Come on Everybody Read online

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

  The crumbling mind.

  There was this astronaut

  And one day he found

  He couldn’t talk

  Any more to the ground.

  The instruments said

  He was stuck for eighty years,

  His helmet began

  To fill up with tears –

  And it was his BIRTHDAY.

  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

  Pain man and fear man and shock man and death man

  The crumbling mind.

  The Only Electrical Crystal Ball I Ever Saw

  Flickering Behind a Bar

  What colour?

  O the colour of an apple in love,

  A tomfool tomato,

  Changing its soft electric moods each second –

  Intimate maps, galactic anatomical charts

  Never to be repeated.

  Well one moment it exploded with every brand of crimson,

  The next it was awash with the blue of peace –

  Ocean, pacific ocean –

  Or became a green place swarmed over by dark canals.

  I said to the man behind the bar:

  Where does it come from?

  He said: I made it myself.

  I was so glad I laughed.

  I said: Where is it going to?

  He laughed.

  Sunset over Venus in a goldfish bowl.

  Silent jukebox with no money-slot

  But pulsing with molten rainbows.

  Belisha beacon drunkenly standing,

  Head back, mouth open,

  Under a hundred-foot-high colourfall

  Of brandy soda crème de menthe

  Sherry-spiked wine of the country

  (Plus a secret formula)

  Flowing from a vat with a fuller draught

  Than the Tuscarora Deep.

  This is no magic melon to solve all our dandruff

  But a small machine for giving.

  It added some light to my happiness.

  It is a good planet.

  I call it the earth.

  My Dog Eats Nuts Too

  (CHEKHOV: The Cherry Orchard)

  The sperm bank manager shoved me up against the rail

  he levelled his gamma ray at my adventure tail

  he said I’ve followed you through fire and flood and firkin

  And you’d better explain just what you think you’re working

  I said:

  I’m not a motivational expert you’d better suppose

  but the trouble is my brain is a long way behind my nose

  I believe in saluting the animals, my motto is dig and have done

  but I spend all my problemofleisure grabbing lots of chinese fun

  having chinese fun

  having chinese fun

  you don’t need a mantelpiece

  when you’re having chinese fun

  He said:

  you’re chewing something terrible, show us your expectoration

  so I banged the spittoon with western civilisation

  he clamped me with his grabbers and shook me till my steeple rung

  tell me what’s so special he said about chinese fun

  having chinese fun

  having chinese fun

  happy as the hebrides

  when I’m having chinese fun

  I said:

  it moves like a leopard on ice cubes

  glows like hot molasses

  its a shady bank by the old gulf stream

  and there’s masses and masses and masses for the masses

  giggles every time that it tries to be sensible

  striped with sex well it’s highly reprehensible

  but I’ll bring you a cut of it only costs a dollar a ton

  and you’ll feel like a Zen Gun once you’ve tasted chinese fun

  having chinese fun

  having chinese fun

  take the moon and rub it all over the surface of the sun

  and you’ll turn in your badge

  when you’ve had some chinese fun

  He tried it.

  He liked it.

  He said: thank you.

  A Spell to Make a Good Time Last

  Walk with your lover through a doorway

  Walk with your lover through the maytime sunlight

  Walk with your lover by a lake

  The past is a stone for playing ducks and drakes

  The stone is lying at your feet

  Skim the stone away across the lake

  The future is a stone for playing ducks and drakes

  The stone is lying at your feet

  Skim the stone away across the lake

  Lie down beside the water

  Lie down beside your lover

  Lie down beside the water

  Lie down beside your lover

  A Spell to Make a Bad Hour Pass

  Unfold your hand

  Place all of the bad minutes in a circle

  In the palm of your hand

  Close your fingers slowly

  To form a gentle fist

  Slowly turn your fist around

  And let your eyes pass slowly

  Over all the surface of your fist

  Slowly turn your fist around

  And let your lips pass slowly

  Over all the surface of your fist

  Slowly

  Tighten your fingers

  Slowly

  Tighten your fist

  The fist is clenched

  All the bad minutes are inside it

  The fist is clenched

  This evil hour is vanishing

  Slowly slowly

  Unfold the fingers of your hand

  The palm of your hand is empty

  Rest the back of your hand

  Upon your other hand

  Look into the palm of your hand

  Look deep into your hand

  Your hand is full

  Your hand is full

  Your hand is full of life

  A Curse on My Former Bank Manager

  May your computer twitch every time it remembers money

  until the twitches mount and become a mechanical ache

  and may the ache increase until the tapes begin to scream

  and may the pus of data burst from its metal skin

  and just before the downpour of molten aluminium

  may you be preening in front of your computer

  and may you be saying to your favourite millionaire

  yes it cost nine hundred thousand but it repays every penny

  and may the hundred-mile tape which records my debts spring out

  like a supersonic two-dimensional boa-constrictor

  and may it slip under your faultless collar and surround your hairless neck

  and may it tighten and tighten until it has repaid everything I owe you

  A Song for Jerry Slattery and His Family

  Here’s your life, Jerry, they said, go out and spend it –

  So he lumbered out into the world and saw that it was good

  But could be a darn sight better, but he began to enjoy himself

  After first making sure that everyone between him and the horizon

  Had a drink in their hand and somebody to talk to…

  Surgery: fifty monologues a day, nervous, desperate.

  Listen. Advise. Listen. Refer. Listen. Sign a little note.

  The troubles of others cascaded through his mind

  While his round eyes said I understand yes I understand

  As he cared, and comforted, and cured.

  Then home to throw the same old wonderful party,

  Greeting you by hallooing your name twice t
hen what are you having,

  Drawing you into the corner between fireplace and window

  To let you in on a joke against the Tories

  Or declare his worship for The Balkan Trilogy or the Cameron column.

  A one-man scrum shoving boredom off the pitch and out through the turnstile.

  A one-man Ireland swallowing his sorrows and sharing out his joys.

  A one-man summertime for friends among whom he was famous,

  He lives in all who loved him, and may we spend our lives

  As generously as Jerry, as generously as Johnnie.

  Funnyhouse of a Negro

  (for Adrienne Kennedy)

  A head

  beating against a wall

  A beautiful head

  beating against a wall

  The beautiful head of a woman

  beating against a wall

  The beautiful head of a woman with her wrists and ankles chained

  beating against a wall

  A million beautiful heads

  beating against a wall

  And the first brick is shaken loose

  topples

  and begins to fall

  A Curse Against Intruders

  (Written after the house of Cicely Smith, the poet, and Ian Herbert, the clarinettist, was robbed by a knife-wielding thug)

  Burglar-bungler

  Ransom-ransacker

  Thug-unhugged-mugger

  Orchestra attacker

  You who tread maliciously

  Into this good Herbertry

  Your nerves shall be torn into raffia,

  Done most debilitating, grievous harm

  And this not through some magic Mafia

  Roused by this spell’s clanging alarm

  But through a slow, gyrating, spiral curse

  The which shall corkscrew up you, verse by verse,

  Till you’ll wish you rode your own hearse –

  (I’ll soon be hoarse, so I’ll be terse) –

  A mumping thumping curse and worse

  Fall on your heart, that bulged-with-poison purse.

  You, Scowler with the Knife, may gulp

  Before you slash a clarinettist’s hands.

  Behind you a rock-wielding poet stands

  Ready to crush you into dismal pulp.

  Piss off! Piss off you fart-filled fool!

  Your arteries I’ll use for wool

  And when I’ve plained them and I’ve purled

  You’ll be right knitted up, then hurled

  Into the Dustbin of the Universe.

  These are the best people in the world

  And you had better never ever trouble them

  Or I’ll take your worst scares and double them

  And I’ll take your best hopes and rubble them.

  For Gordon Snell – My Best, First and Finest Friend – on His Fiftieth Birthday

  ‘By and by they all are dead’ – stage direction at the end of an early play by Gordon Snell, writer for grown-ups and children. ‘By and by is easily said’ – Hamlet in Hamlet, a part once played by Gordon Snell.

  By and by they all are dead –

  The people, animals, earth and sky.

  By and by is easily said.

  Any child who has ever read

  Knows that Book People cannot die.

  By and by they all are dead?

  Peter Rabbit’s still raiding the potting shed

  Under Long John Silver’s laser eye.

  By and by is easily said,

  But Alice and the Golux tread

  Emerald Oz where the Jumblies fly.

  By and by they all are dead?

  Lorna Doone and Just William wed

  Where The Wild Things Are with Harriet the Spy.

  By and by is easily said…

  Gordon – the creatures your fancy has bred

  Shall live with them – that’s the sweet By-and-By!

  By and by they all are dead?

  By and by is easily said!

  My Parents

  My father died the other day and I would like to write about him. Because I think of them together, this means also writing about my mother, who died several years ago.

  About a thousand people called her Kay, most of them people she helped at some time, for she was what chintzy villains call a ‘do-gooder’. Nobody ever called her that to her face or in my family’s hearing; if they had, she’d have felt sorry for them. Both her brothers were killed in the First World War. She wore two poppies on Remembrance Day. She divided her life between loving her family, bullying or laughing innumerable committees into action rather than talk, giving, plotting happiness for other people, and keeping up an exuberant correspondence with several hundred friends.

  She was not afraid of anyone. She was right. A Fabian near-pacifist, she encouraged me to argue, assuming right-wing positions sometimes so that I was forced to fight and win the discussion.

  She tried to hoist the whole world on her shoulders. After each of her first two cancer operations, on her breasts, she seemed to clench her fists and double the energy with which she gave. She wasn’t interested in unshared pleasure.

  After the second operation she answered the door one day to a poor woman whom she didn’t know. The woman asked where ‘the wise woman’ lived. My mother knew who she meant – a rich clairvoyant who lived down the road. Not trusting that particular witch, my mother asked what was wrong. The poor woman’s doctor had told her that she must have a breast removed, and she was very scared. My mother said, but there’s nothing to that, look – and she took out the two rolled socks which she kept in her empty brassière and threw them up into the sunlight and then caught them again. So the poor woman came in, drank tea, talked, forgot many fears, and went away knowing that she had seen the wise woman.

  People called my father Jock. Face tanned from working in his garden, he survived the trenches of the First World War. He spoke very little. When he talked it was either very funny or very important. He only spoke to me about his war twice, and then briefly. In my teens I wrote a short, Owen-influenced poem about that war. My father read it, then told me of a friend who, during the lull between bombardments, fell to all fours, howled like an animal and was never cured.

  Usually he avoided company. There was something in other people which frightened him. He was right. At the seaside he would sit on the farthest-out rock and fish peacefully. When visitors called at our house he would generally disappear into his jungle of raspberry canes and lurk.

  Maybe there were twenty or thirty people in the world whose company he really enjoyed. They were lucky; he was a lovely man. Like Edward Lear, he was most at his ease with children, who instantly read, in the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes, that this was a man who understood their games and jokes.

  He was short and lean and had fantastic sprouting Scottish eyebrows. He was a research chemist, but that didn’t mean he only took an interest and pride in my elder brother’s scientific work. He let me see how glad he was that I wrote, and I still remember the stories he used to write for me and my brother.

  A year or so before he died he was in London for the day. My father sometimes voted Tory, sometimes Liberal, but when he began to talk about Vietnam that day, his face became first red and then white with anger about the cruelty and stupidity of the war. I seldom saw him angry and never so angry as at that moment, a man of seventy, not much interested in politics, all the grief of 1914-18 marching back into his mind.

  People sometimes talk as if the ideological conflicts between generations have to be fought out bloodily, as if it is inevitable that children should grow to hate their parents. I don’t believe this. Our family was lucky: my brother and I were always free to choose for ourselves – knowing that, however odd our decisions, we were trusted and loved. We all loved one another and this love was never shadowed.

  Taming a Wild Garden

  (for Celia, 5 April 1978)

  I peck away with my pick-axe beak
/>   To break the crust of builders’ concrete

  And let the ground of our garden breathe.

  I rake away cream-coloured crumbs

  And there’s the brown earth

  I never spend long enough learning from.

  There’s the brown earth

  I never spent long enough loving.

  My brown-faced tabby cruises by.

  I bend to stroke her as she goes.

  My chest warms.

  My brown-faced father

  Who loved his garden and several cats,

  Smiles inside my heart.

  One More Customer Satisfied

  He staggered through the cities moaning for melons:

  ‘Green melons streaked with yellow!

  Yellow melons tinged with green!

  Don’t try to fool me. They fooled me before

  With tie-dyed green-and-yellow footballs

  And the breasts of yellow women, green-tinted nipples…’

  In his yellow rage and his green longing

  He rolled himself into a melon-shaped heap of hopelessness

  Crying out: ‘Melons! Bring out your melons!’

  So they took a million melons to Cape Kennedy,

  Scooped them out, filled them with green and yellow paint

  And splattered them all over the bright side of the moon.