DID I DO THIS DREADFUL THING?

DID I DO THIS DREADFUL THING?

She loved me but she didn’t care.
She dug me deep a place to die
indifferently in an everywhere
where time and chance conspired to lie

and call it life. Abandonment
roared with a silence that betrayed
the gunshots that the music meant
when memory was so afraid

of silence that it couldn’t sing.
Why did my life abandon me
and did I do this dreadful thing?
The power of my memory

is such that I still speak the dead
languages to life and years
of waste are dripping in my head
like blood in love with vacant tears.

I can remember Christmas Day
when I was two in seventy-four.
I could have taught the dead to pray
and memory was just a whore

who cost too much and fucked too well.
I shot myself in seventy-five.
Is this death-in-life a Hell
where suicides are still alive

or think they are? Did I betray
love with an absent memory
or did you lie then kneel to pray?
I know that you abandoned me

the day we met and here I rot.
How can abandonment forget?
They say I am but I am not.
Death just hasn’t happened yet.

LETTER TO MY FATHER 2003

LETTER TO MY FATHER 2003

 

Do you still sleep at night?

Your hair was white

until you were seven.

“You’ve got a baby sister,” said your mother.

The shrivelled dwarf span the wax of your hair into gold

overnight and you were old.

Who was that other,

shitting and puking in the Moses basket?

 

If you’ve got a question for me, ask it.

The questions that I’ve got for you

crowd me like the poems that I’ve lost

to fear, disgust, the horror and despair,

the frost

that you still comb from your hair

turned white again,

little boy lost:

the snow queen stuck your heart with a splinter of ice

and called it Paradise.

 

Do you still sleep at night?

Do you dream in black and white

or colour,

do you dream white nights in Copenhagen

or Elsinor

where Hamlet called Ophelia a whore?

 

Are you afraid, teacher of fear?

Do you still hear

in the dark crisis of the paralysed hours

a remote cry heralding your name,

my Grandmother,

and still imagine that you’re not to blame?

 

Do you still sleep at night?

I know you can’t any longer toss and turn,

rage and burn

as you used to do.

But do you have a soul?

Did you go to Hell

in 1972,

has a demon walked in your body for 31 years

shouting, “Don’t tell! Don’t tell!”

 

And there was other shouting, wasn’t there?

Did you like it, dragging her by the hair?

I don’t think you did.

I don’t think you wanted to.

I know you were bullied at school

but join the club,

I went to the toilet to gibber and blub

and I want to know why

you perpetuated a lie

by taking it out on us.

My mother should’ve taken a bus

to Dover

and left a note, saying, “The nightmare’s over.”

 

I can still here you screaming at her,

I always will: I can still see your face

twisted into a patient, repetetive hate:

“I see, streams of abuse.

Mend your temper, Know your place,”

you always said.

What’s the use?

Both your children are already dead

or rather rotting inwardly,

corrupted by your legacy of rage.

Neither of us will see old age

which must be a comfort to you:

our mother now has nothing to do

but pay attention

“Like a naughty schoolgirl”, watch for the blows

of a perverted small-town schoolmaster

taking detention,

a prefect with a roman nose.

 

She says she chose you as good breeding stock.

Decapitated, the little mermaid sits on the rock

 

and she didn’t leave so I don’t believe her either.

When they ask me who was good and who was bad, I always answer, “Neither”

or “I don’t know”

or “Why” or “Oh”

 

but I know you envied your children their lives.

You envied other men their wives

and we looked on

in screams of despair

as you dragged our mother by the hair

across the hall

towards the study door:

“Be quiet!” she shouted, “You’ll get taken into care.”

 

Half-dead, hysterical she lay

one day:

“That’s right, you two come and help!” you said

but we were both already dead,

the tears immobile on our faces

as in so many places

before and since.

 

“I am Hamlet the Prince!

 

Madman. I was two. My brother was nearly five.

We both pretend we’re still alive.

 

One year you ‘cancelled’ Christmas.

Our mother made shepherd’s pie.

We had to lie.

“Tell her it’s delicious. Tell her you want some more.

(“That’s all your getting,” she said as she slopped it onto the plate.)

Food for hate.

It was disgusting. It was 1974.

 

You ‘sacked’ your mother-in-law.

You ‘sack’ employees

but we were all (unpaid) employees,

weren’t we?

My Grandmother couldn’t see.

She was seventeen years

blind among strangers.

Sometimes I dream her sightless tears

are mine.

I see them shine

like revelation or the remotest things.

Sometimes I play with the rings

on her fingers entwined in mine.

 

She was flawed. We were all flawed apart from you my lord.

 

And all for what?

All for the attention that your mother

(the phrase ‘son of a bitch’ has a special meaning to me)

gave to another.

 

Envy like moss on a heart of stone.

You get on fine now that I’m gone, now you’re alone,

 

with no one to envy, no one to hate.

An old woman stirs the ashes in a grate

pointlessly: my mother, the woman that you’re going to kill

 

with work. Will you leave me her ashes in your will?

THE NIGHT THAT ACHILLES MADE LOVE TO PATROCLUS 1992

THE NIGHT THAT ACHILLES MADE LOVE TO PATROCLUS 1992

 

In memory of Justine

 

 

Was it love?

Who turned the lights on?

Why do they burn?

 

Did the earth move

or was it me?

Did the world turn

or was it the emotion of the sea?

 

Were you the Queen

or the kitchen-maid?

Have I paid enough, now,

for everything I’ve seen

and heard, seen and heard,

for everything I’ve done and been?

 

Was it Heaven

or was it Hell?

There was no marriage.

“All shall be well,”

said the sun that I saw rise,

that I glimpsed

between the half-open lids

of your eyes’

fluttering,

the wings of the morning

dropping to mourn

 

the radiant glance

that glanced against

my first and final chance

as the diamonds turned into coal

in the soul that clung

to the hanging tree

and hung suspended there.

 

I bowed my head among

the hanging gardens of your hair,

testing the branches, twisting them into

some kind

of patience proper for the despair

and ecstacy that darted in and out of my mind

as if the naked child’s arrow

was a wheel turning so fast

it seemed to be turning backwards

as I replayed the past.

 

I was Zeno’s Achilles,

outstripping the heart stripped bare,

escaping through the thorn-trees of your hair,

tearing the branches that have to be torn to bleed and speak,

fleeing the stripped and peeling child

whose dart

turned once

in Achilles’ wild and wandering heart

 

oh my Patroclus.

 

Tell me Patroclus – you should know,

being a ghost to me now –

was it earth that we moved

or was it snow?

Was it sand

disappearing like air in an hour-glass

through the fingers

of one hand clapping

that ran through my fingers

 

when I stretched myself on the grave

of the woman I could not save?

A PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL 1992

A PSYCHIATRIC HOPITAL 1992

 

 

Trampled snow in a moonlit cemetry by night,

a psychiatric ward

under the blue emergency light.

 

Madness manufactured by the damned,

the sound of slamming doors and pounding feet,

bells raving bells,

raving

as if to deafen Quasimodo

in Esmerelda’s grave

 

until the stage hand

stops grinding the wind machine,

placates the dancing monkey

with 100 mg of Chlorpromazine

and reads a stage direction.

Scene: a little Victorian hospital on a hill.

Storm still.

Enter the beautiful and the damned

 

dancing in procession,

chained. “This is our first session.

How do you feel?”

“Unreal to myself and others.

Not mad, just sad. Sometimes I’m good, sometimes I’m bad.”

“Do you ever wish you were dead?”

he said as he scrawled across his pad

the words: “Trial by water:

if you float your a witch, if you drown your not.”

 

Visitors dropping over their teas,

electrocuted women shriekin for their memories

 

as England covets her disrepair,

calls her slaves servants.

Anorexics comb skull-caps of hair

by their unmade graves,

kneeling in prayer

to Paul their God.

 

The ghost of Cromwell stalks the corridors,

the New Model Army slams invisible doors,

 

their motto “Pain to take away the pain.”

A burning brand

(that’s my thing),

self harm in the palm of a scissored hand.

 

The birds don’t sing

at dawn, only the para-suicides

dripping blood, hanging

like the wedding dresses of jilted brides.

 

“Give me a grain of sand

to take away the pain.

Hold my hand.”

“No. You smell.

Personal hygene is all important here in Hell

and besides, in this place

where time is frozen

like a corn-doll’s face

in a mirror made of ice,

you must choose between pain and pain.

Choose between dyskenesia and the African prince

you saw at the end of your bed

the day you woke up dreaming you were dead.

Pain is the currency here.

Sell your prophetic soul.

A vision buys you a lump of coal.”

 

“That stuff you gave me…I can’t pee…”

“Pee in the bath. Let your muscles relax,”

he said. 

His face was like wax.

I felt so cold

it was as if

both of us were dead

but hadn’t been told.

 

I overheard a rape behind a screen.

I vomitted an egg. The yolk was green.

FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE

FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE

 

Father Mychal Judge was the chaplain of the New York fire department who died on 9/11

 

 

The clouds began to cry,

the rust began to settle,

the ashes of the angels lie

amassed in a twist of metal

 

and the ground was called groung zero

and the people as they turned

to run saw another Nero

play the fiddle as it burned.

 

Islam like Vesuvius rumbles

and a fine grey mist of clay

smothers a woman as she stumbles,

a New Yorker in Pompeii.

 

The patient archaeologists

of grief uncover the layers of fault,

the Kalashnikov rifles shaking the fists

of underage pillars of salt

 

and a priest called Mychal returning

to the towering eye of the storm,

the Archangel Mychal burning

in a fireman’s uniform.

 

(2004)

I HEAR VOICES

I HtEAR VOICES

 

Note: This poem is about psychotic depression, not schizophrenia.

 

 

The silence comes as a surprise,

sometimes, when voices tear your face

to pieces and then drink your eyes

as witnesses to their disgrace.

 

Human beings are made of light.

Light is all I ever see.

When silence roars exhausted night

away it’s all that’s left of me.

 

The sagging voices cry and shake

and sing the executioner’s song.

What did I do? Some slight mistake

or just a vast ancestral wrong

 

that means I have to be my own

executioner and be

the crowd as well and be the stone

to make a chopping-block from sea?

 

Love was just words. Words aren’t enough

to feed the broken and the blind

and no amount of empty guff

will heal the light-song of the mind.

 

Who the hell are you? “I’m Hell.”

Well move aside, I’m trying to write –

“Kill yourself down a wishing well

where human beings are wished to light.”

 

Stop writing in my notebook you –

“You what? There is no cure or curse

can stop me doing what I do.

We’re writing lining for your hearse.

 

It’s so much better now he’s dead.

My name is Legion and our voice

suffered, trapped inside his head.

He shot himself. He had no choice.”

THE BRIDE OF SILENCE

THE BRIDE OF SILENCE

 

 

Her calves were Michaelangelo

and Raphael haunted through her hair.

Her kneck Vermeer – but wait, the snow

was blameless in its blank despair

 

or was it me that gave up hope

or was it hope that gave up me?

The painter’s hangman lit the rope

and knotted light to set me free

 

to plunge so deep – but no, the smell

inside was like defeated stone

and fire that filled the wishing well

still rips me to the withered bone.

 

I touched you and you crumpled. Good.

What am I worth? Can life forgive

a curse that paper made from wood?

Give me a little chance to live

 

before I die inside you true.

From cliff to cliff – but there again,

willows between your thighs drip dew

and I’m the luckiest of men,

 

unluckiest when silence roars

without you in this empty flat.

My ghost walks empty corridors

and kills the ticking of a rat.

 

The bride of silence roared with blood.

I rose between her raging thighs

to make the promise more than good

and the man who made it more than true.

 

Flirtatious? You can kiss me arse.

I loved you years with patience deep

to crash the gates and flood the pass

with tears of life that dreamt of sleep.

MAKING LOVE TO HER

MAKING LOVE TO HER

 

 

I stroked her inner thigh so full

she shuddered with the love she fought.

I felt the tide inside her pull

but two and two makes fucking nought

 

when time’s a gentlemanly thief.

I touched her skirt and I was real.

The stains of time were clogged with grief

and love was made the flesh to feel

 

sweet damp under the skirt she wore.

I touched her breasts with fingers rare

to write what life was really for

and fight the deadly of despair.

 

You make me whole,a nakedness

that entropy can never change.

I felt the rumours of your dress

and felt them deep and felt them strange

 

but then you left. I was alone.

My lifetime was the love I gave

and not the hours of acheing stone

that made my gravestone, not my grave.

 

Sighed through the willows that I kissed

an Eden that I never lost

between your legs that dripped with mist

because the stone had cracked with frost

 

and love was more than just a word

that suffered time. The drunken boat

pitched downstream and thought it heard

the dark inside you rise to float

 

light years above the stave to kiss

the wreckage of the man in me.

You’re the everything I’ll miss

when dark and life put out to sea.

FINGAL’S CAVE

FINGAL’S CAVE

 

A hymn to her naked beauty

 

 

She dressed in faded amethyst

and moved like words that couldn’t write.

I knelt between her knees and kissed

basalt that echoed with true light.

 

Flame me another kiss so deep.

The water brimmed a secret cave

and love remembered it was sleep

when it wrote your name across my grave.

 

The deep inside was soft with rock

I kissed as it dissolved a sea

no wreathe of shipwreck could unlock

with shallows of a memory.

 

When Fingal moaned a flood of light

the answer was a shudder so

deep that the cave was lit with night

and Fingal’s life was a dawn of snow.

 

Deep me another kiss of dust

and feel the veins that throb and roar

as Fingal’s sword begins to rust

snowflakes that melt the word before.

 

Up through the rising dark, the deep.

Flood, when the sword inside you died.

Life is short as a moment’s sleep

but Fingal’s cave is deep and wide.

 

What died in you was wide and white

like snow that drifts the breaking day

with footprints of the melting night

and what the darkness couldn’t pray.

 

Sleep me a river, wash me clean

with a better love than memory.

Your deep was how it felt to mean,

soft in the amethyst-grey sea.

LOVE SEES MOST WHEN LOVE IS BLIND

LOVE SEES MOST WHEN LOVE IS BLIND

 

 

You’re the other half of the sky.

Unreal life was real when we

sank a thousand kisses deep

where nothing had the time to die

and love was a reality

that had the time but not to sleep.

 

Human promises are frail

but I hope I’d die for you

and if I didn’t sacrifice

my life I hope I’d learn to fail

better since death makes life come true

with fire writhing in the ice.

 

Sing me a river and kiss me slow.

I had nothing left to lose

and lost it all but I don’t mind.

You are the miracle of snow

and the ruined life I didn’t choose.

Love sees most when love is blind.

 

I didn’t do time, time did me.

My body is a a prison cell

graffitied with my dates and and name

when the prisoner looked out to sea

and Heaven was a kind of Hell

where death was just the final shame.

 

Diamonds are exhausted coal.

Look how the sky bereaves the sea

with love and everything you are

makes footprints from my broken soul

and paralysis the free

diamond in a fallen star.

 

You make whole. Hold me so close

that cliffs of pain are just a dream

I never had that it would rain.

The nothing that I had to loose

I lost to an appalling scream

of love when life was just the pain.