by Jeremy Reed
Johnny Spitfire
Obsessed, I even save his texts,
Dr Johnny
like Burroughs’ Dr Benway,
issuing taxonomic, chemical
and pharmacological tips
from the French House, or a submerged Gerry’s,
wearing a blueblack jumper full of holes
like black ones in the universe,
deep space another sort of chemistry.
I’d buy him 20 red roses,
a berry cake, and exchange tongues
if I could find him on this rainy night
in which I sit imagining
the dystopian survivors of catastrophe
led out into the cloudy Sahara
by the Zen-Buddhist septuagenarian
Leonard Cohen
dressed in an orange suit and black slouch cap,
a gigolo diplomat on the move,
the great inveterate idealist
armed only with a voice and a guitar
leading the tribe towards a point
that vanishes into nowhere.
Johnny’s my weird association here
to panicked vision, as I wait
to hear his rapid-fire, stripped dealer’s voice,
the rain outside falling so fast it sounds
a shattered staccato
like thousands of clicky Japanese heels
racing for trains in rush-hour Tokyo.
Marta
I’ll never know her more than casually,
the cornflower blue eyes like a manga doll’s,
a futures blue like summer holidays
in places I can’t remember.
She’s Polish: black curls scrolling down her cheeks
like springy pasta twirls,
glitz diamante bracelet and earrings
that sparkle like her personality.
She tells me focused fragments of her past,
little bits of excerpted biography—
her mother’s eyes are bluer (think sapphires),
they live beside a lake (think dark cobalt).
She has an arts degree (think colour codes),
her sister Monique’s with her at Gaby’s,
fringed black bob black as a blackout,
green eyes (the colour of a smoky jade).
Marta’s fine-tuned, her sensibility
like rice paper, her skin a transparent mapping
of sensitivity. We touch like that,
our thoughts meeting like clouds, intuitive
in pink and blue, a few minutes each day,
tentative, reassuringly,
the understanding perfect, despite word tumbles
and misunderstandings that correct themselves:
we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Voodoo
It’s age works as the hex I can’t repair,
my genome hacked by error—I’m half done
like someone returned from the rocky Moon
with an Apollo camera.
I go to Camden, buy two voodoo dolls.
mini-hoodoo, vampish things
like black mice with Keith Richards’ leathered face,
junkies habituated to pins
impassive to the needled pain. I want
(won’t get)—time to magic words all day,
a slave to tease my fetishes
in every way, abundant red roses
bleeding into my view, I need (won’t find)
brain essentials like DHA
in the marine food web. It’s slow poison,
the debris circulating in my veins
like accumulative NASA space junk.
If my lifetime pop icons die, I die
by association. It’s always late
because life never seems to properly start
and lemon drizzle cake won’t compensate
this lemony dazzled October day
for seasonal change, and my two voodoo dolls
become family with their zombie eyes
and love whatever flavour turns to hate.
The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series
The Quine tapes
remastered from a Sony hand-
held mike
catching the band’s disaffected attack,
the lack
of audience a perverse incentive
to liberate tried solidarity.
Lou chills at Coney Island Franks,
a hot dog stand: his dodgy squinty eye
tricky with paranoia
like a grainy film noir gun chase.
His head’s still compressed fuzzy with reverb,
his mustard lashing’s like a sunset smeared
over the choked-up foggy bay.
He keeps his quaaludes in a cash wallet
as favours for the second set.
He talks guitar to Quine, like engine parts,
feedback as science, it’s the lexicon
of reverb obsesses the two,
an East coast not a West coast thing,
a drone that goes unmodified
at Family Dog: the voice so tonal cold
it’s like refrigerated beer
left in a month, and then uncapped.
Cool mastery, my compact cardboard box
contains four hours of 1969
live acumen, disinterested audience,
a VU soup mixed muddily
into a sonic bonus, like a sun
winning an orange cone through smoky grey
low-lying, furry LA fog,
so it’s the focal point, 38 mins
of epically re-coloured ‘Sister Ray’.
China Tea, Roses and Your Sort of Hat
Chasing the dragon, that’s a smoky leaf,
twists like an alligator in the pot.
I’ve got
a nipple-taupe November rose
stuck in a Coleman’s Mustard jar,
a garden snip, some pink satin
worked in its sleeves, and if you’re hot
an Okamoto Zero 003
in a violet foil, and your black sequinned hat,
part Russian, part beret
does camp over one eye that’s smudged dull gold,
vamped with a dusty thunder grey.
It’s Saturday. The London rain showers in
like atomising a rainbow,
a citified bubble doing striptease
in a diamond tube. Office Space To Let,
it’s opposite, a vacant second floor
repurposed, stripped down, unlet for a year
as obituarised real estate.
We keep our private space, extend the day
like stretching time into a mini-death,
an absence from the world, tea-tourism,
roses and sex and listening out the rain
and thinking options between straight and gay.
Eleonara Come Back
The acid turned the mountain red.
4 men carried Eleonara’s bed
like a black coffin
over the hills, a Beckstein piano’s weight
into the valley, and the drug came up
in psychedelic purples, orange, green,
his brain hallucinating a waterfall
as a silver sequinned fist
studded with prismatic emeralds.
She told him she’d been sucked into a Poe story
like a retro-virus in her cells
copying chaos, she’d been stretched by words
into a psychotic superstring.
They placed the bed beside the moody lake,
he had her in slow motion for so long
that when he came, the sky had moved
a tone up on lavender to indigo
and subatomic particles
were visible. They stayed there through the night
absorbed in leaf patterns and stars and sex,
and when he woke, she’d disappeared,
he saw her footsteps written on the lake;
<
br /> and took a boat and sat puddled by clouds
in the dark water, and the drug went flat
like turning off an orange neon in his brain,
and she was gone, and Poe was there,
sat on a log and slugging Jack Daniels,
his red umbrella raised against the rain.
Ruth Ellis Blues
The room I come from’s where she bounced her hair’s
self-limiting platinum bob
as girlie redo in the bar,
a West End frenchified swipe at the look
without the liposuction jam-donut pout
as cool-satin petulant tease.
We soak the idea of her into talk
like sponging up vermilion paint
into a sugar cube.
Mostly the men she met were abstract blocks
roomy as MI7 offices,
forensic emotions, full of grey sky
planes track through to the Gatwick corridor.
Back home, I feed snake-twisting diagrams
of water to stripy geraniums,
as though I’m doing Japanese rope tricks
on burnt-up flaky soil. A pink, a red,
respond to being liquid corset-laced
into compacted shattered pots.
Their scent’s a thick lemony surge dragged out
by nose-diving. The night ramps up testosterone
and blonde Ruth follows me inside
like worry, a nerve that’s still red alert
and won’t die down inside my brain-chatter’s
Chinese whispers: a woman and a handgun,
six shots fired like she’d thrown a winning dice:
and back of me a cherry-sized red sun
drenched in hallucinated chromatics
backflips off the horizon’s dusty roar.
Listening to the Television Personalities
At transitioning 7 p.m. that’s me,
mint and a pinch of turmeric,
dusting my purple sprouting broccoli spears
for brushstroke steaming, just a smear
for nutty Worcester succulence, the mauve
a sort of crimson-indigo
like rain stepped in over NW3,
the hour with the first bottle almost dead,
a Fitou, Merlot, or murky Chateau
du Paradis, a zesty red
that knocks me into dissociation
to hear the boyz come up abrasively
with 3-chord licks, underground as the Fleet’s
black rolling corridor, the Effra’s trawl
like a trapped nerve under the capital,
Dan Treacy’s weird street grab on poetry
and pills brawling inside my flat
with such melodic hooks I feel
an orange light bulb moment in each cell
switching my neurons on like helium,
‘All the Young Children on Crack’
taking me into the flat’s north corner,
the painted black boards, splintered, knotty, nailed
like the TVs, and they’re obdurately real,
thirty years going under, righting it,
and always by presumption coming back.
Collecting Asa (Benveniste)
I get the booklets like space junk
re-entries to the atmosphere, the stuff
that floats like weak gravity, list mania,
obsessive fixations that, fixed,
leave edgy need like withdrawal.
Breakfast’s their show-time (spinach heaped on toast
for folic acid and vit A
and a dragon-finned China White Point tea);
Asa drank black Turkish coffee:
Time Being, A Part,
Invisible Ink, Cortege, Count Three,
Edge, my favourite, from Joe Di Maggio,
Language: Enemy, Pursuit,
It’s the Same Old Feeling Again:
assembled like urban guerrillas
answering as a cell. And there’s the books –
the seventies in a bubble
of black ink, tugging at the poem’s tail
like a Chinese emperor’s sleeves,
his language like black gold, Saudi oil
converted into currency.
I keep my stack, they’re my only reading
in my speeded-up, disconnected time.
Bordeaux red cyclamen in flower outside,
my tea still steaming, as I tell myself
every line that I write commits a crime.
Selling Truman Capote
It’s like speeding up a garage track
to 2-step, dubstep, gangsta
stuff, what’s in a book, what’s out.
I mean the words compacted into bytes,
you get the thing as physical
before the read, the boards, the glue, the edge,
slight undulation to reverse dj,
some chafish edge-wear, small bobble to cloth,
the book’s statistics—34-24-34
if it’s approximating fine,
and what’s exchanged, the A-side, B-side talk’s
a camp thing, like a pink cup cake
corset-laced with confetti.
The hard-sell’s rooted in the signature,
a navy blue Truman Capote
cute as the logo on a shirt label,
clean architecture on the grain,
each letter happening individually
like a chain of precise blue snails.
He’s quizzical (the price built into this),
the snow falling like blue false eyelashes,
his equivocation a brain process,
the signals firing pathways through his eye,
he checks the signature like DNA
and goes for plastic, while the snow outside
throws hexagonal eyes, and a Grass Harp
goes black-carriered into the underground.
‘Sorrow’—original and cover
Whyz it, a blue association clicks
waiting out on street for a 24?
the evening a rose, confrontational slab
graduating to spinach green,
and it’s a pop hook gets me mean
you know pulled out of a tune-bank
‘Sorrow’ by the Merseys, a blue
Bowie cover—a hooky pop moment
reworked inside my brain
and repurposed for bandit Pete Doherty
if he’d subvert it with coster
cockney, a gritty Brick Lane drawled vocal
like rubies cut with dodgy crack?
‘And all
I ever get from you is sorrow/sorrow’
and I mean that, irreparably true—
the blue bullet holes in the heart
cyan, turquoise, aquamarine,
pop does that, ‘Sorrow’, no come back
‘with your long blonde hair’—please go away,
please come back, and I’m waiting here,
don’t ever leave me and don’t ever stay.
Charles Baudelaire, Voyage to Cythera—(sex tourist remix)
My heart turned over doing crystal meth
beat like a seagull smashed on a cruise ship,
the hull churning under a seamless sky
the current’s rip destabilising as drink.
That off-world island, it’s a blackened chip
called Cythera, only Dylan’s played there
before gigging at sham Eldorado:
you’d think he’d accessed it through a time-slip.
Bob’s on the voyage, a white cowboy hat
sealing in shade: a sexy pull comes up,
a floating scent crowding on feel-good chemicals.
The girls in tangas loll there smoking dope.
The island’s green with myrtle, heady stuff,
there’s boys there too waiting to give good head:
the skyline’s soft as a collapsed red rose;
it shows up violet, p
ink and lipstick red.
The place was once a focus like Bangkok
for selling sex, now seagulls claim it back:
a generation’s litter’s on the beach,
beer cans, a raft of condoms, a skewed shack,
no five stars, nor topless girls in the coves,
the hippy guru gone into retreat,
her beads and incense and her mantras blocked,
she’s turned psychotic staring at her feet…
But as we came up close, sighted the shore
for cell-phone snapshots, scaring off the birds,
we saw above the camp a forked gallows
a crudely improvised immediacy—
and crows were slashing at a ripe body,
spading out sinew, digging out the eyes,
ferociously churning into the brain,
stripping a plump oligarch to the bone….
The eyes were red holes: was it jackal Blair?
the guts escaped into a tumbling coil
the birds fought over: they’d hacked off his cock
and looped his viscera around his feet.
And there were jackals scaring off the birds.
Like answers like; they guzzled body parts
like US soldiers pissing on war dead.
The leader barked out orders to the pack.
We heard news they’d strung up war criminals
around the island, czars who’d ploughed the Gulf
with depleted uranium: this one
was bacon-rashered. Bob sang ‘Like a Rolling Stone’
to put a simmer in our downturned mood.
Thrown by the carcass—his torched jeep close by—
I tasted my end like we always do,
confronted by bloody atrocity:
the hedge-funder, his dodgy dossier,
and now the raw invasion, dog eats dog,
in body-snatching revenge: there were two;
his wife was jacked up on the other side.
The sky and sea shimmered in one dissolve,
but really all I saw was red and black—
Baudelaire deconstructing Baudelaire
confronted by mad predatory attack.
We sailed on, but the man’s face comes at me
as a reminder self-disgust feeds hate,
they’d dressed him in his black suit and white tie
as though he had a Whitehall dinner date.
