This piece stems from the Bush/Cheney days. I still like it. It’s fascinating watching British TV now, as the whole war is disentangled in an understated, completely devastating way. A monstrous saga, still not at an end, and powered by abstract conviction about the world and its desirable shape, its desirable resources. One is left wondering if it was really about the oil, and more about some sense of structural legacy, a fear, ultimately, of impotence.

From the Centre

Once your eyes have adjusted to the burning
scan through those racing battalions:
that mouth, idle elbows, and then tilt your head like this
to observe an arranging sea of grit. You can sense

the singing or crying, crying or singing,
where it is a high-throated sort of commotion
for the day. Anyway, no one wings it
in the compound. We’re poverty in motion.

How we ended up here is funny, like a shiny
belly or bare flank, or it could be that ash-
coloured, hose-damp concrete there.
Every child distorts the man, and man the cash.

Look at it raining down — sordid, localised love
beside electric couples filming, or are they fleeing,
the gift. It is an entirely live feed while we learn scripture
from wire. Someone says, ‘Nomads in waiting,’

as we become scintillating, free in the debris.
Don’t catch life out, then, and watch the traffic.
Now you know when the slap up meals fall out
of those sacks we’ll be taking home our pick

of your bomb-retiring heroes, day and night,
night and day, those clean-cut silent flags of ham-
burger heaven still warm under props. Later we’ll
be zooming or seething through that dream

up dislocated arterial routes, shaky gorgons
in the zone. Together again, we are a modern fog,
the idea of the better dead, immortalised grey
eyes above subtitled totally idealised dialogue.

No one adheres to the precise terms any more.
The streets shiver like widows this afternoon of very
large government, we’ll ape out the speeches
of the ape. Our country is his artery.

Here’s another filmic poem. I like to write from the perspective of a film maker, and often move around the poem in the way a camera man would. Checking the angles, looking for the cut away shots, adjusting the lighting to build the scene up. This poem takes place in an undetermined Latin American town. A small town. There’s an element of threat in the piece, which is another thing I like to see engineered into a poem. Some risk. Some tension.

Eduardo

Our fine neighbour, Eduardo,
known locally as ‘an hour with the pig’
is folded in viridian evening beside blocks and hooks.
Folded neat and hot, he is all helmet-like.

Teeth grind of moped. Lolloping begonias.
He plays Carmina Burana considering workaday beauty,
yet it is a bad Decca recording and he tires of it. He loves justice on TV
and the weekly surgery of romance: the doomed brides.

‘Eduardo,’ they shout. ‘Do not sleep at your sister’s place tonight.’
He is pinched up considering his inept grasp of planets,
He is everyone’s fastidious shark, happily cutting, cutting,
cutting to the end.

Fermina does not have his weakness for display.
She is emboldened by her single mole, a loyal creature
beneath the mighty storm and a century of town smoke.
‘She will phone tonight,’ Eduardo says,

‘and discuss the shapes of her cabaret, her sour winds of love.’
Eduardo imagines crudely that her mattress is the horn of plenty
despite his abhorrence of winter perfume
and spitting gutters. There are no coyotes.

He chews on the spandrels of some grey meat
and picks out sequin pips for Fermina’s wan retrieval this evening.
There is so much affection in his brother’s gaze.
Lodged inside the weathered purse of his face he is quite terrible.

He has always procrastinated over business meals like this.
Fermina will be revered inside a new family procedure
where we shall leach from out our shadows towards the stitches of stars.
Our mouths are gaping now in the drapery behind her.

Charly Whelan’s mam

Charly Whelan’s mam was a fucken whore,
her fanny big as a dustbin liner.
It would eat you up, shoes and all, then roar
through the panty lounge with air fresheners

for perfume, so Freddy Ricketts said.
She did twos up and nobody noticed.
Except for Big Dennis from Birkenhead,
who loved her pussy when he was shit faced

and home from the clink for a month of harm;
banged up for petrol bombings, racial spite.
Charly laughed his arse off and said his mam
was reeking and puking from the all-night

benders at Sinatra’s. But that was then.
Mr Right and Mrs Pong worth nowt.
Last Wednesday in the Bendix she pegged out.
Charly said she’d always be forgotten.

The Lilac-Patterned Institution

Fostrup’s biography pours out on phlegm-
coloured snowscapes while I watch the steaming
semis. She’s remembering bismuth from
poor chemistry lessons and draped in this bling
of fairy lights. No one can escape such
cholera of the mind. Watching her pant
Colgate breaths above her bacon sandwich
shows Droylsden is parole from life. Why can’t
we neck on doorsteps before the grief thing?
Pitted between the sandbanks of new building
and the weekend theft of Samsung pressies
she’s hooked up to some post-millennial
milk and honey, cheating the horses arses
out of tax and all things matrimonial.

Last time I was back up north, I had to travel to Leeds before heading back to Cambridge — a journey in the wrong direction, but I studied painting and print making in Leeds in the 80s and the journey became a kind of retreat into the past.

Boy’s Town

Clanging by, most patios are squalid tips pouring into lawns
of carburettors, broken baths and bogs, or leaking
pigeon houses, mossy, skeletal. The bricked-up space yawns
past with its noose of hawking kids, each red estate leaching

out their dreams with piles of squat architecture, canals and dogs.
Is this tableau meant for our sweaty Pennine journey? At gable ends
70s graffiti lists the names of dads and granddads: Suggs
and Bez, Pez and Spud, the sniffing gangs who make amends

in B wing as their cage of youth swung shut on race and loyalty
and broken knives. In these rushing archipelagos of broken bleary
Escorts and Sierras, a wintry pub displays its tarry
puddled roof, glinting with defenestrated urban grey utility,

all of it idly monitored, and somehow happy if crappy. Somehow,
it is indistinguishable: there’s the surgery (Methadone on Wednesday)
and steamy chippy, too. This methodical morning is a short ride, elbow
to elbow, hearing the stations as our thin society blows its wages, gobby

and reprieved, while the buses come to take commuters home.
The bypass has left a few suits to congregate by iron work and riveting:
gas towers, viaducts, then bookies, it’s like some 50s English poem
that guards its lines like queues of men, first sorting, then departing.

Back in Manchester in the 80s I got caught up in the riots and got beaten quite badly by a gang of lads. One bloke had brass knuckles on and I ended up losing several teeth, getting my nose broken, and generally was messed up.

A Short History of the Manchester Riots

In Chichester Road I lost my teeth in 1981
on the pavement of a social studies website not begun,
in cream and orange cine-8 where gangs were surging
and everyone wore big hair and pixie boots.

It was opéra bouffe outside Loreto college
where the needy queued in second hand serge.
Observe the brass knuckled uppercut in slo-mo
and watch me kiss each shining node just so.

No kerchief for my running mouth, the zygomatic bone
depressed, and plumb-line nose gone for a Burton,
I travelled off imagining a month of tubes and soup
from that place of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary

to Manchester Royal Infirmary,
and waited for the goats in white between two boys in blue
like it was Orgreave or Maltby and the lines were drawn.
But that was all to come, a few years on the Tory dream

would cut a of swathe of diffidence across the pews,
wearing Westminster’s finest ketchup and swords of truth,
while far-off Hulme was history. We knew that ruin had begun.
In Chichester Road I lost my teeth in 1981,

with a face like Mickey Rourke after the umpteenth face lift,
or bulging like a Stan Lee über-villain with my crones.
I learned that culture meant six months of dentistry
and justice was the sordid life of bones.

Still working on this, chopping it down, chipping away at it. Paddy’s stories are astonishing pieces of writing, and I love Broken Things. Somehow or other I started working on this after a brief chat on MySpace.

This Angel

for Padrika Tarrant

This angel was banged up in his blood.
He looked like a pile of old decorator’s sheets
left to collect god’s beetles in a corner.
His head was full of rain.

Words gurgled in his throat, but nothing much came out.
His mind was like a silent movie
fading in vignettes of exception bathos:
moneyed disastrous staring; wives on the tracks;
distended white dresses in the scrutiny of this oven.

There was some kind of heresy of maths calculating altercations
for the suicide, his mouth full of carvings like
hands full of hearts, fires full of legs,
old bird bodies upended in trash cans. The angel watched.

When he stood up to scratch an awkward spot
he was this ornate hat stand with too many coats piled on.

He never flew but loved conviction politics
with their residues of laughter.
Every day life filled with dismal wonder.

He yearned for extermination and a little trip.
He stroked the children in their clay chambers.
He packed their eyes with delicious crumbs.

A side effect of all professional life is the 3 a.m. existential horror of the air-conditioned hotel en suite bog. Alone in a single room. There’s another post on the site about this, but here’s a conventional narrative where the hotel takes centre stage. I think I’d done some Creative Writing teaching somewhere, not the postcode given here, and I thought, let’s hear this hotel speak …

M1 3LA

Up the pissy steps we find nostalgia’s vein-blue glamour
sweeping under chandeliers and a dominating
stairwell, cloistered bridges and gantries
and dark batik where hoteliers in sulking combat sit
maybe they’re fed up faking it with crimpolene
for mauve itinerant weddings or watching
the unhitched come past name-boarded rooms
straight from the sales circuit to some daft do
on sill linings or Mitsubishi extractor fans
all scooting in from Bromley and Burnley
on £20K contracts with options for export.
The car park is all sun-roofed Mondeos.
The cladded bars are putty coloured, and flooded
with Sky Sports where the peeling edge of youth embarks
on suited years of margins on the way to a Dad’s
divorce or dividends, drizzle and Droylsden’s
best kept secret, moored to all these structured terms.
We sidle up among the winding men intent on
feeding this necrosis of signage and pull up
a pew to spot a few lame souls sat reading
the monthlies in Edwardian kitsch. So
gone up in the world, and yet gone off. The tide
has turned, the boats have sailed, and all of us
are stranded in this little local absence, making of it
what we can, not filled with laughs or money, carried
over six pints of Boddies and a go at the vids
before the bells call time and Sugsy coughs up
on the cards and Darren shuts up shop on his Chinese
bonded plastics tale; he’s almost bagged it now.
Our lives are made between such repetition,
like the Manchester Hollywood boudoir thing,
where ideas still die among the lazy girls
and rooms of cheap cutlery. Bed time now. The salad
bars are gaping still in stolidly lit suites.
Six flights up we separate into our cares like fish
along the empty lungs of corridors like one
exit from home. We hit the padded fungus of a bed
in yeasty air and muzak, the telly freeze-framed
on a grinning line of chefs, shot in some spittoon of an atrium
in Gatley. Once we work the handset out we hop about.
How many of us strip before the atrocity of the mirror?
Unpeeling selves like a bridge into some white error
of arse and thighs, the tide mark of pubic hair greying now.
The air con whistles and shifts its haunches. The toilet groans.
Sleepless at three, we draw back jacquard curtains
on the soaking brick Elysium of sacral urges in this city,
all eyes up for what refocuses on icy panes, those body smears
catching vacant light like a Vaseline ghost and in
those whorls of communion we see the mad swifts’
shrieking circuits echoed over torpid crowds and feel
or half sense each torso lifting in the livid air
towards a trace-setting where hopes perpetually pour.

A good few months back, Roddy Lumsden set a challenge to write a tripartite narrative in a loose structure of triplets. The narratives were to have no connection, but resolve. I found the structure a great tease, but didn’t quite follow the rules. Here’s one of my favourite pieces that emerged. I love it when structures offer up there own voice and you just listen in …

Rita’s Creatures

Donny Scues’ Waz-mobile was only
heard in Mulbrox, like several rust jobs deep,
whacking out The Cool Kids for Compton or Big D

or cruising Aldo’s for a big widow night of bliss.
Alien detox. Crustadelic. All over soil fanatics.
It made me barf. Sissy’s kids was through with Donny anyways

but comforting though she was I really doubt
the seamless crotch was so fantastic in the seat.
You know it, too. That place is dog perfect.

How come eating cuties is so bad anyway.
Gricedale’s everlasting crudités always
left me smelling of clam soda or kelp and gave me gas,

like I’d done a week in Tina’s salon as she stubbed out
one thousand L&Ms next to the extreme nail dipper.
All that chicken gone to waist.

Slow season. Big learning, burning earth day.
Some commotion held our attention for an hour
like anti-saucer vigilantes moaning about hell

as the deli off takes sashayed through Montgomery
on a featureless pine hunt, parrots braying.
Bettie crawled out to ask, ‘Is that you, Vernon?’

But the phone in died. Donny’s bucket of love.
How come so much style can be wasted
on a creature? Even the heat ain’t pure in that life.

I mind my nails on the bag spinner and pack away
another sister’s yesterdays. I am not leaving here.
That’s one hunnerd forty two dollars, Ma’am.

I found myself writing these bizarre magical narratives and raiding imagery from museums and folk art. Here’s an example, I was kind of seeing these characters on stage, perhaps in an opera. No one escapes from themselves.

The Invocation

I keep scratching and scratching the fabric
but Mother will not burst
she parades above in her twisted Navajo mittens,
she parades below in her 1859 sergeant’s outfit.

I eat all the crusts and carve smiles into stone maidens
hoping for them to speak and grant me wishes by the river.
I scatter catkins on the grave of the spinster miser Ursula Dunn.
Yesterday’s foot ache came about from

wielding the Sword of Involuntary Masks slowly around
the pentacle Jess and I’d arranged near Herbert’s Portacabin.
The demons filed in with double beaks and raisin eyes.
‘Take Mother away with you,’ we asked, ‘stuff her appalling legs inside you.’

‘We’re not adjudicators,’ said one with a purple snout, hurriedly.
‘We don’t do tricks; eating people is discourteous here.’
Mother hovered over in her great parade furs winking.
‘We want rid of her,’ we explained. ‘She’s been here too long.’

‘Ancestor worship is always a matter of weights and pretension,’
said another with tombs for eyelids. ‘Explain your
predicament to the many bones of Horus,’ advised the corporate one,
singly suited, heaving coals like a baritone.

‘Boil cabbage with bear eggs and add wolf placenta,’
said the under-god, later. ‘Do not yearn for her ridding. Attend to her.’
‘Even stopping the drooling would be a start,’ said Jess.
We piled the stones and made love under ten willows.

Mother appeared in several World War II bunkers
dressed in stags’ horns wearing a cluster of oak leaves, bleeding.
‘Hurry up and kiss her,’ Jess said that night. I reached up,
reached and panicked as the helm ripped clear of my scalp

the ship of her face was burning, burning. Over the well I use, my love.
Over the well I own. Over the well I leapt, my love,
down to the burning stone. Mother looked back from her oilskins.
‘We will miss you,’ we shouted. ‘There’s always the morning!’