Come on Everybody Read online

Glances round the bar like a rector in church

  Then she points one finger like a sensitive gun

  And another guy topples to Sally Hit-and-Run.

  Holiday Inn, Room three hundred and three,

  Sally got him wrapped around the colour TV!

  She shakes him and she bangs him like a tambourine,

  Then she spreads him on the carpet like margarine.

  Up comes the dawn – Sally’s gone like a dream

  Riding Inter-City drinking coffee and cream

  Guy’s left counting up the things he’s done

  Trying to give his goodness to Sally Hit-and-Run.

  Dear Sir

  I have read your Manifesto with great interest but it

  says nothing about singing.

  English Scene

  You sit at a table with two other men

  Your left wrist slants in front of your throat

  Your right incisors chew the nail on your left little finger

  Your right index fingernail ploughs across the grain of the tabletop

  You are nervous, obviously

  You are right to be nervous, obviously

  The man on one side of you has less money than you

  He wants your money

  The man on the other side of you has more money than you

  He wants your money

  Your left arm protects your throat

  They usually go for the throat

  Under Photographs of Two Party Leaders, Smiling

  These two smiled so the photographer

  Could record their smiles

  FOR YOU

  As they smiled these smiles

  They were thinking all the time

  OF YOU

  They smile on the rich

  They smile on the poor

  They smile on the victim in his village

  They smile on the killer in his cockpit

  Yes, Mummy and Daddy

  Are smiling, smiling

  AT YOU

  please try to smile back.

  Saw It in the Papers

  Her baby was two years old.

  She left him, strapped in his pram, in the kitchen.

  She went out.

  She stayed with friends.

  She went out drinking.

  The baby was hungry.

  Nobody came.

  The baby cried.

  Nobody came.

  The baby tore at the upholstery of his pram.

  Nobody came.

  She told the police:

  ‘I thought the neighbours would hear him crying,

  and report it to someone who would come

  and take him away.’

  Nobody came.

  The baby died of hunger.

  She said she’d arranged for a girl,

  whose name she couldn’t remember,

  to come and look after the baby

  while she stayed with friends.

  Nobody saw the girl.

  Nobody came.

  Her lawyer said there was no evidence

  of mental instability.

  But the man who promised to marry her

  went off with another woman.

  And when he went off, this mother changed

  from a mother who cared for her two-year-old baby

  into a mother who did not seem to care at all.

  There was no evidence of mental instability.

  The Welfare Department spokesman said:

  ‘I do not know of any plans for an inquiry.

  We never become deeply involved.’

  Nobody came.

  There was no evidence of mental instability.

  When she was given love

  she gave love freely to her baby.

  When love was torn away from her

  she locked her love away.

  It seemed that no one cared for her.

  She seemed to stop caring.

  Nobody came.

  There was no evidence of mental instability.

  Only love can unlock locked-up-love.

  Manslaughter: She pleaded Guilty.

  She was sentenced to be locked up

  in prison for four years.

  Is there any love in prisons?

  She must have been in great pain.

  There is love in prisons.

  There is great love in prisons.

  A man in Gloucester Prison told me:

  ‘Some of us care for each other.

  Some of us don’t.

  Some of us are gentle,

  some are brutal.

  All kinds.’

  I said: ‘Just the same as people outside.’

  He nodded twice,

  and stared me in the eyes.

  What she did to him was terrible.

  There was no evidence of mental instability.

  What was done to her was terrible.

  There is no evidence of mental instability.

  Millions of children starve, but not in England.

  What we do not do for them is terrible.

  Is England’s love locked up in England?

  There is no evidence of mental instability.

  Only love can unlock locked-up love.

  Unlock all of your love.

  You have enough for this woman.

  Unlock all of your love.

  You have enough to feed all those millions of children.

  Cry if you like.

  Do something if you can. You can.

  Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow to Anybody

  1 Patriotic

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  I didn’t lay down my life in World War II

  so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow.

  2 Snobbish

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  Unfortunately Samuel Beckett is using it.

  3 Overweening

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  It is too mighty a conveyance to be wielded

  by any mortal save myself.

  4 Pious

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  My wheelbarrow is reserved for religious ceremonies.

  5 Melodramatic

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  I would sooner be broken on its wheel

  and buried in its barrow.

  6 Pathetic

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  I am dying of schizophrenia

  and all you can talk about is wheelbarrows.

  7 Defensive

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  Do you think I’m made of wheelbarrows?

  8 Sinister

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  It is full of blood.

  9 Lecherous

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  Only if I can fuck your wife in it.

  10 Philosophical

  May I borrow your wheelbarrow?

  What is a wheelbarrow?

  Vroomph! or The Popular Elastic Waist

  (A cut-up of sentences from the Sunday Times Colour Magazine of 9 December 1967, which featured Civil Defence, Famous Footballers, The Girls of Thailand, Gangsters, and several advertisements.)

  Juliet sighs. Romeo speaks.

  Deep shelters are out of most people’s reach.

  The white tin is a simple gadget for pinpointing the size and position of nuclear bursts.

  Simply push the needle in, pump the handle, and

  You haven’t seen anything till you’ve seen the 200 pounds of beautiful Louise

  Tucked away in the secret, hardened, national seat of government,

  Or balanced on bicycles while removing 12 shirts.

  Yet, even when we made love, at a time when most

  women are feeling romantic, she would start to

  prattle away about

  The Royal State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry.

  Stimulated by these breaks in the nuclear overcast,

  the Sunday Times here offers what i
s probably the

  first complete review of our Civil Defence

  preparations,

  A symbol of the virile, aggressive, muscular game which

  one associates with a man who has twice broken the

  same leg – and twice returned to the game.

  This is the problem: whether to drink Cointreau neat

  and slowly savour every warming sip,

  Or hang from the tops of palm trees by our feet.

  While we have the bomb it seems ridiculous not to be honest.

  It works like this: the motor is powered by ordinary torch batteries.

  The slightly wounded will be sent on their way, the severely wounded left to

  The Marquis de Ferrara.

  Fill out the Panic Sheet.

  Neither the Sunday Times nor its agents accepts any liability for loss or

  The gruesome electric chair.

  You see, we are unashamedly devoted to the kind

  of quiet courtesy

  which gets rarer

  every

  day.

  Leaflets

  (for Brian Patten and my twelve students at Bradford)

  Outside the plasma supermarket

  I stretch out my arm to the shoppers and say:

  ‘Can I give you one of these?’

  I give each of them a leaf from a tree.

  The first shopper thanks me.

  The second puts the leaf in his mack pocket where his wife won’t see.

  The third says she is not interested in leaves. She looks like a mutilated willow.

  The fourth says: ‘Is it art?’ I say that it is a leaf.

  The fifth looks through his leaf and smiles at the light beyond.

  The sixth hurls down his leaf and stamps it till dark purple mud oozes through.

  The seventh says she will press it in her album.

  The eighth complains that it is an oak leaf and says he would be on my side if

  I were also handing out birch leaves, apple leaves, privet leaves and larch leaves.

  I say that it is a leaf.

  The ninth takes the leaf carefully and then, with a backhand fling, gives it its freedom.

  It glides, following surprise curving alleys through the air.

  It lands. I pick it up.

  The tenth reads both sides of the leaf twice and then says: Yes, but it doesn’t say who we should kill.’

  But you took your leaf like a kiss.

  They tell me that, on Saturdays,

  You can be seen in your own city centre

  Giving away forests, orchards, jungles.

  The Obliterating Prizes

  A gruesome occurrence fell on me once

  When I was a sammy at oxford

  They chose me to be the college’s dunce

  O I was the lubber of oxford

  A conical hat they plunked on my head

  Those grievous old gories in oxford

  With a D for Dunce wrote upon it in red

  Yes I was downderried at oxford

  Now underbred dunderheads romp round the town

  Through the blithering weather of oxford

  Each wears a gold cap and a silvery gown

  Each moocher but adrian in oxford

  And I cautiously watch their regalia flap

  As I stand in the corner in oxford

  For now I’ve been wearing that overhead hat

  For twenty dark blue years of oxford

  Ode to Enoch Powell

  The vulture is an honest man

  He offers no apology

  But snaps the fingers from the hand

  And chews them with sincerity

  Birmingham Council are bidding for the Berlin Wall.

  There’s swastikas sprouting in the ground round Bradford Town Hall

  Callaghan and Thatcher are dancing cheek to cheek –

  Everybody getting ready for Kindness to Vultures Week

  The vulture is a gentleman

  He does not stoop to kill

  But watches murders from a height

  Then drops to eat his fill

  The Press is so excited that the Press can hardly speak

  There’s red stuff dripping from the corner of the Telegraph’s beak.

  You can say that white is right but it looks like black is bleak

  Everybody getting ready for Kindness to Vultures Week.

  The vulture is a Christian man

  Goes to church on Sunday

  Prays to God to give him strength

  To tear a corpse on Monday…

  But when Mr Enoch Powell

  Emigrates from this life

  And the media forget to mention

  That his tongue was a poison knife

  When they lay him out in state

  With a lipstick job

  And an aura of after-shave

  And twenty-one guns have farted Goodbye –

  We’ll dance on the bugger’s grave

  Dance on the earth that’s hotter than his life

  His blood was chilled

  Dance to the music of the human beings

  That liar killed

  We’ll stomp – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Stomp – 7, 8, 9, 10.

  Yes we’ll stomp all night till the soil’s right tight

  So Enoch never rises again.

  The Blackboard

  Five foot by five foot,

  (The smalls have measured it.)

  Smooth black surface,

  (Wiped by a small after every class.)

  Five different colours of chalk

  And a class of thirty-five smalls,

  One big.

  Does the big break up the chalk

  Into thirty-five or thirty-six

  And invite the smalls to make

  A firework show of colours

  Shapes and words

  Starting on the blackboard

  But soon overflowing

  All over the room

  All over the school

  All over the town

  All over the country

  All over the world?

  No.

  The big looks at the textbook

  Which was written by a big

  And published by a big.

  The textbook says

  The names and dates of Nelson’s battles.

  So the big writes, in white,

  Upon the black of the blackboard,

  The names and dates of Nelson’s battles.

  The smalls copy into their books

  The names and dates of Nelson’s battles.

  Nelson was a big

  Who died fighting for freedom or something.

  Question Time in Ireland

  1. If the Devil had used all his ingenuity to damn Ireland, could he have invented a more devastating trinity than the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Church and the English Houses of Parliament?

  2. Why is it possible to withdraw from India, Kenya and Aden – but impossible to withdraw from Ireland?

  3. Did Jesus say: Blessed are the poor, for they shall tear each others’ throats out? Blessed are the rich, for they shall watch the tearing out of the throats and shall place bets upon the outcome?

  4. What’s wrong with torture in a good cause so long as it’s not reported on television?

  5. What is the answer to the English Question?

  The Savage Average

  I feel like a little girl of six

  In a school built of two hundred thousand bricks

  And every day, in the purple playground,

  One child is chosen and killed by the other children.

  Loose Leaf Poem

  (This is a diary of good and bad things, mostly for friends and allies but with a few sections for enemies as well. It was written in a peaceful room with a view of the Yorkshire Dales. In reading it aloud, I often change the order of sections, talk in between sections and leave out any part which doesn’t seem relevant at the time.)

  *
r />   There was a child danced with a child

  The music stopped

  *

  I stopped reading The Wretched of the Earth

  Because you cannot read it all the time.

  My stomach felt like outer space.

  The sunday papers all sounded

  Like bidders in a slave market.

  I ate rapidly, alone,

  Because I couldn’t sit and eat with anyone,

  Or look at anyone.

  I glanced into the television’s eye.

  it was both bright and blind.

  I was full of useless tears.

  I did not use them

  *

  Who was the hooligan who ripped off all your skin, madam?

  The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

  *

  Below my window, a stone wall begins,

  swerves past a tree, drags its weight

  upwards, almost collides with a second tree,

  breaks for a gate, resumes,

  and skitters over the horizon.

  I watch the way it rides,

  blonde stone in the blonde light of Yorkshire.