Tag Archives: England

MOSSLEY SURREAL (LONG STORY REVISED)

MOSSLEY SURREAL
(LONG STORY)

I was there the day
Mossley, town
of my birth,
went
  as surreal as it could

the day this, little Pennine town
hosted a visit by
the completely surreal

and me
in my parents’ nice
little 40s brick
semi-detached house
up to their crazy nonsense
I was to yet figure out

down from Manchester
(where I would go
to university) on
a camel, in a caravan,
the surreal
   on its way

to mess
with our field gray
Northern Englishness
us afterthoughts of Empire
who maybe
had not seen better days

too early to
pose the existential threat
of psychedelia
doom us
     to a world of
Sergeant Pepper colours
snarling Jagger Stones
up
   in your face
                 though our
little Tame river flowing
to become
the Mersey
        certain to
back wash everybody one day
in the full
        Lennon-McCartney
helter-skelter
      Walrus, Strawberry Fields
awakening experience of
full-flood
hallicinatory Liverpool
sound

fish and chips, that staple fare,
squid, octopussified
by the brush
       of the immortal Dali
decades before
colonization
     by McDonald’s

and then the vagrants, puppets,
teddy boys and
ne’re do wells
      up on the moors turned
raging rebel

nor did the Anglican Church
up in Micklehurst
for all
    its solid stone and
hegemonic presence
survive this
assault
       unscathed, do any better

and me
    just ten and

confused as shit, but sticking
my neck out to
           understand what
going on

laughing my head off
             as this
my little
    former world went wrong

that head
   rolling rolling rolling

the length of England down
to Southampton

for crisis crisis
    my father fired and
can get
no job

trying his luck
       in an apartheid white
Christian national
land

and me
       long story

living that
bad surreal through
                              to its

happy surreal end

in my twilight as
        overly surreal sort

of South African

living at
    a distance
         British revolutions
in sound

WHEN IT GOT COLD

WHEN IT GOT COLD

when it got
cold, cold, cold

we would watch
Dr Who on television
around the gas fire

we did not know
how far South
we would be
sailing soon

how balmy they
could be
those balmy Indian
ocean white
sand beaches’ nights

but Dr Who too
had places to go, future
times to meet
Daleks
just around the corner
to terrify the life
out of the nation
(thanks to
Mr Nation)

so
frights to be had
shores
to say goodbye too
and hot tea to drink

my sister Sharon
saying nothing but sensing
the two of us
returning in the future
back for a squizz
a reconnoitre
a blessed
peep in
through that exact
window to see
how it was

tree full of bees
by the backdoor and
our nice
imported little fridge
and watching
with Mother and those
short-short, too
short
English Summers send
Springs
and Autumn, Keats’ season
the trees
changing colour

and we
already
selling up
already
on the move

boat sliding out the harbour
together on
the ocean for
goodbye to
all English things

CEMETERY ROAD

CEMETERY ROAD

cemetery road
ultimate
cul-de-
sac

for here
ages of souls
slumber
sleep

sounds of war in the distance
not too
far in
the distance

no one not
in that cemetery
can recall the
days the Nazis
brought their blitz
to Manchester
now under
the flag of St George
fascists of new kind
are fighting their way
into the city
Oxford Road and
all those universities
turned
I fear
into our British Stalingrad

oh, these ghosts,
do they see, sense
any of this
are they disturbed

on which side would
they fight
for which cause
would they fall

imagine themselves
dying once, twice,
thrice
many, many
times

since already dead
and my great war grandfather
what
would he
make of this

thing surely
beyond his comprehension

so
beyond yours
beyond mine
beyond all of
us

comrades, enemies
too divided here, now

to
share this poem
begin to talk

ASHTON

ASHTON

the track
curves like a scimitar

I remember
being in a park in
Ashton on the red
steel roundabout

overreacher
    and fell

that roundabout went
on revolvng, spinning forever

that red roundabout
or maybe it was green

and talking of green
I waa distracted thereafter
by what
had happened to
the countryside

wondering where
it had gotten to
and so
forgot my poem
on the train

that train winding its way
forwards to the millennium
ot
  backwards in time

through toytown stations
where they loaded
real soldiers

some soon
       stacked to be buried
piled up in ossuaries

others, as is the nature
of war, simply evaporated,
officially disappeared

and my poem out there
with other poems lost
or forgotten
     poems out there too,
be it
recalled recounting
the horrors of war

but train
is at the terminus, no
more huff-puffing, or
smooth
      electric or
even diesel

the countryside chaning,
the poems
    No longer speaking the truth
they could not escape doing

this picture fading
all
   those lines
yet unwritten, all those tracks
going somewhere
          having nowhere left to br
   





BUST

BUST

heard the good goog news
that they cut
the arts in
th-re-will-always
be an-England

big cities did it
because they are bankrupt now
and who wants
poems and plays about
terminal
   austerity

why should the State
or anyone subsidise
anything so irrelevant
trivial, spurious
as performance pièces
exposing this very hypocrisy
when money
is desperately needed
for jets and bombs

preserving the hegemony,
no time for idle hands,
wicked pens and
wasting
    all that is precious on
such self-indulgent luxury

nothing there worth
watching, listening to, reading

this is our absolute truth
to you
     there is no longer space
or capacity
they are
no longer part of
our identity
do not fit in
     our economy

we
are the final arbiters

we decide the colours, tastes,
feelings, shapes

this
   the realisation of our
special, almost sacred mission

to tell our culture like it is
close down all else for all

BLACKPOOL

BLACKPOOL
“how many holes it
takes to fill the Albert Hall”

I came to
Blackpool, Lancashire,
to be conceived
my soul already garbed
in tangerine

inland from the Irish Sea
I lived
our little river
up to something

revolution in music
to be remembered forever

there in that old, dead
slave port
swept up by voices, songs
steaming in
from a wilder West

brief Renaissance they
just had to
weed out

the fiction of Empire
in such dire need of it.

I came
to Blackpool to
get conceived

though sex, as Larkin said,
waiting for its establishment

ALONG

UK OK (not so very)

        still solid
    (courtesy of Victorian
architecture)

crazy high aquaducts
    (now exactly what
               do they do?)

university I went to
down main road manchester
freshly
    returned from
south africa

settler colonial
(apartheid to
           god knows who else
and me
and you)

but on that diet of dismal
how stuff going to grow properly?

how stuff going to flourish
when for best moral fibre
getting
     force-fed gloom

red, white, blue
flag should be slate grey and
colour
     most exploitative

see your politicians now
scared at the thought
                               people

might
     have their
                       own ideas

university down oxford street
(or was it road?)
                 taught me something
about the
    economic of F and K
(plaque proclaims
them
                    the previous tenants)

anarchy
OK OK    strawberries
spoiled, by
                      this time
was
          the late 70s

ust rattle your cheap jewellery here
                                  and I’ll
imagine
            in falsetto

less than happily singing along
        

ROSE?

ROSE?

is that
a rose

or is it
a bullet hole?

red rose
red rose

so many of them
slaughtered in the snow
days of
    York and
Lancaster

tried to stitch those
wounds together

but blood still leaking
through that tapestry

carnage
    somehow still
in your
    poetry

freeze
    framed you thought
for all
of history

not forever displaced
from theme to theme