Come on Everybody Read online

  The sky – the worst offender of all,

  Tasteless as Shakespeare, especially at sunset.

  (I wish my body were all one colour).

  There are too many colours.

  I collect flat white plates.

  You ought to see my flat white plates.

  In my flat white flat I have a perfect set,

  (It takes up seven rooms).

  There are too many colours.

  The Ballad of the Death of Aeschylus

  Eagle flying along

  hey hey

  Eagle flying along

  Swinging his golden all along the hey hey sky

  Tortoise rumbling along

  hey hey

  Tortoise rumbling along

  Dreaming of salad if you want the hey hey truth

  But that was one heap of an

  Astigmatic eagle

  Astigmatic eagle

  The kind of person

  Who looks at a tortoise

  And believes he’s seeing casserole

  Eagle swivelling down

  hey hey

  Eagle swivelling down

  Clamping that tortoise into his beak

  Dragging him up into a neighbouring cloud

  And shutting the hey hey door

  Aeschylus was steaming through Athens

  Somewhere near the Parthenon Gents

  It is believed

  Aeschylus was steaming through Athens

  Out to get his tragical propensities

  relieved

  That’s the hey hey set up so remember it love

  Man down below and an eagle plus a tortoise up above

  Better carve that message in a durable cheese

  And let it learn you a bit of manners please

  It wasn’t one of your charter flights

  The eagle got Aeschylus in his sights

  It was tortoise away and super-zap

  Doing kerflumph and possibly BAP

  Does anyone want a flat-headed tragedian?

  Poor old bloody Aeschylus

  hey hey

  Poor old bloody Aeschylus

  Come to that poor old bloody tortoise

  Gaston the Peasant

  Gaston liked being a peasant. He enjoyed all the things which peasants usually like, elemental things like being born, living and, something he looked forward to with oafish optimism, dying. Often, seated on a sack of blackened truffles in the steam of the peat fire, he would speak of these things:

  ‘We peasants are almost excessively privileged,’ he would vouch, in the expressive dialect of the Basques, ‘in that not only do we delight in the elemental joys of Mankind, but also in that we are denied the manifold responsibilities accorded will-he nill-he to the holder of high office.’

  Gaston had lived a long time, seen much, known many, done little. He was sketched eating turnips by Van Gogh. D.H. Lawrence dropped in to talk to him about the blood. He once tried to cheer up Emile Zola. Orwell slept with his pigs for the experience. Ernest Hemingway borrowed his pitchfork He did not return. He did not return the pitchfork.

  Lady Macbeth in the Saloon Bar Afterwards

  It was all going surprisingly well –

  Our first school matinee and we’d got up to

  My sleepwalking scene with the minimum of titters…

  Right, enter me, somnambulistically.

  One deep sigh. Then some lout tosses

  A banana on to the fore-stage.

  It got a round? Darling, it got a thunderstorm!

  Of course, we carried on, but suddenly

  We had a panto audience

  Yelling out: ‘Look out! He’s behind you!’

  Murders, battles, Birnam Wood, great poetry –

  All reduced to mockery.

  The Bard upstaged by a banana.

  Afterwards we had a flaming row in the Grenville

  About just who should have removed it

  And just when –

  One of the servants, obviously.

  And ever since, at every performance:

  Enter myself in those exquisite ribbons

  And – plomp – a new out-front banana.

  Well, yes, it does affect all our performances

  But actually, they seem to love it.

  And how, now Ben’s in Canada

  Doling out Wesker to the Eskimos,

  Can we decide who exits with banana?

  You can’t expect me to parade down here,

  Do a sort of boob-baring curtsey and announce:

  ‘Is this a banana that I see before me?’

  Anyway, darling, we may have egg on our faces –

  But we’ve got a hit on our hands.

  To the Organisers of a Poetry Reading by Hugh MacDiarmid

  You chose the wrong place –

  A neutral room with tawny blinds pulled down.

  You pulled the wrong audience –

  The gabbiest cultural bureaucrats in town.

  You picked the wrong poet –

  Too clever too daft too great for you to deserve his spittle

  And you brought the wrong whisky

  And you only bought him half a bottle.

  Private Transport

  round and round

  his private roundabout

  drives the little critic’s car –

  a sneer on four square wheels

  What the Mermaid Told Me

  (for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the British Broadcasting Corporation.)

  Every sentence in the middle section of the piece was broadcast by BBC TV during the period 13 July – 12 August 1972.

  Strapped on my aqualung and flippered my way

  To the bed of the electric ocean.

  The water was flickering white and grey

  And thick as calamine lotion.

  Groped along the rocks till my hand came to rest

  On the lukewarm pudding of a mermaid’s breast.

  She was British, broad, corporate and fiftyish

  With a hint of aristocracy

  Her top was woman and her arse was fish

  And this is what she said to me:

  ‘How dangerous are these cable cars?

  We have a lot of fun on this show.

  When is all this killing going to stop?

  I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?

  ‘We are very environment-conscious

  This is like a bloody Xmas grotto.

  What if everyone else refused to obey

  The laws of which they don’t approve?

  ‘What does Muswell Hill mean to you?

  Will the ceasefire stick?

  He was not the man to embarrass the police.

  I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?

  ‘I came to an arrangement with him

  To come up with 40 million dollars.

  When I sing my songs you can’t sit still,

  Your big toe shoot up in your boot.

  ‘If only women could get on with women

  Like men get on with men.

  It’s lovely for me to be sitting

  In a seat like this again

  ‘Just in one day our lives were crushed.

  I don’t want to be an old curmudgeon.

  Are the five senses enough any more?

  I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?

  ‘You’re doing to this country what Hitler failed to do.

  Has he been the victim of a personal witch-hunt?

  He makes no bones about carrying the can

  For Rio Tinto Zinc.

  ‘There is going to be a very high attrition rate

  In this field of 26 starters,

  Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.

  We’ll kill ’em all or get back into Cambodia.

  ‘I’ve had people who’ve had conversion experiences

  Following leucotomy.

  You can never be certain of anything in Ireland.

  I think they deserve
some applause, don’t you?

  ‘British public life is singularly free from any taint of corruption at all.

  Our towns are almost ready to be destroyed, they are uninhabitable,

  They are completely contrary to human life

  The British found it necessary to intervene to protect their interests.

  There are so few young women in Highbury who are in any way suitable

  What has become of your traditional British phlegm and common sense?

  We’re only giving the public what they want.

  I think they deserve some applause, don’t you?’

  The mermaid was ten thousand times as heavy as me

  And the scales of her tail were moulting.

  But since she was the hottest thing in the sea

  She was also the least revolting.

  I proposed a little sexual action

  And she smiled (which was mostly gaps),

  And she wriggled her satisfaction

  As she whispered to me: ‘Perhaps.’

  A Blessing for Kenneth Patchen’s Grave

  may hummingbirds

  forever hover over

  white and purple domes of clover

  Discovery

  Unpopular, Tibetan and four foot two,

  He ran an underground cocktail bar

  Near the pit-face of a Congolese coal-mine.

  Nobody would listen to his stories

  So he scribbled them on the backs of beer-mats,

  One sentence on each mat.

  Because he hated coal

  He wrote, mostly, about the sea.

  Years later two critics from Cambridge

  Spent their honeymoon at the same colliery.

  They discovered a black chamber

  Empty but for a hundred thousand beer-mats.

  After years of beer-mat shuffling and transcription

  The critics published the text

  As The Fictional Works of Joseph Conrad.

  Three cheers for the critics!

  Three cheers for Cambridge!

  Where would Joseph Conrad be without them?

  Down the mine.

  Where be Joseph Conrad?

  Two hundred yards down in the same Congolese pit,

  Serving mint juleps to the husky miners,

  Speaking when he is spoken to.

  There Are Not Enough of Us

  How much verse is magnificent?

  Point oh oh oh oh one per cent.

  How much poetry is second-rate?

  Around point oh oh oh oh eight.

  How much verse is a botched hotch potch?

  Ninety-eight per cent by my watch.

  How much poetry simply bores?

  None of mine and all of yours.

  Oscar Wilde in Flight

  motherofpearlcoloured feathers

  preposterous wingspan

  glides over earthscapes waterscapes icescapes

  dropping a trail of surprise green blossoms

  and archangel Oscar

  rolls with laughter as he dives

  through the sunset revolving door

  of a cloud decked out like the Café Royal

  only once in every thousand years

  he downs a glass of liquid granite

  and privately weeps with memory

  for the butchers chopped his wings to stumps

  and threw him into Reading Gaol

  with the other amputees

  he weeps for them

  not for himself

  then he shakes away his tears

  and up he soars again

  swinging his way

  throughout the blue and white in happy flight

  John Keats Eats His Porridge

  It was hot enough to blister

  The red paint of his mouth.

  But if he let it lie there, glistening,

  then clipped segments from the circumference,

  it slid down like a soggy bobsleigh.

  Grey as November, united as the kingdom,

  but the longer he stared into that dish of porridge

  the more clearly he traced

  under the molten sugar

  the outline of each flake of oatmeal…

  When the milk made its slow blue-tinted leap from jug to bowl

  the porridge became an island.

  John’s spoon vibrated in his hand.

  The island became a planet.

  He made continents, he made seas.

  This is strange porridge.

  Eat it all up.

  Forster the Flying Fish

  Forster the Flying Fish

  In a purple tank did dwell.

  I say dwell, it sounds damper than ‘lived’

  And also I would be the first to inform you

  Were Forster the Flying Fish to be dead.

  And ‘did dwell’ gives a quirky kind of antiquated

  Twist of the wrist to the opening lines,

  Good.

  I mean the bones of this poem to show

  And I make no bones about it.

  Forster was named Forster by his master

  After the liberal novelist.

  Forster the Flying Fish was born to stunt,

  At least he thought of himself as a stunt fish

  But he never learned the knack of stunting.

  Look, I promise you the critics will hate this poem.

  They hate all poems they haven’t read already.

  However, the audience of gentle, wealthy readers

  Who drooled over Tarka the Otter, Hazel the Bunny,

  Jonathan Livingstone Vulture,

  Bebop the Hobbit and Dolly the Wet Hen –

  Surely they will salute

  Forster the Flying Fish,

  The latest Literary animal hero.

  Forster the Flying Fish

  Had a sidekick –

  A slick amphibian called Cissy the Coelacanth.

  Together they paddled and lapped round the globe,

  Righting the wrongs of the animal kingdom –

  Forster taking care of war in the air,

  Cissy looking after land jobs.

  If you have intelligent pets

  Ask them to complete this poem.

  I’ve got stomach ache.

  The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry

  Back in the caveman days business was fair.

  Used to turn up at Wookey Hole,

  Plenty of action down the Hole

  Nights when it wasn’t raided.

  They’d see my bear-gut harp

  And the mess at the back of my eyes

  And ‘Right,’ they’d say, ‘make poetry.’

  So I’d slam away at the three basic chords

  And go into the act –

  A story about the sabre-toothed tigers with a comic hero,

  A sexy one with an anti-wife clubbing twist –

  Good progressive stuff mainly,

  Get ready for the Bronze Age, all that.

  And soon it would be ‘Bring out the woad!’

  Yeah, woad. We used to get high on woad.

  The Vikings only wanted sagas

  Full of gigantic deadheads cutting off each other’s vitals

  Or Beowulf Versus the Bog People.

  The Romans weren’t much better

  Under all that armour you could tell they were soft

  With their central heating

  And poets with names like Horace.

  Under the Normans the language began to clear

  Became a pleasure to write in,

  Yes, write in, by now everyone was starting

  To write down poems.

  Well, it saved memorising and improvising

  And the peasants couldn’t get hold of it.

  Soon there were hundreds of us

  Most of us writing under the name

  Of Geoffrey Chaucer.

  Then suddenly we were knee-deep in sonnets.

  Holinshed ran a headline:

  BONANZA
FOR BARDS.

  It got fantastic –

  Looning around from the bear-pit to the Globe,

  All those freak-outs down the Mermaid,

  Kit Marlowe coming on like Richard the Two,

  A virgin Queen in a ginger wig

  And English poetry in full whatsit –

  Bloody fantastic, but I never found any time

  To do any writing till Willy finally flipped –

  Smoking too much of the special stuff

  Sir Walter Raleigh was pushing.

  Cromwell’s time I spent on cultural committees.

  Then Charles the Second swung down from the trees

  And it was sexual medley time

  And the only verses they wanted

  Were epigrams on Chloe’s breasts

  But I only got published on the back of her left knee-cap.

  Next came Pope and Dryden

  So I went underground.

  Don’t mess with the Mafia.

  Then suddenly – WOOMF –

  It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al

  And it didn’t matter how you wrote,

  All the public wanted was a hairy great image.

  Before they’d even print you

  You had to smoke opium, die of consumption,

  Fall in love with your sister

  And drown in the Mediterranean (not at Brighton).

  My publisher said: ‘I’ll have to remainder you

  Unless you go and live in a lake or something

  Like this bloke Wordsworth.’

  After that there were about

  A thousand years of Tennyson

  Who got so bored with himself

  That he changed his name

  To Kipling at half-time.