Authors: Barry MacSweeney
Shunned, ignored, cast off, slung in the bin,
sent from the bridge, pariah man, Mr Negative Endless,
fiercely fingered out by his ice queen and put on ice:
Gazer at photographs, kindler of memories hung on the wall.
But there’s no breathing hot reality here today!
You lean, arms out east west, on the powerful rivetted
spine of our Malevich Suprematist bridge, above
the raging salmon spawning greatest river, but
it is only a picture, and the sky is moonmilk blue.
Today it’s me with the twelve strings, the three
bars, me with the solo harmonica, unaccompanied
raw heart sax machine. Me with the loony frets.
No more us the boon fruits. Me Disney Dumbo big ear re-make.
Big ones, plopping pear drops splash on the silent pathways.
Always the salinations, cheek wiping, straight up
from the human salt beds. What matter this?
Don’t ever leave me.
Harmless nightdressed Palladium utterance
it really seems. Yet it blows like thunder
crushing at least one fucked up skull.
When it pops out of my enzyme count I’ll sign for it,
if write I may and can. Don’t bank on it, as in bank.
My great hero Kazimir Malevich, how the moon the other night
was just like your Suprematist plate in 1917, when
you quietly stormed the waiting world
with your railway sidings. I wear a cap in honour of you.
Now I have my CAFE CUBANO – Tueste Oscuro, and
today, with the rosemary flowers so azure
beneath the borage heavens, I,
like you, and Sergei and Vladimir, hate
all of my replicant oppressors, double-breasted
faces, Otis lift tunes all of the way to the boardroom if you fancy.
And Kazimir, I think of your wonderful plate, wonderful
is not too great a word to use. Indeed, it is undervalued
these very salination days, these days of liver expansion.
And Sergei, and Vladimir, I think of your guns,
and what they can eventually do. I used to myself shoot one,
but never at myself, though I have always had reason.
Yes, bless, blessure, bliss and blood, worst and wine
are my saintly, thorny words. I am crowned by them!
Not wearing fur-fringed gloves upon her flinty fingers
which sometimes taxed my shifting planets, she
felt my collar, for I am a drunken criminal of overspent
love, and she threw me in the jail of my terrible life.
Always in the locker of my single-minded lit-stricken cuffs
reaching for the emerald glass cylinder
cork within aperture, and the demons rampant
in their crest cockiness hands down my throat.
Hysterical psychotic drain cleansers.
Gnashed fervour licks down like fire
as the diazapam takes over and I lurch worse than drunk
down the locked ward. Barred windows, bedlam,
and all that mashed potato. I am mashed
also, stale holocaust bread without milk.
The autumn leaf which blows its tiny way
through the wonderful universe
before streams sweep it into nowhere.
No milk, just water with the dosage, urine. No wine.
But that is the curse of the Demon who shall always
be known as The One With the Mouth filled
with Rustling, Restless and Relentless Blades.
The wine comes complete with salt! Drink
at your own expense, but lap that brine. Suck
the Dead Sea dry and imagine it best burgundy.
In the hospital, locked and barred in the Harding Ward,
up the redbrown carpet into the first floor mental asylum,
away from the ground floor ward of patients under section,
with a blue carpet, with a phone, as in telephone, booth
working, first charge 20p, 10p not enough, 10p to
the red telephone company and 10p to the new trust,
which frankly seemed minimal, even the most heroic
twig of my family’s tree died for want of mashed spuds
in Cork on the blanket on a prison bedbunk, it’s all
on the gravy train of pills down the dry throat
and the mashed taties a comforting white collar.
I was not there to hold his hand when he died for
freedom and he was not in bedroom 4 to hold mine
when very funny vermilion lines slide viper-like
up the wall escaping the ant-gangs gathering to
plan a throat-choke raid on me at 4.50am.
Knocked up at 7 for the showers, the brain-dumbing
first knock-out of the day, the tick-off from Mr Starched
White Coat with Himmler clipboard, then the shit-brown
bran after a look at the slumped pink cardies to see
if death had come upon them yet. We tumble to
The Trough and exchange our troubles. And when we,
except Tony, dying from self-imposed malnutrition
and not from any kind of certifiable brain disease,
and who was from a village sacked by the shock troops
of this present Government, and not even on a proper
glucose drip, sitting on his bed in Bedroom Four, and
when we, not to repeat to even test your listening boredom,
sank back pill-brained and detoxing into bed, I
knew why in 1994 the windows were still iron-barred.
No corpses to be found on the York stone flags please
or it would have meant deducted funds on April Fools Day.
The Jesus Christ Almighty is a barely stripling bare-chested biker.
Bolting Pharisee jailers shaking shackles and chains, knuckled
love
and
hate
in Galilee blue, ace of clubs across his tanned blades.
He rides into town on a Vincent Black Shadow and moves his feet around.
My territory, his territory.
But we won’t fight it out. We won’t do a Hemingway.
We’ll exchange bike parts, accelerating road stories
and little-known facts about best oil and chrome polish.
In our eyes we can both see it: no curses or cures, both
on a dustbowl highway leading to the cleansing of temples
and the unstrapping of my Goliath gargle gargantuan addiction.
He had telling things to say and I had mine. Townsfolk
arced around in an awe of wariness and dread, planning
all mock trials ahead.
He had a cross to go to
and I have mine.
O yes, let’s kick some Makem Pharisee
scruffs from the thrash-hot main drag
handing in all badges and spreading allegiance to nobody.
Together let’s beat the smotherers of justice.
Fill her up, load her up, ready to run.
Your blood’s fluxed with serious innocence and grace,
but my tongue tells me I need something stronger.
Ferocity?
Try me my provoked and peppery friend.
Meanwhile, until the thunder rolls
and the street becomes a bloodbath,
come inside and lean against the bar.
Red wine for you, gin for me,
as the menfolk shrink away.
Later we’ll listen to the eternal music of plovers.
You’ll meet Pearl and her unremitting ceaseless silence.
I’ll tie one on, ready for a vomit seizure
alone in the treeline.
Expecting an overcooked cauliflower brain
convulsion, a horizontal twitch dance in the locoweed.
Addicted to alcohol, poet away with the prairie fairies,
the monkeys and the demon mixer.
Ignore me and the medics arriving
stuffing the bottle down a gopher hole.
Stick around.
You’ll make sheriff one day.
Demons, big-hatted and hard-hatted, far as gutter-toppled
squint-eye with grapple-lost spectacles can see, custard brain
head slanty on kerbside perch, vomit ready for a roller ride
into the X-rated, dog arse emptying unlit street, mongrel eyeing
the demon conveyors from here to eternity, bottle after bottle,
twisted cork to twisted head and unscrewed, screwed-up life,
over the slag heap of stonegrey aggregate from the moony saltpan
beds where the stones will surely lie upon my swollen liver,
as the swollen argent river sweeps across the tumblestones.
Grog demon biceps leaving me moan groggy, foggy-bonced,
pouring lunarstruck salt, sel de mer, coarse white pellets
scuttle-funnelled on MacSweeney’s stuck-out begging tongue:
Tongue stuck out like raw begging hand in the mall, sticking
out straight, single digit filthy message signal up yours tongue,
in the air bloated for booze upright needle Cenotaph tongue,
grovelling, whining, soliciting, pleading, eyes imploring,
thirst, thirst, thirst, craveache, pinecovet, itchneedlust,
but on comes the salinating, saliva-droughting insult, Sahara
mouth an agony O, my Lot’s wife tongue, rough orange fur tongue,
tongue examined by Dr Guo in needle room number two,
bladderwrack tongue late of the ebbingtide pools, salt on the rocks,
tongue of the deep sea trawler lick hull clean department,
tongue out on rent as a dog’s public park hard-on, for
artists to paint in glory of its pinky stiffness and quality
as blotting paper for anything as long as it’s a double on the rocks.
Blot, blot, blot, blotting me out: moan, moan, take me
from the slake tide to lake or snaky clean river, before
the endless chained pails of salt end me, tireless demons
happy in their work: a regular seven dwarfs scenario,
whistling darkly all the way to the daily saltbeds as
they pour, pour, pour, and the demons’ capped gaffer,
fancy Dan Demon Man, who shall always be known as
the one with the Mouth of Rustling and Relentless Blades,
swaggers barely into focus from my throne in the gutter,
one hand filled with bottles and the other with scran.
Just one more, sir, for the road?
Arrest me asleep, crashed out
under the eye of the borage: So what? I’m
just pissed as a primrose posy
beneath an April shower. I’ll do.
At least I’m speaking in cogent sentences
from the back of nowhere below an argent moon.
At least I’m not a replicant Labour Party goon.
I sold my fancy suits for vodka and a copy
of The Russian Experiment in Art.
It was the only way I could get near
Kazimir. I stood proud alone
in the Stalingrad rain and read
the legend headlines: Fiend Poet
Shot Dead With Broken Hat. Scald
Of The Steppes Before Firing Squad
Accused Of Dawdling On Lithic Tuff
With Shattered Socialist Heart – Gun
Seized. Friend Of Few Flees Not So
Lengthy Life With Unpunished Book.
But they were all too long or badly
bust and the typeface choice at least
debatable. So much in my oddly spring-
like foreign guises – Swanne, Ludlunatic,
MoonySwooney, Madstag, Lenin Wolfboy or
swiftly skilful terrace tantalising
push and run teaser fan pleaser Sweeno –
I yearned for 200-point Cyrillic caps
across seven cols or in cirrus strands
and to be a bloodred flower too, guts &
heart upon my sleeves and not a pinko posy!
Not to be out in rainy Nevsky Prospekt
but here I am at the back of nowhere
under a fickle sickle harvest five-year
plan pearly Shirley shiny moon, dreaming
in my railway sidings way of tiny toes
and teeming tumblestones twined without
torment in greeny locks and coronets
of cushy crushed footfall meadow cowslips. In
the dimmed and dimming day when it
will be dark along the river and always
dark and Othello will pad freely demented
a panther in my sickened heart, I feel
the gutter twisting, hard-fortuned
carrier of water and nitrates to the
unholy earth, and it all, all, yes, all
of it, howls in the basement bowels as
the gale gets up its fatal goat. Starlings
thrash the sky at dawn in feathered
shoals, quitting nightrest rooftop
cat-free safety of the city centre Odeon.
Truly, I do have 20/20 Vision: She’s
gone, she’s gone, but what can I do? What
drives me to you is what drives me
insane. Mental rental idiots in hatred
uniform pursue me through fire
escapes to arrest once and forever
before the racing sails of my heart
can capture her eyes of borage blue.
They’ll drag me away from B&Q the
gall and spite and malice crew, to
filthy demon paperwork and drinkwork,
to slurword work, collapse hardwork,
to tonguebite drudgery
grand mal
jerkwork
and far away, my fingerfast, from you.
All my rotten reeking shrieking shreds
are speaking fast now, sledging off my
funnybone tongue. The very last words
sung, they’re exploding and expanding
as they hit the croaking creaking rhizome
rats’ tail ground. Outbreak! Outbreak!
Thousands dying and thousands dead! It’s
more an incurable curse than a human
tempest clashing in the midnight blue
of the outer outskirts of Murmansk.
All human malevolence planned, sewerage,
invade my hair and lips and lovely
blue far horizon cloud cotton-soft eyes.
Killer virus in my brain bane, this liquid
poison potion passion pestilence for which
I have shown so little prayerful penitence
coughs its infection into my lovely kitten
drunken face. Spikes, brads, studs and welds
bussed up the bombed-out road from Nixville
to empty eager waiting bottle-holding hands.
Nailbite squall-stirring helicopter gunships
of darkest green – it is dark now along the
moonless river and dark and always dark –
descend to drop the flogging hammers in.
Tell Anne she can have her wildest pills
again tonight and the devil be on look-out.
My rattlechain hands go out unshaking now
in feverfew frenzy, big Russian tarragon
twister tornado as it whips its Monroe hips,
in the hostile thunder bellow days alone away
from you my lovegun, my bullet to the heart.
The violence universal of all you warders,
white coats or blue: needle room number two,
Chinese doctor grinning at me Manchurian
Candidate with her needles and punctures,
bars or no bars, mashed spuds or no spuds.
In single mode I speak out clearly astride
the argent turquoise starre system which
beams in your eyes. No log-in further
sequence needed. To log-out now means to die.
And the terrible gutters move again aching
with gargoyle gushing rain above the graves
dug by those who will lie in them horizontal.
The moon’s awesome gaping craters lean in
and the lurid savage cranberry sunne muscles
up inside its squadron of burning over and above
the iceblue rims of the fabulous fjords. Is that
Kazimir, John or Percy in the railway sidings
astride or in or beneath or moving through
the water? It is the streaming dark water,
for the water is dark and it is always dark
and the night is dark and cold is the very ground.
The emerging lanceheads of the chives are so
beautiful tonight, by offshore rigs, mainland
bridges and cranes, and humans walk beneath
the stars by the streaming dark water where
in the land of tumblestones it is dark and always
dark. Hear the roots of the flowers stress even
the mighty earth and cry. Feel the mad planet
buckle at the soul and knees. This memo to all:
I am 72-inches tall, yet when I go to meet John
and Percy and Kazimir and Pearl, stick me in
an oven and burn me just the same. Then I will
be a true Jew, a poet through and through.