When it stopped,
he didn’t believe it.
He didn’t know what to do.
He went hunting around
for the trip switch
that had made this darkness,
this withdrawal.
(Alas, he was never much
of an electrician.)
What happened
to their lovely
puppet theatre,
their grand knockabout?
Poem
When all’s said and done, there’s still
the joyful turning towards you
that feels like the oldest, warmest, and quite possibly
best thing in me that I must stifle,
almost as if you were dead,
or I.
Lisburn Road
Ah, if one could at least live like that, not at odds with things
GEORGE SEFERIS
A few yards of vinyl records, well-thumbed,
Under the cistern that sometimes overflows over the front door in London,
The drips giving visitors Legionnaire’s disease. Books in four countries,
The same books. No turntable. None of this is a boast.
Boots, sweaters, jeans, from pre-designer days.
Papers, birth certificate, dead passports, their corners docked,
My degree, my decree.
Unopened letters from my mother.
Three sets of taxes, old boarding passes,
Coins, bundled stationery envelopes that are stuck down or won’t stick.
The whatever world of passwords, streaming and clouds –
Oh, streams and clouds by.
A trunk holding a suitcase holding a holdall,
The travel equivalent of the turducken,
Motheaten to buggery.
Children’s clothes, Oshkosh, never worn.
Two paintings by a man called Smith, American in Paris, or Brit in New York,
One by ‘Puck’ Dachinger, a black canted nude in a pink camisole,
With a stove in the corner, scratched with the back of the brush:
Ravings from internment on the Isle of Man.
Blood on one of the doors, peach on one of the walls (don’t ask).
Two plastic bottles of yellowing samogon mezcal
From Mexico, sealed with extra twists of plastic.
Imagine travelling with liquids.
Afghan rugs. A reamer, a garlic press.
A funny cup. The Porky Prime Cut greetings etched in the lead-off grooves,
When not only did you listen to records,
You held them up to the light and read them.
Motet
It’s naphtha now you’re gone
a sudden apprehension of squalor
the unflowering cardamom plant
gummy with syrup and flies
sour footsmell in the rumpled quilt
a wilted squadron of paper airplanes
ready to take me after you.
Ebenböckstrasse
for my mother
A plaster – piece of sticking plaster – on the wall
Where the doorknob of the cold-water bathroom door might hit.
Has hit. A bruise in the other kind of plaster, a dent.
Mend and make do. Guest bathroom, if you will.
It never gets any better; just an embarrassing display of solicitude.
A naked concern with wear, like mylar or antimacassar.
The basin still too small for one hand to wash the other.
A crust of soap. No one’s died, at least not recently.
One playpen in the living room, penal, receiving.
Obsolescent photographs of grandchildren.
Small sticky fingerprints. An actual cobweb in my cobwebby hair.
Knick-knacks no one understands trembling for their lives.
Lake Isle
Get me a place on Danube Street, I want to live
on Danube Street, or if not there, then Ann would do almost as well,
between the padlocked private gardens (no dogs no ball games)
and the barranca, the sanction and the delimited amenity.
Mindless wood pigeons bleat like unanswered telephones.
Nothing so douce as sandstone in a granite town,
a town monstered by gulls and sunspots and unkempt dogs,
softened in any case from when I lived here fifty years ago,
when, taking my life in my hands,
I walked to school to save a few shillings bus fare,
beside a Styrofoam stream past drinks cans and jobbies and the occasional
murdered foreign student, but not too many.
Where the walls are scarred with YMD (for Young Mental Drylaw),
and the streets on Fridays are blustery with witty drunks,
and beautiful grant-maintained schoolgirls
tuck into beastly food with savage appetites.
I want to have wooden shutters and specimen plants,
Georgian casements (the only artefact I’d countenance from two millennia),
and ten fine days a year, fossicking at home in a cardigan
while my fellow-professionals are all at work.
I want to take my place as a nationally – make that notionally –
known professor, among investment advisers and plastic surgeons,
where there are always builders making improvements or repairs,
and the cobbles play merry hell with the bottles on the milk floats.
Seagulls, Italian Style
[where engineering meets design] their creams and tans
a conscious colour statement, a finer, flashier glide,
a bigger entrance and a bigger entrancement,
volplaning wardrobes always newly back from the cleaners,
neither ‘scroungers of the empyrean’ nor ‘nibblers of edible stars’
their minds on higher things (or lower things),
cashmere sleeves dangle-draped over their shoulders,
annulments in their man bags, foulard, eyewear, metal bangles.
Venice Beach
… reducing all that’s made
to a green thought in a green shade
ANDREW MARVELL
These are all thoughts – of course. At the edge of the ocean with nowhere to go,
the nearest land three thousand miles away and under different management,
the diving sun another thirty thousand times that, there is no reality,
only these parlous notions, messages, statements, stylings on the edge of extinction.
Little petillas. A kind of spontaneous zoo of human recency and arrival
and promontory variorum. Imprudent combover thoughts,
rigid and proud eye-catching false thoughts, little jiggling thoughts,
intricate braided beard thoughts the product of much misplaced patience,
product placement thoughts (which are rather elementary,
and are almost a contradiction in terms), unlike myriad highly evolved
dog thoughts (no mutts here), pushing a baby in a three-wheeled stroller
whilst running very hard in no shirt and sixpack thoughts,
this a development on the now-obsolete egg and paddle
(what it does to the infant to be impelled at such a rate into the future
whilst facing backwards like an Aeroflot passenger is not recorded –
not that forward is necessarily better), high-concept silky-swishing Afghan hound thoughts,
intrusive bum thoughts, hapless and homeless pan-handler thoughts
(a smarte carte loaded with undesirables never far to seek),
low-slung belly-dragging beagle thoughts little better
than the serpent in the Bible, holding hands Adam and Eve thoughts,
foot-shuffling Zimmer frame thoughts, ‘revolution in mobility’ wheelchair and gravel thoughts,
pushed by most likely an illegal attendant borderline thoughts,
cand
y striped T-shirt and shorts thoughts, cut-off thoughts,
paired with sometimes nothing more than a bikini top, those three-quarter length
thin and probably amphibious trousers, worn without socks, that men go in for,
suggestive of adaptability and resourcefulness thoughts,
standard overloud mobile thoughts, (‘our relationship is …’),
lying immobile on the grass on your back mobile thoughts
(these are different), tourist thoughts, an unexpected preponderance of Russian thoughts
(though with residential qualifications), borscht belt leopardskin thoughts
dripping with gold and eccentric lamentations, dog and baby both thoughts
(these last thought to be ideally-balanced), high-stepping poodle thoughts
like a four-wheel drive with little intelligence in rough country,
furiously texting in the glare with all thumbs to the pump thoughts,
being at least half elsewhere, baseball cap thoughts rife with determination,
slightly dated straw hat thoughts, reverse baseball cap also thoughts.
Midterms
Those no-treads. Scott and Tom and Scott Scott and Tom Tom,
wealth-creator or small billionaire or lawyer or even, even woman,
groomed for the succession from yea-high, or there on sudden impulse
or empanelled cosmeticists’ and focus groups’ say-so,
committed to working (or porking) across the aisle, ‘humbled’
(read insufferably puffed-up) to ‘serve’ (recte rob and enfeeble
and generally mal-administer) his/ her flyover state (its name here____________):
the great, the great, the greatest the world has never seen
in – uh – the entire history of the world.
Higher Learning
for Sarah Trudgeon and Aaron Thier
‘We monetise the university.
Raid the pension-fund, lease out the classrooms, put coin-slots on the phones and copy-machines,
and we throw money at the football team, the basketball team, the track team, all the other teams.
Sport deepens the Crocodile brand. Sport kicks communities and builds ass. You can shove the rest.
We casualise the support staff. Who’s scared of a few roaches and spiders.
We empty the bins once a week, then once a month. Are we serious about paperless learning or not?
We stop the water fountains. Don’t replace bulbs, call it green, and save thousands.
To think big, you’ve got to dare to think small.
We pause the elevators, let the profs find their own way downstairs
by the light of their towering intellects – or, more likely, their smartphones.
Bunch of limey faggots. Underpaid, undersexed and underwear.
Or, as I believe they like to say over there, ‘pants’.
We get some proper K Street chops into our fundraising effort.
Personalised databases. Twitterfeeds. Birthday messages. Con-dolences and -gratulations.
A little complimentary merchandise goes a long way. Pre-formatted wills.
Candlelight giggle-o dinner-dates with Old Croquettes.
We hike the fees and we re-prioritise.
It’s what you do in a race to the bottom.
We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs –
everything, and the great lunks still pass out at traffic lights.
We do a heavy concentration on STEM subjects,
plus microbiology, medicine, law, and one other.
Entrepreneur.
The rest can go wither. What are we here for – educating citizens?!
We free up tenure. We de-accession the library.
You don’t need books to cut-and-paste, I always say.
We boost distance learning. Streaming lectures. Log on and goof off.
Overspill classes. Computer grading. Multiple choice.
Redefine the contact hour. Redefine the degree.
Virtuality is the new reality.
We put in a Gap and a Walmart, and call them bookshops.
We sell Pepsi one university-wide monopoly franchise in perpetuity, and TacoBell another.
and in general we take a leaf out of the contemporary airport:
a shopping centre with half a runway attached.
We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only),
plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate,
with green lights at the end of their private piers.
Throw in a motorboat and some stables, or else we’re uncompetitive.
We put up a new building a week – prospective parents
like to see that stuff – and we sell on the naming rights to the old ones.
They plough up cemeteries, don’t they?
Nothing’s forever. Go Crocks.’
Less Truth
kneedeep in foaming status quo
HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
more denials, more prevarication, more #real
hashtags and pop-ups and calculating interesticles, more clickbait,
more straight-faced, bare-faced, faceless, baseless
counter-allegations, more red herrings, crossed fingers,
rehearsed answers, turned tables, impossibilities
before breakfast, more ‘accepting responsibility’, less truth.
Lusher menus. Bigger bonuses. Less contrition. More shamelessness.
Less truth.
Silly Season, 2015
Money is speech. Firms have feelings. The People’s Republic of Facebook
is offended by that woman’s pseudonym,
takes a copy of her passport to have her account made out to her real identity.
Your bank card is good for drawing cash, but
not for a balance or a statement. The Greeks, meanwhile,
revert to barter. One wolf cries ‘terrorist!’
and sheep come from miles around to applaud a (Kurdish) boy being savaged.
(It’s called NATO.) A list of NSA search terms
is so confidential, it can be shown to one person, if that.
Beate Zschäpe, on trial for the past two years for her part
in the racial murder of ten people, shares giggles
with her latest defence lawyer (28), cold shoulders
the other three. The accused bench is like a box at the opera,
there she is, popping a cachou into the new boy’s mouth, cynosure, flash of cleavage.
Wagner directs Wagner. Disparities widen; ‘scissors’ is the German term of art.
Cities fill up/ empty out (your choice) with ‘buy to leave’ property.
Countries not busily pursuing their dissolution (UK, Belgium) harden themselves.
Walls go up against Serbia, Mexico, Palestine. A large body of water is of course (Australia) ideal.
Donald Trump pioneers the quick-drying comb-under.
The Republicans come up this time with (digit sum: seven) sixteen dwarves.
Never mind the quality, feel the narrowness.
The weather breaks records every which way; traffic reports –
miles of Stau – go on forever. Railways lose money hand over fist, but continue
their policy of neurotically expressive pricing (no two journeys the same).
The Chinese stock exchange gets all kittenish at a cost of trillions.
America is good for an atrocity a week (‘gun violence’), and doesn’t get it.
Brazenness or apology: a style choice. Putin is a figure from Artaud or Genet;
‘Sepp’ Blatter wins and postdates his flounce out of FIFA; ‘el Chapo’
burrows out of a high-security Mexican prison on a rail-mounted motorbike.
Lame-duck Obama goes to Africa to preach the virtues of term limits.
Human rights lawyers disappear like old snow or coral reefs or old-growth forests.
; Most constitutional arrangements are subject to review,
most trade is with China. Nothing trumps (trumps!) immediate gratification.
Governments continue to attempt to refine their populations.
The new instrument of domestic policy is the F-16,
used by Syria, and now, three years later, by Turkey as well.
Saudi Arabia apes the US; a ‘loose’ alliance ‘of the willing’ bombs Yemen every day for months.
Whole families up sticks and emigrate to ISIS, if they can find it, or failing that ISIL.
Religions have feelings. Cartoons aren’t funny. Speech costs.
The Case for Brexit
for Frederick Seidel
I dropped my new shoes in the stream, thinking perhaps
They would get there before me, like two drowned Jews
Trundling along the seabed to Jerusalem. My immigrant parents lost patience and thrashed me.
The best thing that ever happened to me was on the boat.
I’ve no idea what it was. Then Tilbury. Or Harwich. Or Southampton.
I got eggshells crushed with lemon juice for the calcium and its better absorption.
I got buttered bread with a little bitter chocolate grated over it.
I got glabrous soured milk with cinnamon and sugar.
One Lark, One Horse Page 4
