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What makes life last
2. Ghost stories
The world is full of wisdom that’s received;
can there be one of us who’s not deceived?
What are the stories which seep out of sleep
into half awareness, like TVs blathering
unattended in the abandoned nursing home;
I catch distorted syntax here and there
in vivid nonsequiturs just beyond
logic, aquatic voices in my head
which say I think I’m depressed, and I’m not.
“My best advice is hide from your cars
since we gave them powers to know where we are;
our movements are also known by the stars,
their light is trying to prise us apart,”
says a man in a bar. “My ka is a void.
The universe chose me to be paranoid.
“Have you been in a room with papers blown?
seen too many people you already know?
stayed on till dawn to be the last to go?
put trust in friends? everyone, anyone, none?”
Online he sees his avatar avoid
him too, so maybe they’re both paranoid.
“Why should doors seem to open behind me?
Why do insects, birds and angels have wings?
How could they possibly know they’ll find me
when the phone in the shopping mall rings?”
It’s this kind of crap gets the bar annoyed:
does he want to make everyone paranoid?
“Can they tell for certain that I’m speaking?
and on what, since when, why, where and to whom?
Can I ever trust sunlight that’s sneaking
in crevices at the edge of my room?”
His friends stay indoors wearing polaroids –
and he thinks it’s just him who got paranoid?
“What made the world stay so warm for so long
if the sun’s nine minutes away from our berth,
unless there’s a force that’s equally strong
burning the dark at the core of the Earth?”
It’s physics that first got the stars deployed,
but in minutes he’s made them all paranoid.
“If you spend your life expecting to trace
evidence of who you are, you’ll erase
your footprints, your co-ordinates, your base,
and mirrors will spit back names in your face.”
Were microbes dispatched here by asteroid?
Is that why evolution got paranoid?
What are the stories spun in my mind
while I am sleep-waking into life?
Sure, psychology and neuroscience
might winkle out mechanisms, functions
from a quadrillion possible connections
in each of seven point three billion brains;
but pictures in mine spread like stains.
We haven’t seen the sun these last two nights,
the sky’s black sponge has soaked away our lights.
Has our lust and greed blocked its return?
Will we put it right if we watch till dawn?
We haven’t seen the sun these last two days
our highways and distance are closed by haze;
it’s the densest fog anyone can recall –
some say it prefigures the Kingdom’s fall.
We haven’t seen the sun this last two weeks.
There’s a forlorn pall of which no one speaks
but sometimes clouds lighten a moment as though
an eye is watching, pressing to see through.
We haven’t seen the sun these last two months –
our forecasters will pay for these affronts,
as ministers and speculators strive
for lies to help economies survive.
We haven’t seen the sun these last two years;
silence and darkness amplify our fears,
But deep below ground our well-stocked cage
keeps our people safe from the surface rage.
We haven’t seen the sun for two decades:
Loss and hope won’t hurt when memory fades,
but they say we’ll freeze, and we’ve heard we’ll burn
since friends who ventured out did not return.
We’ve seen no sun these two generations.
and we can’t endure on failing rations –
our young men say we should storm the stores,
share out the food, take our future by force.
Our ancestors died while they watched the sun,
and growth is too precious to let time run;
we must mine, and make, and consume to escape;
our greed must be the future of the race.
What are the stories that come when I’m engaged
elsewhere, negotiating with demanding nerves,
mediating for eyes, throat, limbs and organs
prying for insider knowledge, doing
opportunistic deals to buy more time.
The spider slips into the folds of my brain
its bargain is nothing, or fear and pain.
The Mourning News – Bargaining
And all news now becomes obituary.
Normal service has somewhere gone awry;
distain and pain is not how listeners align
since everyone suddenly wants to supply
their ideas of what it must be like to die.
Researchers at an uptight university
report today how differently
we’d live without philosophy;
they speak in deep opacity
as if there were proximity
in being dead and being free.
Someone says when molecules are parted
from the recently departed
they rarely travel far from where they started,
and so, sic transit Gloria,
residents near crematoria
must inhale us in memoria.
Now the Pope and ayatollahs chime,
archbishops, patriarchs and rabbis mime,
address their childlike worlds in rhyme,
ascribe our stint to a tunnel in time.
We’re all going down, all on a slide,
despite the warnings in their guides.
Honest doubt is fine or, maybe, a crime,
but most of all don’t touch the sides –
the moss may turn your fingers green,
and rub our noses up against the grain.
The price we pay may fall or rise
as we glide away sidewise inside.
So let’s be sure, His Holiness implores,
before we board that train:
life may be the Grotto Azure,
but it could be a drain.
And by the by, this dead celebrity
would seem to be a real cool guy –
the Vatican’s immediately applied
its influence to get him sanctified.
Biography and history are crap
says a man deemed old by virtue of his hat
who never made it as a diplomat.
The past is a parameter, simple as that:
we can go back only just so far
and still accept the thing we are.
Flying kites
We have the power to make you and take you away;
we relish our control, the puppeteer holds sway;
and yet we wonder at your curves and dives
and envy your freedom, your mastery of skies.
We are your playwrights – we feed you lines –
but stage lights and sets are your designs.
The sharp-toothed valley bites the air and sings
as we slice at heaven with whistling strings
and cut the bellies of clouds, spilling rain
like a fall of angels both good and malign.
Though we can’t be sure what you are, windspite,
we’ll face the demons who dance on our kites.
What are these stories recycled as myths?
these childhood lessons in pride, vengeance, death?
Morality tales, timeless as stones,
relayed forever in our veins and bones.
When history’s too early for survivors
it still burns in the hearths of its admirers
as crimes against justice, flawed redemption
and shedding of blood without exemption.
But whose moral code? And whose mindless scores
are used to confuse their purpose and cause?
We know for sure veracity is skewed
when corpses are piled for their point of view.
Cromwell, Churchill, Thatcher claimed the past,
and climbed on wardead for their names to last.
Blasphemer Marlowe who lies for the state,
is plotting at Deptford, drinking with fate.
He’s asked: “Will you have to go underground,
to give the Stratford hack your drama crown
while you scribe with his name the next twenty years?”
“I’d rather die than yield fame to Shakespeare,”
he slurs. “Wait. I fear friends here mean me ill.
Please excuse me while I settle the bill.”
“Why build a pyramid, o Lord Khufu?”
“There’s a journey to make,” the grave replies.
“When the last stone’s laid it will touch the skies.”
But his smile says: “So, you know of me, do you?
What are these stories parading as dreams?
Are they unconscious reassurance, streams
of underground miscellanies for me
to wash away the pain of memory?
Is the self-awareness which makes us humans
so unbearable that our brains must groom us,
make deals and restorations overnight
till we next face the awful waking light?
How am I so broken? What would be undone
if my mind ever made its secrets known?
I’d give anything not to cross that line:
So I’ll live in your fears if you’ll sleep with mine.
I passed Bob Dylan coming out of the john
hollow-eyed, love sick, anger almost gone.
I told a friend who claimed he’d almost met him,
and he knew someone else who Bob let in.
We are so free and loose and lost and lone
that only heroes spilt by cars or guns
can make a reeling nation act as one.
We blink, as they did, then another’s gone.
Their deaths are strange, but living’s stranger.
Not even DNA is what it seems;
though it may survive, there’s hidden danger:
we’re dead before we find out what it means.
We’re trapped in darkness, figments fill our dreams,
commanding and commanded by our genes;
So why’s predestination such a crock
if an earthquake stops my watch at twelve o’clock?
Life’s a sprawl. It’s not a spurt.
You go to school, you stay alert:
you want to win, you learn to flirt;
you play the fool, you lose your shirt.
You try to rise above the dirt.
But no one says old age will hurt.
There’s a pulse that waves us onward from our birth,
a ripple of electrons through the earth,
it’s pushing everything towards one end,
though not what these synaptic ghosts intend.
Growth forges knowledge; knowing drives decay;
pain sharpens its claws on our nerves each day.
The only hell which might still make sense is
living forever and missing the census.
All over the world people think they’ve seen
doors slamming shut on Zimmerman’s latrine.
But Christ, aren’t we all thin women and men
pretending we can tell what’s going on?
So if all you live for is to criticise,
show us naked as someone to despise,
tough luck, you’ll have to join the fucking queue.
Our pants are down, and we might agree with you.
What are these stories I read if not lies
by people who lead, sell, write or advise?
Aren’t they the fictions of those who hold power
applied to mislead, though some lies are purer
than others – dishonesty compromised
by good intent, deception improvised
by figures of trust whose condescension
wins our approval and quells dissention.
They might as well have told me white was black
while whoring wishful thinking out as fact;
and so denying me respect has left
a grievance easily as deep as theft.
An entomologist sends his respects,
reflects that a rarer insect yet
was moved when its habitat
came under threat
(common wood ants won’t confess
that they’ve remained emotionless).
Only the queen can reproduce
which clearly can’t excuse
a migrant mass of half a million males
who followed on behind and on the loose.
It couldn’t happen on a human scale.
The PM, blowing in on a popular gale,
has nailed the skill to aimlessly flail
against some group beyond the pale
and shrill the cherished values they assail,
while wearing chain mail behind a wall,
Today the risk is less that he will fall,
so he joins the caterwaul
and sends condolences to all.
But just in case, he vows that he will drill for shale
or save the whale or never bail
against the migrants, even if our borders fail.
His rival, the mayor’s a classical scholar,
a rotter from another Oxford college;
he drops the PM in a spot of bother
with hints that he’s a tedious plodder
who understands rather less than nolla
and famously gets hot on the collar
when other fellows can’t follow his thread.
He’s setting teasers for our leader
to test his neoclassical cred:
Shakespeare’s the wallah we’re led
to believe went out, got fed, got drunk, got red
got wet, got chilled, got ill, then dead,
and left his wife his second best bed;
Socrates was hemlocked, but could have fled;
Aeschylus was silenced, tortoise on head;
for Shelley and Keats it was loss of breath
while Byron purposefully bled.
So, what tells us more of what’s ahead –
the things they said?
or the fatuous way each lost his head?
Superlatives get adjectival,
and the speed at which this death goes viral
is on an endless upward spiral
without a single lifetime rival.
Even those who hadn’t known his name insist
his funeral’s to be a public fest
The civic grip on this deceased
means his corpse can’t be released –
he could have hardly been more pleased
if he hadn’t been diseased.
And yet, communities
of scientists are cheesed
on behalf of the bereaved
that the admitted oddities
of their ideas are squeezed
right out of these formalities.
it seems that matter has by stealth,
they say, found a way to be self-
organised, which is good for making life;
meanwhile chaos, entropy and strife
feed off the same equations
which while less satisfactory for health
is helpful for artistic installations.
A stringtheorist too phones in with a sting:
there really are angels that dance and spin
in trillions on the head of a pin –
they’ve been there since the dawn of time
to argue for intelligent design.
While he thinks that nothing that can be can sin,
we’ll have to take it on the chin
that Hell might be activity within Within.
A trick cyclist has one wheel.
A psychiatrist can’t fix a bicycle.
A tricolour plays in three bands,
on two boundaries across one border.
A lama has four legs, and rear legs.
A starfish has five extensions
and unknown intentions.
Six quid buys you a dying octopus.
The Severn receives income
from tributaries and bores.
The spider had one web and ate husbands.
The politician is a fatcat with nine lies.
about innocence too tense to score.
You need to see elves
in elevens or twelves
to be sure.
Thirteen bankers lent bikes against a wall.
And made much more.
What are these stories we hear in the car,
the scrap of discussion, a snippet of news?
(Tuning in late we’re unsure where we are.)
We go to a meeting, we read the reviews.
That night we drink and drown in noise at the bar –
half-heard half-truths, sounds our minds won’t lose,
crashed half-facts bedded deeper than scars.
Were they true or false? Our heads have to choose.
Like uncertain diplomats they’ll lie all
night; nothing says “true” like a quick denial.
Whatever reason can there be to grieve
when there’s nothing left for us to believe?
Making Road Movies
The screenwriter whines:
Today I found myself inside my own
road movie, reflecting everything in sight;
tarmac poured with gleaming grills, car doors
in sprays of morning light. Here there’s a smile
that races like a snail across my face;
road noise dies, a CD laser glides,
the place I’m heading lies as far as I can go
A director signs:
Don’t question me
if I can see
gravestones on the skyline;
no route between
symbol and scene
blinds you like your eyeline.
The producer opines:
Got yourself a fucking road movie, right?
Can’t ever sleep, and you still can’t write?
Aren’t your aims like motel walls too slight?
Is this the only way you can pass the night?
And so the actor mimes as she declines.
What are these stories conning me as news?
Inference, deception, control, abuse?
And these falsehoods you’re telling me now?
You need them anyhow, doubt’s not allowedin this godawful babble that we share
to dull our fury and fill vacant air.
Why? How can this vital force clock off?
memory, reason, purpose, love just stop?
How can everyone known, one by one, pause, pop –
it’s a snatched arcade game preset to drop
us to oblivion, break every rule,
and in an instant take back all our jewels.
But I’m damned if I’ll buy hope on a metre
while I can still measure the earth in feet,
and while there’s love I’ll travel to meet her
as far as Mars if that makes us complete.
Your truth is a wish, your trust is imprisoned,
so shut the fuck up, and for once just listen:
Death is a bastard, and life it isn’t.
Now some clown unleashes fears to hound us:
“We can’t allow those work-grab westward-bounders
in here unless, until our health care flounders.
We need our uppers and our downers.”
This witless politician doesn’t get “discussion”
or why the miseries of dead celebrities
should get more coverage than his;
he lands a million listeners with concussion
confusing self-importance with compassion
while wearing his rejection like a fashion;
“Taxation is an evil sent to saint us;
if you’re not with us you’re against us,”
says the Minister for Not The Faintest.
Statistics fly with witches to confound us
when a mum in fury counters
it’s the state not her which should astound us.
She’s also on her uppers and her downers
and feeds her kids on quarter pounders,
while banking’s snakes and ladders played by scroungers.
She says the numbers are a fiction –
almost boundless in the countless
shades of their unsoundness –
like a spaceship, upsidegroundless.
It’s the facts that makes her madder,
fire her disaffection
with government’s addiction to distraction.
The instant audience reaction
is outrage at her lack of tact and
disrespectful plea for action
while a man lies dead in his perfection:
so they demand her obviously fractious
children are put in care for her infraction.
Wild last words pour down like water,
storms of words, words in chorus.
Words as adjectives and verbs and nouns,
words insignificant and words renowned,
new forms of words, unknown, unfound
and swarms of words that swirl you round,
dull leaden words, waste coffee grounds
words with meanings sunk and drowned:
so many words until the morning’s run aground …
It’s already 9am here
and the news like mist is going off the air.
Next is a phone-in for people who care
which one of the Dimblebys will chair;
there’s a helpline for joy, another for prayer,
and Twitter’s the place to go to share
the emptiness spilling out everywhere.
Then for those with pain they still can’t bear
there’s a brand new channel for rolling despair.
But tonight there’ll be more serious fare –
an in-depth probe on his life will dare
to ask if you die of fame is it fair?
and was there really anybody there?
I ached and shook a fist at someone else,
then turned and found I was talking to myself.
I’ll never accept this mealy-mouthed fest,
the “passing” of relatives, friends “at rest”,
the warm euphemism of remembrance –
in case we betray that priestly licence
to mangle living memory, and maul
our capacity to know them at all.
Just at the point we’re clawing for meaning
we’re suffocated by the preachers’ preening:
vacuity that validates delusion,
curtains closed to simulate conclusion
to the real life rolled silently away.
Someone, please say, who do I have to pay
to bring an end to this vampiracy
that makes believers prey on our dis-ease?
I’m sickened by that bear’s bloody bandage,
that slack black armband round our knowledge,
not because we need to revel in death,
not to complain, to confide or confess –
but damn you all, and damn your hellish haste
to eliminate my feelings from this waste.
It’s naïve to believe that our sole loss
of bodyweight is what leaves as shit and piss.
There are bits dropping off us all the time
in front of pitying families, in sight
of embarrassed friends and grossed-out workmates:
the falling hairs from balding pates, the slake
salt solution wiped off our necks as sweat,
the tears and crystals scraped from sleep-caked eyes,
scabs and skin cells, tumbling by millions like
demons into hell, sebaceous oozings
from our slimy flesh beyond our choosing,
earwax in lava flows, dead mites, and semen,
gases and vapour, spittle, mucus, phlegm,
the flush of dead eggs, the lining of wombs,
platelets, and sorry seepages from wounds,
and after-births with life’s unique completions.
They’re all real and measurable excretions.
Then what of weight loss when life goes down the bowl?
How is it no one ever weighed a soul?
- Community development