Nothing is pointless

To Peter



The sky is like an inverted bowl

A cup of darkness pushing us down

A grey blanket that presses our soul

We stumble along, frail and alone.

Being human we look up, hopefully

We count the stars and measure the rain

Carefully, we construct an ontology

We wait for the light to come back again.

Nothing is pointless you said

We can find meaning in philosophy

We owe it to the living and the dead.

Our vegetable soul seeks harmony

We love others; people love us

We look up. The sky is numinous.

The Atheist

First name on the list of well-connected atheists

Ziggurat

We glance upwards as we wander by
At its vertiginous engineering –
Flimsy cranes pinning blocks to the sky
The great columns and slabs cloud spearing.
We are bewitched by its clumsy lurch
Into space because we are earthbound.
It dwarfs the handsome planes and the church
Echoing the hollow vaults underground
Its shafts are like vast sarcophagi.
They are allusions to our vanity
Crude attempts to defy gravity
Like monuments to some cruel deity.
We glance upwards as we wander by
We cannot climb to heaven, but we try.

They are building this monstrous monument to greed close to my office

Ziggurats (/ˈzɪɡʊˌræt/, Akkadian ziqqurat, D-stem of zaqāru "to build on a raised area") were massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels.

RockZest

Blue canoe

Halcyon

 
By the gas works and the giant Sainsbury’s

blocking the winter sky like a shroud

the boxed hatchbacks swarm like larvae.

Though smothered, she was not dead

she was merely exiled beneath the ground –

sleeping fields that have never seen a lark

acres of concrete spreading like a wound.

She springs from the earth near the car park.

For an age, she waited, like a rumour.

Glimpsed in the flash of a kingfisher

she is the queen of  hawthorn and alder

the goddess – here, you can almost touch her.

She threads through ash and willow weeping.

She was not dead. She was merely sleeping.

Photo shows the subject of this poem, the River Pool in Lewisham. Went to buy a telly, wrote a poem - well, not immediately. London has many rivers as well as the Thames  (eg the Fleet, the Wandle, the Effra, the Ravensbourne, the Pool, the Quaggy) - rivers that are recorded in the Domesday book and were known by the Romans and Saxons and before. Often they are buried in culverts and used as storm drains but in some cases, as here, they are allowed to resurface.

Tony

In a photographer's studio you pose.

They must have taken you to the sea 

a small boy in cut-down fireman's clothes.

Your stillness echoes their formality –

the mayor and his wife on holiday

walks on the esplanade, the golden mile

in Weston-super-Mare or Torquay

Something is absent from your face – a smile.
You were never a child. They were Victorian 
You played with lead soldiers and painted wood 

but you were never a cowboy or Red Indian.

You stole your innocence where you could.

Did you love them? There was no childhood then.

Little sailors were miniature men.

This is about my dad, Tony.

I am not a cannibal ... but

To Tom


Before the rising of the sun

A package came from Amazon

He woke me from deep sleep that lad.

Was eating him really so bad?

He was … number one

It took me hours to get through

My boiler broke. What can you do?

The man they sent out was a dork

He tasted something like roast pork

He was … number two

I fell in love with that settee

It suited my flat perfectly

But five weeks is too long too wait

He paid the price for being late

He was … number three

Sunday morning. Knock on door

I’ve warned religious types before

He hinted at the fires below

My blood sugar was rather low

He was … number four

Without meat how can humans thrive?

It’s tasty and keeps us alive

Tesco forgot my weekly roast

From that moment their man was toast

He was … number five

I’m living somewhere in the sticks

I have few friends. I rarely mix

We talked a bit. I asked him in

Yes, it was probably a sin

He was … number six

Since I won't be going to heaven

I drove camper van to Devon

I saw him on a lonely path

Do I have to draw a graph?

He was … number seven

I had to fix my squeaky gate
But B&Q are second-rate
When I asked them what to do
That fellow didn't have a clue
He was ... number eight

I said ‘Deliver no more wine!’

Ignoring me they crossed the line

I braised him slowly on the bone

With a delightful Cotes du Rhone

He was … number nine

They keep sending these useless men

Excuse me, there’s the bell again!

A voice inside me says it’s wrong

But now I’ve wronged, I must go on

Here comes … number ten

Summer's last shout

Glowing in the brilliant autumn light

in an old argument learned by rote
defiantly, they fight the last fight.
Each is a blazing promissory note.

Without their death, there can be no life.

On fire, they pull back the canopy

to avoid the ruin of winter’s knife

spiral slowly to earth for you and me –

watch them sever their ties, take the plunge
like doomed aviators spinning earthbound.
Heaped into mounds of pavement grunge
their veined bodies are littering the ground.
Each brave martyr was willing to leap out.
Now, they are worm food, summer’s last shout.

The shredder

NB I made this a bit simpler.

Your lack of soulfulness sets you apart

You are the practitioner of a lesser art –

A leather-encased warrior preening.

In some, virtuosity hides meaning

In textured layers. But not you –

There’s no reality in what you do

You are a copy, not the thing itself

You pull your moves down from a shelf

There is no sincerity in what you make

You’re an imposter – a fake of fake

OK Mr God, you may be a success

But more is not more, more is less

Rothko

Great slabs of light-refracting gloom

Are laid out, dismally, across the lobby

They seem to suck light from the room

Shocking the easily shocked was your hobby.

Life is short. You gave them a new angle

An offering for a vampiric brood

You gave them – a dark red rectangle.

It was a metaphor made from your blood.

You knew that you would die soon.

No light for you. You liked to look down.

Let this growling tantrum in maroon

This absence of light, this sullen frown

This dismal slab, be your memorial.

It worked for you. Your art was janitorial.

Orpheus and the moon

Translated from the English by me









Our human pulses are warmed by the sun’s fires

But sometimes we turn away from the sun

Go down alleyways. We glance up at the skies.

One evening, when the cold white moon shone

Bewitched by her icy brilliance

I was drawn in by her dark glamour

Her shy demeanour, her veiled glance.

Of the cold white moon I was enamoured.

I passed through the gate of my desires

And felt the delicate touch of a new bride

But in her body I discovered yours

As if we were touching, side by side.

Embers cool down that once glowed red.

It was you I wanted. Now our love is dead.

My new shirt

A weirdly-patterned Paisley relic

Pretending to be pyschedelic

First prize at the bad taste fair

As worn by the London cast of Hair

A ghastly mess of pink and brown

An empty theme park, now closed down

An eye-assaulting heart attack

An evolutionary cul-de-sac

A jarring garment at a disco

What straight men wear in San Francisco

A vicar trying to be cool

The boy you didn’t like school

A nylon-ruffled crooning dork

Playing a wine bar outside York

A drug tourist, a week-end raver

Travelling on a super saver

A night spent in a broken lift

An inappropriate wedding gift

A losing Eurovision song

A baked product that came out wrong

A dodgy batch of LSD

A poorly-written symphony

An STD, a weeping rash

A rusty motor bought for cash

The kind of military error

That sends men to their deaths in terror

You’re slightly colour blind, I know

And you are old, but even so

Is that what you really think?

That I would wear that shade of … pink

D’ you see me as a ballad singer

A cruise ship gigolo, a swinger?

A romeo in garish swirls

A terror with the office girls?

Like something sicked up after lunch

It is recycled that’s my hunch

It’s a mistake, it has to be

Why would you give that shirt to me?

Orpheus and Eurydice

 

I’ve just beaten up my sacred muse

I wouldn’t feel bad if I didn’t care

she’s wearing a headscarf over her bruise

I worship her. I think she knows that, yeh.

She took away her love, went cold on me

she said she don't like my rap

I’m not proud. I took her to A and E.

It wasn’t a punch, it was more of a slap.

They’re hard work them posh birds

she cussed me, but it’s no excuse

she's taught me some of her words

but she don’t like my rap, my blues.

Look at it this way, there’s no history

my muse she's an Orphic frigging mystery.

MANY were the minstrels who, in the early days, went through the world, telling to men the stories of the gods, telling of their wars and their births. Of all these minstrels none was so famous as Orpheus who had gone with the Argonauts; none could tell truer things about the gods, for he himself was half divine.

But a great grief came to Orpheus, a grief that stopped his singing and his playing upon the lyre. His young wife Eurydice was taken from him. One day, walking in the garden, she was bitten on the heel by a serpent, and straightway she went down to the world of the dead.

Then everything in this world was dark and bitter for the minstrel Orpheus; sleep would not come to him, and for him food had no taste. Then Orpheus said: “I will do that which no mortal has ever done before; I will do that which even the immortals might shrink from doing: I will go down into the world of the dead, and I will bring back to the living and to the light my bride Eurydice.”

Then Orpheus went on his way to the valley of Acherusia which goes down, down into the world of the dead. He would never have found his way to that valley if the trees had not shown him the way. For as he went along Orpheus played upon his lyre and sang, and the trees heard his song and they were moved by his grief, and with their arms and their heads they showed him the way to the deep, deep valley of Acherusia.

Down, down by winding paths through that deepest and most shadowy of all valleys Orpheus went. He came at last to the great gate that opens upon the world of the dead. And the silent guards who keep watch there for the rulers of the dead were affrighted when they saw a living being, and they would not let Orpheus approach the gate.

Dear Jim

  

With thanks to Gavin

NB note for American readers. Jimmy Savile. English radio and television disc jockey who rose to prominence in the 1970s in prime time TV shows, one, in particular, in which he granted children their wishes. Later, he was primarily associated with charitable causes.

They are piling into you Savile

they say that you preyed on the weak

that you were a vendor of snake oil

that you took advantage of the meek.

They’re saying that you were a sick-headed

Perv. A pustulent, leering gargoyle –

a sweaty jackal, in a stained shell-suit.

They are pouring oil on troubled oil.

One should not speak ill of the dead

but, sadly, Dear Jim, it’s all true.

You were a sexual predator, a wrong ’un.

They’re asking why no-one rumbled you.

Surely, we all did. We must have known

as you poked the air with your phallic cigar

blowing out promises like stale smoke.

Can you fix it for me, to have a ride in your car?

On any street we would have avoided you –

seen through your saccharine vulgarity

observed that you were broken inside

sensed your horrifying brutality.

Dear Jim, please can I have my innocence back?

You even had the Queen. It was just our luck.

She must have smelled your sour whisky breath.

She gave you a knighthood, you sick fuck.

Thin air

My hungry jowls are lean and thin
I am a beast, I play to win
Ruthlessly, I seek to grow
By devouring those below

My simple goal, to win the race
On this planet and in space
I always get the fattest cut
And I should be happy but

The voice that says I shouldn't care
When I am carving up my share
Is not as strident as before
It's bugging me about the poor

At night, when I should be sleeping
I hear the sound of people weeping
The thin air fails to hold me up
Liquid is spilling from my cup

Travelling hopefully

It is a noble act to labour and save

To thrash the motorways, to work hard.

Their charcoal grey suits and aftershave

Radiate a modest self-regard.

In a hierarchy of vertical esteem

They cluster in groups around the bar.

Travelling salesmen. Of what do they dream?

Of a quicker route, a superior car

A freshly-ironed shirt, a silk tie.

They are eternally driving, hopefully

It was the rim for them, not the bullseye

They work hard for the family

In the middle lane, neither peasant nor king

On the motorway, hopefully travelling.

Only ajar

I ain’t never won no fucking award

I’ve tried hard, shed syllables of blood

Merely to attract your casual disregard

In essence, your poetry is no good

Good university, expensive school

People like you prefer not to gloat

Artfully, you played me for a fool

You encouraged me, then you slit my throat

It must be fun to patronise a lout

And to possess the keys to the jail

You promised, emptily, to let me out

Carefully, you set me up to fail

The door slammed shut, my dreams were broken

It was only ajar, never open