The Blue Books Restored: Fragments 1A to 70 (part 3 of 4)

anyone who may struggle to handle all this flux

 

I grew up in a part of Essex where I did not meet – or even see – a black person until well into my teens. This seemed to make some people with the same background into ignorant racists. In my case, I became an ignorant liberal. I tolerate all races due to a sort of colour blindness and effectively know nothing of other cultures. It never occurred to me that a golliwog was an offensive racial stereotype. I thought they were fairytale beings like elves and talking bears.

 

The carousel turns and grinds the stars
like peppercorns. It blares the music
of steampunk. Of the brass and copper
wheels that steer the universe. A tune
which, played backwards, reveals the language
of angels. Like the sigils in blue
ink, etched upon her pallid torso.

 

When you hear my song, it will be the blues
When you hear my song, I am not singing
Though the moon is waxing, it wanes again
Though the sun is rising, I am sinking

 

Therefore, when I write a poem, I cause words to change their state. The poem already exists in a potential form and the act of writing excites it to assume a form that can be read.

 

With Heath and Wilson both disgraced,
the mantle fell to Thorpe
to lead the coalition out of chaos

 

The aliens appeared to be unaware of us as individuals. As society collapsed into anarchy, they strode above us as obliviously as we might have stepped over ant hills.

 

Real life lacks the structure of fiction. It is full of loose ends, of random events with no further significance, of dramatic turns from which no moral can be drawn. Yet sometimes, we perceive patterns in the raw chaos of existence. We insist that, somehow, it must all make sense.

 

let the freak flag fly even higher

 

I have been with the same woman for twenty-seven years and we have always been completely faithful to each other. This does not stop me having an appreciative eye for other women, but I am not tempted to stray. In fact, I often feel that – if I could live my life again – I would not bother with chasing after women at all, because it was such a waste of my time, energy and money.

 

Dear Jonathan,
I am sending you this letter
before things go wrong.
I am begging you to do better
and please be strong.

 

     It was then that Jonathan spoke. A rare enough event in itself, without what it was that he actually said. My memory of this moment is probably the most vivid image of my entire life. It still gives me goose pimples to think about it.

 

You wear your face like a Guy Fawkes mask
that grins and grins as the bonfire grows.

 

Worms feed better than any fuck buddy
on the carrion of your cunt, the stripped
bare bones of your scavenger licked pelvis.

 

     Being surrounded by hills, my mobile phone signal is erratic and there is no connection to the internet. I miss neither service.

 

     I had always loved the view from the headland. The sunlight glinting on the ocean. The blue haze at the far western horizon. The sound of waves breaking at the cliff’s craggy feet. But, as the threshold of Chaos had drawn closer, these things had mutated, then disappeared.

 

If there are found poems, then there are lost
One kind ready-made, the other unformed
One kind like flowers, the other pulled teeth

 

things that are going on in my head that I really don’t want to explore

 

I got into science fiction at about the age of 7; first reading my dad’s library books, then devouring everything by the likes of Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton and Hugh Walters in the Junior Library. ‘Ordinary’ children’s fiction held no attraction for me. It was just so boring and unimaginative by comparison. And I am disappointed just how dull the future has turned out to be, now that I am actually living in the 21^st century, for fuck’s sake.

 

The longeur of London, beneath a yellow sky;
a land with its own language, character and clime,
where Gog and Magog laid foundations deep beneath
the Roman tiles, upon the bare alluvium,
beside an undistinguished river: a squiggle
on a crude drawn map of glaciations defines
the logo for a mock cockney stereotype.

 

You shoot your rockets early, for Diwali
and dyslexic neighbours complain about your nose.

 

Theoretical poets posit that a poem can exist in a number of quantum states. There is the zero state of a blank page. There are quark, strangeness and charm: the three sub-poetic particles that support a poem’s pre-existence. Then there is inspiration: the moment in space/time when a poem exists as a spark of energy, a little bang in the poet’s brain, which may expand or collapse.

 

The Jubilee assassins
deployed a nuke in Northern Ireland
creating a Union of death, a radioactive Republic

 

it was like some fascist notion of male physique

 

My gran’s next door neighbour had a fish pond in his back garden in which he stocked carp. Not the ornamental kind; just ordinary river ones that lurked beneath the murky water like hinds of grey shadow. He gave me a jam-jar full of tiddlers to take home. I kept them in a small tank and they never seemed to grow any bigger. One winter, it was so cold in my bedroom that their water froze. But they survived the experience. However, they did not survive my mother. I suspect she got fed up being the only person who regularly fed them and cleaned them out, so she probably flushed them down the toilet.

 

And you wonder whether poetry is worth the pain,
when each Muse  is cousin to a Fury,
who whips you down streets paved with bone,
who strips you down to abject penury,
and rends you naked as a stone.

 

     Jonathan struck a pose. Left arm partly raised, with the fingers clenched around an invisible magic orb. Right arm extended, with the index finger pointing at the fence. Eyes deep set, burning like hot coals at the bottom of a pit.

 

Diane has a plan
written on the palm of her hand
permanent as henna
matching hair of burnt sienna

 

There is no point looking up, for the stars
are tippexed from the sky. They are errors
in a manuscript that once foretold fate
and are now no clearer than chalk marks smeared
across a schoolchild’s slate. That shows my age.

 

     I brought a small writing pad with me, in case inspiration struck. It remains in the suitcase, unsullied. And I am recording these thoughts a week later, now I am back at home.

 

In the blood-filled eyes of Christopher Lee
I see the intensity of a man
who rises above hokum to become
the last bastion of black-and-white cool
in the neon glam of seventy-three.

 

     The sun had become a huge golden phoenix, an orange lantern hanging from a tree of bones, a green unblinking eye, a purple veined heart pulsing blood, a shield of brass, a wheel spinning threads of fire – and many other eldritch forms for which there was no name – before finally merging with the sky, which was a slowly flapping curtain of pastel blue and pink stripes.

 

Attempts to mobilise both military and humanitarian aid were virtually halted when engines ceased to start. Weapons proved useless, in any case. A nuclear missile deployed over Salisbury Plain can still be seen, blooming in slow motion, as cool and beautiful as a carnation, even today.

 

What good are verses without sweat or cost?
Wrote with all guns blazing or barely warmed
Like Lear raging or Tom cold on the heath

 

the way we seek memories of old lovers in new partners

 

As intimated earlier, I was able to read fluently in primary school. I cannot credit any inspirational teachers for this ability. I have no memory of ever not being able to read. Though I do not recall being taught, I guess I should credit my parents. I could already read and write when I started school. My vocabulary was tested and found to be equal to an 11 year old’s. I think comics like the Dandy, Beano and Topper were my main source of early reading matter, so I also give credit to Biffo the Bear and pals.

 

Diane draws a line
joining up the dots in her mind
lattice work of meaning
tangled up with my daydreaming

 

I am caught red-handed. Paint dapples my skin from the sigil I sprayed on the Dragon Wall.

 

When Marc became Poet Laureate,
he was condemned for comparing
the Queen to a Cadillac

 

The screams of children greet me as I walk down the hill from the railway station. I turn a corner and there is the pier: its gaudy red and yellow facade fills the throat of the bay, like a giant cartoon hot dog. There is a rumble from the roller coaster and further screams, plus the squeal of seagulls, muted by the relentless plashing of the waves. Sea and sky are steely blue and make me squint.

 

like all perfumes its impact fades

 

We met at ‘The Barge Aground’. A character pub in Barking, if that’s not an oxymoron. It’s not the original 17^th century building, but it retains the period charm of a sign inviting patrons to surrender their swords. The door supervisors barely glanced at me, though I could have had a rapier tucked down my trouser leg, for all they knew.

 

We flew in starships of the mind
beyond the Oort cloud, into deep
space where the remnants of earth-kind
were dreaming in their cargo-sleep
suspension, en route to Alpha
Proxima Centauri. Faster
than the speed of light, we arrived
in psychic forms and to master
our return to matter contrived
to build new bodies from the clay
of our new Eden. We were gods
in waiting for the joyous day
when our parents’ survival pods
would reach this outpost Omega.

 

     “Whoever pulls the sword from the stone,” he announced, in an eerie voice crackling with age and authority. “Shall be crowned the true King of England.”

 

This poem exists in a state
of quantum uncertainty, until
you click on Read Now
and collapse the probability wave.

 

As my pen traverses this notebook’s page,
I pause to consider how far the light
of alien suns has fallen, only
to fail to reach my eyes; how once I thought
I might holiday amongst them, as if
they were Southend’s illuminations strung...

 

Death punts his boat ashore for the Reunion. Steps with a clack of bone upon shingle as he wraps his cloak of haar tighter round his heartless frame. Affixes a scythe blade to his barge pole and raises it like a standard. It gleams moon crescent pitiless in the cavernous vault of sky.

 

I don’t believe I have a soul to damn
or save: the fear of darkness is as dumb
as love in the abstract, the way we fool
ourselves, that a cross fashioned from a tree
can transform blood into blackcurrant jam.

 

     And the sea had writhed and boiled and screamed. A cauldron of rotting stew, an undulating meadow of frost-black poppies, a dazzling pool of mercury, unending ranks of soldiers bearing spears, an enormous calliope of carnival horses. Then, it had become completely abstract: waves of sound, of music, of discordant crashes. Until it also dissolved into the pallid flicker of sky.

 

Whether trimmed with scissors or carved in bone
Sharp as steel blades, blunt as a whetting stone
Words are to wisdom as birds are to air

 

lyrics about bruised skin and washed linens

 

     Diane recognised me and waved me over to the table she was sharing with three other 50-somethings. Quite some feat of memory after thirty years.

 

Through uncharted words, without a key
You will not find your way to me
It is an act of synastry
To merge your prejudice with mine
And bend the meaning of each line
To fir into your own design
No matter what I say or do
I have no existence without you
To validate my point of view
Regardless of what I may mean
My countenance is never seen
This is no mirror, but a screen

 

Until then, it could be a work
of genius or a pile of crap,
a blank page or an immaculate
verse, or it could remain indeterminate.

 

          “Come with me, girly.” The officer’s grip is hot and heavy on my shoulder, but not unkind. I flinch as if to make a run for it, yet cannot escape the weight of his long arm. The flat line of his jaw, the straight edge of his smile: like a No Entry sign beneath the sad sodium lights of his eyes.

 

When Brian broke up the band,
he kept the name for himself
and made the Stones high concept art

 

In the Peak District, aliens moved the mountains around, like giants playing chess with the landscape.