Tag Archives: Manchester

SYLVIA

SYLVIA

I am in the throes of being tested
examined on a poem
we have not
seen before

unless I have
unless that
was your poem
smacked me in the face
when last night skimming through
that paperback anthology

if so, must admit
a bit unfair it being
an unfair
advantage

but still
they (those in
the know steeped in
verse, figures
of speech and,
perhaps, poetic history
and literary theory)

they
whoever they are, big
wigs in the Department,
have to determine whether
I am up to
your poem
       not quite yet whether
I am human
or machine

literary scholar or
just along
for the ride
    following you observantly
for I know this
thorned fruit
have
   been bloodied as a child
seeking out the juiciest

will
    know what to do
when you take
my hand
wrench me with
your words out of
the comfort of my world
(this comfort being
unearned, here on
this lofty
campus
staring down upon
the Flats and
the Southern Suburbs of
apartheid Cape Town)

you
my polestar here, point
me any
direction and I will
feel obliged to follow

and nothing
fixed
   even for a moment
everything far
from exactly what it seems

green to
brown to
green
something raging, unbalanced,
in the seasons

something wrong
with time itself (warping in
the heat of
   these scorpion energies
can see
    in the gravity of sheer purpose
you are a late October
child

and me
thinking, talking Transatlantic,
as the berries in your
bottle feel
suddenly thrust upon me

overpowering me
in an instant, which
that whole
new critical cabal
you were
bound to
find at Cambridge

Richards, Leavis (F &Q),
Empson
     and the whole
etcetera

who
   knew instantly what
this
  style meant

but me back there
battling with the simple stuff,
basic
   putting pen to paper

hoping
   what thoughts I think
serious
magic in the
ink
beginning to flow will
just have to express

(but
damn thosr hooks clawing
at you
   same time
holding you back)

something way off-beam
getting forged
in this cauldron

as soon
     as I read the opening
lines, made
the connection
the poem
opened its maw
and duly
swallowed me

taking decades
from that moment
of seizure
to
   digest me

you who
were so badly loved
and much accounted for

and I must tell you
I heard those laureate lips
speak
    deliver the hard
cryptic truth, so-
called gold
veined throughout (I am
told) all
those crow poems,

in a cold Gothic hall
when I was
      a student back in
Manchester

place packed out with
troops of British devotees

and me
    mum about my heresy
that he
    just not
in your league

and now
    by virtue of this
technology of technologies
will be
    the death of us

I get to
chat to
   you, if
anything there is you
resurrected
             for the occasion
courtesy of
the binary brilliance
of an impersonator

and
   I recall
this first encounter

wondering how this clone
will react, what
this mind will say

seems
   I was none too wayward
making personal sense
of that
dark expressionism,
those tortured ramblings

feeling
   that you and
I

always
     to, somehow, share
this reading
all
   our readings

bound in space and time
ever to
    return though

swept away

DUCKED EVERY MODULE

DUCKED EVERY MODULE

“The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, and from without.”
 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

ducked every module
on Romanticism
during my
English degrees

and yet maybe
that is exactly where
my antipathy
to the movement
must have
originated from

kind of imagining myself
a poet, sort of poet, or
something not
too far from that
as I wandered down
towards the River Tame
(tributary of
the far more
famous Mersey)
stretched out
to the East and West
and South
the Pennine Moors
Bronte territory,
roughest, toughest, most desolate
part of England

still
  a ways to walk
to get there

and me for now
meandering riverward

slipping through my neighbour
crazy Gordon Shelley’s
immaculately
      mown garden

passing the tiny glade
of wild narcissi
     (dangerous lure, that
purity)

and down into the hollow
graveyard for one single
completely
    broken piano

its innards spilled, everywhere
rods and hammers
and scattered keys

leit motif
   for someone’s life
if not mine entirely

try to duck things
and they still
get to
nail you
one way or’t tother

PAR FOR THE COURSE

PAR

par for the course
par for the curse

mute the Wasteland
savage reduction of
noise
    stanza
by
stanza

you feel it in your bones
tremors under the skin
your tectonic
plates shifting

specialists mailing in
their verdict
      you on the verge
of breakdown

hanging by a thread
golden, astral silver
or maybe just
Manchester cotton

an industry booming
blackening the sky with it
suddenly
       in the wash there
is blood
much red blood
humanity split, a house divided

par
   for the course
echoes, allusions, vertigo
in the poetic factory,
foundational mythologies,

whatever
   it takes to finesse vers libre

rich resources to be mined
be inevitably exhausted

see there
    what scripture remembers
we should know,
it needs to
tell us

   a door opening, first
thought springing
to mind
  must be of awakening

so much out there
the picture freezing
in anticipation

of expected regret,
customary hesitation

step
    by guarded step

par for the course

,

MANCHESTER ON THE MOON

MANCHESTER ON THE MOON

I wanted to
return to Manchester
study its
poetry its
secret geometry

found it
buried beneath
Roman ruins
there on
the dark and
light sides
of the Moon

and digging there
found Victorian wonders
and once great
football stadiums
forgotten tales
of glory
   written in
scarlet red or
sky blue

and
    relics of the famous
Royal Eye Hospital
where I
was both treated and
(those green goddess
days) stopped
from burning

and the libraries, and galleries,
and theaters and
universities
where I once
studied
    or sojourned

and now must excavate
to find if
memory is real, my
history is true.

TED

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.

MIKE

MIKE

great a Tae Kwon Do
(gang of young heavies
round at our little house
to claim money
owed them)
me smiling like Mr Niceguy
carving knife hidden
behind the couch cushion
behind me)

not so good at popping
ligjtbulbs with a airgun
in our kitchen
firing range
     my sniper’s instinct
something we did
not share
   (hope you do not feel
that I
am sniping at
you now

       catching you for all
and suddenly in terrible
cross-hairs)

and you
    always so ultra mod and style
and fashion and look conscious
didn”t ever
imagine members of
your sacred tribe could be
as narcissistic
as that

and that beautiful Tess of
the D’Urbervilles girl you
took into
your bedroom
        moaning with
vociferous pleasure at
whatever you
were
    doing to me

and me as per usual
univolved, unsatisfied
and she
exactly my type

and our little terraced house
in the collapsing inner city area
just a stone’s throw
from City’s
       great storied ground (before
greener pastures
called
    courtesy of Arab money

and the job you hooked up
for both of us guarding
the then
Polytechnic
   lecture roomz downstairs,
unisexual residences
upper floors

place where
       I had my David Bowman
2001 out
of the body experience

place where we
played football with
the cleaning
crew in
    a basement corridor

place where you insisted
I read every page of
this book you
swore
    I would swear was
“even better than
Ulysses”

never heard of Thomas Pynchon then
or his 1973 masterpiece
of apocalyptic
         postmodernism

and the crazy way
that year’s cup final
followed
   the track of the channel
we were watching

Arsenal
      better (who would have
guessed!) on BBC
on ITV
    United suddenly, magically,
with all the mastery

2-0 down at halftime least we
United fans could do
(with the muscle of
the biggest United in
the room
   who just so
happened to
   be younger brother)

was cool
all that Gunner ardour
and rampant triumphalism
down
    a cold cold bath
up the stairs
strategically waiting

one night
at the Poly workplace
(Manchester Central
University now) they
left the
     door to the upstairs rooms
completely unlocked

and there I wandered
taking in everything

finding myself on a balcony
looking out
    into the night lights of
this
   sleeping, dreaming
city of
my birth and
place of study

wondering where
this world was at and
where
    I was heading

what
    other
      strange definitive friendships
would carry further
along
   whatever track

and which
    friendships, to my shame,
I would
let disappear

OVERLOOKED

OVERLOOKED

I awake
fresh from nightmare

lost my way in a city
of memory spiralling upwards
into the mountains
totally transformed beyomd
all that I
can remember
wanting
    to get home
needing to get home

but no sense of direction
as with every step
I climb higher
and higher
passing a giant cathedral
like structure, itself
like a mountain with
a trio of spires as
its peaks, its pinnacles

all the wonder
    I should feel submerged
by the fear

and no way of phoning you
because I am
out of reception, do
not have
your number
so far for you
to drive
      in the night to
collect me

your death three years ealier
somehow dream- forgotten
crucially overlooked