Authors: Barry MacSweeney
The horror of the hospital for us both.
Demolished eager hopes and trudges up the bad
steep hill in your dun winter clothes: to be
refused information. Not your bright red
party jacket not your guitar badge and
funny pinned on chrome figure. Just
petitions and pleas – how’s that man
of mine? That badly displaced fellow
on 50 mils a day and what, what for
god’s sake, is he eating, and I don’t even
believe in gods – or that one from
Cecil B. De Mille. For when the Wall,
and I don’t mean the tourist attraction
touted in China, when the Wall was
chipped to bits it broke my stern heart
and it broke his, my man, and I know
you are breaking his and mine now.
And you are breaking me to uphill
trudge bits and episodes – like poor
hammered toffee – and I cannot eat
myself and I am being distracted
my heart itself once an oven of love
turned into a rainy asylum alone
in the bleak upland rains. How
much better it might be in summer,
recovering our seasons released
upon sensational sun-peeled skin,
boats and oars and oarlocks and
handlocks and kisslocks locked
right in place, pure juice from
Spanish oranges, Miró suns pouring
endless light over grief of my walk
across the spated river, touching
the black painted bridge lamp after
dark, made in Brum, near where
Nazi airmen torched my childhood
cathedral; me in a shelter, afraid
of flames and fire, as you are now,
flames in your heart, O darling
don’t let them be extinguished now,
it is the smashed cathedral of your
life sweeping up in utter flames
to the frozen ground: torched and
charged with terrible destruction.
For many days, my man, you were
a man with a many-layered mask.
You did not want to know me and
again as I arrived and arrived you
bent your head and heart away and
did not want to know me. My own
heart a haunted husk without you.
But always I put my hand out and
want to and always did and do. We
have been driven to distractions
by a long revelation of deprivation
madness which triggered me to
trudging, loving you, pursed lips
grim in every worried step back
to your haloed bed in wardlight.
Your northern arms around me
not browned by Miró’s molten suns,
and you held me strong and lovingly,
northern hands, tight, tight, tight,
forearms around my ribs and spine,
making me shudder in happiness
and unbroken realms of loving safety,
so paleness of spirit left me undaunted;
a queen of hearts and a warrior of love!
Yet once more I am at the hospital door.
Once more you will be completely
off-centre and pilled up, caustic tongue
not lazy. Once more betraying my heart
your illness clinging like oak-roots.
I pray the trees will lend you strength.
The time has come to palm aside all
images of lost sheep and willows weeping.
In my bad dream you climbed to the wet
roof of the lunatic asylum, through barred
windows, determined to be demon free.
You said you were a magpie and would
fly to me. But your flight ended in a fatal
swan-dive into the Yorkstone yard. O
mendacious reel of bad fortune, let
sun’s pollen-gold wake me to a saner world
so fleet already without this torment too.
Smartism seems to be the best deal
in these broken-fire days, honed up
with barely held apologies, not the
Suprematism of monumental Kazimir.
He’d weep seven broken plates at its
purity of abjectness, lack of muscle
tone. Not for us now to stand upon
the steps in a revolution’s moment,
with Miró’s crown of sun and stars.
All the demonic graffiti is quite certain:
I’m the abjuring man.
I’m the abdicating man.
I’m the strangely dislocated
disconnecting disconnected man.
I’m the storm-tossed tosser
on Earthquake Street, mindblown
dead on arrival sprawled on
Richter Scale Prospekt, found
crying wolf beside the troikas.
I alone in detox itch and fury
test the temper of sunbeams
and angels. I flee across the shiny
floor – believe me, it is shiny –
headbackward pursued by flying
animals and objects each
with forktail cocktail blazing. Endless anger
only is my recompense for
first-rate pistolage now she’s
fled these shores for sanity.
O my wires keep dropping out.
Let loose my stumble in the darkness.
Fling my face into brooding earth.
Trample forward onto footloose ground.
Watch the devil’s tarpit veil smother me.
Who today will fetch my idle drinkless
hands a king whose neck wants wringing?
Who will set me free from strapdown
to deliver Sexton’s necessary utmosts?
It will be the last house-call after all.
No, no, it is all drinkless dole and drollery,
regime of hysterical tomfoolery.
Why can’t you get helium on the National Health?
Because the Tory Government has taken it all.
It is dispensed every day to Cabinet ministers.
Now they are gone completely myxomatosis bunny funny.
May the demons track them down
as they tracked me. Relentless pursuit
and capture their family’s fantastic method
code and motto. O, SAS where are you now?
Gone to an alcohol oasis every one.
Blackhand gangs through every window
leapt craving my wit from ice-wagons – every day
was Drink More Pour More Day.
May they sting their heads and hearts
and sap their very strength and breath.
Am I alone in my symmetrical vision
of this unequivocal stupidity? Look
at the Labour Party too & roar with laughter.
All, all, all, clowns of conceit.
Shafted & driven intolerant on spewground
wearing only an orange Cuba baseball cap
say then this: Lift one much exercised
right arm more used to shifting Russian
vodka, drunkenly saluting naked and badly
bruised Albion and that failure St George,
declaring in soaking mattress rawness –
that’s the ugly nation you have made.
And that’s the nation of me too: each of us
in very separate parts brought to our knees.
Now it is time to put aside and forget
the decadent period of fast red cars &
slothful attitudes towards boldness
and moral mettle except in entering
the National Lottery, the greatest
con yet wrought by the Tory Party –
worse than cheap gin for quelling
here in the Great United Quelldom
where tomorrow never comes fast
enough for win ticket announcement.
I have been admiring the caked
menstruation blood you left
on a pillow before we parted.
It was the most tender
moments of our days.
We laved and laved the blood away
and you helped me with my broken leg.
It’s amazing what we did considering.
Nothing remains now.
World in smithereens.
4:56, sun rising after me,
swoon alone in the garden
at lilac and azalea fumes
thanking heaven inside
the utter madness for
nasturtium you planted
before fleeing from
my darkriver drinking.
Rain, alone in the rain,
rain and the train and
the river darkly summoning
towards its source my heart.
All the buttercoppes
flush like forests ankle-high.
I am so glad to live at the
northern end of the earth!
The south would suffocate
and humiliate me. Once more
the blossoms and birds. Even
aconite and horehound
bloom and bloom. I&I
myself am in a poisoned
corner, Chatterton-style,
entirely deconstructed.
Toe pressing the mad earth.
Stiff bottom lip turned out
against the rules and rest
of it, all in despotic shame.
Said: should do, but I won’t.
And she said: that’s the story
of your life. Almost man.
Rain, rain, rain again and bonerolling bloodthunder,
lampblack clouds from the Pennines
towards fjords in the east
releasing their load
soaking the tied-back crown of Russian tarragon, swaying
so high in the herb garden
– reminding me
of the cast-back hair of Anne de Bretagne in 1514
commemorated in marble: full-length along the sealed
casket
eyes closed by human hand, lips half-parted for a last kiss,
O please, O please beloved,
and those frontal bones and ribs pushed up
made more emphatic in her exit exhalations
in the Cathedrale Basilique Saint-Denis
as the young beauty
longed to find her breath.
Yes, Paris, you have everything,
the fastest nitrate in the best Laforgue rain,
the best gutters and downpipes and poets
and the marble hightide hair swept back in death pose
like wind-whipped tarragon.
How sweet today the scents and air perfumes
down the overgrown flags, binding stems
cling to my fair descending legs
which never saw a proper dance
in the arms of another – at village gatherings
I could only nod, neither saying
yes or no. So charmless harmless me!
Yet the true blue cranesbill like heaven’s light, invading
our brilliant path at Sipton Shield, crowning
the riverbed of tumblestones, is my
queenly ankletwine today, and the Michaelmas
which will be for my hair, washed
in the white water, crown of hair
lashed back from my supple neck, O yes
I hoy it back, defiant almost, if I knew
the word defiant and I wished I did know,
for it is a gunmetal word with a hard ‘t’
all should be acquainted with, with which all
should be in talking agreement: talking, what’s that
my sky-blue eyed Bar?
You speak the petals off the trees
each day and I in wonder
watch you draw them down. You’re like a bird
with fluting beak, while the silence
of the Nenthead shafts populate
with lack of noisesomeness my full
disabled cleft and tongue.
To call me idiot, brand me nobody,
is bestowing lustrous ermine qualities
upon my nowhere frame. There are no proper words for me.
Pearl: now our secret paths above the tumblestones
are pierced by yellow arrow marks
for all of those who would walk there too.
Everybody’s tortured, everyone’s in chains
I hate them and loathe them with strengthening abundance,
forehead-strong, and when my abundance, my overflowing
emotion, my abundance of the heart, my
moorland affluence and wealth which others call poverty,
when it streams like a fire seam,
I loathe them for binding my pearly toes.
I hate them because I am among their
other refugees. They put up the wire, wire, wire,
along my way,
which no one should do, for wire
is an industry, a containment, made in
Leeds or Wakefield Bar said, brought by 12-wheeled lorries
in unrolled bales like silver hay
from some industrial graveskin graveyard
completely contrary to the wings of my spirit.
Fraught I am with poor lip service,
destroyed and betrayed
and the river flows from me, my molten white water,
1500 to 1400 to 1300
past hawhips and sloes
and so to the sea.
I will wash myself in it forever.
Darling, reader and writer with azure eyes,
eyes the colour of the sea’s horizon,
I will wash myself in it forever.
In umber spate it ripped my breastbuttons, like your eager hands.
It broke apart my loving heart, like your cruel talking lips.
It stopped my sense.
O love, in a world of shuffled papers
and cheap haircuts, your honeysuckle-
scented locks, your locked and gripped
tongue will always be delight to me. In
an alien world of distant characters,
you’ll always be inside the dangerous
part of my forever welling willing heart.
Bar, Bar, barbed wire. Bar, the barbs
and staples and hooks and eyes. Did
you see the photographs? Did you see
the charred skin, the gravedigging
ceremony with gleaming boots,
spectacles and sneery smiles?
Did you take note my angel poet
of the complete famine due to
circumstances beyond control
of let’s grin and bear it?
Did you see the bushels of knees
and other thinly-appointed limbs
and the gaps of extracted – there’s
a word, my Bar, I know you’d love –
teeth, did you wonder where the world
was, where the world went, my honeysuckle love?
Blonde but a Jewess just the same.
No one had our words in those days.
When we stared and wandered
and stored and wondered
in each others’ far-reaching eyes
beneath the croaking creaking tumblestones
where our trout leapt mad for midge and mayfly
pollen puffed in gold explosions by sucking bees,
our ankles smoothed to Oriental beauty, before
either of us knew where was the Orient, before
Jeremy travelled there, before you read me
Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril, O dimmer
of my heavy lids, dizzy with pollen and sunlit
prose, O stunning quiet reader, seducer
of pathside petals and birdy wings, bringer
of betony, pointer out of fairies’ chimneys,
runner of rings in the rinsing rain.
I stood in any light there was, in
every light, dark and almost dark,
fiercely black, like a dark heart torment,
strangely grey all the way all day
from the storm-shaken ferry jetties of Ireland,
and I stood there, arms, heart and mouth open,
ready to be annoyed and poorly-addressed
by the sudden sun over the longing of the law,
and ready to be addressed by my loving love.
Medici? Three syllables, my honeysuckle
tumblestone rosehip love, but I did not
feel like an Italian court princess, for
my vowels were uncut marble then.
Even writing the words
rose
and
garment
broke my heart; their real variousnesses
pricked me awake when I expected it least.
O my love, my rosehip plucking love, my love,
kiss the bandage from my face and haul me from the wire.
All the mam-made hems, the man-made hymns,
none of the blood-filled truths, none, I say none,
none of them can move or call me as you can.
O my love, my harping, high fell honeysuckle
tumblestone molten white water love, haul me
from the terrible terror of the wristblood wire.