Come on Everybody Read online

*

  Are you bored by pictures of burning people?

  You will be bored to death.

  They did the dying.

  You did nothing.

  Not a gesture, not a word, not a breath,

  Not a flicker of one line of your face.

  You said: There is nothing I can do.

  As you said it you seemed so proud.

  *

  There was a wretched danced with a wretched

  The music began to burn.

  *

  In the chapel-cold porridge of fear

  Crouched the spirit of Edward Lear

  Through the hole in his head

  His agony bled

  Till he changed to a Whale

  And spouted a hail –

  Cholomondley Champagne and the best Babylonian Beer.

  *

  To Ian Hamilton and A. Alvarez, Poetry Reviewers –

  Get your blue hands

  off the hot skin of poetry

  *

  (to dogmatic men and automatic dogs)

  I’m an entrist, centrist, Pabloite workerist

  – Sweet Fourth International and never been kissed,

  I’ve got a mass red base that’s why I’d rather sit on the floor,

  If you want to be a vanguard, better join Securicor.

  My daddy was opportunistic

  My mama was mystified

  I want to be a movement

  But there’s no one on my side…

  NO REVOLUTION WITHOUT COMPASSION

  NO REVOLUTION WITHOUT COMPASSION

  *

  Never look out

  You might see something bigger than you

  Never go out

  You might get your iambics dirty

  Wine is a river

  Flowing down to sleep

  So climb in the boat

  With your legitimate wife

  No sharks No storms

  No underwater explosions

  Never look out

  The sun might punch you in the eye –

  Say home.

  *

  I pulled on my solid granite gargoyle suit, borrowed a hunch from

  Sherlock Holmes and swung down from the turrets of Notre

  Dame just in time to rescue the naked Andromeda who was

  chained to King Kong in the middle of Red Square,

  Milwaukee.

  Mark Antony immediately denounced me to a mob of Transylvanian

  peasants, who hurried me to the nearest oasis for a good

  guillotining.

  Luckily for me the Flying Nun was power-diving down for a

  suicide raid on Moby Dick.

  She noticed my plight, shot out a tentacle and scooped me into an

  echo chamber full of Dusty Springfields, thus foiling the

  machinations of Edgar Allen Fu Manchu, the Jackdaw of Zenda.

  So you will understand why I am delighted to be here tonight to

  introduce a fourth member of fiction’s Trolleybus Trinity –

  ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for Miss Marlene Brontë.

  *

  At the end of each adventure

  Mighty Mouse stands, arms folded, on a pedestal,

  Cheered by a crowd of infant mice.

  Every Sunday

  God is praised

  In several million churches.

  Mighty Mouse saved us from the Monster Cat!!!!

  *

  In case the atmosphere catches on fire

  The first thing to do will be to burn

  My brain socialist

  My heart anarchist

  My eyes pacifist

  My blood revolutionary

  *

  The man who believes in giraffes would swallow anything.

  There’s been nothing about ostriches in the papers for months,

  somebody’s either building an ostrich monopoly or

  herding them into concentration camps.

  Butterflies fly zigzag because they want to fly zigzag.

  I have looked into a hedgehog’s face and seen nothing but goodness.

  A huge ram stamps his foot – a million sheep charge and occupy

  the Bradford Wool Exchange.

  *

  pip

  pop

  pip

  pop

  pip pip pip

  pop

  i am either a sound poet

  or a bowl of Rice Crispies

  *

  (to a friend who killed himself)

  All that pain

  double-bulging under your forehead

  I wish you could have taken

  a handful of today’s Yorkshire snow

  and pressed it to that pain.

  You rummaged for peace

  in the green country, in the eye of the sun,

  in visions of Tibet,

  brain-shaking drugs, black magic,

  police stations, among the stones,

  beneath the stones.

  But the stones, which seemed so calm,

  screamed into life in your hurt hands.

  Simpler than you

  I simply wish you were alive

  walking among this snowfall.

  I’m glad that all your pain is dead.

  *

  Your breath is like deodorant, your blood like Irish lager,

  Your idea of paradise an infinite Forsyte Saga,

  Your head belongs to Nato and your heart to the Playboy Club,

  You’re the square root of minus zero, playing rub-a-dub-dub in a Fleet Street pub.

  Sit tight in your tower of money…

  You’ve got a problem of identity, ooh what an intellectual shame,

  You’ve got a million pseudonyms and can’t recall your maiden name,

  You cannot tell your face from your arse or your supper from your sex,

  But you always remember who you are when it comes to signing cheques –

  Sit tight in your tower of money…

  In case England catches on fire

  The first thing to do will be to form a committee

  To organise a weekend seminar

  On Little-Known Conflagrations in Italian History

  Or The Rise and Fall of the Safety Match in Literature and Life.

  *

  Many thin men

  saying: No.

  But of course we’ve got to inside-out ourselves

  and splash around in our own juice,

  and the juice can’t shine if you don’t throw it up into the light,

  and of course you’re hard to hit if you keep dancing

  and harder to hit if you make up your own dance as you dance,

  and of course Tarzan is more exciting than Anthony Trollope

  because he can MOVE, swinging through jungles of clubfooted prose,

  into your eye and out your navel,

  and of course there’s no perfect music,

  no perfect words,

  only the ridiculous beauty of man and woman

  silly with each other,

  pulling off their skins and swinging them round their heads,

  becoming incredible fountains upon legs –

  Many thin men

  saying: No.

  *

  There’s a factory for making factories,

  A sinking pool for learning to drown,

  A university like a pencil sharpener

  To whittle you down to a pinpoint.

  There’s a mean old weather machine

  Churning out crapstorms

  And a generation gap between

  Me and what I used to be.

  But the cities of horror,

  Skull pavements, murder girders –

  They’re going to crumble away in our hands.

  *

  The ice-cubes in my bloodstream decided to melt today.

  I’d buy a moustache like everyone else

  But I’m too attached to golden syrup.

  There are hailston
es big as hailstones, but I’m sure

  They’re not aimed at me.

  Yes, Timbuctoo. I suddenly want to go to Timbuctoo.

  *

  Grass pours down the hillside.

  The stone wall gradually turns green.

  A dead tree can keep its balance for years.

  *

  You can’t win

  Mary Queen of Scots invented high-heel shoes to make herself

  look taller they cut her bloody head off. (John Walton)

  *

  Suddenly it hits me that it’s May Day and I hadn’t even noticed it was April,

  And was gazing over the floodlit fields at a group of socially-minded cows,

  And laughing to myself about the time Allen Ginsberg bared his arse to the people in a whizzing-by train,

  And marking passages in a book of Fidel Castro’s speeches –

  Quote – And then you hear a revolutionary say: They crushed us,

  They organised 200 radio programmes, so many newspapers, so many magazines, so many TV shows, so many of this and so many of that – and one wants to ask him,

  What did you expect?

  That they would put TV, radio, the magazines, the newspapers, the printing shops –

  All this at your disposal?

  Or are you unaware that these are the instruments of the ruling class

  Designed explicitly for crushing the Revolution? – unquote.

  And I was also thinking of the pirhana fish grinning in the depths of my bank manager’s soul,

  And I was looking through the BBC Folk Club magazine and trying to imagine the BBC Folk,

  And I was looking forward to a bit of bed with Celia in the afternoon,

  And my eyes kept returning to a letter from the poet Tim Daly,

  Liquid blue handwriting between strict blue lines,

  His words saying – quote –

  As a whole, the support I have received has amazed me,

  I had anticipated only antagonism.

  Love be praised, I was wrong – unquote –

  And I look again at his address:

  Her Majesty’s Prison, County Road, Maidstone, Kent.

  Tim, aged twenty-one, who took his petrol bombs

  To the Imperial War Museum

  Because the Museum was teaching children war…

  And so when it suddenly hits me that it’s been May Day all day

  And I should be feeling solidarity,

  I think yes so I should, and yes I do, and so yes I write this down

  As a demonstration of solidarity –

  With the cows, who have now moved on,

  With Allen Ginsberg, who has now moved on,

  With Fidel Castro as he moves socialism onwards,

  With Celia who moves me as we move together,

  And with Tim Daly the poet,

  Locked away for four years

  So that England may be safe for the dead.

  Back in the Playground Blues

  I dreamed I was back in the playground, I was about four feet high

  Yes dreamed I was back in the playground, standing about four feet high

  Well the playground was three miles long and the playground was five miles wide

  It was broken black tarmac with a high wire fence all around

  Broken black dusty tarmac with a high fence running all around

  And it had a special name to it, they called it The Killing Ground

  Got a mother and a father, they’re one thousand years away

  The rulers of The Killing Ground are coming out to play

  Everybody thinking: ‘Who they going to play with today?’

  Well you get it for being Jewish

  And you get it for being black

  Get it for being chicken

  And you get it for fighting back

  You get it for being big and fat

  Get it for being small

  Oh those who get it get it and get it

  For any damn thing at all

  Sometimes they take a beetle, tear off its six legs one by one

  Beetle on its black back, rocking in the lunchtime sun

  But a beetle can’t beg for mercy, a beetle’s not half the fun

  I heard a deep voice talking, it had that iceberg sound

  ‘It prepares them for Life’ – but I have never found

  Any place in my life worse than The Killing Ground.

  The Swan

  The anger of the swan

  Burns black

  Over ambitious eyes.

  The power of the swan

  Flexes steel wings

  To batter feeble air.

  The beauty of the swan

  Is the sermon

  Preached between battles.

  Farm Animals

  Clotted cream sheep

  We troop in a dream

  Through the steep deep wool

  Of a yellow meadow

  We are oblong and boring

  We are all alike

  Liking to be all alike

  And the grass-like grass

  Is alike, all alike, and all we think

  Is grass grass grass

  Yes grass is all we think

  And all we do

  Is wool

  But that’s the deal, the ancient deal,

  The wonderful deal between sheep and men

  Men give grass

  We come across with wool

  That agreement was signed

  On the green baize table in Eden

  What would happen if we broke the contract?

  Oh that would be mutiny, we would be punished

  By being eaten, we would deserve to be eaten.

  But of course we never rebel, so we are never eaten.

  On the Verses Entitled ‘Farm Animals’

  The stereotypical tra-a-avesty opposite

  Purports to speak for sheep

  Nothing could be more cra-a-assly human

  Despite our similar coiffures

  Each sheep’s a separate planet

  With its own opinions and visions

  All that we share is the furnace heart

  Of all long-distance serfs

  We’re hot and getting hotter

  So shepherds, you better watch your flocks

  A. Ram

  Commuting the Wrong Way Round Early Morning

  Caught the Gospel Oak train

  At the dog-end of Tuesday night.

  Camden Town darkness

  Laying like gravy on a plate…

  But at Liverpool Street Station

  They’ve got a smudgey brand of blue daylight.

  Here comes half the Essex population

  Tensed up for their desky work.

  I’m struggling up a waterfall –

  Bubbling secretaries, rocky clerks.

  For I’m off to Billericay

  Like a sausage on a fork.

  For My Son

  ‘The next best thing to the human tear’

  ADVERTISING SLOGAN FOR AN EYEWASH

  The next best thing to the human tear

  Is the human smile

  Which beams at us reflected white

  For a lunar while.

  But smiles congeal. Two eyes alight

  With water cannot glow for long,

  And a better thing than the human tear

  Is the human song.

  If cigarette or city burn

  The smoke breaks into air.

  So your breath, cries and laughter turn

  And are abandoned there.

  Once I had everything to learn

  And thought each book had pretty pages.

  Now I don’t even trust the sun

  Which melts like butter through the ages.

  Nevertheless, crack-voiced I’ll sing

  For you, who drink the generous light

  Till, fat as happiness, you sing

  Your gay, immortal appetite.

  I bring you air, food, grass and rain,r />
  Show you the breast where you belong.

  You take them all and sing again

  Your human song.

  Four Sorry Lines

  Sixteen years old, and you would sneer

  At a baby or a phoenix.

  Mock on, mock on, in your blue-lidded splendour –

  Most well-paid jobs are reserved for cynics.

  Action and Reaction Blues

  Further back you pull a bow-string

  the further the arrow goes whooshin

  Further back Maggie drags us

  the further the revolution

  Screws and Saints

  What’s worse than the uniformed devils

  When they trap you in a concrete hell?

  The claws and boots of the angels

  When you’re savaged in a golden cell.

  New Skipping Rhymes

  Good little Georgie

  Worked like a madman

  Three years at Oxford

  Five years an Adman

  Went on Mastermind

  Did so well on that show

  Now he’s the Host

  Of a TV Chat Show

  My savings are my baby

  Money is my boss

  My mummy and my daddy

  Were profit and loss

  One thousand, two thousand, three

  thousand, four…

  Meat on the hook