Selected Poems
Page 3
This is Noah’s weather. All will drown –
But I’ll escape by crawling on all fours.
III. The Foreign Body
Each blue horizontal thrust
into the red, rain-spattered dust
brings my tachycardia back.
My heart’s a thing caught in a sack.
Lashes of tall grass whip
at my genitals, the thick ears flip
hard insects from sprung stalks
and the fraying lightning forks.
Boom! The flame trees blaze
out the ancientest of days.
All the dead in running shoes!
A bootless marchpast of dead Jews!
Boom! Bad blood cells boom
in unison for Lebensraum.
Burst corpuscles and blood cells spray
the dark with fire and die away.
The brief glares strewed
flamboyants in my face like blood.
Boom! Boom! And at each wrist
a worm as blue as amethyst
burrows its blunt head in my palm
to keep its bloodless body warm.
And in my bed I hear the whine
of soliciting anopheline,
and diptera diseases zoom
round and round my foetid room,
and randiness, my life’s disease,
in bottle green Cantharides,
and the bloody tampan, that posh louse
plushy like an Opera House,
red as an Empire or lipstick,
insect vampire, soft-backed tick –
all females, the female womb
is stuffed with blind trypanosome.
Which of your probosces made
my heart fire off this cannonade,
or is its billion gun salute
for lover or for prostitute?
Boom! Boom! And now here comes
the endless roll of danger drums,
and the death-defying leap
jerks me panicking from sleep.
Boom! Boom! Bonhomie!
America’s backslapping me.
Starchy Baptist cherubim
give me tests at the SIM,
and swallowed US tracers trace
my body’s Cuban missile base.
Boom! Boom! World War 3’s
waging in my arteries.
Desperately I call these app-
rehensions Africa but the map
churns like wet acres in these rains
and thunder tugging at my veins.
That Empire flush diluted is
pink as a lover’s orifice,
then Physical, Political run
first into marblings and then one
mud colour, the dirty, grey,
flat reaches of infinity.
The one red thing, I squat and grab
at myself like a one-clawed crab.
5. from The Zeg-Zeg Postcards
I
Africa – London – Africa –
to get it away.
II
My white shorts tighten
in the market crowds.
I don’t know
if a lean Fulani boy
or girl gave me this stand
trailing his/her knuckles
on my thigh.
III
Knowing my sense of ceremonial
my native tailor
still puts
buttons on my flies.
IV
I bought three Players tins
of groundnuts with green mould
just to touch your hand
counting the coppers into mine.
V
My Easter weekend Shangri-la, Pankshin.
I watch you pour the pure
well water, balanced up the mountain,
in blinding kerosene cans,
each lovely morning, convict,
your release date, nineteen years from now,
daubed in brown ink on your rotting shirt.
VI
My White Horse plastic horses carousel
whirls round an empty and my hell,
when the last neat whisky passes my cracked lips,
is a riderless Apocalypse.
VII Water Babies
She hauls at his member like a crude shaduf
to give her dry loins life, and calls it love.
She’s back in England pregnant. Now he can
flood the damned valley of his African.
VIII
Sex beefs at belled virginity. The wives
nag back at sex. Ding, Dong! Ding, Dong!
rings no changes on their married lives
clapping out Love’s Old Sweet Song.
What’s that to me? I can get a stand
even from maps of the Holy Land.
IX
Je suis le ténébreux … le veuf …
always the soixante and never the neuf.
X
It’s time for tea and biscuits. No one comes.
I hear the flap of Dunlop sandals, drums,
terrifying cries. My clap still bothers me.
Siestas make me dizzy. I stagger up and see
through mesh and acacia sharp metal flash,
my steward, still in white uniform and sash,
waving a sharpened piece of Chevie, ride
his old Raleigh to the genocide.
XI
The shower streams over him
and the water turns instantly
to cool Coca-Cola.
XII
We shake baby powder over each other
like men salting a spitroast,
laughing like kids in a sandpit,
childish ghosts of ourselves,
me, puffy marshmallow, he,
sherbert dusted liquorice
licked back bright
and leading into Turkish Delight.
XIII
Buttocks. Buttocks.
You pronounce it as though
the syllables rhymed: loo; cocks.
I murmur over and over:
buttocks … buttocks … BUTOX,
marketable essence of beef –
négritude – dilute to taste!
XIV
I’d like to
sukuru
you.
XV
Mon égal!
Let me be the Gambia
in your Senegal.
The Heart of Darkness
Disjointed like a baobab,
gigantic first, then noonday blob,
my shadow staggers, lurches, reels,
elasticated at my heels,
then stretches out with its blind reach
way beyond the gasp of speech.
The wind’s up and our last weak light
dithers and lets in the night.
Shadowless, one dark hand flits
spiderwise for crusted bits
of Christmas candle, German art-
creation wax with plastic Chartres
Cathedral windows, coloured light
evoking Europe till Twelfth Night
and aspirations from our dust
with no repository but lust.
Earthed so, lust like radar beams
bleeps for realities from dreams
out of darkness for the new, rich life,
the unmistakable pulsation – wife,
my blurred light in the blind
concentric circles of blank mind,
this blackout makes our flesh and bone
an Africa, a Livingstone.
Like galoshes going vitch …
vitch … an Easter birch switch
going vitch … the fan slows
down and stops, dense mangoes
rustle and a Congo band sings
indigenous and Western things.
The crowds flock in, agog to feel
new frissons out of Brazzaville.
Novelties! Good drummers come
miles to hear a diff
erent drum
as men go to adulteries. Sounds!
Women! It’s the same. Our ground’s
stamped and rutted, so we choose
either to hog it in squelched ooze,
or get resurrection and find sties
most radiant with novelties.
My shadow’s back as if it could
smell lust steaming off my blood:
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
this is my Praeconium.
Paging angels set down this
fastidious and human kiss;
and this; and this; and this; and set
down this, my Exultet:
Everything in this rich dark
craves my exclamation mark.
Wife! Mouth! Breasts! Thigh!
certe necessarium Adae
peccatum … felix culpa … O felix
dark continent of fallen sex.
Harrowing Christ! O Superlamb,
grown lupine, luminous – Shazam!
Not so bravado now, but bare
cold, and sober on a camel-hair
Saharan blanket. Tuareg guards
patrolling with their rusty swords
swing up a lamp and weldmesh
thief-bars check our flesh
gleaming: breasts; thigh; bum;
out of our aquarium.
Our fruitless guava quincunx
curvets on its supple trunks.
The candles in the empties flare
sideways in the stirring air
and then go out. The curtains soar
horizontal with the floor.
It seems a whole sea must pour through
our all-glass house at Samaru.
And now all’s dark and the first rains
splatter at the window panes,
flattening down ten rows of beans,
a bed of radishes. This means
no news from England, no new war
to heighten the familiar:
Nigeria’s Niger is not yet
harnessed to our wireless set.
The Songs of the PWD Man
‘We were not born to survive, alas,
But to step on the gas.’
(Andrei Voznesensky)
I
I’ll bet you’re bloody jealous, you codgers in UK,
Waiting for your hearses while I’m having it away
With girls like black Bathshebas who sell their milky curds
At kerbside markets out of done-up-fancy gourds,
Black as tar-macadam, skin shining when it’s wet
From washing or from kissing like polished Whitby jet.
They’re lovely, these young lasses. Those colonial DO’s
Knew what they were up to when they upped and chose
These slender, tall Fulanis like Rowntrees coffee creams
To keep in wifeless villas. No Boy Scout’s fleapit dreams
Of bedding Brigitte Bardot could ever better these.
One shy kiss from this lot has me shaking at the knees.
It’s not that they’re casual, they’re just glad of the lifts
I give them between markets and in gratitude give gifts
Like sips of fresh cow-juice off a calabash spoon.
But I’m subject to diarrhoea, so I’d just as soon
Have a feel of those titties that hang down just below
That sort of beaded bolero of deep indigo blue;
And to the woven wrapper worn exactly navel high,
All’s bare but for ju-jus and, where it parts, a thigh
Sidles through the opening with a bloom like purple grapes.
So it’s not all that surprising that some lecherous apes
Take rather rough advantage, mostly blacks and Lebanese,
Though I’ve heard it tell as well that it were one of these
That white Police Inspector fancied and forced down
At the back of barracks in the sleazy part of town.
Well, of course, she hollered and her wiry brothers ran
And set rabid packs of bushdogs on the desperate man.
He perished black all over and foaming at the mouth.
They’re nomadic, these Fulanis, driving to the South
That special hump-backed cow they have, and when they’re on trek,
They leave wigwamloads of women, and by blooming heck,
I drive in their direction, my right foot pressed right down
Laying roads and ladies up as far as Kano town.
Though I’m not your socialistic, go-native-ite type chap
With his flapping, nig-nog dresses and his dose of clap,
I have my finer feelings and I’d like to make it clear
I’m not just itchy fingers and a senile lecher’s leer.
I have my qualms of conscience and shower silver, if you please,
To their lepers and blind beggars kipping under trees.
They’re agile enough, those cripples, scrabbling for the coins,
But not half so bloody agile as those furry little groins
I grope for through strange garments smelling of dye-pits
As I graze my grizzly whiskers on those black, blancmangy tits.
I don’t do bad for sixty. You can stuff your Welfare State.
You can’t get girls on National Health and I won’t masturbate.
They’re pleased with my performance. I’m satisfied with theirs.
No! I think they’re very beautiful, although their hair’s
A bit off-putting, being rough like panscrub wires,
But bums like melons, matey, lips like lorry tyres.
They all know old Roller Coaster. And, oh dear, ugh!
To think I ever nuzzled on a poor white woman’s dug,
Pale, collapsed and shrivelled like a week-old mushroom swept
Up at Kirkgate City Markets. Jesus bleeding wept!
Back to sporting, smoky Yorkshire! I dread retirement age
And the talking drum send-off at the Lagos landing stage.
Out here I’m as sprightly as old George Formby’s uke.
I think of Old Folk’s England and, honest, I could puke.
Here I’m getting younger and I don’t need monkey glands,
Just a bit of money and a pair of young, black hands.
I used to cackle at that spraycart trying to put down
That grass and them tansies that grew all over town.
Death’s like the Corporation for old men back in Leeds,
Shooting out its poisons and choking off the weeds.
But I’m like them tansies or a stick cut in the bush
And shoved in for a beanpole that suddenly grows lush
With new leafage before the garden lad’s got round
To plucking the beans off and digging up the ground.
Yes, better to put the foot down, go fast, accelerate,
Than shrivel on your arses, mope and squawk and wait
For Death to drop the darkness over twittering age
Like a bit of old blanket on a parrot’s cage.
II
Life’s movement and life’s danger and not a sit-down post.
There’s skeleton cars and lorries from Kano to the coast;
Skeletons but not wasted, those flashy Chevie fins
Honed up for knife blades or curled for muezzins
To megaphone the Koran from their mud mosques and call
The sun down from its shining with their caterwaul.
But it’s not just native say-so; it’s stark, realistic fact;
The road’s a royal python’s dark digestive tract.
And I expect that it’ll get me one rainy season night,
That sudden, skating backwheel skid across the laterite,
Or a lorry without headlights, GOD IS LOVE up on the cab,
Might impale me on my pistons like a raw kebab.
Smash turned into landscape, ambulance, that’s that,
A white corpse starkers like a suddenly skinned cat.
As kids when we came croppers, there were always some old dears
Who’d come and pick us up and wipe off blood and tears,
And who’d always use the same daft words, as they tried to console,
Pointing to cobble, path or flagstone: Look at the hole
You’ve made falling. I want a voice with that soft tone,
Disembodied Yorkshire like my mother’s on the phone,
As the cook puts down some flowers and the smallboy scrapes the spade,
To speak as my epitaph: Look at the hole he’s made.
The Death of the PWD Man
‘Chivo que rompe tambor con su pellejo paga.’
(Abakuá proverb)
I
Earth-brown Garden Bulbuls in the Bathurst graveyard trees
Sing, they say, ‘quick-doctor-quick’ or ‘fifty-nine degrees’.
God knows, but I’m drawn to graves like brides to baby-wear
Spending an afternoon ashore to see who’s buried there.
Ozanne, DO Blackwater Fever. FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH.
A commissioner, they say, who mustered his last breath
And went on chanting till he croaked the same damn thing:
A coffle of fourteen asses bound for Sansanding!
Then Leeds medic Rothery Adgie, dead at twenty six,
His barely legible wooden cross a bundle of split sticks.
Though mostly nineteen hundreds half the graves have gone
Succumbing like the men below to rains and harmattan.
But fine windborne sand and downpours can’t obliterate
BLAKEBOROUGH’S (BRIGHOUSE) from the iron hydrant grate
Outside the Residence, and I’ve a sense of dismal pride
Seeing Yorkshire linger where ten Governors have died.
The same as in Nigeria, though the weather rots the cross,
There’s HUNSLET (LEEDS) in iron on an engine up at Jos.
Wintering house-martins flutter round MacCarthy Square
And bats from Mauritanian shops get tangled in your hair.
Sunset; six; the muezzin starts calling; church bells clang,
Swung iron against iron versus amplified Koran.
It’s bottoms up at sundown at the praying ground and bar,
Though I prefer the bottle to the Crescent and the Star,
The bottle to the Christians’ Cross, and, if I may be frank,
Living to all your Heavens like a woman to a wank.
And it’s a bottle that I’m needing as I get back to the boat
With a lump like coal or iron sticking in my throat.
Though I take several bottles, though I hawk like hell and cough,
It stays fixed like a lodestone Northwards as the boat casts off.
II
Sunday Scotsman Northwards, autumn trees all rusting up;
My fifth Light Ale is swashing in its BR plastic cup.
Coming back to England; there’s no worse way than this