for the same thing twice. You did it.

  What. Didn’t you. Fuck. Fuck. No. That was

  the wrong verb. This is only an abstract noun.

  Havisham

  Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then

  I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it

  so hard I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes,

  ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with.

  Spinster. I stink and remember. Whole days

  in bed cawing Nooooo at the wall; the dress

  yellowing, trembling if I open the wardrobe;

  the slewed mirror, full-length, her, myself, who did this

  to me? Puce curses that are sounds not words.

  Some nights better, the lost body over me,

  my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear

  then down till I suddenly bite awake. Love’s

  hate behind a white veil; a red balloon bursting

  in my face. Bang. I stabbed at a wedding-cake.

  Give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.

  Don’t think it’s only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.

  The Suicide

  Small dark hours with a bitter moon buffed by the smudgy clouds

  till it gleams with resentment.

  I dress in a shroud. Despair

  laced with a little glee.

  Leave it to me.

  Never never never

  never enough.

  The horrid smiling mouths

  pout on the wallpaper. Kisses

  on a collar. Lies. Blood.

  My body is a blank page I will write on.

  Famous.

  Nobody drinks with their whole face.

  I do.

  Nobody’s ears are confessionals.

  Mine are.

  Eyes in the glass like squids. Sexy.

  I get out the knives. Who wants

  a bloody valentine pumping its love hate love?

  Utterly selfless

  I lie back under the lightbulb.

  Something like a cat claws from my head, spiteful.

  Fuck off.

  Worship.

  This will kill my folks.

  Stuffed

  I put two yellow peepers in an owl.

  Wow. I fix the grin of Crocodile.

  Spiv. I sew the slither of an eel.

  I jerk, kick-start, the back hooves of a mule.

  Wild. I hold a red rag to a bull.

  Mad. I spread the feathers of a gull.

  I screw a tight snarl to a weasel.

  Fierce. I stitch the flippers on a seal.

  Splayed. I pierce the heartbeat of a quail.

  I like her to be naked and to kneel.

  Tame. My motionless, my living doll.

  Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell.

  Fraud

  Firstly, I changed my name

  to that of a youth I knew for sure had bought it in 1940, Rotterdam.

  Private M.

  I was my own poem,

  pseudonym,

  rule of thumb.

  What was my aim?

  To change from a bum

  to a billionaire. I spoke the English. Mine was a scam

  involving pensions, papers, politicians in-and-out of their pram.

  And I was to blame.

  For what? There’s a gnome

  in Zürich knows more than people assume.

  There’s a military man, Jerusalem

  way, keeping schtum.

  Then there’s Him –

  for whom

  I paid for a butch and femme

  to make him come.

  And all of the crème

  de la crème

  considered me scum.

  Poverty’s dumb.

  Take it from me, Sonny Jim,

  learn to lie in the mother-tongue of the motherfucker you want to charm.

  They’re all the same,

  turning their wide blind eyes to crime.

  And who gives a damn

  when the keys to a second home

  are pressed in his palm,

  or polaroids of a Night of Shame

  with a Boy on the Game

  are passed his way at the A.G.M.?

  So read my lips. Mo-ney. Pow-er. Fame.

  And had I been asked, in my time,

  in my puce and prosperous prime,

  if I recalled the crumbling slum

  of my Daddy’s home,

  if I was a shit, a sham,

  if I’d done immeasurable harm,

  I could have replied with a dream:

  the water that night was calm

  and with my enormous mouth, in bubbles and blood and phlegm,

  I gargled my name.

  The Biographer

  Because you are dead,

  I stand at your desk,

  my fingers caressing the grooves in the wood

  your initials made;

  and I manage a quote,

  echo one of your lines in the small, blue room

  where an early daguerreotype shows you

  excitedly staring out

  from behind your face,

  the thing that made you yourself

  still visibly there,

  like a hood and a cloak of light.

  The first four words that I write are your name.

  I’m a passionate man

  with a big advance

  who’s loved your work since he was a boy;

  but the night

  I slept alone in your bed,

  the end of a fire going out in the grate,

  I came awake –

  certain, had we ever met,

  you wouldn’t have wanted me,

  or needed me,

  would barely have noticed me at all.

  Guilt and rage

  hardened me then,

  and later I felt your dislike

  chilling the air

  as I drifted away.

  Your wallpaper green and crimson and gold.

  How close can I get

  to the sound of your voice

  which Emma Elizabeth Hibbert described –

  lively, eager and lightly-pitched,

  with none of the later, bitter edge.

  Cockney, a little.

  In London Town,

  the faces you wrote

  leer and gape and plead at my feet.

  Once, high on Hungerford Bridge,

  a stew and tangle of rags, sniffed by a dog, stood, spoke,

  spat at the shadow I cast,

  at the meagre shadow I cast in my time.

  I heard the faraway bells of St Paul’s as I ran.

  Maestro. Monster. Mummy’s Boy.

  My Main Man.

  I write you and write you for five hard years.

  I have an affair with a thespian girl –

  you would have approved –

  then I snivel home to my wife.

  Her poems and jam.

  Her forgiveness.

  Her violent love.

  And this is a life.

  I print it out.

  I print it out.

  In all of your mirrors, my face;

  with its smallish, its quizzical eyes,

  its cheekbones, its sexy jaw,

  its talentless, dustjacket smile.

  The Windows

  How do you earn a life going on

  behind yellow windows, writing at night

  the Latin names of plants for a garden,

  opening the front door to a wet dog?

  Those you love forgive you, clearly,

  with steaming casseroles and red wine.

  It’s the same film down all the suburban streets,

  It’s A Wonderful Life. How do you learn it?

  What you hear – the doorbell’s familiar chime.

  What you touch – the clean, warm towels.

  What you see what you smell what you taste

  all tangible to the stranger passing your gate.

  There you are again, in a room where those early hyacinths

  surely sweeten the air, and the right words wait

  in the dictionaries, on the tip of the tongue you touch

  in a kiss, drawing your crimson curtains now

  against dark hours. And again, in a kitchen,

  the window ajar, sometimes the sound of your radio

  or the scent of your food, and a cat in your arms,

  a child in your arms, a lover. Such vivid flowers.

  Disgrace

  But one day we woke to disgrace; our house

  a coldness of rooms, each nursing

  a thickening cyst of dust and gloom.

  We had not been home in our hearts for months.

  And how our words changed. Dead flies in a web.

  How they stiffened and blackened. Cherished italics

  suddenly sour on our tongues, obscenities

  spraying themselves on the wall in my head.

  Woke to your clothes like a corpse on the floor,

  the small deaths of lightbulbs pining all day

  in my ears, their echoes audible tears;

  nothing we would not do to make it worse

  and worse. Into the night with the wrong language,

  waving and pointing, the shadows of hands

  huge in the bedroom. Dreamed of a naked crawl

  from a dead place over the other; both of us. Woke.

  Woke to the absence of grace; the still-life

  of a meal, untouched, wine-bottle, empty, ashtray,

  full. In our sullen kitchen, the fridge

  hardened its cool heart, selfish as art, hummed.

  To a bowl of apples rotten to the core. Lame shoes

  empty in the hall where our voices asked

  for a message after the tone, the telephone

  pressing its ear to distant, invisible lips.

  And our garden bowing its head, vulnerable flowers

  unseen in the dusk as we shouted in silhouette.

  Woke to the screaming alarm, the banging door,

  the house-plants trembling in their brittle soil. Total

  disgrace. Up in the dark to stand at the window,

  counting the years to arrive there, faithless,

  unpenitent. Woke to the meaningless stars, you

  and me both, lost. Inconsolable vowels from the next room.

  Room

  One chair to sit in,

  a greasy dusk wrong side of the tracks,

  and watch the lodgers’ lights come on in the other rooms.

  No curtains yet. A cool lightbulb

  waiting for a moth. Hard silence.

  The roofs of terraced houses stretch from here to how many months.

  Room. One second-hand bed

  to remind of a death, somewhen. Room.

  Then clouds the colour of smokers’ lungs. Then what.

  In a cold black window, a face

  takes off its glasses and stares out again.

  Night now; the giftless moon and a cat pissing on a wall. £90pw.

  Mean Time

  The clocks slid back an hour

  and stole light from my life

  as I walked through the wrong part of town,

  mourning our love.

  And, of course, unmendable rain

  fell to the bleak streets

  where I felt my heart gnaw

  at all our mistakes.

  If the darkening sky could lift

  more than one hour from this day

  there are words I would never have said

  nor have heard you say.

  But we will be dead, as we know,

  beyond all light.

  These are the shortened days

  and the endless nights.

  Prayer

  Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

  utters itself. So, a woman will lift

  her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

  at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

  Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth

  enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;

  then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth

  in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

  Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales

  console the lodger looking out across

  a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls

  a child’s name as though they named their loss.

  Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –

  Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

  Little Red-Cap

  At childhood’s end, the houses petered out

  into playing fields, the factory, allotments

  kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,

  the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,

  till you came at last to the edge of the woods.

  It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

  He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud

  in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,

  red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears

  he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!

  In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,

  sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

  my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.

  The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,

  away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place

  lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,

  my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer

  snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

  but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,

  breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.

  I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for

  what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?

  Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws

  and went in search of a living bird – white dove –

  which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth.

  One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,

  licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back

  of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.

  Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,

  warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

  But then I was young – and it took ten years

  in the woods to tell that a mushroom

  stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds

  are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf

  howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,

  season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

  to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon

  to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf

  as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw

  the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.

  I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.

  Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

  Thetis

  I shrank myself

  to the size of a bird in the hand

  of a man.

  Sweet, sweet, was the small song

  that I sang,

  till I felt the squeeze of his fist.

  Then I did this:

  shouldered the cross of an albatross

  up the hill of the sky.

  Why? To follow a ship.

  But I felt my wings

  clipped by the squint of a crossbow’s eye.

  So I shopped for a suitable shape.

  Size 8. Snake.

  Big Mistake.

  Coiled in my charmer’s lap,

  I felt the grasp of his strangler’s clasp

  at my nape.

  Next I was roar, claw, 50 lb paw,

  jungle-floored, meateater, raw,

  a zebra’s gore

  in my lower jaw.

  But my gold eye saw

  the guy in the grass with the gun. Twelve-bore.

  I sank through the floor of the earth

  to swim in the sea.

  Mermaid, me, big fish, eel, dolphin,

  whale, the ocean’s opera singer.

  Over the waves the fisherman came

  with his hook and his line and his sinker.

  I changed my tune

  to racoon, skunk, stoat,

  to weasel, ferret, bat, mink, rat.

  The taxidermist sharpened his knives.

  I smelled the stink of formaldehyde.

  Stuff that.

  I was wind, I was gas,

  I was all hot air, trailed

  clouds for hair.

  I scrawled my name with a hurricane,

  when out of the blue

  roared a fighter plane.

  Then my tongue was flame

  and my kisses burned,

  but the groom wore asbestos.

  So I changed, I learned,

  turned inside out – or that’s

  how it felt when the child burst out.

  Queen Herod

  Ice in the trees.

  Three Queens at the Palace gates,

  dressed in furs, accented;

  their several sweating, panting beasts,

  laden for a long, hard trek,

  following the guide and boy to the stables;

  courteous, confident; oh, and with gifts

  for the King and Queen of here – Herod, me –

  in exchange for sunken baths, curtained beds,

  fruit, the best of meat and wine,

  dancers, music, talk –

  as it turned out to be,

  with everyone fast asleep, save me,

  those vivid three –

  till bitter dawn.

  They were wise. Older than I.

  They knew what they knew.

  Once drunken Herod’s head went back,

  they asked to see her,

  fast asleep in her crib,

  my little child.

  Silver and gold,

  the loose change of herself,

  glowed in the soft bowl of her face.

  Grace, said the tallest Queen.

  Strength, said the Queen with the hennaed hands.

  The black Queen

  made a tiny starfish of my daughter’s fist,

  said Happiness; then stared at me,

  Queen to Queen, with insolent lust.

  Watch, they said, for a star in the East –

  a new star

  pierced through the night like a nail.

 

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