Tag Archives: England

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

CEMETERY ROAD

CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”

I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem

by any metric
it’s a real shocker

give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
   begun somewhere

with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species

and so me
      not yet teenage

about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that

far from this little British
cul-de-sac
        joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
   a pastoral

where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle

not much interest in my
life

     this broken life

after which
my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire

       somehow not
translating

finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture

will not
     let this poem end as
dead at
    point blank range
as Larkin’s does