Listen
For simplicity’s sake,
they turn each page as though
it were the first; between the
lines are merely cavities they
cannot read, and therefore,
don’t:
the face of value wears scarlet
lipstick, nose-rings and mascara,
and so many layers of foundation
the lines dance naked and
mockingly across the truth,
their steps indecipherable,
their breath silent,
their memory white.
(from ‘Copyrighting War and other Business Sins’)
Listen
Where is the will, imagination, thought, instinct,
self-imposition that gets you to a better place,
a higher plain? What have onlooker’s seen
but savage and stupid, binge-like broken instincts,
toxins with no quick-fix antidote, freak-show-style contestants
cooped up in grim-rimmed chicken grids for homes,
their bladed cages promising sharper, steelier freedoms
beyond and stab at the sleekest glint of self-improvement.
Inevitability is government policy at its most austere, MPs
playing bow and arrow from the glistening turrets of Shitehall.
Social mobility is segregating buses and schoolrooms
and city centres; it’s being granted permission to breathe,
to smell the weed-wrangled breath of your neighbour
on the other side of the wall: his rising damp, your rising damp:
in the soup with asthmatic, nicotine-hungry kids
who are kicked in the head before they know
what disadvantaged is.
(from ‘The Oranges of Revolution’)
Listen
It’s official: the stats have shrunk.
It’ll be illegal to be sick by 2020.
Disease has been cut. So don’t
develop ME, rheumatism or any
strain of mental imbalance
or you’ll be pawning breadsticks
for psychiatry sessions.
Don’t catch STDs or smoke yourself
to infertility. Don’t have an accident
on your front porch without a fully
comprehensive insurance policy:
there’ll be no beds to death-rattle in,
no emergency staff at hand to yank
gadgets out of children’s noses.
Don’t bank on anything other than
this one minute detail: that sickness
will be cut when there is no longer
a service for it. The league tables
will see to that. Just watch how
cancer dribbles off the NHS menu,
how hip replacements halve to a halt.
There’ll be no future docs with nous;
just the stupid, rich ones who can
foot the bill and bribe their way into
the medicine cabinet with a sharp
wrench at daddy’s little finger. So
don’t get sick any time soon. There’s
a time and a place. But it’s not here.
(from ‘The Oranges of Revolution’)
Listen
Our relationship to intelligence:
military
insecure
unguided
unintelligent; floating around
like a misdirected childhood
without letters and numbers
and colouring books;
painting-by-number kits
that cannot be read, that
translate into psychedelic houses
and grey fields and purple cows
with jaundiced udders. Intelligence
farts and huffs and dies.
Retraced and recoloured, and
as a harried Chinese whisper,
revisits ever more inaccurate:
‘til it is another.
‘Til it is stupid.
(from ‘Copyrighting War and other Business Sins’)
Listen
She droops,
eyelids photo-snapping her sporadic days
as grandmother like she did last week,
clutching at familiarity
before a makeshift den of savages
who still favour games of wood and rope;
who Tarzan-yodel across the digital planet
in search of a mate. Conquer. Own.
Each ride is a continent of the world,
another land to parcel up
done and dusted;
another custom to learn
and tongue to tie: nothing
anticipation can prepare you for.
They arrange themselves high. Or hidden.
Stretched and crouched and arched
over their circus like trapeze artist
wannabes; every tunnel and tomb
bends an ear where the giants cannot go.
Pebble on pebble. Electrified mosaic
of stone. Or glass. Smash. Quick. Time to grow up.
Every kid wants to play referee for the winning side,
finger a symphony of sea-life in the sand
and call it a masterpiece.
Henry Moore becomes a knot of architects
all building their own castles.
I ride the tunnel inside.
For that split-second I am not
myself. Falling every strip down the slide
from myself. Far from the gangs who stand
triangled to the climbing wall in slick prisms
of authority. They know what they want.
They harmonise the patch between screech
and song, kissed to a whisper as the sun
dims the cold hide of the slide’s
perfectly mirrored limbs;
a crescendo of pleasure
springs from the whistling kettle my grandmother
always forgot to remove from the hob of a morning.
Her memory a roundabout. Going nowhere.
Yet still she wants another spin.
Same, same. As it was before.
I drive the cockpit of a photograph
she calls the past, the mosaic all white
in her day. The playground never changes.
Only the kids. Their folks. The words they exchange.
‘How do you play?’ they ask. But playground framed in time.
Hers and mine. Yours.
Playground still breathing. Still not beat
by Gameboy and PS three hundred and wotsit.
Though maybe hibernating, dozing goddess aglow
in the six o’clock sundown: reclining spiders set alight
the pert corners of your smile.
They outline the immensity
of your features. Serene sculpture.
I don’t know what you’re thinking.
I can only guess.
Open barrel – closed door
(from ‘The Oranges of Revolution’)