by Jeremy Reed
see the planet as cyan yolk,
an opalescent cone, the first
to enter into lunar time. Our hits
were random on a rainy day,
a raindrop like a tadpole on your chin
fanned into liquid tails, the tiny bead
flashing up like a starburst on your skin.
Pink Roses
These shaped up like shocking pink ice cream scoops
in steamy June, cerise bra cups
expansive under hissy thunder rain.
I wrote to you out of the gunning shower
The postcard a black and white
Button To Secret Passage Press
Helen Levitt
New York 1939,
a squattish atmospheric down-there light
no-colour dead-end alley grey
leaked out the photo’s accidental find
for Helen on a fogged-up oppressive
late summer on the East Side NY day.
I wrote to you of full on pink roses
to take you out of your pain a bit,
or so I hoped, your fear you’d crack
again, and keep on going down
to where you couldn’t make it back.
Pink roses seemed appropriate
a subject to share, while the rain came on
abruptly in my thoughts of you
and how we’d both been places you don’t go,
the bad end of breakdowns and seen it through,
and got out some, and lived to share this thought
of roses piling on in rainy June
their optimal crazy stupendous scent.
Bank Holiday
Our neighbourhood goes flat, its Range Rovers
jeeped out of town by urban desert rats,
sunglassed paramilitary bankers
perma-tanned and vaccinated with Tamiflu
driving blacked-out into a hazy sun
like an orange interplanetary traffic light.
Indoors, I’ve got
six shocking pink hyacinths in a pot
throwing striptease angles, that pink
they’re sexy like a Cadillac.
Mostly I think the light forgets the time
like I do, travelling that fast,
186,000 mph
accelerating away from its past
like my billions of neurons burning out.
I forget everything I write
as though licked by a bathroom wipe,
and link only to the present,
like there’s no yesterday involving me.
Ruth Ellis shot her lover where I drink,
a Smith & Wesson .38 handgun
ripping blood torrents over South Hill Park
outside the Magdala, April 1955,
cherry blossom mixed in like cake filler.
The killing’s always there as legacy
to a nightclub hostess’ red lippy:
the blonde and a gun as her dialect:
a shattering six-bullet inflected cockney.
I stay a while; April bleeds into May,
Sunday to Monday worked up by bright showers,
And do my thing like tricky Sudoku
sitting out back under tusked lilac flowers.
Just a Shot Away
He scratches at the blister pack
Ace inhibitors for the autocrat
with his blood pressure volume up
in loud arterial corridors.
Low thunder rumbles in the air
over Whitehall, dense blue and black
cloud patterns, just a shot away
in thumping feedback decibels.
His blobby makeup’s too orange,
his testosterone level’s flat,
the storm moves in like a Boeing’s
lowering whack of engine roar.
Time’s like a movie: nothing’s real.
The moment documents the speed
it’s overtaking. Westminster
fries in its bloody ecosphere
of unremitting and unsanctioned wars
blowing the Middle East into toxic Lego.
The man’s squashed suit’s like separates
forked off a greasy breakfast plate.
His cold refrigerated brain
hums like a mortuary.
His body’s square, shaped like a van.
He doesn’t hear the detonating rain.
The storm’s localised as a hit,
the inky daylight’s shot through by
a squirt of livid orange sky.
He’s got his customised bunker underground,
the planet that he burns resists
as the one green space in the universe
with atmosphere. The rain again:
it’s dazzle throwing a rainbow
right over Vauxhall, as his pill
metabolises and a truck
waved down by police has as signage
www.WhatTheFuck
Geranium and Orange Chocolate
Bought upriver at Bermondsey—
the tide mixed there like a Persian carpet,
blues, greens, a maroon undertow,
the city’s toxic arteries
ducked by a yellow river bus.
Downriver, I told you I’d missed out on it
despite the fit, 38”/40”,
the black retro Agnes b jacket
tagged at a snippet
I’d left back there like a blind date.
Later, you nibbled the chocolate in bed,
searching to separate the mix
unable to find the geranium,
the orange too upfront a note,
and jabbed your tongue into my mouth
opening an orange flower in my throat.
100 Years On or So
The toast I pop crumbles like a bronze beach
compacted by the tide; the smear
of honey a flower synthesis,
an ecology got by tunnelling—
the bee in a black corset upending
into a sticky corolla,
and it’s a kitchen thing I do
getting into the day’s anthology
of bits, the sky filling in blue
spaces between the grey—it’s my time
like reading engineered ingredients
on a Green & Black’s chocolate bar
in London now and 100 years on
70% cocoa
on another industrial star
sold off for mineral acreage.
I use my bullet twin-tip promarker
Letraset black to mark up a jiffy
with poetry as a footnote
to my address for winging to CA’s
sapphire coastline cratered with meteor-
sized boulders, raw planetary rocks
dumped by the dusty sky
from another turbulent galaxy
into rumbling Pacific blue.
The future’s a species patched by stem cells
with transplant organs living on an Earth
ripped into global psychosis
by war and its cash-guzzling oligarchs
locked into bomb-proof fortress Jaguars…
I scrape my second toast of burnt granules,
a powdery blackening before the lick
of honey holds: I’m in the day
like sunlight on pink chrome and place the jar
back in cool storage and up higher still
the ceiling’s painted with a ruby star.
Workshop
It’s the cardboard carton lettered OSPC
black sans-serif stamp interests me
more than the poetry.
10 of us in a room with trial paint marks
an aqua slash a violet rip,
raw strip lighting, a conference-size table,
all women coming on 40,
marriage or big relationships stared down
immobilised by a red traffic light.
Poetry’s now the le
tting go
of mess, constraint, ‘he hurt me bad
and left me crying on the stairs
but now I’m almost glad
I’m free,’ Christine relates as a postscript
to reading ‘Falling Down the Stairs,’
the vertically absailing imagery
scooped up by forward signposting
like fizzing coke.
No poem gets things right,
it reinvents the story, puts in bits
otherwise lost, you never know
the things you do until you write them out.
Christine, with the blonde bob and turquoise frames,
and casual giveaway delivery
like effortlessly pouring wine,
you in the group lead by the pain
you’ve converted into a state
that’s matt indigo with a come up shine.
Holly’s Moves
Cornholme, Todmorden, always deeper out
than urban stuff I correlate
with fusion in our lives, Holly’s glammed up,
lashings of black lash and so desperate
she drank the bottle three quarters
pretending that the bottom was the top
like listening to a pop song in reverse,
glittering my flat with red love hearts
painted over the bare black boards
as though her feet had turned heart-shaped
and left vermilion signatures.
We lost each other, her Whittington stay
a chemical cosh, suicidal thoughts
the propellant to interludes,
she orbited a polarised black hole
and disappeared. Today it’s geography
keeps us apart, raw November outside,
a grey 4 p.m. sky that’s coloured up
crushed raspberry, her email clicking on
to how I’m suddenly alert
to all we left unfinished and the way
she wrote her novel face down on the floor
and left the pages there like mapping out
a continent in rectangles,
propped up on a left elbow, quizzical,
with her red handbag hanging from the door.
Chasing the Dragon
Richmond as a leafy gentrified remove
dragged out to on the twitchy District Line
(a 40 miles sub-surface 60 stations
peppermint-green colour-coding)
Paula’s white powder’s in her bag
for chasing Asia on a curve
of dirty smoke into the China Sea
each hit compounding a habit
she couldn’t kick, junk in her cells
for dopamine as credit.
Piccadilly to Strawberry Hill
our desperate track itinerary
for white lady, I never touched.
I was Paula’s dependable
poet writing in notebooks on the floor.
She made my face up like her own:
red eye shadow, black eyeliner,
and saw a pharaoh standing at the door.
The dragon habituated all night,
elusive molecular chemical
standing out like a smoky contrail
the single red eye winking at a drag
diffused into blue foggy cumulus.
Come Alive and Burn
My chemistry kick-starts its neural surge
at 10 a.m., a fired-up thrust
like a rocket’s sub-orbital hop
boosted from the Mojave Desert
into dusty transparent sky windows
to end up a burnt-out re-entry can.
It’s glucose activates my busy cells
for sex and riffy poetry
as the sensational I do.
The garden fries, a peach-coloured lily
in a ruffle shirt comes explosively alive
after the shower’s forward-thinking spill
into warped fissures. I post-date my words
because they’re dated from the start
the way language breaks up
like faulty DNA error.
I’d like to design adventure products,
things that go on into deep space.
Weird life organisms, galactic dust
converts to double helixes in space
with reproductive memory
in zero gravity.
I wear a biker’s jacket for the thrill;
its skin’s alive with studded energy.
Most of the time I know the alien
wonky chemical industry in my brain,
the side that selects imagery for show
like cars in a showroom display—
the Elvis type, red glossy fins,
customised art-space gunning the highway.
My arteries are lined with time
as an instructive agent—go with it
like the M1—the wear’s the poetry,
the crazy pick-ups, break-ups on the way,
for looks that kill, flashes of edge beauty
and a hot vision streaming through the day.
Maddox Street
A year scrunched angularly on the top floor,
a nosebleed-red crane’s arm outside
working a reconstructed shattered site,
I catalogued books like playing mah-jong,
with rare editions, handled thumb-stained skins
rubbed pig, deer, cow, human
epidermis from the 18th century,
the light collecting in scattered colours
as atomised sunshine, blue, purple, red
surges of photons immediate
as consciousness, a drill blasting into
a concrete regolith; the windows shook
from the abrasive shattering
like sitting on a fault line: linen, glue,
full cloth and jackets with edge-wear
part of my process playing book striptease
to get descriptions right and books malleable
to handling. I couldn’t sustain
interest in data, my futures radar
working a poem intermittently
against typing in facts in quirky rafts
that looked like strings of Beluga caviar.
I collected Maddox Street in my blood,
walked its quarter lunch times as my anthology
of London street surprises caught its mood
on rainy days best, and nurtured a plant,
a left behind guzmania
rewarding me with a triple raspberry star.
Elegy for Paul Lightborn
White Jamaican Plumstead Paul,
hatted, prettified dodgy rent
working the blowy circular concourse
at full-on Piccadilly Circus Exit 1
circa late seventies, degraded, hurt,
grime on hot money like pigment,
bacterial traces patterned like snakeskin,
our lives crossed disruptive 2009,
you shuffling, puffy with PCP,
holding up on triple combination,
your antiretrovirals doing bits
to re-regulate toxic downward drift:
April, and I’m lost in my Dilly book,
you as my compromised interviewee,
firsthand streetwise bashed-up smoke and mirrors
residual outtake from an outlawed trade,
remembering the lot, each punter’s face
and more exactingly just what they paid
and what you did, subverting public space
into a systemised rent arena.
It broke you, each new undercover raid
hauling you off to Bow Street, nights in cells,
later the Marlborough Street Magistrates Court,
and always you went back to hanging out
in people’s faces—damaged love for sale—
the exhibitionistic effrontery
a part of it, the rest the need to eat
or party in a club. You’d kept alive
the dead man who’d infected you, no trace
of bitterness, drinking Jamaican coffees
on Pembridge Road, telling me all of it
with swipes of bitchy humour, and certain
you’d do it all again, win and not lose
if you could correct time, re-write the past,
forking a syrup-drenched waffle, ‘You know
the punter’s on you and you’ve got to choose.’
Books
They’re like decoding someone’s DNA.
You get the genome signature
buried in language: do they mean
these woody awkward 8x5s in stacks
nobody buys, glossy jackets
like designer statements, a high-rise spill
like pulp architecture
replaced by e?
They’re like copies without originals,
neurology converted into print
and kept precisionally rectangular.
Dead books do disinformation like the dead.
The one in the dictator’s car’s a paperback
on longevity called Forget To Die.
He flicks through surrounded by suited thugs
under a radioactive blood-red sky.
Wounded Kink
Slim, facing out in black reflective shades,
doorwayed for sunshine breaks in Cecil Court
I can’t retrieve or let go bits
or ten years on remix these lines
as spooky altered physics.
A poem’s like declassified papers
or a deleted number plate.
Two floors above me a guitar hero,
Dave Davies, relearns chords after a stroke,
a flameout in brain circuitry
projecting him into missing time
outside the BBC. Now his retrievals
are slow like regaining the riffy stairs
after a fall. He can’t get back to Kinks,
but stays on as a futures legend
like a re-entry astronaut.
Are same-decade sharers in the same time
directed somewhere by the similar
that others aren’t, the cut off point
contemporaneous, the check-in regular
at the departure gate?
November cools like a crystallised contrail,
no questions answered, me inside the shop
