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)

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.

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.

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.