this town, I’ve been a fool.”

Subliminally I heard her thoughts processing, like the sweet smell of lilies on a summer’s breeze; ‘Your words go deep to the heart of me’.

I saw her eye twitch, aware that I had grasped hold of her estimations and was consuming them like soggy spaghetti. She glanced down at her personally designed Converse trainers, the shine of which had been our first talking point when I found her hanging from the neon Café sign.

“I seem to have a history of missing the point. Is it any wonder I can’t sleep? Knowing now, that it is you that I adore.” This is of course rhetorical. I sit poised, lost in contemplation,

as I mix my raspberry sherbet into my vegan ice cream, believing I’m somehow experimentally diverse.

“Now you know where I’ve been,” I sighed, long and protruding. She had sat patiently, her pointed chin dug into her pale, ink-covered palm, while she listened to my stories and tales of childhood make-believe, slowly twisting her paintbrush through the foam of her latte as if she were teasing my stories out of its froth. I continued further, intent on conclusion.

“There’s no need to lie to yourself; it gave you pleasure, permitting the curious nature of your multi-faceted mind to play with the imagery my tragedies and triumphs bought you.”

She knew now, just as I always had, that the young generation is the sick generation, recycled repeatedly, as with double figures we find our cumulative cures and our temporary treatments.

With intense Dali-esque eyes, she turned to me and spat her hot caffeine into my palm.

“This feeling is sterile. I grow tired of coffee house debates and the laptop visionaries. Creation is my right, the snapping branches that grow within my flesh. I want to dance to the murmuring heartbeat of the busker on the street corner. I want to shake up the safety zone in society’s nightmares. You and I” she looked through my right cornea straight to where I hid my desires “we are the purveyors of casual enlightenment.”

She turned, tearful yet liberated, like the feeling of awakening on the first morning after new sexual passions, opened to an invigoratingly fresh and unfamiliar world, but still treading tentatively. We sat holding dry, gnarled hands across the shining veneer of the sugar-dotted table. Watching leaflet-laden club reps hustling the free, pushing flyers for nights of debauchery like highly sought hallucinogenic drugs, attempting to unshackle the closed down, button-holed society suits and lure them into a four-walled false dream underworld.

Catching her wandering mind once again within my invisible soap-coated hands, I heard her hoarse inner-head voice, almost as a reflection of my own, ‘your pounding heart releases me’. I pulled back the lower half of my jaw, until my bottom lip flipped under my front teeth and bit down hard until my eyes began to fill with water, blurring my vision and making the hanging light bulbs and wooden walls become a flood-lit plain.

Rico Craig

Evection

Down York Way toward Kings Cross. I’ve been smiling at the seamless solidarity of our journey, floating through sparse five a.m. conglomerates debating the morning. Buses shunt toward the footpath, stop and swallow wads of passengers. Condensation curtains the upper windows, words and shapes are communicated in slimy streaks.

Our footsteps, on the concrete, tap in time. I start laughing. Maxim turns. I keep laughing. He bends his index fingers into little horns sticking from his forehead. I laugh louder.

I laugh at the horns. I know the horns. I mock whisper, “cacoo, cacoo,” mispronouncing a word I don’t even know except from his mouth.

My laughing starts to slow. I think about moving my hand down from his shoulder. The thought gathers itself and I find my hand on his chest, his hand holding mine against his breast. I take the half step closer to him. His hand leaves mine and reaches around the back of my neck. I lean into his arms, his right hand pushes at the small of my back. I look up and he bends slightly toward me. We kiss for a long time. My eyes are closed until we begin to part, I feel his lips purse trying to hold my bottom lip. I hear him say, “Stephen.”

Blue helmets, retractable batons, round plastic shields. The leading cordon of police plough into the crowd. Thick, padded, black gauntlets. Blows caroom off a white boiler suit onto the shoulder of a shirtless man. Metal poles are removed from banners. Banners bound around a wedge made from two red and white barriers and metal pole. A woman in a black shirt, two men in boiler suits arrange themselves to stabilise the wedge. They charge at the line of police. Shields and batons fly. The crowd moves in behind the wedge. The police line begins to break up. People run from the foyer of the LIFFE building. Police without shields loose baton swings as people run past. The crowd pushes forward through the gap made by the wedge. The police move backward. Smoke swirls from the foyer.

“I see you my mirror girl,” yells Maria. Her arms stretch through the air and embrace. “Dove

to see you.”

“Same.” replies Astrid into her ear. “Every morning,” she laughs and leans back from Maria’s ear.

“Every morning?”

“I need you in the mirror every morning.” Astrid begins to laugh again.

“You’re looking moderate.”

“Still a bit left foot from the protest.”

Maria nods, a smile beginning to cross her face. Her eyes move to Astrid’s left hand. “What magic have you got down there?”

Astrid looks down at her left hand. “For Gaston,” she lifts the plastic wand in her left hand and holds it toward Maria. “Peace, maybe.”

Through the floor six people felt the steady vibration of tires passing over the smooth surface of a freeway. Metal guards around the pallets rattled at their hinges. His head was full of disappearing identity. Don’t remember who we were, his brother had said, don’t remember until we get there, we’ll learn the city. He forgot himself in the darkness and did something he would never have done. He reached for the stranger next to him, reached for his brother, lifted them as he stood. Felt his way through the darkness, past his brother and lifted the next person. As people stood they began to stumble a disenthralling dance, strangers circled in the blackness and reached for each other. Six people moved swiftly toward the channel, their eyes wide and sightless. Familiarity became a texture of fabric, a scent, the size and shape of body, a hardness or softness of hand.

Silhouettes move in front of two drums. Hand around, up and down, bodies past, stopping and past. The fire throws sparks into the air, light catching the smoke as it floods the sky. There and gone, smoke rushing through the light. Astrid looks at the silhouettes. Light from inside is at her back. Tough techno belts out through the back doors. Astrid waits in front of the double glass doors. The sky is dark grey as smoke caught rising from the drums. Voices and laughter come from the silhouettes around the drums. She steps forward tentatively into the darker light of the backyard.

…they were waiting for us…

…it was their plain to break the crowd…

…trashed the Benz showroom…

…went around from Bishopsgate…

…hit her and kept going…

…parasite tried to take a photo…

…had them on the run at LIFFE…

…on to Upper Thames…

…would have pushed us into the river…

…hit me four times…

…horses and over twenty vans…

…from all over London…

…four hours I heard…

…wanted to search every person…

…closed for the night…

…could have been millions…

…work at Croydon…

“You always listen in on people’s dramas?” He turns away from the fire to face her, pointy smile on his face. “I remember you. You gave me the crossy placard. I lost it not long after, got it ripped out of my hands when one of them tried to drag me onto their side of the line. I wasn’t going there by myself. They beat everyone out of the building,” looks away from her, “don’t know how I ended up there.”

“People were ragging everywhere,” she offers, hand bending to her hip. Her face turns to the firelight.

His face follows her look at the fire. “No one wants to get battered.”

Astrid looks him down and up, from his feet in darkness to the firelight glancing off the sheen of his shaved scalp.

He waits for the glance to rise, less then a second, to his face. He offers a hand. “I’m Stephen.”

Astrid takes his hand.

“Did the pineapple heads get you?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t give much away.”

“They held us at Finsbury Circus for hours.”

“Section sixty.”

“What?”

“They say it gives them the right to hold and search innocent people.” His hand touches his cheek. “In order to stop further disturbance.”

“There were hundreds.”

“Did you give them your details?”

“I thought we had to.”

“What did you say?”

“Name and an old address.”

“They’ll keep it on file for seven years and use it as evidence if you’re ever arrested.”

“I wanted to get away.”

“Don’t let them bully you, next time say none of your fucking business, you don’t have to answer their questions,” glances over his shoulder at the fire, “they make you think you’ve got no choice. Remember you’ve got the right to refuse, all they can do is search you for weapons.” He turns back to the fire, reaching into the bag slung over his shoulder. “I’ve got something for you. I’ve been waiting for someone who needs it.” He pokes a plastic wand at Astrid. “It kept me out of trouble, I’ll pass it on.”

Astrid takes the gift, a child’s toy, plastic wand blinking red and white light. “For next time.”

“For any time if you want to use it.”

I see them as I open my eyes, over Maxim’s shoulder, walking toward us. They’ve got rosy cheeks from the booze and cold night air. One of them must have said something to the others, they’re looking at us with bitter amusement. Swiftly aggrieved, now, because I’m looking at them. I look from the side of Maxim’s face, back again, quickly. The light is still beautiful on his skin, his expression is unsurprised, composed to conceal emotion. They’re younger than twenty five, each wearing an all-weather jacket. They look like they’ve been dressed by the same mother. I can hear the rustling of their jackets, their shoes are shining new leather. I imagine the selling points of their garments, the guarantee of durability, the thermally adaptive inner lining, the low surface tension of the weather protection layer. I think of them, each being convinced, each standing in a shop at a different time, each touching the exterior layer and feeling a surface that water will bead on and run off, each convinced by the ruthless practicality.

His brother stopped breathing. He waited. His own rhythm fell carelessly away until his body jerked, coughed and gulped at empty air. Sweat covered his limbs. The body in his arms. He kicked his feet against the metal cage, it rattled loudly in the darkness, he kicked again with more force, slipped down on to his back, arms tight around his brother’s head kicking both feet at the cage. Noise bounced around the rectangular container, a harsh, toneless and violent tolling. His tears came in a torrent, filled his eye sockets, ran over his temples as he twisted his head from side to side.

Stephen nods, “I stand in a queue pretty much, try to help people with the bureaucratic stuff. That’s officially. Unofficially I link people with people. My big achievement is getting people into jobs that pay cash at less than minimum wage.”

“I’ve never worked on the books.”

“Yeah right. I’m like the pied piper of dishwashers and minicab drivers. It’s not pretty but people need to eat. If you’re in Limbo you don’t get much help.”

“Sounds like you need the magic.”

“Not me.”

Music, lights and club-smell hit her simultaneously. She walks in between the shadowy shapes, turning and sliding sideways until she is under the balcony of the mezzanine level. Steps lead up on her left and right, the long bar is directly ahead. Between her and the bar is a fifteen metre clot of moving bodies.

“It’s been scarce without you.”

“I came to take you some place real.”

“Gotta play for the slave warriors.”

Astrid shakes her head. “Still?”

His face creases into a frown. “What you mean?”

“After last night.”

“You’re still blurred A.”

“Blur’s not the rage. I’m asking.”

“Don’t play all unique A,” he looks through the shadows at her face, “I’m the one with manoeuvres to make,” he sips cola, “you be wise.”

Astrid holds up the wand. She presses a small black button on the handle; the star shimmers with tiny red lights and emits a long brrriinnng. Gaston stares, moves his head to follow the line of her arm until he reaches her face.

“For me?”

Astrid raises her eyebrows and nods her head.

“I’ve got a wish.”

The beat jerks, slows, jerks, disintegrates to silence. Lights close to darkness. The room disappears. For a moment, silence. Blank darkness surrounds them. Voices begin. Names in the darkness, names fill the silence. Gaston stands still, he feels a hand on his side, it touches his arm and moves down toward his hand, it runs across his fingers, follows his hold on the wand. Her fingers reach over his hand and locate the button. She lifts his arm, presses the button. The wand sparkles with warm red light, the brrriinnng of a wish fills the silence around them. The light floods down their arms, flickering like fire, their eyes watching the light. Astrid steps closer to him, as the sparkle begins to die she presses the button again, they see the darkness outside the flare of red, hear the brrriinnng of another wish. Lighters begin to flicker in the dark, orange flames throwing circles of light, hands illuminated, the half moon of a face.

“Did you wish for this?”

“You need a minicab?”

“Yeah, Chalk Farm,” replies Astrid.

“Be thirty.” The driver is young, belt thin, he moves toward a dirty sedan.

Astrid nods. She moves quickly to the rear door.

Gaston’s voice, yelling, cuts through the sound of the engine starting. He runs along the footpath toward the car.

Astrid shakes her head, reaches around to the shoulder bag at her side. Her fingers latch around a bunch of keys.

The driver glances in the rear view mirror. “I don’t want trouble.”

His eyes stray down to her hand in the shoulder bag. He turns to the steering wheel and presses his foot on the accelerator. The car begins to move, jerking away from the kerb. Astrid lifts her hand from the bag and sidearms the keys through the open door. Gaston is at the door, the keys hit him on the right shoulder. He steps, keeping pace with the car. Astrid is thrown part out of the car as it pulls from the kerb. Gaston grabs the door. The car begins to gather speed. Gaston slams the door. It smacks into the side of Astrid’s face, just above her left eyes. The car straightens. Astrid tips herself back into the car. She reaches forward, grabs the handle of the door and pulls it closed.

Out the rear window she can see Gaston watching. His face becomes part of his body, hands on his knees. His body becomes a man. The man becomes a shape in the darkness. Astrid feels a warm dampness on the left side of her face.

The nearest has a racing stripe of shaving burn running from the middle of his cheek, across jaw line and down his neck. This is what they choose. The mean shell of all-weather protection, a few grimy lines of coke, drink until they’re sweating the sick-sweet smell of vodka and red bull, then shoulder into a fight. I can see pinpoints of sweat appear on his face, they’re catching prickles of light from the station. I look down and see the Kings Cross lights reflected in the dark leather of their shoes. I’ve got one hand in my right pocket. I’m looking down, caught in the light reflecting from their shoes.

“Take me to a hospital.” Astrid nods her head under her hand. “I’ll pay.”

“My first night, you bleeding,” he looks around her and the back seat, “not my car.”

“I’m sorry, please take me to a hospital,” she looks at him with her uncovered eye, “I don’t want to go back.”

The driver looks at her, “I don’t want trouble.”

“Please take me to a hospital,” she repeats.

The guy with razor burn is yelling at us. “You’re filthy, filthy.” He keeps yelling. From this distance, those bodies in the light appear to be moving in a perpetual approximation of convergence. Our deeds are steps around illumination.

Alan Corkish on

Foyle Young Poets of the Year

A Foyle to Foxbridge

Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 10th Anniversary Anthology

Edited by Andrew Bailey & George Ttoouli

Published by the Poetry Society 2007

No cover price; no ISBN

May I invite you to conjure up an image of a Steam Engine with the name ‘Great Poetry’ which is chundering across the world (Bit like Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed) swathed in mist, belching fire and roaring loudly to be heard… behind it come the carriages; hundreds of them snaking and rolling as the speed increases with the inhabitants clinging to leather straps suffering a mix of pride and fear as the pace increases…

Got that? Well this collection is the premier-class carriage, the one with stabilisers and deep, spacious seats. Not, you must understand, ‘premier-class’ because the poetry is premier but because the inhabitants are select, exclusive, they are a different class to the plebs in the other carriages being mainly University fodder (with the exception of the two black contributors; one male, one female, neat eh? …as you might expect)… and top Universities at that; Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Harvard etc. The single black male poet (Nii Npakpo Addo) is here, so he informs us, ‘By God’s grace’ and I have no cause to disbelieve him and oddly enough God has selected someone who is at least original. I actually quite like some of his contributions especially his ‘Hymn No. A4’ which speaks of:

tanned girls like ruffians, stutter past

laughing spontaneously

I smile into them

a futile desire to touch them – different lives

even if I screamed back the silence

I like that ‘smile into them’; poignant without being mawkish.

But you know; this collection saddens me deeply; I’m being led to believe that these really are the best young poets of the year but if they are then poetry seems to be still the exclusive domain of the middle-class intellectuals and frankly I just don’t believe that. The collection seems incestuous too with the children of past judges or the protégés of past judges being included, it’s all a jolly good show chaps and to hell with the lower classes.

I can see many of you already penning emails and letters to the editor of The Journal screaming that this is not literary criticism and you may be right; but I believe it is a fair criticism or comment about the alleged experts whom we rely on to tell us what is good poetry. My opinion is that most of the poems inside this collection read as if they are the products of the teaching-by-rote school of literature and have been selected by University bods and intellectuals who have a firm idea as to how one should write poems but sadly have little knowledge or time for the wonderfully stimulating experimental poets who inhabit the third class carriages trundling behind.

I wont waste your time going through each tediously similar contribution which even includes a pointlessly banal short-story, there are faint highlights; ‘Impartial Information’ by Caroline Bird and ‘Kid Moth’ by Jay Bernard stand out but the rest; ugh I despair…

There is no price on this book; that is either because it is priceless or worthless, you must decide… and you will. One final word; this is more a criticism of the judges than the contributors, the latter have been tutored to know what appeals to the people whom they are submitting their work too and probably, freed from the shackles of what-is-acceptable, they could make words dance and sparkle as poetic words should; but that would mean they’d need to move down the train where the seats are harder and there is no vintage Champagne with the Foie Gras… I humbly suggest that they do just that.

First published in The Journal #21, February 2008

Christianity is:

The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master…

If you do this he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in all humanity and we know this is true because a ‘rib-woman’ was convinced of it by talking to a snake that sat in a magical tree…

Christopher Capelluto

JUMP JUMP JUMP”

Let’s make some time go by, let’s make some time-
Skip, past the stars, stars; Gods cosmic middle finger to the earth.
Everyone needs to know how everything works.
“I could tell you how everything works” said the gang.
“I could tell you how everything works” said the clergyman, politician,
scientist, teacher, father, brother, mother, friend, military.
Which fool am I?

Lets stop some time let’s make time stop, stop lets-
reevaluate time, time to move on stop looking back, Lets kick some time to the curb.
Yeah curb stop time.
Picture this, someone dead.
Got that picture?
Snap. Ca-click, photoshopped then uploaded.
They died trying their best to jump over- Wait. Screw “They” “their” it’s not the ustedes “you all” general terms.
Its “him”, “he”, masculine, take two-
He died trying his best to jump over a fence into his pool.
He’s ugly. Not just because of the fence post that is impaled through his forehead.
The police officer, he shakes his head. Tisk-tisk.
Stop rewind. Let’s go back and unwaste time lets go smoke some heavy weed.
Of the cannabis type. He did. Right before he jumped.
At least he tied his sneakers but he’s not wearing pants or a shirt.
He’s nude besides the tied sneakers. Why?
Stop rewind ten years that’s 120 months that’s 5184000
minutes and you’re being yelled at by your dad or maybe its your mom
they’re being unfair you’re crying. “You’re” “They’re” “We” “Lets”
general you all, displace blame, it’s the word used to deny association
with. When really its “Me” “I” “Me” and “I” “us”.

“Jump, jump, jump!”
He jumps.
Close the dead, rotting jumpers staring wide open eye lids for him.
Why?
“For dignity, can you stop busting my balls? Why are you even here?” said the cop.
“I could tell you how everything works” said the law.
Look at the pole going through his dome look at him naked hanging there.
Blood splattered coagulated, red not the shade you’d expect
bits of pink not the color you’d think. Dignity he says.
He’s got a pole through his head he’s dead. He lost his dignity when he
tied those shoe laces.When he jumped.
I told the cop why I’m here: “They asked me to help”

Look past the giant finger in the sky, see clearly.
Transport to his room. Why did he decide not to wear clothes?
Look past it this time, look past time, WAIT.
Saw past seeing through the trick only for an instant.
Enough to see. He didn’t wear his pants because a girl was in the pool skinny dipping.
she shouts “Jump, jump, jump!”
Chanting it now, it’s a party and the Jumper, he’s bored.
“Let’s do some drugs, drinks or smoke something” said the jumper.
“Let’s do something sexy, lets skinny dip” that was the girl saying that.
“Sweet I’ll be right back I’m ganna’ jump from the roof!” that was the jumper that time.
“hahha dont do it –dd”
Can’t catch his name something ends it two d’s Teddy? No.
She’s taking off her clothes now there are those tits that defy
gravity. Shame our boy –dd can’t do the same.
“Nah don’t worry I do it ALL the time” said Todd. Todd was his name.
He’s not lying he does do it all the time, sober. He shot guns a beer.

“Jump, jump, jump!”
He jumps. Face free fall.
Shoes tied?
Check
Intoxicated and bored?
Check
Necessary velocity to impale your dome?
Check.

In fact he did not know it but a jump from two feet lower would have
caused him only a concussion to the head. Fate, but that’s boring. I’m
Bored let’s do some drugs lets pass some time let’s make time skip-
Close his eye lids for dignity? He looks like a Shish kabob.
Don’t do it, it’s time to unwind rewind look past the great big Godly
middle finger in the sky where if you have even an ounce of faith, if
you measure faith in ounces because I do not, I measure it in faith
units, you’d take the leap of one faith units. Find out how it all
works.
“JUMP JUMP JUMP”
We jump.