Authors: Barry MacSweeney
1
Far cliff Babylon, your natty dread future is a dole card
stamped with asteroids exploding
across the city of my
birth.
Putty children,
crassly aware.
I am 16.
I am a Tory. My
vision of the future represents
no people.
Celeriac priesthood offers up my rifle to the sky.
2
Tear the carbon paper of your soul. Virtue
lacking wit cries on the edge
of minefields.
Agents want me to yield. When
I see the Sex Pistols in my dreams I
roll into the garden of a small
nightmare,
looking for holidays in the
sun.
No fun.
My simple body is
a complicated asteroid,
torn
from her
skin.
My life is the size of a
pin.
I have no people.
They represent me.
When we go my separate ways
the colours are dark.
No more apartheid.
3
Hearts like aubergines
cancelled from the garden.
Bint glove,
suck the rivets from
my cymbal,
smoke
vermilion gas. Feel
the city like a river, its
future not written in
words.
Language is a steady stick.
But people are
colour conscious. Their
heroes are red and their traitors
yellow,
Dan Smith fruit skin.
I have cancelled everything and now I am free to choose.
4
I have died every day since I gave up poetry.
Dangerous condescending humans lapped it up.
They stuck their tongues into the gravy and
licked the plate.
Heroism learns to be a stranger
with odd shoes,
too late to use.
Combine your heart with fantasies
of power.
Copulate with the dynamoes inside this
red shirt.
Armband sex.
Helmets erect their tower.
Men train boys.
Fascist tarts obey.
5
Exaggeration is a gift that strays, towards
the minor forest of her mind.
Pineal furtherance smokes, like
a blues clarinet
in water.
She is my only daughter,
torn from her skin.
I would not let her in. I
discovered my ability as
a father
snapped at the wrist.
I ate my fist.
The doubts are bicycle in the
hospital door.
We sucked the floor.
6
The small belief is arrogant, how sick people
move. Hit my bruised runways,
on a council grant.
We collapse in domestic chaos.
Three minute punch ups are commonplace.
My children can
never pay back the thrashings
bashings & lashings.
I represent no people. Not even
myself.
Small,
crawling piety, you deserve
many bombs
&
guns.
I ate your Christian fish.
It made me sick.
Division is your prayer.
1978
(elegy for William Gordon Calvert)
if I was a blackbird
I’d whistle and sing
rude unwelcome guest
luckless wind
at family’s four doors
nothing fever eyes wear
solid fern
narrow compass
abjuring life
treason to my instruments
of you taken
beamed
invisibled counterfeit
midnight stealer
quiet roofs pigeons croop
sponge boots caress
aching sills
stare at rough slot
magnets on the heart
aery chambers lift
handsome filings
from dust to a star
solid route distinct choice
years upright to earth
elements
world streets erupted fuses
smash at old photographics
rushing memorials
heaving thickly
iron tough
& curled
drowning love’s boat
Russian heart gondola
same hull punctures
deadly violent reefs
fire & ice teach
beginnings tough
to believe
London shrubs & buds
neat borders
casual solace
explode in nothingness
no comfort poison
coal with o’erblowing quench’d
vapour forth flamed
shut & digested to mucus
in swan’s belly
fish of sky
hot masculine flame
driven by sleek leathered
foreign chauffeur whose
visor snaps & gleams
suck in air over liquid paths
route marked unblotted
black grouse feathered lyre
whisper to your soul
Newcastle’s kindest
harshest burr
melt & make no noise
hands to miss
bunched on a driving wheel
obliquely track a journey
vowed to this trench
sudden anchorites
dust without & stink within
hearth mate joyous rise
if so I believed
freedom is a current choice
Hartfell grasses harp & sing
discoverer
meet the cavernous mole
shrewdly converse
when timbers fall
thick peat stampings
swift & pure invasion
driven by glade music
total capture invisibled
veined in truth no captive
sun & moon also particles
seduced by gorgeous charts
attend your fresh horizon
servants of such final need
old as this century is
polish felspar at Sparty Lea
burr the wind with Tyneside songs
skin mixie rabbit from ferret’s jaws
melt & make no noise
bunch your hands & clap my head
invisibled by a thief at night
stolen from sleep you stole from your family
melt & make no noise
ruthless masters did not poison you
you opened doors saluting their children
proud to chauffeur rich men’s sons
drugged by work you wouldn’t rest
melt & make no noise
dominoes laugh in the sun at night
ash drifts down & coats the dogs
fired upwards in the art of flight
melt & make no noise
lapwing lapwing green or grey
singing the smell of earth
sand mingled with blood of lies
melt & make no noise
no requiem no hymn no journey song
stopping to drink from a broken stream
ghosts of miners on the fell
shadowy poachers armed with snares
melt & make no noise
stern with children who grew up wrong
crossing your path when I crossed the Tyne
independence is a wolf that slays
melt & make no noise
follow your eyes to the source of the Allen
follow your hands inside intricate car engines
follow your speech to a wheel that cracks
follow your body to the ash in my skull
melt & make no noise
suck in fire from four windows
blasted kitchen with flaming breath
bear silence which your leaving makes
melt & make no noise
curlew chatter
crescent beaks
ragged wings swoop
snipe song
long way from Kent
to your rough ash slot
which pours
fills this skull
schooled in grind
taught with pennies
tall on earth
golden man
not fascist Aryan strength
dangerous claptrap
Allendale rosehip
whose fruit blood dries
lichen is armour
against these sores
we learned stones flowers fish birds
beasts
streams of fact
beck fells
whose terror
waited for my walk
you spoke
punched
logs flared
sank
we disagreed
furious
obstinate poles
iron words
fire words
survival language
tears will not
people will
not conniving
emotions will
not fences &
gates will not
bought flowers
pretty cards will
not
callous disregard
will not
no buying back
no second chance
no guarantee
no trial period
no refund
trough gathered
pig faces
falcon glances
magpies
stealing shirts
pawning hair
pasting pride
I want his braces
shining sleevebands
greedy bastards
how much
remember solid tongue
no fuss mouths shut
tight against
light
leave to discretion
who has it but
the but the
but the
but the
dead
do not paint skies at Sparty Lea
do not bring rain to Martin’s Haydon Bridge
ignore sun’s invitation at Sipton Shield
stand by the Allen at Dirt Pot waiting for trout
watch the rats
kneeling
spit on priest
& dud employer
with his sent wreath
don’t take sides
nothing left
nothing’s right
you cannot buy
you must realise
you cannot retrieve
remember this
you can’t buy
no change
you can’t retrieve
hare in a gin
you can’t release
snipe in a trap
you can’t persuade
his heart any more
with toys
1975–1979
1
. Orphan consorts & vipers under glass. Hair
wrapped in knots, secret purple liquid
in her circus fingers. Good morning day
is love for you at work.
Electric
envelopes.
We flame upward
in a dream of flight.
Gash lips, depot
Venus sinks, sucks, turns
her secret
to scrawl erotica. Blind
men crawl. White
sticks click, venom. Walking
men see too many politics. Commons
pin-time. Shredding machines
hot with use. Dogs
shit on the earth & bark.
2
. I love you
my friendly little wayward trout of Lambeth Walk.
Persephone is a gas that kills.
Trysted husbandry rots.
Acid bullion fans each window
from the poisoned centre, we bend
will
to its taste.
3
.
She syttes upon a Rocke,
She bends before hys Speere:
She ryses from the Shocke,
Wieldynge her owne yn Ayre
. Right. season fytte
self ends touching. Blue bliss banshee
arrow death. Lette my Loverde fitte
itself a knot
of snakes, scorpion burning
million sand eyes. Uncouth brute. Stinking yob.
Collared neckblood, finger shit,
duff born bastard, entrance wrong way.
Mercy is Xtian
no mercy no molotov me. No bash
but kiss –
not foot. Your little games
secret. Pretty shirt
joy
shared not
.
4
. Patchy dark
overtakes the bloody mistress of his pleasant ayre.
Blood whose with my waters fat flow thick. sonke
in bloode, neck charts, grim Juga:
burn pansies, parsley vlix, pick-your-mother’s-
eyes-out, purging flax. Rip chicken legs (rhode island sussex)
out of it. Pisspoor jackdaws bark
long legged gnawed by filthy cats
& stinking canine flesh.
Butchers
all I see. Flesh hanging
off the bone & hooks. Burning
books. Taj Mahals
of muttshit, people
eating anthrax virus. Horned
fuckdust plugs their eyes.
INHILDE SOMEJOICE OF LYFE, OR ELSE MY DEARE
(LOVE DIES –
burn yr halles of merriement – burst
yr miskynettes.
Sack the scallywag who brought me to this
fucking awful place.
5
. Elated surgeon, second honeymoon ragged to ribbons
by freedom Belfast housefrau
obsessed with her / nothing has moved /
engages the characters/ stunningly/ mummers
aiming red guns, lonely passionated
gum blood, fire, spitting house flame,
cold bodies in what happens next is
a victorian collection of demesning smut.
6
. to find
out 10 years younger why this happened
her hair streaked with splendidly bracing
experience. Precious few female
erotic forces can knot
such deadly nightshade
Merk Plantes in her
fingers
for so many
lovers to
suck
the poison down.
I to the Qwood muste goe because there is more cash in It.
Arts Councils
I suck dry. Blacklists
stuff my mind. Col B’s name
(JOHNSTON) writ large in letters scraped
on Whitley Bay’s famous golden shore.
Where waves roar
inside the cardboard heads
of grey overcoats
with writs to serve. We swerve.
7
. Drybblet joie maie find a beme of bacon rind, inshore, when
it he she they come
home (where violence is & was). Yem is where
people die, mindblood
draining into hearths from hearts. Slaver
drips from every pore
you see. It
will cost nothing. You will be refunded
for this so-called truth.
Your house will have kernels of gold
laid upon its roof.
Piss on it & pull
nettle roots from your plan. Gourmets
in evasion spick petal dust up
fucked kind like.
none wife go/sweater pretty shirt/thread politics/explain/apologise
burned relief I come from bulls, creased amoeba
hit the fan of all delights, cataract, blind pastry
ducks, sways, seeks
ENHELE ME/CAST NO SHRED.
8
. Come far in years.
Sample hard mania lies. Sample rubber policies.
Swallow stiff wrists embalmed with sable tongue.
Learn gristle kidda. Learn scumbag frown.
Learn slap on head
or you’ll stay in for life. belted arse, slave tactics.
Plit quote love poems to reach jowhere:
8
. meant split love’s
mayakovsky boat bolshevik bad translation
GONDOLA on vodka Neva
future/wrist/stick plimsoll geometry
of the hardened spirit
bent back to sky
canvas slashed,
anonymous goths,
heavy european rain (rulers, federalists, kings).
Tsar me. King me. Secretariat my joys. Bureaucratise
loves, hair. Bind this
muscled canopy & cook it dry. Scrape
gravy from heart’s disease, curious
disquiet of the soul.
Bondage is a SCORE OF STEDES
to Ride Me from this Arid Plain. Get
whatte I know is nowt, sunny Jims
so filled with valley
rain. HARTE
SYKE PEYNE, middle english sense
I know tonight or any day
of dreams that clash. Fash not
ligamentisity, fresh language, pulsing
velour cravats, fannies
of famous women,
doggie carrots, eyes swivelled
in a mirror of their own reflections. We
learn page one, page three, banner trash.
Queen me! Ha! Princess pearl toes
120-point princess Cinderella, what bedbait. Kiss
then. Bend under rain.
9
. Last buds
come first. Come back. Lions
are their fear. Maned kayaks
in the rough of life. Thorn
roots – I have their
word for it – pull
DOWN.
Snap Snap Snap. Trench is life. Rut is go.
Blending was post-Swedenborgian, cherries
10
.
fell from the cake house. We learned
many. Sheen peeled. Lacquer lost its somehow
in the gale. Too small
a guyfte the londe & sea, you spread
a shield whose argent. Whose argent
burned up sight sound.
I was Aella’s slave. I ate words.
I was Aella’s wife. No holpe came quick.
I was Aella’s labourer. He broke my axe.
I was Aella’s lover. We made amends.
I was Aella’s universe. We settled for sandgrains.
O save me from her thou illustrious sage
is a herbal telegram whose text (nicked from Dante)
enchained
moi, would not keep us from the flames
of Dis.
Hear this.
Your
secret
11
. games
tempt to wrong beds. Drawn by conduits
of red hair
up
sleek
gunbarrels in the rain, gutter
stealth, I
rode gondola’s nightshirt waves & sank
a shaft to hilt
in molten sand. Betraste, coptic,
this is the network, ancient brother
in arms, hand
by loin.
I seek your groin
with a stone.
12
. CELMONDE is a lover I would skin sheets to seek.
Pleats in her many-furrowed glebe
as she speaks queen’s speech
: POTTE OUT POTTE OUT
melt these plastic bicycle
tinerary’s dark stream
clash events:
marrows, young rhubarb
stainless bint is number 10
no glove on cattle grid this horn whose hooves
spark furnace night. We eat
red snow. F1 hybrid
St John Stevas grin at Bexley Ted
hair on hair shirt before cameras, Bede’s sandals
Cuthbert’s
cannot walk this land. His
hut
is cut
by hand
while private practice thrives. Weep in drizzle
of raincoat doubled majorities. THE MAGGIES
BEATS. THE MAGGIE BOEAST.
The Maggie Beast
fire amalgam, mercury poisoning
tubed cadmium, delta mouth
mudlips on stroking maps
Albion, a new geography
Albion, to be repealed.
IAM NO SHIELD.
Open the door.
Rented skies.
Colour bleeds to horizon’s rim.
Quest is claw.
(coda)
Betelgeuse. My central star.
Justice as geography of the soul.
Opportunity is darkness. I am
16
. I am
a Tory. I am sixteen
different stories.
The moon (Beulah) walks Up.
She is white torch maiden
protected by blue police of the night.
No frights
distress her
glowing
garment hem.
Plexistars,
windows of the mind, cloches
thrown up reflecting
dawn, so blind
each pace towards the door.
Sunken breath,
saucer eyes, no
surprise. Up for sale
we go, driven into
roots
by blood & silence
of our lives.
1978–79
this state of the nation bulletin for J.H. Prynne