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Frae the Gentleman’s Relish jar

  Then up and spak the Cardinal

  His voice was like a Boeing

  O I hae eaten the Eggs o’ God

  And I’m eight miles tall, and growing…

  ROYAL POEMS

  Another Prince Is Born

  Fire off the bells, ring out wild guns,

  Switch on the sun for the son of sons.

  For loyal rubbernecks who wait

  Stick a notice on the gate.

  Thrill to frill and furbelow,

  God Save Sister Helen Rowe.

  Lord Evans, Peel, Hall and Sir John

  Guard the cot he dribbles on.

  An angel in a Hunter jet

  Circles round his bassinet.

  Inform The Times, Debrett, Who’s Who,

  Better wake C. Day Lewis too.

  Comes the parade of peers and peasants,

  The Queen bears children, they bear presents –

  Balls and toy guardsmen, well-trained parrots,

  A regal rattle (eighteen carats),

  And one wise man with myrrh-oiled hair

  Brings a six-foot teddy bear

  From the Birmingham Toy Fair.

  Lying in State

  He’s dead. Into the vault and out

  Shuffles the reverent conga.

  With his intestines taken out

  He will stay sweeter longer.

  Poem on the Occasion of the Return of

  Her Majesty the Queen from Canada

  Some love Jesus and some love brandy

  Some love Schweitzer or the boys in blue

  Some love squeezing that Handy Andy

  But I love model airplane glue

  Gloucester Gladiator

  Super-Constellation

  U2 U2 U2

  I can see all of Russia from up here

  Once upon a time I couldn’t leave the ground

  My wings were warping and my props were through

  No elastic could turn them round

  Till I found model airplane glue

  Supermarine Spitfire

  Vickers Viscount

  Junkers Junkie

  Come fly with me

  Take one sniff and my engines start

  Second sniff I’m Blériot and Bader too

  Holds me together when I’m flying apart

  So I love model airplane glue

  BOAC

  El-Al

  Sputnik

  I am Eagle I am Eagle

  Some love a copper and some love a preacher

  Some love Hiroshima and Waterloo

  Some love the Beatles and some love Nietzsche

  But I love model airplane glue

  A bit of wire

  A rubber band

  Balsa wood

  That’s man

  And a man needs glue.

  My Shy Di in Newspaperland

  (All the lines are quoted from the British Press on Royal Engagement day, the only slight distortions appear in the repeats of the four-line chorus. Written in collaboration with Alistair Mitchell.)

  Who will sit where in the forest of tiaras?

  She is an English rose without a thorn.

  Love is in their stars, says Susie.

  She has been plunged headfirst into a vast goldfish bowl.

  Did she ponder as she strolled for an hour through Belgravia?

  Will they, won’t they? Why, yes they will.

  They said so yesterday.

  He said: ‘Will you?’

  She said: ‘Yes.’

  So did his mother – and so say all of us.

  Who will sit where in the head of the goldfish?

  She is an English forest without a tiara.

  Love is in their roses, says Thorny.

  She has been plunged starsfirst into a vast susie bowl.

  Most of the stories in this issue were written

  By James Whitaker, the Daily Star man

  Who has always known that Diana and Prince Charles would marry.

  He watched them fishing on the River Dee –

  And Lady Diana was watching him too.

  She was standing behind a tree using a mirror

  To watch James Whitaker at his post,

  James Whitaker, the man who always knew.

  Who will sit where in the stars of Susie?

  She is an English head without a goldfish.

  Love is in their forests, says Tiara.

  She has been plunged rosefirst into a vast thorn bowl.

  All about Di.

  Shy Di smiled and blushed.

  Lady Di has her eyelashes dyed.

  My shy Di.

  She descends five times from Charles II –

  Four times on the wrong side of the blanket

  And once on the right side.

  Who will sit where in the rose of thorns?

  She is an English star without a susie.

  Love is in their heads, says Goldfish.

  She has been plunged forestfirst into a vast tiara bowl.

  Flatmate Carolyn Pride was in the loo

  When she heard of the engagement.

  ‘Lady Diana told me through the door,’ she said last night.

  ‘I just burst into tears. There were floods and floods of tears.’

  Who will sit where in the forest of tiaras?

  She is an English rose without a thorn.

  Love is in their stars, says Susie.

  She has been plunged headfirst into a vast goldfish bowl.

  THE ARTS

  Goodbye

  He breathed in air, he breathed out light.

  Charlie Parker was my delight.

  Jimmy Giuffre Plays ‘The Easy Way’

  A man plodding through blue-grass fields.

  He’s here to decide whether the grass needs mowing.

  He sits on a mound and taps his feet on the deep earth.

  He decides the grass doesn’t need mowing for a while.

  Buddy Bolden

  He bust through New Orleans

  On his cornet night and day,

  Buddy kept on stompin’

  Till he was put away.

  He chose his girls like kings do

  And drank like earth was hell,

  But when they tried to cut him

  He played like Gabriel.

  The notes shot out his cornet

  Like gobs come off a ship.

  You felt the air get tighter

  And then you heard it rip.

  They threw him in the bughouse

  And took away his horn.

  He hadn’t felt so mean since

  The day that he was born.

  Some say corn liquor done it

  Or layin’ a bad whore

  But I guess he blew so much out

  He couldn’t think no more.

  Bessie Smith in Yorkshire

  As I looked over the billowing West Riding

  A giant golden tractor tumbled over the horizon

  The grass grew blue and the limestone turned to meat

  For Bessie Smith was bumping in the driver’s seat.

  Threw myself down on the fertilised ground and cried:

  ‘When I was a foetus I loved you, and I love you now you’ve died.’

  She was bleeding beauty from her wounds in the Lands of Wrong

  But she kept on travelling and she spent all her breathing on song.

  I was malleted into the earth as tight as a gate-post

  She carried so much life I felt like the ghost of a ghost

  She’s the river that runs straight uphill

  Hers is the voice brings my brain to a standstill

  Black tracking wheels

  Roll around the planet

  Seeds of the blues

  Bust through the concrete

  My pale feet fumble along

  The footpaths of her midnight empire

  What to Do if You Meet Nijinsky

  The special child

  Remains a child

&nb
sp; Knowing that everything else

  Is smaller, meaner and less gentle.

  Watch the creature standing

  Like a fountain in a photograph.

  He’s moving carefully as a leaf

  Growing in a hothouse.

  What are the roots?

  What is the stem?

  What are the flowers?

  Nijinsky

  Dancing too much truth.

  If you don’t kill Nijinsky

  He’s going to turn you into Nijinsky.

  You’ll live like a leaf, die like a leaf,

  Like Nijinsky.

  Sweet magical

  Skinned

  Alive

  Animal

  You must decide for yourself how you’re going to kill Nijinsky.

  Leave him in the prison

  Whose stones are cut so cleverly

  They fit every contour of his skin exactly.

  Leave him collapsing

  In the foreign forest clearing

  While the pine trees burn around him like a circle of matches.

  Climb into your car and drive like a rocket right out of the world of feeling.

  Leave Nijinsky dancing

  The dance of lying very still

  To the Statues in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey

  You stony bunch of pockskinned whiteys,

  Why kip in here? Who sentenced you?

  They are buying postcards of you,

  The girls in safety knickers.

  Tombfaces, glumbums,

  Wine should be jumping out all of your holes,

  You should have eyes that roll, arms that knock things over,

  Legs that falter and working cocks.

  Listen.

  On William Blake’s birthday we’re going to free you,

  Blast you off your platforms with a blowtorch full of brandy

  And then we’ll all stomp over to the Houses of Parliament

  And drive them into the Thames with our bananas.

  Crusoe Dying in England

  Always the seagulls cry on me

  Weak from the waves. They tell me tales,

  Say: Now you breathe the English sky;

  You have been rescued from the toils

  Of the black island. All the day

  They speak fair times. But constantly

  Caged in my chest a huge fowl wails

  And screams the truth above the lie:

  England is drowned. Old age despoils

  My senses. I am cast away.

  My body is a breathing weight

  Obscenely formed to be my shame.

  I cannot show it to the light

  But hide it in my hollow room;

  For now the rooted traps are set,

  The springs are sour and my estate

  Is lost to me. I have no name.

  Thick grow the poison weeds, no flight

  Is possible. The branches loom

  Shining above with lazy sweat.

  Fruit hangs and drops upon the hut

  Endlessly from heavy trees.

  I have no will to hook or net

  Fantastic fish I used to prize.

  Shuddering skies melt in the heat

  To soak my limbs. My heart is shut

  And locked to hope. My silly knees

  Kissing the earth, let me forget

  The ghosts who turn before my eyes,

  Companions of sea and street.

  We would go, swaggering and fine,

  To rake the taverns of a port.

  My storming friends, we loved in vain

  For now your eyes are all put out.

  Shackled along the rusty chains

  Of thought, you are not truly mine.

  Captives, but you will not be taught

  To sing, or move, or speak again.

  Bad air invades me from without

  My friends lie sullen in my brains.

  Crusoe? I am some other thing,

  A city caught in evil days

  Of plague and fire: I am a throng

  Of shaking men: I am a race

  Undone by fear, for I was born

  In a cursed country. Who is King?

  Who is the ruler of this shattered place

  Myself? The Bible God? But strong

  Crusoe is dead. I have no face;

  An old mad god, my powers gone.

  Whitman on Wheels

  Fanfare: in transports over transport

  I salute all passenger-carrying machines –

  The admirable automobile, the glottal motor-cycle,

  The womby capsule bound for Mars.

  The tube train (see how well it fits its tube).

  The vibrant diesel, the little engine that could

  And all manner of airplanes whether they carry

  Hostesses, hogs or horror.

  Gargantuan traction engines.

  Curmudgeonly diggers, bulldozers, dinosauric tank-tracked cranes.

  Zoomers, splutterers, purrers and gliders

  I salute you all,

  And also the reliable tricycle.

  Canine Canto

  Dogs thurber through the whitman grass

  On wild shakespearean excursions.

  They have no waugh or corneille class

  In their laurence sterne diversions.

  They sniff blake blooms and patchen weeds,

  They have no time for strindberg doom,

  Or walks on firm jane austen leads,

  Formal pope gardens or the baudelaire room.

  As for donne love, while going it,

  They lawrence without knowing it.

  Thank You Dick Gregory

  King Lear kept shouting at his Fool:

  ‘These children squeeze, bruise and knot my arteries.

  I ache and shake with fatherhood.

  Sex can’t ache or shake me now

  But bawdiness makes my old eyes shine.

  So make me jokes that jump, and tumble,

  A whole crowd of jokes, a courtful of pretty people jokes

  So I can meet each one just once

  And then forget, meeting another joke.’

  But the Fool made a face like an expensive specialist,

  He put one hand on the king’s pulse, one on his own heart

  And said: ‘Your Majesty, you’re dying, man.’

  Dick Gregory, the funny man, left the glad clapping hands

  Of San Francisco, where tigers still survive,

  To walk in the dust of Greenwood, Mississippi.

  He walked as Gary Cooper used to walk

  In Westerns, but Gregory walked blackly, seriously, not pretending.

  He burned as Brando burns in movies

  But the flames behind his eyes were black

  And everything his eyes touched scorched.

  His jokes crackled in the air,

  Gags like Bob Hope’s, but these were armed and black.

  Liberals realised that they were dwarfs,

  Colonels got blisters, and Gregory laughed.

  When Dick Gregory reached the South

  They told him his two-month son was dead.

  I heard that today.

  I had to write and say:

  Thank you Dick Gregory,

  I send as much love as you will take from me,

  My blackest and my whitest love.

  King Lear is dying of your jokes,

  Of your flames, of your tall walking –

  Thank you Dick Gregory.

  Lullaby for William Blake

  Blakehead, babyhead,

  Your head is full of light.

  You sucked the sun like a gobstopper.

  Blakehead, babyhead,

  High as a satellite on sunflower seeds,

  First man-powered man to fly the Atlantic,

  Inventor of the poem which kills itself.

  The poem which gives birth to itself,

  The human form, jazz, Jerusalem

  And other luminous, luminous galaxies
.

  You out-spat your enemies.

  You irradiated your friends.

  Always naked, you shaven, shaking tyger-lamb,

  Moon-man, moon-clown, moon-singer, moon-drinker,

  You never killed anyone.

  Blakehead, babyhead,

  Accept this mug of crude red wine –

  I love you.

  For David Mercer

  I like dancers who stamp.

  Elegance

  Is for certain trees, some birds,

  Expensive duchesses, expensive whores,

  Elegance, it’s a small thing

  Useful to minor poets and minor footballers.

  But big dancers, they stamp and they stamp fast,

  Trying to keep their balance on the globe.

  Stamp, to make sure the earth’s still there,

  Stamp, so the earth knows that they’re dancing.

  Oh the music puffs and bangs along beside them

  And the dancers sweat, they like sweating

  As the lovely drops slide down their scarlet skin

  Or shake off into the air

  Like notes of music.

  I like dancers, like you, who sweat and stamp

  And crack the ceiling when they jump.

  Hear the Voice of the Critic

  There are too many colours.

  The Union Jack’s all right, selective,

  Two basic colours and one negative,

  Reasonable, avoids confusion.

  (Of course I respect the red, white and blue)

  But there are too many colours.

  The rainbow, well it’s gaudy, but I am

  Bound to admit, a useful diagram

  When treated as an optical illusion.

  (Now I’m not saying anything against rainbows)

  But there are too many colours.

  Take the sea. Unclassifiable.