Good Friday, Driving Westwards

While driving along the M6
it struck me that Judas is a position
into which we all slip from time to time,
not a whole, immutable, person.

Occasionally, like him, we become
so stuck in this position, we don’t realise
where we are. Then we end up
not existing, in one way or another.

But if we can understand that
this could be just a phase,
like feeling virtuous, or sexual,
or wanting to buy things from IKEA,

then we have a chance to avoid being
someone set in agonising, archetypal stone,
whose identity rises to the sky from
the depths of the earth, like the gods of old.

Is this what Christ struggled with
in the Garden of Gethsamane?
Not my will, but thine,
He prayed, sweating blood

– understandably, perhaps,
because it’s so bloody hard
to accept the bitter cup
that incarnation offers,

instead of regressing
to the omnipotence
we once had
in the depths of our mothers.

Perhaps, Christ saw that
to have done His own will
would have meant
being eternally enwombed.

Only by accepting the death
incarnation implies,
could He heave the stone
from the door of the tomb.

Tornado

After I arrive home,
I fall on my bed in a swoon,
the ache in my head easing,
warmth radiating from under the hand
I lay on a heaving stomach.

I remember you saying to me:
‘I can hear you breathing,’
as if I had been lying on your lap like an infant.

I pretend it’s your hand,
not mine, that is touching me.

Then, as I turn over
in the heat of the afternoon,

delirious,

dribbling,

I think I see:
rain drill down
upon the full-leafed trees
in a thunderous,
perfectly vertical stream,
framed by the window
that I lie before.

Or is it a dream?

Later, when I’m awake and downstairs,
looking onto the road,
cars begin to turn round its corner,
one after another,
in an endless metallic stream.
It could still be a dream.

But something is wrong.

Outside, just yards from
where I had slept,
trees, felled by the tornado,
crowd the streets
with their amputated limbs,
and, also, their corpses.

People, suddenly out,
like me,
crowd the street too,
frantically smiling,
not knowing what to do:

A man acts as a policeman,
directing traffic.
A woman, out of her 4×4
angrily shifts some branches
as if they were protesting
against her right to drive such a car.

Through the jungle I see:
roofs, which had held out water for years,
now caved in, their tiles stripped off,
littering the streets in fragments
after being knife-edged playing cards
flicked viciously through the air,
I later heard on the news

I think of you leaving from where we’d met.

Is the roof of your car now caved in,
your head slumped on the steering wheel,
glass in your eyes and your hair,
blood trickling from your nose and your mouth?

Or, perhaps, you’ve been decapitated,
by one of those knife-edged playing cards
as you leapt out to avoid the weather,
I think after watching the news.

But now that we’ve said goodbye,
how can I ring,
knowing you won’t ring me?

I was trying to bury my loss
in sleep and dreaminess.

Instead I feel as exposed
as the houses all around,
that people gawp at,
glad they are not theirs.

Notes on my Excavation

In the morning:
crushed by the self-disgust
your touch and frightened look
bequeathed to me (that now
I freshly trigger every day,
like a radioactive spray).

In the afternoon:
this rottenness scooped out
and replaced by the surge
of any powerful feeling
that can fill the space
and conceal the fact
that who I am, died,
and was excavated, long ago,
even as I tried to root and grow.

In the evening:
such etiolated words as those above,
(desperately put down – and at the last moment),
blacken and fall back upon themselves,
as I swoon into the darkness of the year
and into arms that are not really there.

Mirror, Mirror

‘I’m so superficial,’ you say,
shaking your head,
and looking in the mirror
to check the hang of your hair,
as you twitch your nose like a rabbit
and dart glances at yourself from afar.

I stand watching,
remembering all those stories
you tell of women approaching you:
on an escalator – in a coffee shop – at a bus-stop,
to say, ‘who cuts your hair? It’s wonderful,’
as if they wanted to touch.
‘Oh, please, please!’ I imagine them chorus,
while you bask in the glow of their admiration,
as if you might actually let them.

Then I approach you,
and I touch your hair,
pulling it back
from the high forehead
you use it to hide,
smoothing it around your skull.

‘I don’t know why you need it colouring, ‘
I say. ‘There’s not a gray hair here.’
‘Oh, yes, there is,’ you retort.
‘They’re just not on display.’

Then I bend to kiss you
in the crook of your neck,
to send shivers down your spine
- and, as I do, glimpse,
in the mirror on the wall,
a reflection of you snapped shut.

‘Yes, you are superficial,’ I say,
as I find the precious spot,
‘but in the deepest kind of way.’

Father’s Day

It’s not her fault,
lying there, on her front,
in the sun, looking back
at me and asking,
as I leave,
how long am I to be?
- so peremptorily,
that I feel she’s judging me again
as another of those wicked men.

I’d just decided not to phone you,
and, therefore, not to say
my wound had burst once more,
and that, within my inner world,
there raged another furious war.
‘Please, help me not to lash myself
until I am a writhing mass of flesh,
and almost dead,’
I also had not said.

Then my son had rung,
wanting to see me -
me the reviled, the rejected,
the renegade.
So often when he rings,
I feel like this.

I’d put down the phone
and been in tears.
Why couldn’t my nascent sexuality
have been welcomed,
instead of prodded with fear,
as if it needed extirpating?
For this is surely what has banished it
to languish in so total a disgrace
in such a dark and fetid place.

But it’s not to blame this either,
though it’s a struggle:
for, first, I want to blame;
then have to pull back
to feel the pain,

as now I do,
slamming the front door,
in another surge of tears,
for this lost, rejected part of me.

Then that door inside shuts,
echoing the one I have just slammed,
and locking me away again for what,
I know will seem like years.

Total Immersion

I had to go in at the other end,
where diving is permitted, for
unusually, the pool was crowded.
Children were criss-crossing the water with
their parents and, as with ducklings on a river,
I knew that one or two would soon be
losing touch, and paddling frantically
to reattach, regardless of whether I was
in the way or not. I stood, my toes curling
round the pool’s ceramic edge, reluctant
to plunge in and take my chance.
A group of older, West Indian girls
was playing with a huge inflated ball.
One of the girls flung it high into the air. Then,
whoever got there first had won the game.
All over the pool they thrashed through the water,
trying to hang on to their opponents
and slow them down, as well as reach the ball.
Such fun, such glee, but not for me, standing
there, on the edge of everything – not just
the pool, and noticing for the first time,
in several months, the waves painted half way
up and all around the wall, and, for a
ceiling, the plastic, cuboid sky that filtered
natural light, whether from sun or through cloud,
so that always there shone down an intense and lurid blue.
Now from opposite sides of the pool some
Asian youths were swimming towards each other
with such flashy, slashing strokes there must be
someone here they hoped would be impressed.
Needless to say it was not me, still perched
above the chlorinated deep, beginning
to feel cold, and increasingly concerned,
for how was I to swim one length, let alone
the number that I knew I had to do?
Of course, the lanes would soon be physically
in place; then all these people, they would have
to go, every single one of them.
I had been here ten minutes early,
as I like to be to ensure that I
can swim the distance that I know will
calm me down and tire my body out.
But those ten minutes now had gone
and there was just an hour left
to cram the necessary distance in.

It had been ages since I’d dived
and I just plunged straight in,
(legs bent and flailing in the air, no doubt)
confidently expecting soon
to beat the surges under me.

Yet I’d not thought to tighten up my goggles
and the sudden rush of water round my head,
skewed them from my eyes. Out of my depth,
I had to struggle to the side, and even when
I’d readjusted them, they were never really clear again,
as if something on the lens had reacted with the chlorine,
leaving a smeary deposit, like the scum on tea in areas of hard water.
It lasted all the time that I was there; so that dim
through the misty panes and turquoise light, was how
I saw it all that strange, miraculous afternoon.

And this was how I saw her one-piece swimsuit, first,
- an impressionistic flash of scarlet -
before it slipped down the steps and her head
was bobbing on the surface like the polystyrene
floats on ropes now strung from one end to the other
to mark the lanes for different speeds of swimmer.
She was in my lane, the one for ‘medium’ swimmers;
yet she was not, I saw, following the arrows on the board
indicating which side was ‘up’ and which was ‘down’,
and now she was heading straight for me, and I for her.

And then I realised I knew her from before.
I thought she’d looked familiar
when I’d entered the building,
as she locked her bike up to the railings:
fair hair put up, but sprays of it escaping,
red scarf, with cheeks flushed by the cold to match,
Amazonian in stature, but also a painting by Rubens,
perhaps an English rose as well, who knows? I didn’t.
Although I knew her from before, I’d never spoken to her.
She was just someone I’d noticed from afar;
and now she was coming straight towards me.
Who would give way, I thought, as I breaststroked up to her?

I did. It was as if I was invisible,
mere scum on the surface of the pool.
And it got worse when she moved on to backstroke;
for then I really was invisible.
And all the time my difficulties were being intensified,
by one of the Asian youths, who had not left with all the others,
but was hanging round the steps halfway down the lane,
and very definitely not swimming.
The scarlet swimsuit ignored him too,
which was something, I suppose.
(probably she was oblivious of us both.)
But as I swam up and down the lane,
gurgling underneath the water,
then surfacing to survey the scene,
hoping we would not cross
where this young Asian man was hanging round the steps,
(with all the attendant risks of actual bodily contact),
I began to wonder, what was he up to?

There seemed to be a friend of his, also not swimming,
on the other side of the pool, which would explain
to some extent his smiling and his shouting,
but what on earth was the substance of their communication?
Then focusing upon our lane again,
as she back-crawled up to the steps,
I saw she would collide with him.
She had definitely not ever noticed he was there.
Perhaps she didn’t care.
But he did,
and, inanely grinning, almost seemed to will her on.

Yet in the event there was no collision;
for, as she approached,
he ducked under the water
and she passed over him.

A miracle, I thought.

Then, as I swam past the steps,
and, with my forward thrust,
plunged underneath the water,
there, through the milky distance,
as through a cataract in an ageing eye,
I saw it, like a spear, jutting out
from underneath his billowing boxers,
while he, now with his head above the water,
(I’d surfaced and glanced backwards)
continued to grin and gesticulate across the pool.

The stretched out feeling in my stomach
which had been with me all weekend
(and to relax which I had come out swimming)
pulled at me, like tears that could not happen,
as if the ratchet of the rack that I was lying on
had suddenly been turned on another notch.

Then, just as I was wondering how to cope with this,
all around the learner’s pool,
(ten feet from the one that I was in)
there rushed a congregation of West Indian
men, women and their children,
rupturing the rhythmic swish and glug of water,
with singing, and concerted clapping that
echoed and reverberated around the lofty building
to produce for me a kind of pandemonium:
it felt as if my rack had been turned on,
not one, but several notches, all at once.

It was a baptism in which those wishing
to declare their faith would be totally immersed,
as Jesus was by John the Baptist.
I had witnessed one before, but not like this:
from behind my smeared up goggles,
surfacing from water, like a creature of the deep,
to look up at a wall of people lit by
the elongated halos of the pool’s fluorescent lights.
I could hardly make out anything at all.
I certainly saw no one being totally immersed.
To me their singing sounded more like wailing,
their clapping like the beat of drums,
and their swaying from side to side
- and up and down -
caught at the stretched out feeling in my gut.
It felt so sexual and primitive,
as if an orgy was about to happen.
Yet they were here to wash away their sins
and start their lives afresh.

It must be me.

Most of the other swimmers had been drawn
to the shallow end, nearest to the learners’ pool.
They were looking upwards, goggle-free, at the spectacle
trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on,
chatting and exchanging comments with each other;
while I, still through my smeared up lenses,
could only see this wall of swaying people,
gray and pink, with card board cut-out hats and suits.
A look of sugar candy, set off by all their deep black skins.
I knew that unlike all the others I had to go on swimming,
or I would probably have been magnetically sucked in
to what they seemed to be for me.
I could not just gawp up at them
as if I were a tourist or a student of anthropology.
I also had to swim to stretch this thing within my gut
to keep it flexible, for otherwise it felt as if
the weird cacophony that I was hearing
would tune in to my brittleness inside
and make it shatter, like the walls of Jericho.

The Asian guy and the scarlet swimsuit had now left the lane,
attracted by the spectacle of the baptism, I guessed;
but every time I swam by where
he’d ducked and she’d passed over him,
I thought of skeins of semen in the water,
like floaters spoiling the vision of an eye.
Was that water eddying round my limbs,
or him, I wondered, as I took a wide berth
round the steps where it had happened.

I was reminded of a dream I’d had last night -
of a butcher selling meat to me,
huge slabs of steak, grained through with fat,
much more of it than I could ever eat.
There’d been a woman with me buying steaks,
but hers were tuna, and one of them had
somehow accidentally touched the meat.
The butcher had just wiped it off;
but though I’d had to make my purchase,
I knew I’d never eat it. To me it was contaminated -
which was how I felt right now, swimming in the lane
where that had happened, as if it were primordial soup,
in which I was immersed, the source of all our lives originally,
yet now its fishiness was hard to bear, as the root of me.

Water eddying round my legs, which could have been his semen,
got me thinking of the theory that the development of a person
from conception onwards is supposed to recapitulate
the evolution of the species as a whole; and I shuddered
at its apparent confirmation of our slimy origins.
For, as I swam along, immersed in life’s lubricity,
this wasn’t just a theory any more; for me it was reality:
sex was the primordial in the present.
I was appalled.
(Yet dimly, and, perhaps much worse, I knew I was excited too.)

Oh, where had all the usual swimmers gone?
That was another way in which
everything was so odd today:
the guy with the gammy leg who’d
always just come back from Spain;
the violinist with diabetes, who’d told me,
Michelangelo, in painting Judas in the
Sistine Chapel had just made Jesus older;
the woman who had swum all through her pregnancy,
and beyond, to recover her shape and fitness;
the man who’d lost his watch, only to find it
later in the day when taking off his shoe:
none of them was here.

In reality to me they were all the slightest of acquaintances;
yet now I found myself yearning to see them.
I felt like the ‘ducklings’ I had noticed earlier:
to me these slight acquaintances, were the parent I had lost.
So what was I to do? It was too late to leave;
I was already totally immersed.
And anyhow, if I left now,
I had not swum enough to sleep tonight.

So swim, swim, swim, was all there was for it,

on the downward thrust breathe out to hear
air gurgle through the water frothily;
then, as I pull back with my arms, lift up my head
to glimpse the blur of sugar candy
and fluorescent strips, glow mistily
like candles on a birthday cake
being brought out in the dark,
for the waiting tribe to clap at fervently.

Such unearthly sights and sounds,

which were, I knew, not really there,
but only in my head:
It wasn’t just my goggles that were smeared.
It was me, smeared by the something in my soul
that closed me off from what was going on
and made me think that contact
with my opposite would damage me;
that somehow I and the ‘other’
could not be together in one space:
meat with fish,
white with black,
man with woman,
gentile with jew,
west with east,
straight with gay
and so on ad infinitum
and vice versa, too.

And, perhaps, we couldn’t, if the connection
only happened consciously, on dry land, as it were,
remaining at best a willed political correctness
that was bound to wither
because it lacked an animating river;
or came as the result of a sudden flood
from the depths of the unconscious,
swamping everything,
(through Hitler, for example)
with death and psychosis.

But here, now in this swimming pool,
where the clapping and the singing had at last subsided,
and the congregation had dispersed,
almost as quickly as it had come rushing in,
an apparent total silence filled the space.
For the first time that afternoon, I noticed
the fluorescent lighting, and the plastic, cuboid sky
flicker on the gently lapping turquoise water.
And simultaneously, with a warm, illuminating glow,
I sensed the tension within my body and my brain
had eased and clarified – not just now, but previously.

It was as if I’d finally found the parent I had lost,
(though not the one I had been looking for)
and at last had let myself be comforted.

How had this happened, I began to wonder?

Was it the little boy, dressed in pink and brown,
running from his mother, like any naughty child,
who had individualised the mass for me?

Or had something occurred earlier that I’d missed
and would never be able to pin down,
like the baptisms I had never actually witnessed?

I could not tell.

Yet did it really matter?

I looked back at what had taken place with the Asian guy.
Was it so unusual for him to have found
a woman in a scarlet swimsuit attractive and appealing?
Perhaps he’d been embarrassed by his bodily response
and that was why he’d hung around the lane.

Maybe I had not seen what I thought I saw,
through the dim and misty panes that I wore,

and now still wear,
yet somehow differently.

Perhaps I was the one, from whom
I wanted to protect the woman:
the black panther, rampant sexually,
uncaged and finally at large.

That was what I saw in him,
because I could not face it in myself,
and so accept my whole humanity:
my fishiness and finitude,

and find how to transmute
these aspects of me into gold,
as if the swimming pool were
some huge alchemical retort
containing in one space
all the baser elements within me
and compelling them to interact
with the necessary intensity,

if only for an hour.

And has this happened?

As I swim my last length and everyone,
both in the pool and out of it has gone,
(except, of course, the lifeguard
standing stoically around),
nothing is certain logically.

An hour could be
just the blink of an eye,
or an eternity.

Yet for now it does not seem to matter any more,
I think, as I touch the end bar for the final time,
and stand with water at my waist,
my chest heaving more than I had realised,
my skin stretching, but holding me together and intact,

not just literally, but in a deeper sense as well.

Homme Fatal

Stereotyped by others,
she was adored by me;
until I had to beat her up
and desecrate her fantasy.

With full red lips,
but nervous eyes,
she seemed to me
a febrile paradise,

offering the miraculous possibility
that I might heal
the gaping wound she seemed
so happy to reveal.

Yet every time I reached out to her,
she was never really there:
her openness was just a hook
to draw me in and generate despair.

Stereotyped myself, I drank, and drank
to bury the way I yearned for her;
for it reminded me
of a distant, long ago affair.

Not again, I thought,
as I recalled her pouting lips,
her flaunted midriff,
and her swaying hips.

I should have guessed,
that underneath all this
was her lubricious emptiness,
just aching for its nemesis.

Self-harm

Finally I glimpse,
beneath the harm
I do myself,
securely lodged
within its wound,
a deeper pain,
like a larva cocooned.

For years I had thought
what I needed was to change
the way that, periodically,
as with a malarial fever,
I thrash through
the walls by which my life is held,
then thrash myself in shame
at losing my control again.

But I have never managed it,
however hard I’ve tried,
and I have never found another way
than just to try, and keep on trying.

Even now I am not sure
that what I see is anything at all -
this little figure,
forlorn, androgynous,
pale, etiolated,
nearly transparent -
putting a hand in mine – half asleep,
still dreamily submerged,
in the great unconscious deep:
my son in me,
my poor, lost son,
whom I would not accept before.

Now I must,
always,
ever,
and do nothing more,
not try, nor sweat about it,
nor pursue, for him, remoter goals.

For otherwise, plunged deeper in that pain,
his hand will slip away again.
Then only my self-laceration will remain.

Medusa and Me

It’s like you’re lost to me forever,
when you suggest my exploration
of the personal, politically,
is nothing more than a distraction.

Then, blank-screening me,
you sit with such an irradiating gaze,
your face quivering around the gills,
and tension eating up the air,
what else can I do but turn to stone?

And all the while,
blind to your role in it,
you, nevertheless, have eyes,
to see me disconnect from you,
and from my feelings too.
This tendency of mine to generalise
is how the links are severed,
you hypothesise.

Yet isn’t this just a theory that is easier for you?
Nothing to do with me, and where I am.
It’s what you know, or think you know.
And you are trying to railroad me into it:
your version of a Gulag Archipelago.

This is why I turn to stone:
to protect my identity;
for now, how can I trust
you carefully to finger
the many details, large and small
of its intricately worked brocade -
in fact a long ago moth-eaten masquerade,
that I had hoped you would feel through
to wilder patterns that are usually taboo;

and, then, even more importantly,
share who you are yourself,
however many-layered
or crudely daubed -
not literally, but so I know
that you are there.

Yet now, instead,
you’re tied up, like your hair,
in snakes, which cannot be transformed -
so tantalisingly close,
yet ultimately withheld:
the conductor of an orchestra
who will not raise her baton,
the music always never being played,
the muffled drum belied,
and everything between us petrified.

Surprised by a Naked Swimmer (after Lucian Freud)

The showers are running cold,
had been scrawled in blue marker
on the white board at reception.
However, until he shuffled in,
clutching a wash bag to his chest,
they were all right – not hot, but warm enough.
Then suddenly they had me in their stranglehold,
like a chilly undercurrent in the sea that takes your breath away;
or an unexpected shudder that’s supposed to mean
there’s someone walking on your grave.
Normally he arrives in the building as I am leaving
and we nod at each other warily.
Today, however, we must have been in the pool together;
and I remarked upon this break in his routine.
To begin with he ignored me,
just opened out his wash bag,
and let it dangle, with its contents on display, from the peg
by the notice that forbids spitting anywhere in the building.
(Use the toilets and blow your nose before you swim, it also says.)
Then, joining me in the cold, he began:
“It’s work, pressure of work.
That’s why I’m here at this time.”
I grunted and continued to rinse my hair.
“Five days a week for the last – what – seventeen years,
I’ve been swimming here,
and I’ve hated every single day
until I’m in these showers.
Then it’s just about all right,
except like now when they bloody well run cold.”
Moments later I saw him
naked in the changing room,
huge gut, like a cliff, above his speck of a prick,
man boobs wobbling and puckering,
as one hand rubbed him down,
and the other used his mobile phone.
“I see what you mean about pressure of work!” I said.
“Not work. The squash club,” he replied.
“If you miss calling at eight,
you don’t get a court till late,
and I just have – oh, well, such is fate!”
He flipped the phone shut.
“I only really swim to cope with squash.”
I wondered:
if he exercises so much,
how come he has such flab?
He sat down and it flopped over his prick.
“No one really teaches you how to grow old, do they?” he said.
“I never thought it would happen to me.
Once you get to fifty, though, that’s it.”
I thought for a while,
in the silence of the changing room,
phalanxes of lockers all around,
with keys on rubber bands and slots for 50ps,
hair and sludge stopping up the drains,
and the remnant of a bar of soap, which I’d been noticing for weeks
lodged in the space where the corner of a tile was broken.
Then I said: “He’s as old as my father at eighty-two,
but Lucian Freud isn’t doing badly, you know.
Did you see his latest painting in the papers the other day,
of a beautiful, naked woman, fifty years his junior,
entwining her legs round his, as he stands,
and she sits on the floor, head yearningly by his knee,
her long, tapering, ringless fingers clutching his thigh?
She’s entrapping him more than just literally.”
I smiled. “The Painter Surprised By A Naked Admirer.
What a wonderful title!”
“I’m not interested in that sort of thing,” he snapped back,
head down, as he dried between his toes,
“I’ve got a daughter of twenty.
My own daughter’s twenty.
It doesn’t interest me at all.”
What sort of thing does he think it is, I wondered,
with a shudder, like I’d had when the showers ran cold?
It sounded like pornography he was rejecting,
or the suggestion that he might be into younger women.
Perhaps now, he would think I was,
like middle-aged men are supposed to be.
I wished I’d kept quiet from the very beginning,
like I usually do and like I was going to now,
for I knew I couldn’t take back what I’d said,
or explain it without getting deeper in.
Then he had on his shoes
and bustled out with a grin
- leaving me as if hung on the peg
above the bench where I was sitting;
for inside my mind,
how desperate he seemed
to avoid my contaminating kind.

Then I remembered showing the article to you,
as we lay in bed together, one night.
Alongside a shot of the painting itself,
there was one of Freud and his nude model,
which looked to have been taken at the time of the sitting.
She was wriggling across the floor on her bottom,
perhaps about to pounce (or was she backing off?),
while he placed a heavily shod foot in the direction of the canvas.
Yet in the painting he didn’t look heavy,
more like a hawk, which had momentarily landed,
and, almost straightaway, was struggling to take off -
sharp-eyed, cannily beaked, with a singular purpose,
the brushes he reached towards, spreading like feathers.
Comparing the two photos, you said,
“Just look how ugly he makes her.
She’s beautiful, gorgeous. The journalist mentions
her delightful orbs, and she’s right,
yet look at how ragged and scrawny he paints her.”
You thought he was boasting like any other stud -
of his attractiveness to even much younger women.
Look, I can’t keep them off. I’m so famous,
such a genius, so personally handsome,
was what you felt he was saying,
the white sheets scattered randomly around,
reminders of her discarded clothes,
or part of a set for that pornographic shoot.
Yet to me he didn’t look so triumphant, or predatory, at all.
His hands were reaching out to continue the painting,
not down to her nakedness, or to touch her hair.
It seemed much more probable that, like a hawk,
he wanted to fly higher in the air,
to capture, not her body,
but the desire that was there,
and their tangled loss of it
(sod what the gossips might aver,
and people, like my fellow swimmer, disavow).
This was why she was so scrawny now:
the sheets were not her clothes, but their shroud,
the look on her that of rigor mortis.
And he must set it down in oils
- this push and pull, this volatility,
this ever-changing world -
and by grasping our mortality
stay within the flow of life -
instead of growing old,
only to curse
the shower running cold.

And if she loves him,
maybe this is why,

and why he’s so alive,

and, now, why I can move,
and feel I will survive.

Your Red Leather Gloves

On a bank paying-in slip I found
at the bottom of my pocket, I wrote:
Passed here on my way home,
and thought of us, each wandering

around the city centre
at the same time,
without knowing we were,
and without actually meeting.’

Then, after inspecting a new bump
on its front, I clicked open your car
with my copy of its key
and put the slip on the driver’s seat.

Your red leather gloves lay there,
as if your hands were still in them,
set off against the charcoal leather,
like a work of modern sculpture.

Ache

What I learn from you
is that this ache inside me,
only ever eases,
if someone else is there.

I know this
because when you aren’t,
it hurts as much as if you never were.

Perhaps, this is all I’ll ever learn, I think,
away from you,
the ache redoubled,
after a long night of the usual trouble.

When we last met,
you noticed I was hurting,
but I did not feel you move
to reassure me,
with your words,
and also through your presence.

It seemed to me you were only there to gawp.

This was the ache tightening its hold.
Now, two days later, it’s got me firmly by the throat
and, surely, I will soon be dead and cold.

This is how it seems to me:
as if I’m in that pram again
being left alone to cry,
the ache passing through my body
into everything out there:
the sunny day that mocks me,
the cloudy day that mirrors my despair,
the gunge in the corner,
the grass I’ve got to cut -
all agony to contemplate
when you’re not there
to help me see,
I’m not omnipotent,
nor need to be.

And maybe this idea is what I am resisting,
and this resistance is the reason why,
(I would not normally
admit this to you,
nor even to myself)
I am irritated by,
and sometimes loathe,
everyone who’s different
and, therefore, out of my control -

which, of course, is how I miss
the unique, the separate individuals
who lie beneath the stereotypes I give them,
creating for myself instead
a nightmare hall of mirrors.

But to relinquish hope of such omnipotence
would add another massive ache:
with what I see out there
I feel I would disintegrate.

Yet, what if, through missing you,
through feeling torn
and twisted inside out,
I finally begin to incarnate,
and, as we do
when we are born,
I cry?

Is that what’s happening now,
when, coming down to earth, with such a bang,
I no longer can deny,
it is my need for this control,
not what it’s there to defend against,
which leads me to disintegrate?

Yet I am torn through with such pain,
that all I want is to be myself again,
free from the prison
of this heavy, grey depression;
while all the time
it throbs into my brain:
such greyness is just being sane,
my ache, in fact a yearning
to be born into my life,
the self I want to hype,
just another dirty,
sticking-plaster stereotype.

Fraud

 

The bank had phoned.

‘Ring us, please, urgently,’

a frail, female voice intoned,

through gritted teeth,

in a message left

at precisely three thirty three.

 

It was their Fraud Department

- just routine security.

Did I have my debit card to hand?

‘Of course,’ I said, like a prim schoolboy

stretching his arm up to answer.

But when I looked, it had gone

from the pocket in my wallet

into which I normally slip it.

 

There were some unusual payments pending,

mostly off licences and bars.

Were they mine?

‘Oh, no, no,’ I said,

as if I’d been accused of an offence,

and needed to protest my innocence.

 

However, when I put down the phone,

even though the bank had assured me

that for every item I hadn’t stolen,

my account would be fully re-credited,

I still felt strangely confused.

 

I wandered round the house,

trying to remember what

they’d said had been spent.

Then, not finding a calculator,

I totalled it up in my head:

all that blood I had bled.

 

If only it were true

that my account would be fully re-credited. 

 

Yet the thought of the card

with my name embossed upon it in gold,

no longer being warmed in my wallet,

by my leg and my groin,

but in the filthy hands

of some complete unknown,

gratifying his basest needs,

for booze, fags, sex, perhaps,

made me feel I was draining away.

 

I just couldn’t get it into my head

that my account would be fully re-credited,

 

for I couldn’t believe that it would

until it had actually happened.

Meanwhile I had to wait,

exposed, vulnerable, naked,

a vital part of me acting without my consent,

going wild out there in a way that I hadn’t meant.

 

Then, like Peter, after he’d denied Christ

for the third time, once I had grasped

how frightened I was of being exposed,

I could no longer hold on

to the door I was trying to keep closed.

 

It wasn’t that I had no memory.

It was just so agonising to recall

that two nights before, home alone,

like a child covering his eyes,

and thinking no one can see him,

I’d been this complete unknown.

 

Then, half-alive the next day,

I’d gone to the supermarket,

shopping for ordinary things,

to pretend that I was OK.

 

Now, for the first time I remembered:

the assistant swiping my card,

and then not returning it.

 

It had hurt me so much to put on a front,

that I’d just wanted to get away

 - which was why I hadn’t noticed

exactly what hadn’t happened.

 

But now that I had, it hit me,

like the glittering bling

the assistant had been wearing:

this loss of my card was the truth coming out

the Fraud Squad detecting me:

my very own

complete unknown.

 

Online I could look at purchases

that may as well have been mine:

seventy-five pounds in an off licence

sixty-five in a pub.

I must have been more drunk

than ever before,

staggering, cavorting, wildly

drinking glass after glass,

in spite of the sickening taste,

because I just couldn’t face

the fraud that, in fact, I am.

 

A suit for two hundred and thirty five pounds.

And I had been doing it in style,

trying to pretend I am not

the derelict I really am.

 

Then an item that I guessed was cashback.

What had I spent this on, I wondered?

Something sexual probably,

something chthonic.

When people become this drunk,

it goes on and on.

As one appetite is sated,

another takes over:

seeking to avoid our demons

is how we become demonic.

 

Then, just quivering endless guilt,

throbbing in my head

- a stye on my mind’s eye.

 

The cut worm wriggling in bits

with nowhere else to go.

 

Certainly not to the shop the next day

just to put on a good show.

 

All this blood I have bled.

 

I cross to the other side of the road

and leave me as if for dead.

 

Falling Water

 

You lay your head on my shoulder,

and I, my ear on your hair,

as we sat, looking out

over the leafless, tree-filled valley.

 

Below us somewhere, there was falling water.

 

The last mouthful of the apple

you had eaten to stave off your hunger,

crunched through your skull

and into my ear:

                              you in my head;

yet, of course, still out here,

 

creating a strange,

echoing, stereophonic effect

which at that moment

I wanted to enjoy,

not to dissect.

 

Later we reached the water,

and had our lunch by the falls,

surrounded by their seashell sussuration;

but then also by crowds of people,

out of nowhere,

suddenly in the same location:

 

a mother and her teenage daughter

in denim, like twins;

her son dressed in combat gear

with his face muddied up;

men with tousled hair,

and packs on their backs,

looking warily over the edge;

a pink-trainered, white-anoraked girl,

hair scraggily pony-tailed,

photographing the rainbowed spray;

and more,

                   endlessly,

                                     like falling water,

 

while, apart on the same damp rock,

we sipped our coffee,

and I looked over at you,

as you ate your chocolate guiltily.

 

In a Minute

 

‘I’ll get you in a minute,’ you said,

as I sat in reception waiting,

when usually, on my arrival, we go straight up,

in complete silence,

to your room at the top of the building.

 

Then, you looked at your watch and realised:

I was not early; your clock upstairs was slow.

‘No, I’ll get you now,’ you said,

pronouncing each word staccato.

 

Back home,

I notice, for the first time,

the words you had used

when, for a rare moment,

your radar was clearly confused.

 

And as I do,

what then had flashed from you,

like a subliminal advertisement,

now blinds me with its isolating glare

and floods my head with blood,

as if I’m on a waltzer,

that’s been spun around too fast.

 

To put it in the form of a question,

(rather as you do, at some point,

almost every time we meet,

like you’re a teacher,

and the answer you require

is either, too obvious for me to say,

or, within your mind,

inscrutably locked away):

would you want to be ‘got in a minute’?

 

Like a cup of tea someone has kindly made,

or a doorbell that rings

during a favourite TV programme;

a pupil standing outside the Head’s study,

or a baby crying in its pram.

 

Why couldn’t you just have said,

‘I’ll be with you in a minute, is that OK?’

and left me feeling warmly held (instead 

of in this state of emotional disarray)

for at least one of the minutes we had today? 

                                

Snapshot of the Eternal Triangle

 

You looked so wonderful in your green striped top,

flat-packed on your body like a tunic,

your black, patterned stockings

 - a new design this time -

and your green, suede boots,

which lunged towards me,

magnified, as if I were with you

in a funfair Hall of Mirrors.

(You had on a skirt, of course,

but not as far as I was concerned.)

 

A man (whose face, like your skirt, I never took in)

was there just before me,

and said, ‘How are you?’

as you opened the door to us both.

‘I’m fine,’ you replied, quizzically,

like, why are you asking me,

strange man, who is nothing to do with me,

just what I expect from men, and enjoy,

as a younger and beautiful woman.

 

Yet you weren’t as exciting,

as in your buttoned-up look:

black suit, with a brooch like a hook.

 

Undead

 

Coming home,

 

being alone.

 

Then, after swatting

the last few annoying phone calls:

 

the excitement and the dread.

 

At last I can do exactly

what I want;

 

for no one is going to be here,

to awaken the feeling within me,

that enjoying myself is bad.

 

I am like Count Dracula:

all that time without

the blood that he needed;

then a victim

finds him.

 

Even though I know I shouldn’t,

that it will not give me

the pleasure, or love, I need,

that it will only feed my greed,

make me bleed,

and that by dawn,

I’ll be back in my coffin,

I seem to have no way of resisting.

 

To watch TV instead,

or read,

or have a nice bath,

or a meal

are just unthinkable;

or rather,

when I think of

doing them,

I see only

the rats,

gnawing away

at my heart

and me sitting there,

not watching the TV,

or whatever,

but being devoured.

 

How much more can I let them have?

 

I just have to snap.

 

So when I turn back to

the excitement and the dread,

I am already falling.

 

I try to hold on.

I pace up and down,

confused and frantic,

moving from room to room,

wondering, why have I come in here,

like I’ve got Alzheimer’s:

the doors closing,

my feet sounding on the different floors,

the emptiness, the emptiness,

echoing in my head.

 

And I am shitting all the time.

I don’t know where it’s coming from,

like I’m finally able to excrete

all the mess of the week,

 

maybe, so that this time,

at least I can be the one

who messes me up.

 

(There doesn’t seem

to be another choice.)

 

A shower,

perhaps, that will help.

 

But this is only

so I can tell myself,

that I have done my best.

 

For really, I know,

that the dirt

I’m getting down to

is so deeply ingrained,

I have to give up hope

of avoiding the pain.

 

After the shower,

as I put on a sock,

I think:

I will remember this tomorrow,

when I am in hell,

as the last, innocent moment

before I fell,

 

like I’m watching myself in a dream,

driving, with accelerating speed,

into a murky and torrential stream.

 

But this is a dream,

from which I do not awake,

to find, that in reality,

it was all a mistake.

 

Instead, the next day,

there is just

this sickly, sweet smell,

in the air,

 

(perhaps, of me rotting in hell),

 

when, after going to bed at dawn,

an hour, or so, later,

I tread on the stair,

feeling alone and completely forlorn.

 

It’s another beautiful day!

 

but for me: ‘deserts of vast eternity’

now that I am: a creature of the night

more entangled than I can bear

in this life-draining web of despair.

 

Chav

 

I am like the company accountant,

in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for whom,

even in the depths of the jungle, a starched collar,

and a light alpaca suit, were essential garments.

 

In the heat of a summer’s day,

the suit I prefer is a white linen Aquascutum

and in winter a Paul Smith pinstripe in blue,

or a Versace in hatched and fretted grey.

 

For the autumn and spring I have

a Dries Van Noten in small brown check,

and for all seasons, there are

my two Armani jackets; yet I’m no chav.

 

Like Adam and Eve, I always hide the label,

particularly from you,

whom I would hate to discover

such evidence of my betrayal,

 

and thereby see

how feverishly I hunt around the shops,

dodging the assistants’ laughter,

(I’m such a regular, they’ve got to know me)

as if it is pornography I’m after;

 

while you are so serene,

(I suppose my god in this)

your beauty flowing naturally,

out of your lived life;

and whether you look the same,

as everyone else,

or different,

you are still you,

and this shines through,

to animate,

what would otherwise

be dross,

or an intricate,

but lifeless,

golden gloss.

 

And if you saw how desperate,

I am to cover up, or glimpsed

just one of my labels,

straightaway you would divine,

my raw, red-meated wound,

the heads on stakes in rows,

the drum beat and the chants

of the jungle in my heart;

 

for I suppose I’m just

a different kind of chav:

inverted, or reversed,

and sometimes inside out,

straitjacketed by the garments that I have;

then twisted full of shame,

and (like Adam and Eve again)

cast out of paradise

- even if you see this blame

of mine, and love me just the same,

for how could I begin to bear such pain?

 

 

Dirty Caller

 

In the middle of the night,

when we were both fast asleep,

the phone rang.

 

Tuned in to its high pitched screech,

as if to a crying baby,

you jumped out of bed 

and rushed downstairs.

 

Maybe it was one of the girls,

out clubbing in another city

and suddenly in danger, I thought,

though I cursed your impetuous movements,

which had finally woken me up.

 

But it was no one again,

saying nothing,

not even breathing heavily this time.

 

Then, back under the covers,

you turned over,

and your heavy breathing began,

 

leaving me

to drift alone through the night

into another tenuous sleep.

 

 

 

In the morning I wake early and am furious.

I feel eaten away by the idea of this man,

out there, deciding to phone us.

Does he know who we are?

And what is he getting out of it?

The thrill of scaring a woman?

Is he wanking off as he rings?

Is that what it’s all about?

 

I want to bar anonymous calls.

Then at least I can go to sleep,

knowing that he can’t get through.

 

But you are reluctant.

Suddenly there are lots of people, you think,

who will ring from anonymous numbers,

and to whom you will want to talk.

 

‘Who?’ I screech.

‘This is not what you normally say,

when the bank or somebody ring.

‘Just tell them to go,’

you shout out to me.

‘Just say, ‘no’.

 

It’s the girls, isn’t it?

Even though they can ring on your mobile,

you still have to keep

all of their umbilical cords attached.

You do. You know you do.’

 

Tight-lipped you try to suggest

I’m over-reacting, that you just want

to make a proper decision about this,

not respond with a knee-jerk reaction,

and suddenly create a fortress.

 

(You’re not letting me smoke you out.

You’re doing what you do so often:

putting all the blame onto me.)

 

Then I see where you’re going to next.

I can almost hear you:

‘You’re just like your father’,

you will say, in withering exasperation –

and I’ll remember seeing him

yesterday – at my brother’s -

away from his fortress,

old and confused and out of his depth,

with the ache back in his heart

that leads him to fear that he’s losing

a life he’s never really been able to live.

 

Or maybe you’ll try to suggest,

that my reaction to our dirty caller

somehow implicates me.

‘Why would you feel so strongly

otherwise?’ you’ll say.

‘I find him funny and sad,

not terrifying, like you seem to,

as if he awakens something inside

- a fellow feeling, perhaps?’

 

Which will cut me to the quick, if it’s said.

 

So, no, I’m not going to take

our argument any further.

I know what I know,

and I know what I need to address,

(though God knows how.)

 

But do you, whose inner citadel

now seems more impregnable than ever,

at least to me, in spite of my best endeavour?

 

 

 

Holiday Complex

 

Out of the photo I stare,

just another middle-aged man,

on holiday in the Med somewhere,

in regulation t-shirt and tan.

 

On a white plastic chair I sit,

a glass of red wine in my hand,

the calm evening sea still lit,

beyond the pebbly strand.

 

Thank God I’m back home where it’s colder,

I think, but keep up the masquerade,

while from over my shoulder

in gushes, come the usual clichés:

 

‘Is that where you stayed?’

‘It’s a complex out of a dream!’

‘That’s such a nice sunshade!’

‘How happy you all seem!’

 

Only I can see

in my face

there’s a twist,

as of a defeated fist,

a battered and misshapen trace,

of the iron turd in my soul,

that, even after all these years,

I still cannot control,

or digest,

or expel,

or simply make so it disappears.

 

 

Empty Nest

 

Tired with Christmas,

after waking at four,

but not because of children

hammering on the door.

 

They left a long time ago.

 

Now just my soul to explore.

 

Oh, no.

 

 

Prison Visiting

 

It’s as if I am a prisoner,

and these visits to you,

are, in fact, you visiting me in prison.

First, the anticipation;

then, soon after we meet,

the dread of going back

alone into my cell.

 

So even when you’re here, I mess it up.

 

How I’d like to think:

that together we could understand;

that hope and despair could be spanned.

 

Would I then feel,

not imprisoned,

but held

within your hand,

like a refracting prism,

out of which a rainbow of colour

might eventually expand?

 

Or would I still see you

only clinging on to hope,

frightened you’ll be swallowed up by me,

(or I will, by myself,

uroborus-like);

then the glimmer

that we’ve got between us

guttering,

and in the darkness,

nothing?

 

 

This Darkness

 

For him goodness was not enough.

A delicious meal, a gentle voice,

a caring thought, a loving relationship

- glittering stars, perhaps, for others -

were, for him, gulped down whole,

by the vast interstellar darkness

he saw in the world and our souls.

He could not ignore this darkness,

(As he thought others must do),

and for years had let it burrow away

inside him, like a parasite, until now

he was almost completely hollow.

 

‘But this darkness must have meaning too,’

he said to himself, one fine day,

when he saw the last shreds

of his soul being finally gnawed away.

‘After all it’s in darkness that life begins:

in the womb, in the earth, in the depths of the sky.

And it’s in darkness that life ends:

pitch-black, no light – none.

It can’t just be an absence of light, this darkness.

It can’t just be nothing,’ he screeched

- which was how, unbeknown to him,

his last redoubt was breached.