Bus notes 8

Each time the bus goes

past the City Hospital

     I find myself naked

     in the UV light

     but for the one sock on

     and a visor over the face.

The good laughter

and wrong comic turns

of the nurses hoped me to

a new kind of humanness

     before I walked, shining,

     on to work’s baby doses

     of quotidian disgrace.

Anamnesis

At the chain restaurant (trussed up French), she told me
she hadn't prayed for months. I said I wasn't praying too.

Here's us then, happy that with our bit
of unhappiness revealed,
we're one person closer to a common custom.   

     no instructions or magic patterns to make

     that old old sort disappear

     no holy potion to make us throw
     our own darts into the nothing there

     all smiles

Only the empty glass of average wine,
and the impatience
of the waiters sensing an hour extending.

Nobody ever gets the wage they ought.

Bus notes 7

      Three old women sit 

      beside themselves.

      One of them half smiles;
      the others won’t.
In singing together, “And can it be”,
they’re at war with the official exorcists.
      They could make a gold light
      burn all of us up
but they just keep on
with the song, wholly lost
in the tonal holy work 

and the remembered words.
      People are finding different ways
      not to hear.
The bus turns from the park
toward Winson Green
and the long, weighted line
of the prison wall.
      What on Earth is a hymn for?

A Postcard

                           We’re where we ought

                                                         not to be

                              All along the esplanade

                                               the heavy weather

                                            disregards our

                                                         little faces

                   big waves come       explaining nothing

                             We’re here with the old new sun

                                                         and sandwiches 
                                and cheap spades and the given time
                                            all turned over to misrule

                     On the beach

                             there’s no corners 
                                            where we're hid
    
                                   There's nowhere
                                                    but the lines 
                                                            are all rubbed out

                                                Our blue and dying anoraks 
                                  Our fresh skin clinging 

      
                                                  Us as aliens         

             
                                                                                A great bell is rung
                                                                          some place far off

                           The tree’s green spasms bless ache
                                                                          stain some and then
                                                                she goes back
                                                                                   to her shivers
                                                                 and bent branches
                                              A big shock of fuck off hair

             The counting songs won’t work
                                   with the rain going on and on
                              stuttering





                          Each wave does break

                                              all in a tempo still
                                                      
                                     The sea is not an animal at all  

                                                                  Here’s crashing for

                               the easy yoke

                                              the jokes unstopped 

                                        the tinned cream        

                                                                    the truth of eczema      

                                    the wet, dark slate

                      the old man’s first tongue lost

                                                the near to broken bellowing clock

                               As Taid types praises of Germania

                                                              tiny fingertips make pictures

                                     on the clean white wall      


                                                   Us as kids
                                                              in time
                                                    will come unstuck        

                                                  

   

Bus notes 6

The boys at the back are laughing
as if their laughter
ought to be heard.
They make it sound like pretending.
       Phone music scratches
       the people done in
       by a waged day.
There’s some showy book in my hands;
these eyes slip on the spilt words

to fall almost to sleep.
       Everything is knackered
       with it so close 

and the stated heat.

Tomorrow, couldn’t you just
not go in?

This is history! The next installment

I bet you were gnawing off the fingertips in expectation. Well, the waiting is all done now, little ones. Come slake your thirst at the Bard's own Bong.

Bus notes 5

        There’d been too many coffees

        and the blood went at a rate.

Talking with Dad before: 
it was words heard wrong, 
the working hurts, a smashed up house.

        Some bloke by the doors

        was kicking out a foot

        with paper stuck to it.
The dirty water slid across the floor.

        We passed the Oratory

        and the lights were out

        and no one crossed themselves

        and everything was still

        in the light and the waiting.

I said in a too loud voice,

we’re all going the same way.

        The whole of the lower deck
        shut up quick and turned

        to look at the thin rain

        start to repeat itself.

Tales from the School of Art

Falling over hisself with

          his tumbledown longing

        giving out the raggedy signs

                      with a dirty brush

       Glamour, disarming

                  scorning the polished demand

    seeping between the fingers

                   held over the eyes

                     Blossoming: the burst sea wall

                remembered here

                        and here the hundreds of arcing stars

                      duffing up the hung up dark

                                

            and the Norwegian girl

    drunk and

               in tears and

                   not in love

                       and not in love 

Tom Clark's Blog 2

Tom Clark has posted something from the Wooden Vaults on his blog, Beyond the Pale. There's been some marvellous posts over the last week or so (not that they are ever anything less than marvellous) and I would recommend looking up some of those past treasures.

Bong is Bard Poetry Competition

The lovely people at Bong is Bard are offering 100 US Dollars for the bestest poem/song/prose piece inspired by a number of curious links. To find out more, go to http://bardisbong.blogspot.co.uk/

Lessons in Epic

You’re worried about him.

In this heat, everything moves slowly.

There should be labels for the mistakes

that piled up as he left each room.

We’d had a couple of wraps

and he just kept going on;

his face was one of them weird masks.

Are there dirty roots now

where the tongue once was?

They’re always saying

there’s nothing to do around here.

I am in love with the thought 
of my failing you.

The air is thick with sociology.

I imagine you as a kid

out of your head on Tipp-ex or

asking the court to go easy after your

half-hearted mugging 
in the park.

You’re my favourite narrative

and I want you

to be angry with me.

I smell blossoms and the trees are bare

     What is it that we’re supposed to be

     hoping for?

     There are no notes to hand.

     (I hear that back in the park

     they’re breeding courtiers at a rate).

The river isn’t a river;

it’s an accident.

     They did the best they could

     with what they got.

The kid on his tiny BMX, dressed up brash,

refuses the mysteries

with his thirty second stunt.

     Just to let you know,

     there’ll be birdsong

     at 5.37am.

     Do you ever do singing?

O what am I to you, sweetheart,

and, angel, what are you to me?

Tom Clark's Blog

Tom Clark has posted my poem Bus notes 4 on his marvellous blog, Beyond the Pale. If you haven't come across Tom's site already (if not, what the hell else have you been doing?) throw yourself in. It's very gratifying to have a poet and critic of Tom's stature pay serious attention to the work.

For all you Brummies and YamYams, he's found some great photographs of West Midlands buses to accompany the work. The image of Rugeley in the Sixties is the bestest.