history – poems 2 die for

PIZZAZZ

wanted
to find history

found
mythology

history as
lie
exaggeration
archetype

sheer pizzazz
(what you
get when
you stuff
a trumpet with
New
York pizza)

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
wherever they
happen to
eke
out their existence
East, West
North, South
of the Continental shelf

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
along the tiny tarmac roads
that slither like
snake trails
(not
weave their way)
between the graves

not much interest in my
life this broken life

scheduled to crack somewherw
along the line
pre-
programned like watch with
Mother, heartache,
failure
sex sharp and sweet/bittersweet
vanilla, spiced, chocolate,
salted caranel
melting pot and
set
to repeat but
not quite
liks clockwork

before which
(and before
post cigarette or
thin after mints)

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 (fuck him!)
Larkin’s does

hard to
top him for
negative inspiration

THE ODDS

threw a
Hail Mary

what are
the odds
historically

it be caught for six points
or fly to the Moon
on the wings
of Apollo?

less or
more
always a risk factor

must check those sacred pages
in my father’s manifesto
of social disconnection

great-grandchild of
some famine immigrant
sold a dream story
of opportunity

progeny of some child
of Africa transported
across the Atlantic
chained
in the hold
to work
those prosperous fields

out there in the touch zone
holding the victory ball
or still waiting
receiver by trade
and set
to receive

the crowd ecstatic that we
have a
Sitting Bull ambush, have
a Wild Bill
shootout

have some music demigod
to serve the half-time feast

red zone
hell hole

too far ahead in
space and time
for me
to ascertain with
degree of
certainty

the shifting nature of this game
cowboys, packers,
miners, and most
typically
raiders, chiefs and
buccaneers

see in its logic
all we need to know
must
now envision

the spectacle
telling its truth, making

the ambition of its
intentions clear

SOLVE

to comprehend the lie
you would have
to go back
to the beginning
of life
before
the fetal position

read everything scan all
those media flashes and
opp ends
from before the
dawn of time
masts and headlines

kick up
a fuss
deconstruct
every word, not
believe anything

sift through
every fable
every conspiracy
every secret
every
hole

back to
Plato’s cave
and its
very first troll

and
every major minor
gaslight that
masquerades as history

liberal radical
whatever what
not worth
the clay
tablet
so-called stylus
scribe
wrote it down on

and there it is
here’s where
it starts
chain reaction
of all
that is
unquestioned

where
it all
got stuck
became impacted

unable to solve
resolve dissolve

impossible
to redress

RECEIPT

got long
memories

still vivid
still fresh

but even if we didn’t
even in everything
was forgotten
and forgiven
as you say

even if there was such
a concerted heartfelt effort
to get them changed
have
them erased

we buried it deep
we have the receipt

what you took
what we got
in all those transactions

down
there somewhere

we kept
the receipt

will
fill in the blanks

FOR THAT LESSON

I was not there
for that lesson
when Adam and
Eve scoffed
forbidden fruit
had to high-tail
it from Eden

I missed the moral
and geopolitical teaching
that story purveys

similarly, must have
skipped class when
the Mongols took
Baghdad, the Crusaders
stormed
into Jerusalem, they
had their final
solution indaba at
Wannasee, and
Enola Gay dropped
her fat
fat egg

and so many knowledge
laden, wisdom enriched
tutorials and workshops
will no doubt
be scheduled when
I am no
longer around

history is the story of
where exactly we
were not
at the time, what
shaped
the world we
were born into, could
not
have been born
without which

but such a bloody, terrible,
power-driven furious fable
neither
more nor less
than this one we are in.

POEM ANTI-CLOCKWISE

REVERSE GEAR TO THINK

road is tar
and economy

hole and
ideology

Someones everywhere
trying to follow
their roads
to their very end

and everything might be
cul-de-sac ultimately
(straat
loop dood in a
slightly more germanic taal)

hopefully you have the grace
not to mind my language

even as rubber
and aphsalt
chew
up each other

pedal to the metal and
concrete to the petal

me stuck in traffic can
safely presume I am
measurably not alone
in not
loving it

not noticing that the lights
had changed

anxious, Slavoj,
for the lights to change
someone
sitting with a sitar
at the back
of my head

reverse gear to think
this is a raga that will
colour the clouds
thus
colour
the
rain

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

TED

…as if the stone’s mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions

                            “Pibroch”)


it is a Winter truth:
every
    library is
a mausoleum

every poem
a tomb

I think it must have been,
if memory serves, in
an old revamped cotton
trade building
that I sat amidst a throng
of hopelessly
eager Mancunians

devouring your every
brooding, grizzled,
Yorkshire syllable

seemingly homespun, yet
distinctly Oxbridge academic,
web of
sturdy twine

each thick, visceral, seed-
spilling phrase
falling like iron
parables
on every kind of ground

Mozart, shark,
hawk from a handsaw,
you were
obviously speaking
of yourself

as we all do
(be do)

metal scraping white ceramic

outside
I am released into the gravel air

pause
for a moment to think of Sylvia

****

old stone
older even than
the cathedrals of conquest
my ancestors
built everywhere

petrified
as to what I might find

I too fish for archetypes
rustic rivers, industrial canals

stuff down there for sure
with more
skewed history than
sets of pram wheels

dull green-gray these waters
of artifice
nothing gurgling yet
we
were no doubt told
means to
our emancipation

***

my grandfather buried here
think he
might have cultivated
a bit of interest
in the craft you
were here espousing

my boys
were the poets of his war

the ones
who died writing, or
returned
to ditch their medals
at the river bottom

common trade
common seam

painful
perpetual

clear as the first sharp
thought in the mind of a stone.