Master Virgil’s Deceyte


by Duncan McGibbon


Master Virgil’s Deceyte

In the myth -spinning streets of Rome, stalks the figure of Virgil, the poet and necromancer. His was the claim to have seen Hell and Rome held him to it. In The Deceyte of Love (1560) in York Library, Virgil has a garden that streams with magic light from a magic lamp, where birds sing without end. Later, a burning, copper statue appears and a lamp. Finally a copper bow and arrow, which loosed by a distracted woman shatters the lamp and with it, the garden and the birds. A Thirteenth Century Romance, Cléomades, by Adenes li Rois and edited by Van Hasselt in Brussels in 1865, tells this myth among many. Virgil as a prophet of Christianity and yet one of the last pagans has a cardinal role in European literature. This is why I have used the myths to join the separate cycles of poems in this book. He appears as a refugee in the opening poem and the other cycles take their titles from the myth.

Both the garden and the lamp are to be found in my Cornwall sequence. The burning statue reflects the destruction of images by the English reformers. The “Man of Copper” expresses the realism of the thepoems in part three. A series of conceptual poemsin part four draw the bow and the erotic poems in part five release it in time to shatter the lamp, leading to satire as in the satyr play with which all tragedies ended in Greek drama.


Duncan McGibbon 


I Virgil’s Lamp

Virgil’s Boast

II His Garden of Light

1. Brighton Beach
2. Great Walsingham
3. Goonhilly and Coverack
1. I will speak though
2. I have searched these heathlands
3. The flies
4. On the Moorlands
4.At Gunwalloe
5. Kynance Cove
6. Lantern House
1 The Lizard Light
2. The Lloyd's House
7. Everyman’s Dragon
1.At the Seal Sanctuary
2. Truro Cathedral
8. Penwith
1.The Flowers
2. The Theatre on the Cliff
9. Marazion
1.To Charles Causley
2.The Seine Fishers
10 Tintagel
11..Land's End

III His Burning Statue

Girl Meditating
Motets for Our Lady of Caversham 1-14
Words for a Ward

IV His Man of Copper

Getting Inside 1-10
January 1856

V His Copper Arrow

Synchronised Divers, Seville, 1997
After the Gala
Trumpington Street
Mia in the Philosophers’ House.1-16

VI Touching the Strings

Matutinals
Metathalamion 1-3
Lifegames

VI Shattered Lamp

The Delivery of the Baboon Parts
My Last Model

After Bergengrauen
After Bousquet 


Virgil’s Lamp
 


Virgil’s Compleynte

Né creator né creatur a mai"
comunicio ei, "Figliuol, fu senza amore"
“No creator, nor creature,
as you know, Son, was without love.”
Purgatorio.17, 90-1

Neither on the earth, nor off it;
I staggered through migration channels,
weary with my father's weight.
I cut the iron city's badge
from my clothes,
but the sky's complexion
was still a giveaway,
seen through the holes
torn in my shirt

Who put you onto me? My spy,
my fan, my obssessive tail?"
The Western Daily,
the Home Office, or the Holy?
dragging my steps as I go down,
rustling Gold-Leaf on a nightshift
to clean the West End lavatory of guilt,
and spray my pagan scent about
to sweeten custom’s daily devotions.
I slink about your dummy eschatology
on permission to stay with a Christian visa.
printed on the margin
of scrolls and codices.
You exploit my reserved labourto show up my world with your stop-watch,
sweet, new life-style-God, accosting
embarrassed celebrities, passing by,
“Say hello to the heathen
who believes in love”
to out themselves.
It's a cuss, a piss-take: theology
wrapped around a love song.
I know you crave
that tarty Florentine housewife
you couldn't afford to wed.
Your light language pickles her
my Monroe-Dido , your Evita-Beatrice:
the wriggle of love-making
polished to an icon, that is nonsense
misted with your incense

I, justified the ways of love
to an audience of mercenaries
that knew only arms deals and defence
and jestified the awe of state. .
You liturgy is spotted; the sacred
never combats earth,
but follows whole to go beyond.
You throw a secular shadow
on my pagan shade
a tired, wounded soldier's
running from a burning town
with the skies of the past
written on my back.
I am the millions I spoke for.
I reach out to you in fellowship
barred in your secular shrine
to find you do not know my human grace.

 


Garden of Light

1.Brighton Beach

The Regency terraces
blaze white in the sun,
still as bleached relics,
futile as empty bone.

On the Pier, a fat little boy
paddles himself precariously
round a plastic river
in a pink canoe.

Here anything can happen;
gunfire regulates the air;
cars explode in yellow flames.

People are carrying
eccentric furry animals,
as if they were running
from houses on fire.

A shaven-haired little tough
is walked, crying,
from the ghost-train ride.
The Pavilion's domes glint
with the patina of dead wealth
as if bone could still tap silent ivory

On the beach
I pick up a stone
and see it has another inside it,
trapped in a cavity.
 
A tiny girl emerges
from the cold, blue sea,
which sucks and retches
at the piles below the pier.
As if she were walking on coals,
she hobbles to her mother
for whom no-one else exists,
who wraps her in a white towel
and lifts her into her arms
.
At a silent moment
the children, men and women
watch awestruck, as Punch hits Judy
to the sole sound of wooden strokes

Under the slimey groines
another boy, with a mop of red-hair
blazing above white matchstick limbs,
makes a barred cellar,
under the massive front,
echo to a mighty roar

The tour-bus microphone
intones the lore of the place
like on Attic chorus
"a torso in a trunk
another in a wardrobe."
Time decapitated
the Mistress’ story ,
worn, and never
identified, like
a prize Greek statue 
of an unknown God
While ahead, in the casino,
coins pile high onto the margin
poised to tumble at the next
rolling ten pence, promising
the miracle fortune,
denied to all others.

Here, anything can happen.
All that counts
is knowing you belong to it,
for those who belong here
always leave.

2. Great Walsingham

Here a river tumbles
like a dancing child
beside a revered church.
It is worn down to a pillar,
yet the trout still bite,
as they did for Cnut.
In a moment of boredom,
my daughter and her friend
plait reeds like their hair,
my rod tautens and pulls.

I see the flash of
a fish’s underbelly
a tremor of strength
then my line falls slack. 


We go home, tired, excited
wondering what the river bank
will make of plaited reeds.

3.Goonhilly and Caverack

i).I will speak, though…
I am this dust and ashes
ashes in the grey sand,
tinting the wings
of avaricious gulls,
veiling the palms
on this tropical stone
like faded Victorian grisaille,
in the lumber room
of an ageing home
with its own proud, fine dust.

ii)

I have searched these heathlands
for those I know, whom I have lost.
The sharp call of the owl
when the dawn disturbs its cover, night.
The steady melody of the song thrush,
marking its territory of quaking snails.

I call You in these bare places,
knowing there is nothing else, 

but poor grass, limp nettle and gorse.
Have mercy, Lord and pity the pride
of my stupid and everlasting heart.

iii)

The flies had taken over the house
their buzzing around "the lads are here"
a chorus of fifty lusty throbbings
each a semitone different apart
like a chair of mediaeval novices
become heretical and diabolic
out of pure boredom

They fly out of crevices,
like bats in a Dracula film,
out of innocent bumps
in the wall paper,
feeding on adhesive paste
glue and bars of soap
exposing the knacker’s knife
behind our household blandness.

The next day we struck.
A chemical Armageddon
mowed them down, though
they contrived to make
a stand on their fall

Then everything went silent,
the floors coated
with little black forms,
like dried out black current.
with theatre-dead legs
and lissome wings,
leaving us with our poisons.
The next day, a tortoiseshell
butterfly lay dead.

iv)

On the moorland,
vast ears hover
listening across the seas of time
for sound that is older
than the buried dead
in iron-age graves.
Neon lights fired red
glow throughout the moonlight.
On the horizon, a host
of slim white girls
dance and cartwheel
in exultation and homage
at the arrival of winds
and the lingering of earth.

4. At Gunwalloe

How can we tell
when only a fire blazes
on the consoling beach;
when trumpets thunder
from the lighthouses.
When voices clamour
to be heard in this graveyard
of forgotten fishermen
and upstart eccentrics?

How can we tell
when the jackdaw
leads up the scrambling step
to the cliff top
to our tower built
into the granite hoard
of your creation?

How can we tell
when the gathering angels
out number the electron sea?
when the censoring voices
are hoarse with an exact
retribution for the guilty few?
How can we know
Have we come, himself, to Him,
when aching arms
and the wearied mind
finds we are nothing at all
but a breath and cry of Your issue,
wanting to be an issue of Yours
5. Kynance Cove

Heather and bracken,
ferns and lichen,
a tapestry of fire
licking the hard stone
for a livelihood.
It covers this
sepulcre land
with a braid
of gentle ponds,
a home to the hedgehog,
to the fieldmouse and the shrew
shapes that move from
the head land's autarchy.
In the shimmering
rock-pools the goby dart
beneath wave-moulded rocks
while the seals howl,
yet every stone is dead
Wave after wave;
yet every living wave will vanish
and the land’s silence, too,
while a drizzle falls
on the dead stone
and livens the dry seed:
the tracks of little animals
in the fine silt,
a scrawling of hope.


6. Lantern Houses

i) The Lizard Light

The building becomes
a priory for mad ascetics.
The foghorns are
huge listening horns.
straining to hear
even a whisper
of a bird in the air.
tipsy with brine.
The lantern-house
is a steel altar,
floating on mercuric grace
while the tiny filament of love
tumbles through a labyrinth of glass
to glow, spectral with geometric
obesity through a four-field bullseye
which flares across the Sound.
with a two-second prayer between.
while black-cloaked jackdaws
man the chimney-stacks
gathering for an Easter-fire
guiding a creator demon
down to this poor heath.
 
i)The Lloyds House,

A glum cairn
of Eighteenth Century stone,
on a foreland, all alone
waiting for semaphores
from trade-worn mariners
of esctasy and pain,
of city loss and gain.


7. Everyman’s Dragons

i) At the Seal Sancturary, Gweek

They lull in bath-tubs,
or sprawl over steps,
seen through analytic
glass below the water-line.
Here the neighbours row
over foreplay,
or wait to be hand-fed
or pretend the sprats still live
or look like taxmen
deciding on our Inland Revenue declaration.
Another spins on her own axis,
having been brain-damaged while on the rocks
another waddling prima-dona,
sags in her hundred weight’
Along the pretty cave
on her own topmost call.
The two-note ostinate
of a blind bull sea- lion
penetrates the quiet woods.
While his mate deftly
generates through the water,
a dragon in the liquid air
breathing silver fire.

ii) Truro Cathedral - An Ecclesiatical Novel

Prologue

Passive voices lumber
behind the heavy syntax
for portentious brick;
The Catholic begin this place
with a lifeless parenthesis inserted
into the living words tradition
intoned by John Robertes,
his family, Time, and Death,
a dapper student, a reliable watchmaker.

Opening Chapter

A surpliced property tycoon
sings the Pater Noster
in matchless plainchant,
while fishing for compliments
from a burly Prince of Wales,
as Pontius Pilate watched over by a hawk-like
Princess May of Teck
who guides his boozy
hand with the gold-plaited trowel
which cements all three
into a terracotta panel on which
gaudy stained-glass reflected
the light of circumstance
(a Clayton and Bell Romance)
In the beginning was Bishop Benson
who saw John Loughborough Reason
Evening came and morning came.
The first Cornish granite arrived
separating the light from darkness,
to the sound of muted pickaxes.

The Climax Chapter

The old church of St Mary's collapses.
Evening comes and morning comes
the second Person in the Trinity,
frank and fearless
rebuilds over St Mary's aisle
a fossil within a fossil's crop.
Morning comes and evening comes,
with the arrival of the Bath stone.
But then, after a hasty funeral
times change for
the South Transept, in a Spirit House,
trapping even Wesley in its web of light.
and Henry Martin’s
Hindus, Moslems and Parsees,
The Holy Wilkinson
second Bishop, glorified.
A theft finds it difficult
to hide itself, a century on, it still
hesitates; each voice ceasing,
retired to become a figment in oil-paint
a procession of Anglican divines
marches on the clouds
above the South West. peninsula.

Closing Chapter

A ray of light descends
on the Prince of Cornwall
standing on the sanctuary as
who dispenses a secular
blessing on the housing schemes
of saints and missionaries
of liberal reason
In the dark halo of cloud,
blacked out Jumbo jets of the recusant,
he rebrobate, perverts,
and invincible pagans.
stack and serially
ditch into the robust sea.

Epilogue

To leave this place,
it is enough to cough,
whisper and steal a leaflet
from the shadows built
for ghosts to brick up souls
and Arthur Quiller-Couch,
in cap and gown
leads the World War dead
in Keatsian prayer.

8. Penwith

i)

The little town
with sooted rooks
settled in the valleys,
while the moorland
and the traverse sea
widen their hunted
influence on the land
like flocks of doves
they huddled on the ground
with slate-wings spread
to focus on uncertain insects

ii)

The florists' stall
of Mousehole,
cockpit for a brawling climate
the car mobbed
by staid pedestrians
like a stagbeetle
in a procession of ants

iii) The Theatre on the Cliff

The land is the backdrop
that baffles the waves.
This stage is reality
struggling to get by
on cliff edges of sheer loneliness
An old woman is
guided fron her gaunt old house
by mindful attendants,
to become the protagonist
in some primitive earth-bound rite.
While from the white-painted
halls, school children
intone Gilbert and Sullivan,
under a fatalising shower

9. Marazion -

i) To Charles Causley

He comes into this tea-house
over-familiar with the locals,
always with a child in tow
who knows he's in for a treat
and has an impish grin.
Yours is the breviary
of the visible, the bread
of the splintered land
shared out among
those with the patience to wait.
While sunlit time
refracts through
the sea-worn window,
a vagrant-light,
beginning to throw
its weight about,
knowing his luck is in.


ii)The Seine Fishers

They were standing waist-deep
in the afternoon tide,
with the silver light
on the scarp of the water.
as they pulled, a perfec
ellipse rose to the
a black line baffling the waves
and shrinking, weighted,
to the land,
where a crowd
stood like extras
in a Gospel film.
As the living pool
reached the shore
the men threw back,
larger saithe and then l
seemed to show.
no further interest
in the Whitebait, Sand Eels
Gobi Weavers and Ribbon Fish
that lay gasping
and pouting under
the drowning air.
The people on the beach
stood dumbfounded
then began to throw
the fishes back,
some were too late,
The men had elaborately
folded up their net
and gone away, unseen
and witnessing adults
never knew why so much life
should be wasted
to find the unknown

10. Tintagel

It is far from anywhere
you might hold dear
yet as Calcium to the bone
its stone is closer
to what you have near

11. Land’s End

The car full of the children's crisps,
the Oasis tapes ranting through the speakers
and windscreens misting
as we headed for Penwith
in a sudden downpour,
assing a gaunt Methodist chapel
the brick chumney stacks
of disused tin mines
and placards advertising
potatoes, Cornish palms and fuchsia.
The road becomes a stalk
stretching towards
the leaf-mountain chaim
which moisten limp
under the driving hailstones,
We turn into the hills
and the sun gleams
with a horn-blare of
circular light
over the whispering heathers
This is a customs house
to a naked void,
a blue emptiness
that everything tumbles towards.
The two toughs with beer cans,
downing then in one
above a sheer drop,
children, women, men, dogs
jackdows even shrews
scrambling about
over a self-destructive
edge edited in
metamorphic schists.
edged with hyperactive waves
Two coasts that elsewhere
could seperate religions
or whole civilizations
now join in rocky,
crumbling landscape
of scheming cliff tops
and beguiled people
on the holiday of their lives.
 

Burning Statue
 
The Retreat, Girl Meditating

The Hampstead daylight
passes through a muslin screen
onto an open carpet.
The room has been made a shrine
to its own spaciousness
an Edwardian toybox
larger than a Waites house
where a girl sits wearing
white jeans and a jacket
upright against the wall,
her head below the dado rail.
Staring ahead of her,
I see she is beautiful
and wants to be noticed,
a self-conscious picture,
more a donor than a saint..
She is with others
who enforcedly meditate
while a tape plays a trite,
self-satisfied keyboard tune
This May which is quiet,
promising sunshine
through time's meniscus
on the brink of belief.
If you want to be. I will let you be
the mystic of your growing loveliness,
and pray for a calling of the heart.


 
Motet for Our Lady of Caversham

Cantus

All night long, the trickle of Saxon water
bled through chalk, rusting the last crumbsA
of an eorl’s reliquary, russet as the tongue
of a dragon on a parchment margin.
Robertus, Dux Normandiae
splits the codex with a short sword
and throws his portion
onto a covered cart.
You brush such dust and drops away
from the universe of your veil,
wound over a face of invisible beauty,
so breathtaking, the river is stilled at the world’s lips.
and the heart’s field is cleared
of the long, heavy dream of power-lines,
sewage pipes and staid Victorian villas.
Father O’Malley opens John London’s chest,
which gouts with mud as the drowned
men of Rochester, climb out,
carrying the wooden statue
and wipe away five hundred years
of the commissioner’s locked soul
and a lighted lamp, one of hundreds
still burning under the waters
in gudgeon-flecked gravels.

 
Organum

Water bled through chalk,
a reliquary. Hearne ,the antiquary
doffs his tricorn to sift the papers.
with an impatient hand.
My Lord of Caversham,
Walter Gifford, of the heart’s field, gules,
his founding hands
glow through the soil of the suburbs
from shadow into shadow.

Discant

They glow, as gas-lamps blazed
in the cause of the wick:
Eve,a visibility,
and Margaret,
daughter of William the Lion,
tenor of Scotland.
whose fingernails light
the staid neighbourhoods
of the city in civil twilight.
as Fr Ilsley watches the Gospels dance.

Trope

Civil applause, an unheard thunder,
you stand there now
your immortal body more
indiscernable than muons,
in which you wrap
our awaiting dead
and my gladdened Earl of Pembroke,
Lord of the Manor
and hold saints.
Expected , a face or two
begins to smile.
“At last can someone help?”
Flesh of his flesh, Mary
flesh of her flesh, her Son.
you wonder what
the visiting angel is doing here.
and walk along with him,
hoping it will help you
understand
why he wants your want,
It is concern
that lights your face,
the torch touched to
the midden of time
to incinerate mortality
bound back from
the dry legacy of disgrace.
by the conceiving Hand.

Gradus

Unwritten, unheard,
the provisions of Oxford,
Mother of Justice,
but sung to the eye
in living melody,
a girl holding her mother’s hand,
a dancing chain
so fearless before that holy place
in polyphony
with the perfect ecstasy
of everything imperceptible
in place of the places
of the dead:
love born on one voice
to be carried to another:
a mother reborn in her child.


Clausula

The child reborn in her child,
was more real than
she could have guessed.
South’s pen scratches on,
“The difficulty and strangeness…”
The rubrics of Father Haskew’s
overdraft redden with love.

What is this place
once my home,
of anger,unpraised toil
and guilt?

It is the poor mission of the body.

You are pregnant by the Holy Spirit
that hovered the depths of entity.
As you are to the stars outside you,
He is to you, yet within .

 
Triplum

From the depths,
the women have climbed
the mountain.
The order of The Visitation
opens a new school of faith.
She is all joy,
singing until the gloss
of happiness shines
from her skin.
the other is full of strong homage
and will not let her walk
any longer until she rested.
Isabella Beachamp
wife and mother to be
of the political slain.
and her servants unload
twenty pounds of gold
from the barge on the Thames
in chains and bracelets,
dropping a brooch
into the water from which
the trout flick away.

The King of Spain’s daughter.
comes to visit with a hollow womb.
while dumbfounded love
witnesses a meeting
that has done with words
for the pain
of a leaping, kicking child.


Bass

The kicking leaping trout
Walton pulls from the Black Potts.
“Playted over with silver”
your image floats
by the next barge
“that comythe
from Reding to London.”
Then he fussed over mules and carts
spending more than was needed
She has all she needs,
the fruit inseason
and the sun’s rays
the twelve fierce stars
tamed under
a Renaissance canvas.
Her milk has shown, liebfrau,
as she will be seen
all over Europe ,
She has the face of as women
given to them,
that only in the poverty
of sight should there be vision.
In wood, you burn,
with the relics of piety,
before the Smithfield crowds.

CantusPlanus

Children of fear,
the monks of Notley
have signed her over
to John London
who “also pulled down
the place she stode in
with all other ceremonyes
as lightes, shrowdes, crowchys
and images of wax.”
The victims are the only suspects.
“I have commended unto
your good lordship
ascertaining the same
that I have pulled down
the image of our lady
of Caversham.”
and staid Victorian houses
from shadows to shows
from whispers to spectres,
on the bridge of breath.
Bled through chalk karst
risking subsistence .
the innocent have a day
to themselves in the hills,
in the hill country
among slender girls,
lamenting she knew no man
and yet one Lord treasured within.

Copula

The empty spaces
will explode with life
over the clay flood plain
and the chalk mines,
scaffolding for ‘semis’
rules the skies next to the
terraces in the lows
and villas on the “heights.”
the incendiary bomb sites
once drifting with smoke
from the cork works,
filled in with homes.
Cochran’s land
became a place for a church,
where children’s voices sing.
The waters, bleeding
through chalk
will separate.
A new life will tumble
into the world
to cry and to suck,
its caul already
a shawl of safety.
an ionosphere of hope.
The world orbits
on the expectation
of her word.
Nothing is finished
that was started,
except the Word,
its founder and their
proceeding
endlessly waiting
on her word,
the Word in her.
The infinite holds its breath.

Melismata

In the image of love,
a golden crown, created joy,
friendship of opposites,.
Creation is held up
by God and given over.
The friends of Joseph carouse.
and Mary dances,
Almah, her heels in the dust.
a rift and a healing,
at Joseph’s right hand
in clothes of gold.

Contrafacta

A rift and a healing,
in the heavens,
supernovae, or conjunction
visible perhaps from
Somalia,or Iran,or China,
the Silk road extended to Rome’
Siurely they do everything
as if they believe it?
Some light too small to notice
becomes a flare
of guiding intensity.
They are astute,
to ways of Kingcraft
the Plantagenets,
the Le Dispensers,
making their way
upstream from Windsor.,
that icon of Regum.
Darwin, Newton
and Eddington
agreeing
like all who meet
with angels
that a return can be
by any route.

Plagalis

Two doves with
their wings fluttering,
in the still air.
At home in this
holy cirty,
she waits outside
in the courtyard
and priests go out to her.
She soothes the birds
not needing their burden
and the old couple
look at her silently
wonder as tears spread
noiselessly in all eyes.

Clausula Vera.

My youngling, my yearling, cry, my infantine:
my fawn, my warble, my whelp, my kitten,
chit, my lamb, my lambkin, ewelamb, kid , my calf,
my pup, my chicken, chuckle, cub ,my chick
my gabble, my fledgeling, my eyas, squab and fry.
Sing my mite, my girl, my lad, my laddie
spat, spawn, my kit, my firstling.

Your squat paw reaches out in dimpled love
for my grown finger and grips in joy.
Your smiling head homes on the palm of my hand,
your pulsing feet push
against the muscles of my arm.
I look into your lyric eyes
and hear my soul in song,
outside its time.

Words for A Word

The infant
moves his head
forward and
tilts up his
face, but with-
out breaking
gaze, as if
he is try
ing to lift
his head and
face towards
the person
who eli
cited the
smile…

At the same
time body
tension will
noticeab-
ly increase,
as may limb
movement, which
may include
a poorly
co-ordin
ated eff
ort to reach
tpwards the
person with
his arms… 


Man of Copper 
Getting Inside

Premonitions.

The sunlight draws thin
as the day with children
ends its pitch.
The last child departs
from my detention.
Twenty years ago
I closed a classroom door,
just as I will do today.
I had headed off across
the dank,yellow drifts
of a withering tradition
to a teacher’s meeting,
preoccupied with some
casual unfairness
about the uprooting
of yet another school.

It was not on the agenda.
Someone asked Blair Peach
“Are you going to Southall?”
and I could not make out
his long, stuttered reply.
I knew I would not there.
On Monday he was dead.
A light was seen to burn all night
at Barnes police station.
“Goodnight, Sir.” “Goodnight”
I wait before tossing
careworn lines in the bin.

2.Drawing the Line

I sit attentive in the 747pig-run
over a frosted Atlantic sky,
signing my boarding card:

Do you have a communicable disease,
mental,or physical disorder:
or are you an abuser of drugs?

No

Have you ever been arrested,
or convicted of a crime
involving moral turpitude?

No

Are you seeking entry to engage
in immoral activities or crime?

No

Have you ever been,
or are you involved
with espionage,or sabotage?

No

Have you ever asserted
immunity from prosecution?

No

Are you alive?

3. Borders

Leif embarked when it suited him
and his problems once at sea.
At last he came upona coastline
he had never known before:
wild wheat meadows,
grapevines and maple-trees.

I leave the Saga
and go aft in carnival
to seek my extra hospitality drink,
while pockets of turpitude
rock my Jumbo,
ascending in twirls
of Rococo fluff.

Clutching brandies and a coke,
I slide through packed seats,
hoping the attedndant
won’t cut into the Adagio
of Kleiber’s noisy Fifth.
to announce the weather,
the time in England,
or imminent disaster.

Back in Greenland
Thjodhild refused to live with Eirek
after she chose to follow Christ
and this made Leif’s father very angry
All winter long at Brattahild
the men debated a further
search for Vinland
where it was rumoured
fertile soil coild be found.

In the seat next to mine,
a girl from Southall
talks about her friends in Queens.
Clare props up her plastered foot.
Her pink toes are a coxcomb’s
taunt from the accidental life.

After two days
they sighted land again.
It was unwooded
and had no harbour.
The beaches were wide and sandy

My daughter Aisling listens
doggedly to pop groups,
while my son reads Milton.

That winter they stayed there,
though it chanced to be acold one.
and the food ran low.Thorhall, the huntsman rose and spoke
“Thor has done more than your Christ
when I wrote verses for him,
he gave me a reward.”
Then there was abreak in the weather
and they wnet fishing,
for there was no want of food.

I peer forward to see
the American day
our scaft advances on,
getting inside the light.
They are shutting
the pastic portholes,
out of one,
at a distance from me,
I see the setting sun
above the margining wing.

4. Landfall

Below, I see Newfoundland
Its street lights are children’s
games of giant marbles
abandoned in an ontological
playground of dark,
matttered, silence.
The woman next to me
is reading New Age
bible-therapy
“Change your life
in six easy steps.” 
We agree the tented shape
of Long Island,
while the plane banks
and throws the roads confetti
in sea-darkness and cloud.
the ladders of Manhatten,
inertly ice-cold,
vanish and appear
from contrary diretcions,
as the plane stacks,
suppresses gruff enrgy
and lands its vessel
a JFK,
Vinland.

5. Landing Cards

The immigration officer
with her knee-led, Bronx waddle
keeps our quartet
under a restless eye:
the clarinet of a tall.
shy boy with a wool hat,
hoved down on long,
light-brown hair,
a vibrant tennager’s fiddle
tuned to a Walkman,
a bearded , bulging cello
of a man in a faded jacket
and my wife, alert
at her wheelchair keyboard. 
“Why did you come here to-day,
for some pleasure?”

“Yes, we’re tourists,
if that’s what you mean.”
6. Thirty Five Dollar Fare Plus Tolls
On the car radio
soft voices narrate a killing,
Amadou Diallo dead
under a rain of fortyone shots.
A Guinean, he tensed up
and went for his pocket.
When the smoke cleared
nothing could be heard
except sobbing officers.
the tight-lipped Bengali
taxi-driver accelerates
over Triboro Bridge
into Harlem to be halted
by traffic lights
alongside an empty
high school playground.

Lorca’s rumor still mingles
with Dylan Thomas’sneer
to the rumble of slaughter wagons.
From the chrome loudspeakers
“Mayor Guiliani has
ordered hollow bullets
they’re safer.”

A preacher’s breathy rhetoric
rattles a plastic cup on the TV
in our East 88th Street room.
“They say he looked suspicious at night.
I’d look suspicious at night
How come a mayor
wouldn’t look suspicious at night!
How come? Yoy know how come!”

we squabble over rights
and rummage with boxy drawers.

A polished announcer claims
“Some shots can penetrate
and leave the body
without stopping a man at all..
Hollow bullets burst in the body,
Police Plaza say they’re safer for the force.”


7. East Riverside, Dawn

From the other window
a New Jersey skyline settles
a seepage of visibility
on the mud-tide night.

A War Memorial
looms over civil peace.

Below, a wispy mapl 

is having its winter
and dying of it too.
While sunlight rises,
as efficient asan Otis lift,
and just enough to drop
a little light upon its leaf.
which would be a tear
if the leaf were
a tattered flag,
or a blessing
from the streetlight’s
aspergellum:
Whitman’s Miracle,
a new species
I have decided to find.
the city of now:
hotels and residencies
throw carton oiutlines
more emphatically,
now the daylight’s here.
You cannot build
wothout a cast of shadows.


8.First Landscape

The girl in the bagel shop
gives me a quizzical look:

“Wadz happened?
Yuh wanted
a black coffee?”

She beckons at the
offending item
with a flick
of her manicured hand.

My son peers
into the fish tank counters
at the modality
of breakfast
amid romping pastries,
while the girl smiles
at his English
indecision…

stepping the legend
of his youth
into the room.

9. Ordinary Time

Tiffany’s is shut
as tight as a tabernacle.
The diamonds are Trump’s.
The toffee-marble
is melting in the mouths of ‘Babes.’

The Archdiocesan Office
is sponsoring
World Marriage Mass.
I manhandle the wheelchair 

up the Cathedral Steps,
escaping the cold gusts
of the ramp access
to the amusement
of faithful Philadelphians.


10. Saga

That night I sat in the dark
at the Nuyorican slam night
and did not read
and walked back up Broadway.
past officers of the law.
I thought of the innocent
dispatched,
Dialou, Peach.

The next day we sat
in the departure lounge,
remembering tall viewpoints.

Returning,
under the reading lamp:

“All the men were
slaughtered like this.
“Then that left
only the women,
for no-one wanted them dead..
Freydis said
“Give me the axe...”Early in Sprin,g
…they loaded the boat…’’
..Then they put to sea.”
 
January, 1856;

Darkness, winter lands;
the Ohio river
is frozen over,
near Kentucky.
On Sunday night,
seventeen slaves,
the work of
several masters
race stolen horses,
pulling a great sledge
over the bare,
snowy ground.
By daybreak,
mad with torpor,
the horses,
bring them to Covington.
They cross the empty,
waste river on foot
and filter separately
into Wester Row and
some from there,
underground
to Canada.
Simon and Mary
with their son, Robert,
his young wife, Margaret
and their three childrenstay in the town.

Later they are seen
asking for Kite,
the purchased slave,
in the house
below Mill Creek.
Fat tongues talk.

Within minutes,
owners and masters
and a posse of officers
surround the barred,
wooden shack.
A woman's voice,
commands
she will kill
herself and her children
rather than return.
They splinter
the window
with a post and
rush the house,
until a crack
of pistol fire
stops a marshall
and they turn to
the door to ram it open.


Robert fires several shots,
and bloodies a lawman
but he is overcome
and dragged out .
Margaret Garner,
takes a meat knife
from the table,
and with one stroke,
cuts the throat
of the little daughter
she loves the best.

She goes for
the other three,
but she was
overpowered
and then to kill herself,
but she was hampered
before she did anything.

All are jailed.

The trial takes two weeks,
bringing throngs
to the courthouse

The defence
brings witnesses to say
that the fugitives
have been permitted
to visit the city
at various times
previously.
It is claimed
Margaret Garner
has been brought here
by her owners
a number of years before,
to act as nurse girl,
and according to the law
which liberates slaves
who are brought
into free States
by the consent
of their masters,
she has been free
from that time,
and her children,
all of whom
have been born
since then- -
following
the condition
of the mother,
unfortunately
an infanticide, - -
are likewise free.

The Commissioner
decides
that a voluntary
return to slavery,
after a visit
to a free State,
re- attaches 

the conditions
of slavery,
and that
the fugitives
are legally slaves
at the time
of their escape..

But in spite
of appeals,
of pleadings,
the Commissioner
remands the fugitives
back to slavery.

The river is flooded
and the shackled effects
stand no chance when
the little boat
taking them back
sinks in the unaccustomed tide.

The Commissioner
says that it is
not a question
of feeling to be decided
by the chance current
of his sympathies;
the law of Kentucky
and the United States
make it a question of property.

Source: Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (Cincinnati, 1876).


Letters From Rodolpho.

She sits long-leggedly in front of me,
a battered table in between, on which
she writes, at my correcting pace, with glee
that she can spell and phrase without a hitch.
She's dreaming of the man that Tiffany
will natter on about tonight, in local pitch,
when, home, she drops down to watch TV,
forgetting these letters scrawled for G.C.S.E.

We barely know the text and wouldn't care,
in any case; it's finishing school now.
"Rodolpho's just a crazy man whose dare
to break the law got grassed and anyhow
his brother knifed the grasser, so it's fair
in'it, Sir?"
A teacher, I take my story-book bow
and wait for you to take the pupil's share
of the action,"What's tragic's what you wear."

It doesn't matter knowing why they spar,
these people of shiny print. Critics can
undress, or dress up Monroe as the star,
should they choose. Truth follows its own plan.
High tragedy's too separate, too far
away for us to reach. To act this man
means searching. What you've found distain,
as finding loss confirms what losers gain.


Copper Arrow
 
Synchronised Divers, Seville 1997.

Paired, the swimmers climb to tall springboards,
as if to find a higher view of us;
to give them sights in which they could abide?
And yet they stand alone and poignant
in a statement of shared uncertainty
that might speak of a losing, a gaining.
Their skin and lycra, buff and black,
tacitly tell that they cannot tell
what kind of place it is they wish to make.
The bareness of these girls cannot be worn
for to be clothed ,or to be naked
points to a heart outdoors, or home.
Except as a pared singleness, being
too far into uniqueness that it cuts off
their leap into nothing from brief premises.
In search of an exact resemblance,
a mimicking of isolations,
they tumble through the neutral skies
Like heavy birds, to fall at last, through staves
of air, cadencing what informs them
to an explosion of silver water.
They agitate to risk sheer freedom
in a shared contrariness that is;
the medium of friendship's art.
They have become as close to absence
as they dare, imposing a vanishing
act on the blue, elsewhere-reflecting pool.


Trumpington Street

The mystery of existence is deepening
and all the people coming out
of the museum's vault
are carrying a look that spells
they're either victims or suspects.
Through the revolving glass,
the Brown's girls are crowded
by the serving hatch
a Caravaggio Masque
for the triumph of Candarel
with linen cloths worn
over worn black tights
which subtract figures
from substance.
The curators are closing the doors
on the silent busts of dignitaries,
on the vengeance of marble
over the professors of Geology,
of confession over the form of every passion.
We all did it, or it did us
and will be rounded up in the end.

Meanwhile we could still live a real alibi.
Try to find a new language
that stumps sharp detection
to explain away our guilt.
Fully feared and fearful,
we are primitives again
waiting for experience, here
in this afternoon of pushy blossom,
showing up the relic trees
to bring us newer signs.
The old ' I ' is a feeling
hiding a thousand ' me's '
that smile clean surrender.

Mia in the Philosopher’s House

1.Footage for an Opening.

It was just her round, no doubt,
with Maya in the pub, to dote
on gin and logic, when hell broke out.

Mr Thought wore a 'thirties overcoat,
with his hands thrust in his pocket
and a brutal look on his face to note.

He reached for his identity, as Mia set
off for the loo. Maya, her accomplice
followed in, to call her her debt

"Why don't you call the police just once"
said,Maya her face blushed with shock
“He's from the Ministry of Appearance,"

Mia blurted, twisting her frock.
“He is the police, the real security.”
said her friend, “We’re in the dock.”

"He really is. That makes me an illegal."
"I lied before. Now they're after me."
Maya's face changed."Let me play the pal.

I'm sure I can get you let off free,
you understand."I don't think so"
said Mia, staring in the mirror to see.

"Do what you think you can, though”
Maya ran back to the agent
"I'm sure it's all a mistake,"she spoke low

"Listen," said the pale, young gent
"We've been after her for weeks.
We're not letting go now we’ve been sent.

The place is surrounded with beaks.
If you want to help her, go tell’er
come to Thought who seeks.

Maya went back to Mia
who stood before the mirror
and read in her friend’s fear

that she was framed in her idea.

2. In the Thinker’s House

In flight, the act is all.
Yet Mia heard Plato’s
voiced ages say “You see,
they may not ever be.”

Caught by a thinking thought,
she finds his house larger
than her thought thought.
Shadows come, as if to charge her 
from a library on the wall.

Daemons, like cats in shade,
slouch, vanish, crouch and purr.
Everything grounded is half-made,
half-shadow, all demur.

Yet they grow towards truth’s aid.
Every night the unhappy stir
as dinner-guests arrive, afraid.
The Platonic show lights up to whirr.

3.In the Cave of Fantasy

Experience in fishnet tights submits
to the thinker’s knives. Her showgirl’s uniform
won’t save her now. He’s trained his hits
closer and closer to her bared form.

Nonetheless it is her ambition
steals the scene and spurs thought now
to release his anger and to shun
that she’s become a spy, made a vow.
to use her charm and her allure
to connive and urge him on,
hoping the skeptic’s keen exposure
of self-doubt and evasion
will save her at the last.
Yet she knows Aristotle’s flight
from the circus of her past.

4. Under Judgment’s Spell

All sequins and ostrich feathers,
inspiration enters the magic box,
a pagan alien in surplice tethers.
She’s idea’s babe and shakes her locks
as Augustine performs the trick
in a way that only can astound
to sunder thought’s body, so thick
from real feet on the ground.
A scream cuts the silence.
Idea’s abstract hand falters
as inspiration’s made a dunce
by a falling act that alters
this ceremony of sense.
How the dumbfounded love it.
It’s their turn for once.

5.Under Suspicion

It was an accident
the tight-rope walker fell’
The line of argument
told, as tongues may tell.

between illusion and reality
and yet it was the heart
of Lady Wisdom that rescued sanity,
despite imagination’s art.


6.In the Lawyer’s Case

Experience is led away,
crying out her innocence
of unseen voices in her pay
of conscious nonsense.

The dumbfounded think she is the ‘show’
of circus pawns Bernard proves fakes,
escorted from that tradition’s shadow.
to be planted during breaks?

Everything in the end
is put down to her,
yet still she didn’t offend.

7.Under the Body’s Sway

Images come in the dark with their team
those beautiful bodies with fashionable hands
that bathe her forhead with a curing cream
and bring her clothes and laurel head bands.
They rub her wounds in Neo-Platonic lore regaled,
remembering to prounounce her name
and yet they leave experience jailed.

8.In the Dock of Guilt

Experience stands speechless
in her shame, still shining
with the image of instress
a ceremony of showingInspiration still clamours loudly
for vengeance, converting new arrivalsenvying her beauty inwardly,
while shaming her before her rivals:

Descartes distances thought and image
with whom she plans more damage.

9.The Boundaries of Love.

Jealous inspiration, works on thought and image
with a cunning so confident, so self-reliant
to tangle experience in a scheme
while the prisoner is taken down to jubilant.

cheers in the audience scaled in rows.
to be counted still distant and distracted,
escorted from the shadows
among Pascal’s tranquil recollected.

10.The Reign of Beasts

Experience’s verdict
is waited on by the press
though easy to predict..
Idea, a hostile witness
suspends belief, giving
evidence to greet
thought’s entangling,
yet she’s a cheat
with eyes askant
on Emmanuel Kant.

 
11.In The Custody of Ghosts

Experience accepts ,come what may,
knowing the world cannot run any other way
Experience could have got way with it,
kept her feelings in,said nothing
about the jealousy in her orbit
She with her country living

squalid with kids and Rousseau for solace
and Miss Inspiration with only
a family photo, a flat in commonplace
a by-passed heart so lonely

and surrogate births, yet experience gets into bother
They fight bare-kniuckled, wrestling on the earth
to keep the peace, Hume bound both over.


12.In the Critic’s Chambers

Dr Thought, a phenomenon in his time
will examine pure experience.
His Ideal mind will judge whether
to suspend her life sentence.
While experience smiles readily,
knowing practice doubts her sanity.

13.The Business of Images

Whatever happened to experience
she turns up in a routine town
trying to be alive without pretence.
Inspiration tracked her down
Now back among the guilty
she only goes where guards allow
Are we safe in our bower,
Herr Schopenhauer
where our loved ones are now?

14.The Property of Shadows

Images bring experience
before her chosen critics,
a jury that never relents
for murder and other tricks

of Corporal Reality, an acrobat
of no fixed address, or site
the images somehow know that
she’d escape into the night.

so Hegel let her free. She’s run,
sensing what poets want
and images make fears to shun
her guilt, while in an unseen font
a finger scratches, writing
in the arena’s sand,
a script without an ending.

15.The Language of Uptake

Back to their day job
poetry and image return
and bow and hob nob
through their theatrical turn
before the footlights
and the circus-horde.
While back on nights
wriggling hands
through a board,
experience lies in the logic box
an elaborate palmistry
of performance and paradox
no poetry of risk and mystery
or customary song and disappears
with thought’s identity
to expose dread Wittgenstein’s fears,
her rival for reality’s heart.

16. The Get-away.

The soldier
who’s older
had already
told her.
“Be steady.”

Mia leapt into the mirror’s world
There was a loud splash, more,

as she parted the meniscus, hurled
off the floor. Before the hole
stood her shadow, furled
for action, burnt onto the tiles
Mia swam in a dark room,
filled with alcohol that files
her to a specimen tomb.
Every dream in her soul's
physiognomy’s outlined doom
under perforated rolls
a pre-established womb
in sepia ink rattles into print,
labelled on a quadrilateral card.
filed to a password with no hint.

Soon she stood up, unscarred
dry on an unlit floor, unmarred.


 


Touching the Strings
Matutinals

1. At the Bus-Stop

Her hair is dark. Her little ringlets
fleshed by olive, almost gold-hued skin.
Her eyes are the friends of ravens
and the pupillage of coal.
"No I've just come," she says,
showing teeth, like fresh milk
on a dairy cart’s shelf.
I laugh. An unseen bus
threatens to pass us. I flag it down
And let her on ahead of me.
She smiles and gives her small frame
grace with a quick oppositional bow
her slight form grown a valuable thing
when cultured with such care.
She gets out with the shop- girls
in the town. Her parting look, a pain
like a jolt against the funny bone
come down hard on emptiness.

2. In the Bus

You look at me
from those wide-open eyes,
Your hair a reddish
angry dawn
and your enquiring smile,
a naked clock.3.At the Station

It is the evasion makes it clear.
Others, more polished, notice it
and try to make up, blunder
across her careful tactics:
That round, full face ,devout
with innate beauty, will turn
when asked and make amends
for a smudged first meeting
with that wary, self-denying smile
as if to say "I am too busy
looking for a self to own one yet.
Accept my case notes for
a small project on friendship."

4 On the train

That study in black
which fashion's forced upon us.
is contradicted by the style
in which you perch
against the edgeof the seat.
Sideways on, I see the roots of fire
that burn beneath your restless figure
a volcanic island whose ruler
lures the tourist loser into towns
that quickly burn objective artifacts
cameos, notebooks, instruments
into fruitless, accounted ash.
As you took your coat off you could see
the verses I was writing in my book
with quick deft movements of your eyes,my signature on a bankrupt cheque.

5 At the Barrier

To meet you now so pale,
despite your hair's electricals,
like you don’t care,
bound up so stroppily with combs
is to discern the sudden,
unasked-for pain of notice
so carelessly blazoned
in those so hautily-crimsoned lips,
like you don’t care?


Metathalamion 1

When I first heard about the big, new house
with its walls the colour of autumn and pomegranates,
I thought all I’d lived for had come true again,
but once when he was out all day at work
I opened the letter about redemption
and saw how the cost had added up,
allowing a place still for him and her,
some flat, or a house where he would visit
and have the kind of nonsense I never wanted,
about postures and games little boys play.
I would work on the next day, at nursing
which he disliked and wanted me to give it up,
He would think reluctance a kind of cruelty,
yet it was only stubborn protest that life allows us
only one chance to be the hero on the stage
and once we leave, someone has to hear auditions.
Now I lie here un-talking with this pain
of a dosage I have given to myself,
wanting no more twisted fiction.
Only to stop, not wanting a silent death
to bring me away from all this fantasy.
If I’m too late he’ll think of me for once
and if I live he’ll tell me what a fool I was
as I lie here trying to lure back my head,
I grieve for the girl, too young be some rival
and add her pain to the miasma of my maze..

Metathalamion II

I know I have taken him from you,
stalking him with my long legs, smelling
his earth of jealousy and arousal.
I will not bring him to my house.
I cannot have him passive, complicating
our closeness. I prefer the years of rooms
and weekends of staircases and flats that smell
of cleaner’s disinfectant and their fags.
We sail for France over a seascape
of remembered voices which only love
can cancel from the luggage of going on with it.
When I became a mother I preferred
my father’s mistress. Now I have you both,
the mutual complicity in oblivion of a love
that answers both your dreams and make mine real

Metathalamion III

Theirs was a Neo-Classical affair.
She was gold Corinthian among her
capital virtues, her elegent hair
always tied with a new ribbon
and her long neck with an even fillet.
He had a Spartan temperament
a pillar of strength among his order.
Their steps to the altar were perdictable
and their passions were smoothed to an even line.
She to her dance administration
and its scenic tempests with dramatic effect.
His to his Home Office career, white collars,
pin stripe and the columns of the Times
Then strangely the bonding seemed to stop.
Their balanced perspective failed them.
He found her frigid. She found him cold.
It all stopped to become a pale frieze
of civic expectations, pious sacrifices,
which they love in equal properties
and closed the entrances on Mausoleum hearts.


 
After the Gala.

Once, when for the gala at school,
he'd walked all morning long
to reach the swimming-pool.
the place his teacher knew, the one

that's dry and dead and boarded up.
He stayed behind for the slim
beautiful, assistant, a pup,
and watched her swim

with the Rugby trainer
who despised her French disdain,
despite the way she trained her
bottom à la Bardot, to claim

his curricular attention.
Yet hidden. he took note of her allure
and thought in which conjugation
he could express his love, so sure.

Now both are somewhere other,
he knows. The girl never loved him
and, yet he admits it, he loved her.
Life need not be so grim !

If he could find the case for time, not space
that's dry and dead, but tense and still a place.


The game proceeds
with every lover
finding a rival.
To those in business,
it could be the boss;
or those you spar with
for your daily fix;
whatever you want.
In her case it’s you.

Decide who’s for real
and who just isn’t.
Put the real person
outside the circle
of your thoughts and fears;
a good place to start.
Put the unreal one
inside the same place.
Then alternate them,

circling to a point
so the real unreal
and the unreal real,
the really unreal,
the unreally real
chase each oth
vanishes, to leave
the winner alone.

The game ends when you
might pass each other
and you can’t do that.
When I play this game,
I always choose you.
and I’m always left
holding and losing
the unreal unreal.

2.Cat and Mouse.

For this game you need
some fantasy to live in,
appointments and tears
connecting your life.

To start, find a place
of your own somewhere.
Lovers stand opposite,
as they do mostly
and then take turns;
one diary to the next.
Love can catch you if
it shares your page
To have a chance
make sure your moves
aren’t dumped in the margin.


 


The Shattered Lamp 
The Delivery of the Baboon Parts

Corpses in their mortuaries, post-coital lovers
all naked as babies at delivery, fail to rise
as I do now, , carrying the weight of the beast,
a thickening, dense, soul-beat in my blood.
Unlivened I live unchaste, I chasten
myself: all hair lines engaged,
while my daughters weave stories to offset suitors
and Telemachus growls and paces
the house like a Byronic mastiff.
Why am I restless again?
Here in this suburb of prizewinners,
the Times Atlases hold the blue skies aloft
on salaried columns. to the crackle of Radio 3,
the tantrums of lawn-mowers.
and the milk bottles’ consecration bells.
It is the Saturday migration to music lessons.
to ballet, or drama halls to the mutter of BMWs
while at the piano, the podgy hands
are bailed out by soft-peddling adults.
I am waiting for the postman
to deliver baboon-parts,
delivering me from this identity,
while I dictate taped messages
on the hazards of navigating Rockall,
a ruse to leave behind on
my departure for toy jungles.

My Last Model

For only ten thousand and one dollars
before Tim Harvey's bedroom -Hamlet mirrors,
King Quantitty, the fashion deity, woke,
evading the image of a middle-age bloke.

He called for his phones. He called for his fee
He called for his salaried gurus three.
"I'm tired," he said, "I'm tired of Quantitty.
of these little drips in a Mossy smock
It's time girls dressed in somthing to shock
I want the new horror movie style
in leather and gore; it might be a while
to get it in motion, but the sugar-twin set's out."
at the other end, a thoughtless silence, than a shout
of adulatory, "It's great”s. “It's what we've been researching
We'll get the grey-market up and working.”
By half-past nine, his pager bleeped
while through his blood, Krug '49 seeped
“I don't want a vampire, I don't want a ghoul,”
I want a monster with style claws, too cruel
We've dreamed of a fabulous idea
We're sending you round the Lamia.
Quantitty looked through the spy-hole
it was the model from his firm, Eyestole.
"She was a gruesome shape of expensive hue
lemon-spotted, lime and syrup and glue,
striped like a baboon, spotted like a cat,
roundelled like a spitfire, shaggy as a mat.
and full of mercury beads that as she winked
displayed a Lopez bottom as she inchedher rainbow sides against the door jambs
and smiled her greeting from lips to hams.
Quantitty sizzled, rolled over in his fat
and let the woman in to the lobby of his flat.
She slunk into the room, in her black-cotton shirt
and twirled in the hem of her leathertight skirt
She hissed. He kissed. They tongued. She spoke
'I was a woman once, let's shoot some coke
then give me back my female shape. This stuff
for New World nutters, I've had enough
of fantasies; they've only real for therapists
I, ever passed the tests. I only know I'm pissed"
“Branquito's cloaks won't protect you now
Before I change you, make a vow
you'll give your look to a new range of gear
that I want to flog to people who's queer.”
“Make me a human and I'll do
just about anything for you.
So I'll give you my lemon, I'll give your my lime
I'll give your my syrup and I'll give you my sweet
My strips and my beads, my spats and my glue
I'll give you anything, old or new.
Just make me human, just like you
so I won’t go back to the mythology zoo.”

Quantitty smiled and waved his wand
“Because of you I've grown so fond
I'll change you, fault of NI year’s missed,
you won't be human just a fashion journalist.
I want you to join forces, don't you see,
with someone called Justine Picardie.”
She screamed, she pouted, she swore out loud
and protested long with pitched screams endowed.
“Don't make me a writer; don't put me on a rack
Don't wave your wand, but just put me back”
with that, to Chanel, the wormly form withdrew
in nether hells Quantitty never even knew.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 20.01.2011

Alle Rechte vorbehalten