admire strange skin (ogle PVC spacesuit).
Alien would conquer world
from business epicentre, with S-Curl
but the lens regressed to sand, attacked my eye
and blaxploitation sci-fi
turned film noir.
I left in dark glasses,
in a black cab like Metamorphosis,
each streetlight burning in my vision
how fact (I could be blind for life) shot fiction.
NOT A 9/11 POEM
No, postmen don’t get postman’s block.
They may deliver the wrong letters
but are never stuck for a line break
or line. If you think writers,
poets are lazy, give them enough real work
to sweat out their poems, a tragedy
like 9/11 and a week
to work on their wordplay
and watch them divide
into poets for spontaneous
overflow and poets for emotions made vivid
months later in the aftermath, the stillness
but since there’s still no peace there’s still no poem, no postmortem.
‘GANGSTERS’
shot straight into the Top 10 and school
uniform was dead. Ties tapered,
blazers trailed and we all murdered
to look as miserable as Terry Hall
or mad as Jerry Dammers whose smile
was a few keys short of a keyboard.
We didn’t get the 2-tone metaphor;
know the rankin’ rude bwoy model
was Peter Tosh; that the Wailers
preached ‘Simmer Down’ in ’63 to stop
rough an’ tough on the dancefloor,
but for ska to rule the airwaves
Sometime people got roughed up. We knew what it meant, ‘music to die for’.
THE LONDON EYE
Through my gold-tinted Gucci sunglasses,
the sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime
strikes the convoy of number 12 buses
that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.
Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting
to you, Hello! . . . on . . . bridge . . . ’minster! The aerial view postcard, the man writing squat words like black cabs in rush hour.
The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.
You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.
We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble
where I think, ‘Space age!’, you think, ‘She was late.’
Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .Beat™ blinks, replies
18·02. We’re moving anticlockwise.
ON TURNING ON THE TV TO CATCH,BY CHANCE, SOME QUAVERING BARSOF ‘SUMMERTIME’, THAT VOICE, PITCH,BLACK AS A SEMIBREVE, SCARSON THE FACE FILLING THE BLANK SCREEN,THE BLURRED BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGEOF JANIS JOPLIN’S SYNAESTHETIC SCREAM,ALL HIPPY HAIR AND CLASS A VINTAGE;MY REACTION MIRRORING MAMA CASSAT MONTEREY WATCHING ‘BALL AND CHAIN’CLIMB TO A CLIMAX; THE HEAVY BASS,THEN JANIS TAKING IT DEEP DOWN DOWN –TO THE BLUES, THE DEEP SOUTH, THE NEXT FIXOF ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND HEROIN AND SEX.
Wow!
COMEDOWN
The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. Milton, Paradise Lost
It wasn’t the rent boy we met in Heaven
who looked fifteen and called us dollies,
with his social worker as an accessory
I thought was his boyfriend, leading us up
to the party full of lacklustre women
in tight polyester, and upstairs, not
the Skin with the spider’s web tattoo
for a face, that bled red light in my skull;
nor the ugly man who said Full of fuckingspades and half-castes as soon as we entered whom I misheard, the social worker doing his damnedest to sugar the pill: it was taking a drug that made us innocent enough to leave Heaven and end up in Hell.
FOREIGN EXCHANGE
In Hamburg, me and Anna, who is German,
and a man across the street attacks us, spitting
his violence; the air is cold, and bitter
faces gather like rainclouds, like an omen
and my gentle friend counter-attacks but later
refuses to translate and that’s the killer,
her silence, like a shroud; I feel the colour
rage in my cheeks for lack of that translation
reminding me of school, that French exchange,
a simple sentence, Parce qu’elle est noire, delivered at such speed and with such hatred it stung me: to encounter so much rage; more, for being judged solely by colour; but most, the fact it had to be translated.
NORTH(WEST)ERN
I was twelve, as in the twelve-bar blues, sick
for the Southeast, marooned on the North Wales coast.
A crotchet, my tongue craving the music
of Welsh, Scouse or Manc. Entering the outpost
of Colwyn Bay pier, midsummer, noon,
nightclub for those of us with the deep ache
of
