Come on Everybody Read online

  * * *

  Confession

  Of course I’ve been corrupted by publicity

  A friendly journalist once likened me to Bogart

  And I took to exposing my upper teeth when I smiled at enemies

  Several years later I was in a theatre

  At the same time as Lauren Bacall

  And she was so beautiful I could only look at her for two seconds

  And that was enough,

  Sam, that was plenty.

  Self-Congratulating, Self-Deprecating, Auto-Destructive Blues

  If you’re betting on the horses, you know you’ve got to follow form

  Got to vet up on the set-up and get up and bet on form,

  I was losing losing losing before I was even born.

  You may come from Venezuela, but I was born on Mars,

  Venice or Venus or Venezuela, but I was raised on Mars,

  I’ve got a head full of meteorites, heart full of little green children

  and balls full of shooting stars.

  So if you want a good investment, better not buy me.

  I’m on the edge of the ledge and I’m not gilt-edge so your broker will

  advise I’m a joker so get wise and don’t buy me.

  Some men are like insurance, but I’m more like – suck it and see.

  I Passed for Sane

  If I’d been born without a mind

  I would be happy, tame and kind.

  People came, saying good things.

  So many people, saying good things.

  I hid my eyes under my skin

  And so they never saw right in.

  Sometimes I Feel Like a Childless Mother

  My hands shake, my eyelids tremble.

  The tigers in my head assemble.

  The Institution

  The crazy talkers in my head

  Steal lights and moments when they can;

  Beat at the windows to be fed

  Or listen to the sounds of rain.

  They stroll, they shout at passing Man,

  And in extremes they form a plan

  To drown at night, or catch a train.

  Simple as glass, they wander through

  The colours of my twenty years

  Singing and whispering the true

  And false of all my private cares;

  Inflated songs that shrink to fears.

  My chest is thick, so no one hears

  The lovely mute who kicks and tears…

  A Slow Boat to Trafalgar

  I was born in a country called Bloody Strange

  With the means of seduction, prostitution and derange

  I was red all through and I was raw on top

  I had a billion megatons and nowhere to drop

  I was a suitable case

  A suitable case

  A suitable case for

  Urgghh.

  Married ten times to the gulp next door

  She was twenty to virgin and half past whore

  We had a mini monster and we called him Meat

  And he sucked our cold sweat through a teat

  He was a suitable case

  A suitable case

  A suitable case for

  Aaragghh.

  Martian mother and Venusian father

  But I tadpoled out of the shaving lather

  Here come the State chewing Gandhi on toast

  Send your subscriptions to the Rolly-Poly Ghost

  He’s an accusable suit

  An unstable goose

  A two-sable sake for

  Raarhh.

  A Machine That Makes Love and Poems and Mistakes

  The whirring stops, the door in my chest

  Slides open. Fatty squeezes out

  Smiling like silver. An airliner staircase

  Appears under his first step. He podges down

  Applauding himself with padded palms.

  Next Jagged, wearing his frayed-wire suit,

  Scales my legs, jerks through the door and pulls

  My starting handle. Thought-gears grind.

  He’s muddled, pressing all my buttons

  Too hard. Not hard enough. His blood is caffeine.

  He exits limping, gladly. Then he flops

  Prone on the tarmac, hiding his splintered eyes.

  His place is taken. This one’s a prodigy,

  A milk-faced boy of five who sings to himself

  As he tries to play tunes with knobs and levers.

  I’ve got other mechanics. Sometimes they fight

  Over my delicate controls. They strike,

  Or try to make me fly. They blow my fuses.

  Just now I didn’t answer. You caught me between shifts.

  Ask again now. Someone will answer you.

  Toy Stone

  I dived and found it.

  A wedge of stone,

  Grey mixed with the mauve

  Of sky before snow.

  Flakes of crystal

  Shining among its mineral clouds.

  Now and again I look at the stone,

  Convert it into the relief map

  Of a nude island or the night sky.

  Or use it as a racquet

  For bouncing light into my eyes.

  Today I took it with my eyes shut.

  Turning the stone between my hands

  I learned

  That it shares the shape and weight

  Of a small pistol.

  Now it has a barrel,

  A chamber and a butt.

  Held by the barrel, it could be used

  To bash almost anything to death.

  Stone-shine is in my head,

  But so is the killing weight of the stone.

  Toy stone, weapon stone.

  I will keep it.

  Unfulfilled Suicide Note

  because there is a golden plastic arrow on the desk in front of me

  because my stomach is heavy and drags downwards

  because I cannot find anything

  because I cannot understand anything

  because I am afraid of everyone

  because there is a small amount of snow on the ground outside

  And Some Lemonade Too

  Drinking gin eating curry

  That’s my second favourite game

  Begin feeling hollow

  Then you sip and swallow

  Till they start to taste about the same

  Well gin got a bite

  Curry got a burn

  Try to teach your tongue to take them in turn

  Drinking gin eating curry

  Shoobi doobi wah wah

  Drinking gin eating curry

  Feeling my way to my ease

  When the curry was dead

  The gin hit my head

  Till I fell down on my knees

  Curry’s ambrosia

  Gin is the elixir

  I am the champion concrete-mixer

  Eating gin drinking curry

  Shoobi doobi wah wah

  Drinking gin eating curry

  Gulped down all my trouble

  Spent a magical sleep

  In a happy old heap

  And woke up with chutney-flavour alcohol stubble

  Took a look at heaven

  Took a look at hell

  Reckoned I fancied them equally well

  Sinking gin and beating curry

  Wah wah shoobi doobi wah wah wah

  It’s a Clean Machine

  (to the Beatles and Albert Hunt)

  A cop needs a gangster, gangsters need cops,

  Fire against fire and it never stops,

  But I don’t want a fire, I’ve got underskin heating

  Thank you.

  They know what we’re afraid of:

  Soundproof cellars, rhinoceros hide,

  Genital electrodes, kneecap sledgehammers,

  The moment when they take off your shoes –

  All of the commonplace terrors.

  But I won’t name my own special f
ears,

  Thank you.

  I have been a one-man band to the galaxies over Bradford

  As I skated over the rust-coloured pavements singing:

  Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me

  A four-legged friend, a four-legged friend, he’ll never let you down.

  Oh you can knock me down, stamp on my face, slander my name all over the place

  But we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when –

  There is a laughing policeman, lives along our street,

  You can hear him laughing, when he’s on the beat –

  Oh R, I say R-A,

  R-A-T, R-A-T-T,

  R-A-T-T-F, R-A-T-T-F-I-N-K,

  Ratfink (brawawa) Ratfink (brawawa),

  Mona Lisa Mona Lisa men have named you

  So squeeze my lemon baby till the juice runs down my leg –

  Singing dangerously

  As I bulged with the dynamite sticks of love.

  They never caught me yet, but they keep trying.

  It happens every day.

  I’m standing down the lavatory end

  Of a shadow-inhabited bar

  When in walks the winter gangster-cop

  And everyone he passes is gripped by his metal hand

  And they wince as the grip tightens

  And their faces sag as the grip relaxes.

  The loudspeaker says:

  An invitation to the glittering world of Robert Farnon –

  Then he acts.

  His icicles focus on my eyes.

  Capone or Fabian, he yawns.

  His iced knees, like car bumpers,

  persuade me to the glittering pavement

  Where his wide-shouldered Mercedes waits to eat me.

  So far, so bad.

  But they never warned him at headquarters,

  They never told him the end of the story,

  They never told him the way it always ends.

  For here they come, sudden surrounders,

  All of them laughing, all around us,

  The gentle, fire-fighting cavalry,

  House-high on ladders, crouched to hydrants,

  Flashing their scarlet down the boulevard,

  Hoses jumping with the pressure of water from

  A thousand Welsh waterfalls, a hundred thousand lochs,

  Aiming their polished, jerking nozzles –

  And here I wish I could record all of their names but they know who they are, the men and women and children I love and those who love me and may the two lists always coincide –

  All my friends, crimson, helmeted, hatchet-holstered.

  Their hoses slosh him down slush-flushing gutters and:

  I’m sorry Adrian, I’m sorry, he drizzles,

  I didn’t know you were a member of the Fire Brigade.

  The Sun Likes Me

  ‘The sun likes me’ – Spanish way of saying ‘I like the sun’

  The sun likes me.

  Maybe I’ve been lying out in the Mayakovsky too long.

  Maybe my mind’s been a breast-stroke commuter between London and

  New York too long.

  Maybe I’ve been longing too long.

  The sun likes me.

  Maybe it’s because my dynamic tension comic-strip bible hath taught me that it’s better to kick sand into the sunlight and watch how it shimmers than kick it in a twenty-stone muscleman’s face.

  And maybe it’s because my atoms won’t stand still because they want to rock and roll all over the place –

  But she taught me to say it.

  I was near enough to lick her

  And I licked her like the sun licks me and

  WOW

  She was a buxom anchovy.

  Through both our sunrise sunset bodies I heard her say:

  ‘Repeat it after me –

  The sun likes me.’

  So I said it (and I believe it):

  The sun likes me.

  I woke up full of business.

  After a two-day year at the Registry of Companies I discovered that a 61 per cent majority on the board of the sun was held by a holding company (Sol Investments) represented by Phoebus Nominees who were nominated by a legalistic fabrication called Icarus Consolidation half-immersed in liquidation.

  And the only stockholder –

  Thanks to Auntie Irma’s will –

  The only stockholder

  Was ME.

  I seem to have changed.

  The sun likes me.

  I’m indifferent.

  The sun doesn’t like me.

  See if I care.

  For like it or lump it,

  I own it.

  Last week I found I’d left my Barclaycard in Das Kapital but when the bill came round I simply reached into my asbestos wallet, produced the aforesaid golden disc or orb and you should have seen the faces of the waiters or their feet for that matter as they blushed to the colour of burnt semolina –

  Because I own the sun,

  The only one.

  Mine, mine,

  Sixty-one per cent of it,

  MINE.

  Self Critic

  who is it trips me in the jig?

  she wears a cast-iron dress

  and growls because i can’t recall her name –

  my heavy-heartedness.

  it’s Radio 2, it’s after-flu,

  it’s the Water Board’s statement to the Press,

  it’s the sonic boom above the toothache room –

  my heavy-heartedness.

  got a weighty parcel shaped like awkwardness

  wrapped in slippery plastic stuff.

  trying to get my hands to clasp around it

  but my arms aren’t quite lengthy enough.

  everybody thinks i’m carrying a bomb

  but it’s a book from a beautiful press.

  oh the rain gets chiller and the buses get fuller

  and the forecast – heavy-heartedness.

  who’s that extra-awful character in my plays

  from the SS Officer’s Mess

  who makes hour-long speeches that you can’t quite hear?

  my heavy-heartedness.

  so if I sink in the drink and sing Sentimental Journey

  and then clown and fall down in a mess,

  i’m just trying to kick that gangster out of my soul –

  my heavy-heartedness.

  Adrian Mitchell’s Famous Weak Bladder Blues

  Now some praise God because he gave us the bomb to drop in 1945

  But I thank the Lord for equipping me with the fastest cock alive.

  You may think a sten-gun’s frequent, you can call greased lightning fast,

  But race them down to the Piccadilly bog and watch me zooming past.

  Well it’s excuse me,

  And I’ll be back.

  Door locked so ra-a-tat-tat.

  You mind if I go first?

  I’m holding this cloudburst.

  I’ll be out in 3.7 seconds flat.

  I’ve got the Adamant Trophy, the Niagara Cup, you should see me on the M1 run,

  For at every comfort station I’ve got a reputation for – doing the ton.

  Once I met that Speedy Gonzales and he was first through the door.

  But I was unzipped, let rip, zipped again and out before he could even draw.

  Now God killed John Lennon and he let Barry Manilow survive,

  But the good Lord blessed little Adrian Mitchell with the fastest cock alive.

  A Ballad of Human Nature

  The Buddha sat on a banana crate

  Sunning his mind in the shade,

  Trying to imagine Aggressive,

  Trying to imagine Afraid.

  A man staggered up to the Buddha,

  He was horrified and thin.

  He was hacking with a knife at his body,

  Paring his own skin.

  The Buddha said: ‘Be kind to yourself.’

  The thin man lowered his knife;


  Then he said, as his blood ran into the earth:

  ‘Where’ve you been all your life?

  ‘You know, you can’t change human nature just like that.

  I once saw it proved in a book by a scientist’s rat.

  We’re jellies shaking with atavistic greed.

  You can’t change human nature – you may as well bleed.’

  This Friend

  I’ve got this friend you see and it was the Cuba crisis and the voices were telling him that there was a plot to set the world on fire and so he shook his way round London lurching deliberately into policemen so they took him in and they knocked out his front teeth and all the time they were knocking out his front teeth they were calling him SIR and after he had been in Brixton for a week or maybe more he doesn’t remember they decided he was mad.

  This friend now carries a certificate which guarantees that he is schizophrenic.

  Birthdays

  (for Ray Charles)

  You shout that you’re drowning,

  You give it everything.

  A manager walks by and says:

  ‘That little cat can sing.’

  You go to bed mad

  And you think that’s bad

  But what you going to do

  When you wake up mad?

  There’ll be no more birthdays.

  I’m talking about

  Pain man and fear man and shock man and death man,

  Not the Hollywood kind.

  I’m talking about

  Man made of bone made of wood made of stone

  By some Frankenstein.

  Talking about