Wolf Tongue (25 page)

The long shadows of gold October stamped into the earth of England.

Amber crowns of trees shredded in the wake of the wind

whose invisible straps unwind allowing previously strapped grasses to become

unfleeced in air and have echoes and tunes like chapel hymns along the arm of the
law.

It is our rim of the world. It is our Aztec finality and birds fly there.

They are funny birds and bonny with aquamarine flashes down their pillowsoft

beakbone nearness & not like peewits at all.

It is our raining night & hoofing the wet lonnen. We are tearing down posters

at Loaning Head

pinned with one nail

and on the posters badly-drawn faces

for we are grey ghosts and silver surfers

the Finnbars the MacSweeneys the Pookas the Toms

the gun-carrying leadmineshaft knockabout nobodies

swimming beer off Sundays in the ice-cold tarn

never knocked down in Knock Down Town.

Nothing left in England now.

One king only not enough.

When did you last see your father
is a laugh for me Tom, he was a jellied-eel traitor

to my poetic revolutionary heart

for always I have the axe in my hand. 1917. I have the hood and the axe and the

unsmilingness. I will do it as duty Tom, for waste must be punished.

O Tom, what am I saying?

I have wept before the shoals of shoes from Amsterdam, from Vienna, from

Warsaw, the leather straps and rusted buckles,

I wept before the Jewish mountain of shoes and sandals and encasements

purposefully stitched and modelled for feet whose feet-bringers were hoyed

in the ovens and the gas.

My axe alone Tom is against the oppressor & oppressors.

Tom, I’m not a poker-hearted Pooka. In sober raindawn reality I’m a cress-

hearted man.

No Caroline Louise no Hazel the pills are wearing off

I walk alive alone in Alston and lean against the menu of the Bluebell Inn

because it is mine. Smoke from the little trains are the fumes in my brain.

I walk there Tom, I run there Pearl. Rings to be made and vows to be said.

Tom, you have rockfire. Tom you have a lordly head.

Tom, can you hear the final slowing down spin of the flywheel

as the last cage ascends?

Tom, these are real men with faces like pandas

carrying badgerbrocks of coal. It’s a memento now.

This place, Tom,
was
a nation, making trains and ships and cranes,

transporting unlikeables like us to the lands of boomerangs and redrock. Our

chainbroken fingers & hands acquainted with hunger & slavering slavery

kept together the hulks on the Thames, we were the true breath of the

nightforest noosehang land.

Tom, do you remember when lightly but enough to hear I knocked for you at

midnight, starres our only light, if starres there were? God help us Tom

we enjoyed it, one more Tory burned from his bed.

We stood together with tightly-bridled panting steeds among pooked sheaves

laughing until the sunne of togetherness warmed our roof-burning brand-

throwing shoulders.

How strong it was Tom, our amusement, as the red-coated militia arrived,

long before they drove down the miners in the villages. We blessed Jesus

the first Chartist for saving the bairns and the wife.

But the port-soaked Tory was dead, Tom,

and we sang our hymns with clean hearts.

Tom, nothing has changed except everything.

All of these centuries and centurions.

Tom, last night Milton & Cromwell said I should speak to you.

Bunyan smuggled a note on ragged paper.

Five knocks on the water pipe, I knew it was coming.

Tom, now it’s us in the lock-up, in the spotty-face bathroom, in the lost

toothpaste universe,

in the argumentative wild Pearl honeysuckle wold unyielding unwielded world

of wrong-sized slippers, in the bad dressing-gowns

before harried relatives arrive to pull the armpits right, Tom, it’s us: the walking

sandbaghead wounded dead of poor lost England.

I met Cromwell & Milton & Blake yesterday and they were lost as us,

funny stout men and one blind looking for the dreams of Albion.

Pen-ready men with quill of swanne.

Tom, you put your right shoe on your right foot and the left on the left.

The laces need to be tied and in absence of your apple-pie wife I’ll do it

because bending down with firm fingers is so difficult

as pills plasticine your once-digitally correct hands and take the few straight

lines in your messed-up mind

and turn them into undriveable curves.

Even Blind Willie Milton even Cromwell even the Memphis Flash even

The Killer even Cash

is on a midnight Vincent Black Shadow.

From Huddie Ledbetter to de Kooning they’re in slave overalls.

There’s a pride in working for a living Tom, but it isn’t for us. We’re wasted

in wastelands before they were invented by Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Before Sylvia Plath paid her gas bill,

before Anne Sexton demanded blue disks from the doktor, before she

admitted an addiction to slavery & left us to be a spirit in the rainy trees.

Tom, King Arthur’s in his counting house, counting out the wastage,

finalising the blame,

And who would say it, Thomas, who would lift the gall from the cracked glass,

but to say: Arthur, you too were a croupier of blame, you too

swept the table clean with the other social model, Margaret of St Francis?

Tom I do miss your wife Alice because for one reason at least

she brought us cloudy pastry tarts filled with apples from your trees

and sweetened by sugar from the Co-op in Langley Park

eating moon slices before pills travelled us to sleep

and Alice left sprightly rightly perhaps a purposeful heart searching for sunshine

in the darkness of day. Heart a mixed posse of love and not love,

of drawn guns and pouched bullets.

And a hatred of the Stasi experiment doktors shared by us all.

Tom, I want to lock the lunar lunatic’s opal horns, I want to run before

the moon, I want to swing on my starres by Bunting, garlanded with squat,

I want to drink endless my Castrol to stop the stile squeak.

Tom, she’s a princess of the mosswalks, and she does not want you to leave

her alone. And the bairns are crying for their dad, dad, lost dad, man with

moustache & a bone in his head.

Hard as a Birmingham spanner and right as a River Tyne rivet.

We’re walking to the gay liberation centre, Tom, but we’re already dead.

Taxi, Tom, heartsore, we’re a pack Tom, infesting the age, thousands of thorns,

which may as well be pennies, someone to pay for it,

trainers for the bairns who know you’re a photo once in the Sundays
borsik
in

the madman’s paradise:

the club, Tom, the full-sized snooker table, where you can write in big chalk and

lay a fat man down: Tom, dear garlanded friend Tom, you’re not that strong.

And if anyone picked on you, they’d have to peck at my fiststance darkdance first,

burst from the feldspar heifer hoof fields.

I am Lenz, underground my natural home. Watch me, Tom,

bust from the cowslip shadow alone with Pearl.

My heart and anger a double-barrelled sawn-off gun. Axe on hold whipped

clean by the wind from Pearl’s mouth.

When did you last see your father,
Tom can you help me?

Invisible he was forever when I was seven-years-old.

My canvas was clean but on it he put troubled colour.

Tom, the point is: I want that portion of him executed.

I know these hills so rest in my shadow.

I’ll talk to the jailer and tea at dawn will be the leastest.

3764 Highway 51 South, Robert already having PASSED BY TO TOES

TURNED-UP TIME.

SURLY STEEL, BOLD STEEL, TUNNELS THROUGH ENGLAND,

TOM YOUR MIND’S LIKE MINE: PEASE PUDDING.

We’re Navvies Tom. Straight up. Garlanded by bows of greenwood tree

and poem and lock-up ward and pill.

We are singing Milton today dreaming of Jerusalem

and the trains which never take us along the steel of the world.

Law with the wind in my face as I mince springingly princingly

on my wincing jade,

bit-jaw strapped in, fist-firm, fury in my heel spur and black frock coat

which can only bring death to the demons and the kings of frippery of England:

Law on the horizon and law in the lonnen at Loaning Head:

Stirrup-high I turn for the smell on the heather fellwind, still

on my mount, still but nostril light, honey of her thighs on Irish winds

before we gathered at night, building obelisks to Chartists

and we stroked goodnight the muzzles of upland high-hooved horses

because they reminded us of women lost in the dawn of the dew and dandelions

Tom I think I’ve gone turnip tuneless toes turned up frozen out from river

to rawness

on the rim of the law and the world

Tom a man came in a long black suit to saw off one of my limbs

before anaesthetic

Tom I pulled from my leather pouch – hole in its hiplength spout – a gun

with hammer of the finest steel, a curved knuckle-guard you’d wish to tell

your children about

if you lived beyond the rapes of the government

and Tom he didn’t get any further

to you for example Tom because your brain’s an oversteamed cauliflower

lolling in the Locomotive Arms

and my lover Tom my lover the poet is not a loader of rifles

a washer of signal cloths

she’s a leader Tom she’s a high-stepping jade herself

not one quick finger far from the pin

Tom, Pearl, I’m wedded to a theory from which I shall no doubt be soon divorced

in undainty circumstances

that disobedience

Disobedience, disavowal, the shredding of woofs and weaves,

the salivating of microphones

when all is denied, Bold steel low lot lacklevel.

I am these men and their lost women.

I am, spur-horsed, undenizened

Invisible twine plying merchants are unravelling the long grasses

and the plovering pull of the long windstrewngrasses pluck the prince

in his chest his heart his passion and love as if no tomorrow.

He caws, crows quietly, softly as a byre when beasts have departed

and rain on a shifted slate is like indescribable music which is

not music because the word is yet to be invented under the great heaven.

Let’s wait for the very day Pearl says it whipped by rain. Beautiful Pearl.

And the leaves in the trees seem to whisper Louise because they’re nuts Tom.

But I sank shaftshining in her budding cressbed. She’s as wet as a 17-year-old.

They should be saying Michael Collins Bobby Sands and a litany a directory

in the wind from Sligo a stooked sheaf of telegrams of the dead the foolish

the aimless the aimed at the fallen and the framed Tom.

But they’re not they’re frozen like my angel in the fantastic magnet filings

of her boldly stirred heart.

So this is where you were in the he-boat the she-boat the he-she boast-come

together lover on the lake where the swans come in.

This is where the matin mount of your kisses wrestled with the oar-lock movings

for supremacy in the long mornings when the boat drifted into the reedbanks

This is where you rowed the he-boat and swam in the clear Irish water

and lay in his swanwings in the uncloaked unlocked dawn of padding

across the water

abandoned abandoned on the ferry landings of Ireland

pipes laid by for
Marie’s Wedding and She Moved Through the Fair

this is where my heart was a black kesh by the forlorn waves of the clear water

where the swans come

my heart my wooing MacSwooning whistling heart love

nothing but a black kesh in charcoal shadow on a sunless hill

I was a monster in Munster swinging my green jealous sword and making you pay

There were no telegrams Michael no messages Tom no letters the Royal Mail

is dead today but a bullet in the head and an army led by Judas

I do not believe him a good man

Soldiers need paying but he was not a soldier for freedom

only my heart will fight for her love and want nothing in return

but a kiss like a flutesong a hug like a tressed harp

a fire in her eyes and a dance in her hair

Tom there will be applause from the gatherings for the pressing and raising of heels

but it won’t be for us

locked in the byre with the beasts and the winding gatepushing wind

Tom you know there’ll be a wind from the west

all my life I’ve been a leader and now like you it’s a lost soul department

nothing to say Tom but this poem

& the rare beautiful women of Doncaster beneath the High Street clock

Tom rarely sick

                                  garlanded by sullen steel

Tom in the tunnel with the dynamite mob

and the jelly in his drainbrain

& mine

its gutters and flues of intelligence flowing away to a land filled with fairies

where Tom

rarely sick and rarely better

                                                threw doll from his pram

on gallery 10

where the screw was hanged with piano wire

we dawdled in the bronze-leaved sullen golden sleeves of the sike paths

threads of earth in the matin mist above the toy cathedral

edgewater clouded with invisible natural matter the human eye will never see

so you say for something to define it the water is clear to the bottom

pebble gatherings clear as the tumbler base seen through gin and vodka

brought by demons from the piggery where my heart lay in ruins

as now it lies ruined Tom

altogether Minister of Mayhem to Myself the great bombardier the single swanne