Another poem driven out of a workshop challenge from Roddy Lumsden, though this naughtily ignored the terms of the challenge and was co-opted by news events unfolding in Austria and the USA of family’s held in captivity. The Fritzl case was one thing echoing in my mind. Then there was the Garrido case. But the poem isn’t about either story — it’s all about a fractured narrative using the soundscape of news reportage and our relationship with stories of kidnapping and the idea that our neighbours can be secretly monstrous.

Petrol Lives

Several concave children gave evidence
of internal heating deficiencies, ghosts, they said,
even when the next farm was ‘kiss-my-ass’ republican

it would consist of ‘abominable behaviours’ though
we knew parenting was edible pulp.
Anyway, Lucy’s relatives were all cholesterol.

Boiling was never a precise art, not like
having hives and the itching would not subside
for days. ‘Creaking is leaking,’ the factor said.

For now make contact with low-ceilinged
housing units and use the yellow jersey
sweater Maud brought from Saffron’s,

the ‘turkey-handed waster’ as we knew her.
Powering up the certain suit was all cluster
and bluster. No one packed it in. No one moved.

Several planes coalesced into a single black basin,
pin columns of bronze integument failed to hold
the listless creepers. Motion sickness everywhere,

even the loyal hangers-on seemed biting and thick.
No synapse provided proof but the buttresses
left the cellar housing all wishy washy. ‘It was like a pit

of fat. We knew they were in the oil. He was a loafer, too.
Never coming out.’ The desk sergeant made calls:
one with a giant gland and uppity manoeuvres

which held the bones of the family together,
the other, long distance, was less secure, ‘I can break him.
He will cry with the teeth of it.’ On ring back now.

The Third Church of Christ Psychopath

In the Third Church of Christ Psychopath
no ruined mothers may pray for dust. Occasionally
unelected Elders order random executions of executives
that priests on weekdays covertly choose as saints.
And large-scale whippings often ensue on traditional
Nights of Holy Disaffection. Such nights being wholly charged
with miraculous bouts of ritual boasting from the grave.
On Tuesdays, steel crosses are recycled in each parish
for the conversions of the famished poor, whom we adore
as divine atrocious food, all gristle and lice. And obese
flagellants repose on the designated benches, staring at
a prostrate sea, their incandescent robes signifying still
neglected island martyrs, stalwarts of the recent purges,
for whom most pray for dunkings in the Hermeneutic
Lake of Blood. And idealistic Wednesday pogroms
in season still flourish, where, through the provinces,
bishops in shabby wigs ride pigs through the streets,
stopping only to piss on the lewd exiles of the Faith.
Everyone takes time to share god’s lesson of venomous
absence with the sad pathetic Council of the Damned.
And all the while, itinerant priests continue calling on tall
houses in the city, lecturing insomniac Magistrates
and Councillors on the indecency of science
and the amnesty of lies.

First published in New Writing 8, edited by Tibor Fischer and Lawrence Norfolk (Vintage, 1999)

Halving

There is a place I could feel at home
beneath a catastrophe of wires
in this white evening under plastic stars
I could feel all the warmth of the room
endlessly in glass in all its orchestrations and might
leaning through wet eyelids
with the valley held in frame despite
or beyond the singing shade where kids
parade in toiling sheets laughing there,
under the hills, under last year’s windows and black bricks,
the black earth with its island kisses there —
and in that place of tobacco and sticks
and seed-strewn avenues, poured at dusk,
filled with hosepipes, rag and bone men and musk —
coal-defined, small, so small, where the roads
turn before a regimented horizon
to take away the girl, to take away the codes
love ladles in, as the lovers run
taking the sales reps and their families
into the future deserts filled with flies,
into the son’s sour contralto cries,
beside the boiling copper lies;
there is a place I could feel at home,
with street names and clangour and dogs
locked in warm sheds beside a green lawn
and all the dread and all the wishes, knocks
and skirmishes, and wise hugs,
would leave us semi-carnal on the rocks
of a magisterial sea, the radio features there,
from a red summer and in that fine archipelago
of thin shouts one sleep would do me there,
one tiny sleep would really do for me and you.

The Weapon

for Isobel Dixon

Waving hello through the Fiat’s fumes, we were waving goodbye,
a film in amber fields of Cornish shade and wheat,
yellow jerseys and a crop duster — that Corsair —
hurling its shoulders over seven-year-old dream-white air.

You had yellow fever in some antic grey chassis, too, mid-
Pacific, gauntleted, hung at my mother’s lips, that hand-painted
lilac studio shot laying near your sack of home, now twenty years apart.
In the end you waved from the car to me, crying some way in to life,

and at your breakable neighbourhood return: ripped up, corseted,
the surgery over, the coming months became love’s parasite
and you became my upholstery of broken evenings, knowing summer static.
But I broke free with all my feelings ending empty in a weapon.

HMS Devonshire, there I see you scrapped in shaking loyal air,
you are breathing in a new Korean din, and I’m inside a future destitution:
breathing still foreshortens time. I’m almost your age now.
A mouthful lies between us then in some disgust of stories and a past,

I am dwarfed beside you in that summer field, a child in mewling montage.
How can we love what’s not bestowed, in the happiest
prize blood brings? My life has always been this weaker separation since.
Plied in that robbery of nows, as you piled in your pillows, too.

The Writer

He sits in the fraying shirt with epaulettes,
hands placed squarely on the knees, so, loyal perhaps,
back taut. He sits in the beach-dreck chair
facing the south window, the long, taupe, negligible
oblong, where we hear (should we lean)
such tremendous sounds as the landscape affords.
He imagines tart packages of darkness in rotation,
winds over plantains, young birds, rasping yards
and, wrapped under the torrid roots, the thin worms
glistening in their white sinecures, eating the past.
We cherish his hard back. We stand behind him and work
around the den to see his grey ears, thick sideburns,
then notice the sudden fuchsia ridge, the blackened
accoutrements of the smashed face. He’s all caved in.
Days pass. Years. We wander. How could we not wander
about his intense, heavy frame. We watch the faceless one
watching, a damaged cuckold watching the shade
over the skins of the timbers, the skins of the walls
settling in the lank tableau. We are moving like hair
in the powdered light over the atrocious basin
of the head, until we notice the mirror sharply recovering
the battery and disgrace and find we are seated alone,
loving again in the wild escutcheons of the days.