Points of interest – poems from the Sixties  

To demonstrate my uncontrolled admiration for the modern idiom 

I shall render the entire Government
Records Office into utter blank verse
And publish it in hard backs brick by brick
 

I shall scan the whole of Liverpool’s Dockland
    and a ferry-load of native poets responding
    to it as if it were National Assistance money
In a single reading 

I shall compose an ode down
Trinity  Street  Cambridge

Using                 paving              Stones

As my                stanza              form

I shall write a concrete poem the length of the M1
Ma                  king             dra              ma
tic                    use              of                the
four                 lane             struc           ture 

i shall embody Cleopatra’s Needle in
Victoria’s embankment in my work
As a universal symbol
And straightly deny any pointed
Reference to sovereign facts of life 

I shall take a verbal sounding of the bottom of the Irish Sea
    in fathomless six-foot lines
I shall adopt the word as an ultimate
Expression of metaphor
And word through the words of Word
Wording for words that I can word 

i shall invest my fancy at oxford
in a cavalier sonnet
for charles lamenting the loss
of the capital 

I shall transpose into narrative poetry the initials of all
    those holding tickets for the Cup Final at Wembley
    in 1968 emphasising regardless of feet the mass
    hysteria of never knowing where there should be
    a full stop 

And when they publish my epic comma
in Penguin Modern Poets Volume Ninety Seven
I shall tell them all without emotion that
I wasn’t joking,

1968 

Cardboard party

Having nothing better to leave

than the party

I took a look outside and saw you all

enclosed in reflections on the

windows round the room

it seemed I might be crawling round

the inside walls of someone else’s

polished cornflake pack

and at that stage I should think

I probably was

but I tried very hard to relax on the floor

pressing nervous fingerprints

onto my sole transparent-consolation

that if you’d been in the least concerned

you could have seen me yourself

stuck out there inside without you;

I’d thought there was something there between us

less brittle than the glass

so we kicked around the formula

for turning cornflakes inside out

till you said how boring it was

to talk all the time;

then I tried kicking you about instead

and stirred the only crackle of feeling

I heard all night

which was for the most part

as smooth as the walls ­–

if only I’d thought to open the window

you might have disappeared.

One way or another we kept up the thiamine-niacin diet

required to sustain our partial liking

and consumed so many bowlfuls of ourselves

that we finally realised we could take anything

but only when there was nothing left to take;

when I left the box by the dotted line

at 2.35 a.m.

I couldn’t help thinking our reflections

might just hang about

where they were until daylight

and I didn’t eat breakfast again this morning

1968 

Once

where did you hide when I kissed you

slightly that first and last time

wanting you so much to stay?

were you talking to your drawings of people

who saw me through shaded lines of their own?

did you find that they left you alone

as often as I felt with you?

can’t you see for once that it’s always

almost time for one of us to go?

I watched you wait for the last grains to move

as beach crabs hid from your toes,

and laughed at you bringing home bunches of berries

to keep till the leaves turned brown;

then you played for hours with a kitten

that ran through your fingers like sand

and sat with your pencil

hoping to sketch me burned down

with a slow cigarette by my hand.

once in the imperfect past

when I wanted to change all my lines

for light and be a part of your scene

you drew me so far that we both disappeared,

and once when I’d just touched your fingers

and nearly your tears,

god, how I wanted you then,

but wants were not what you needed to hear

and once was never enough for me.

1968, 2010  

Bicycles

tonight I was passed by a man who understood

the mechanism of thought: he rode

a green bike and was telling a girl on hers

what he knew – of responses and factors, things

he hoped might disguise the depth of his love;

then he saw into me as I stepped in his path,

and he swerved and paused, collating the facts;

and he looked at the girl on her bike, and they smiled.

so perhaps she understood mechanics too.

1968 

Tintagel

“Why don’t we just get away to the sea for the week?”

It’s the kind of thing you do in a flagellating moment.

“Yes? Right away?” “Yes, right away,” she said.

“Down to Tintagel. There’ll be no one there this time of year.”

We could search for the ghosts of the old kingdom there,

If that is really what we lack so much.

“Where would we stay? Wouldn’t it be difficult right now?”

Guest houses boarded up against the unseasonable minstrel;

The impervious cobbles resigned to a stoic register.

“If we take the tent...” and a sleeping bag.  A frying pan and beans,

We could watch as the tide washes its daily wreckage

Over our feet and heads, hang up bits of seaweed

In place of the sun. “I’ve always wanted to go...

Such a beautiful name for a place to live.”

The castle’s blistering ruins of the Ministry of Works;

Shades of the beach poet scratching in the crystal rocks.

“Have you got the money for the train?” “We can hitch just as well.”

And enormous intercourse with a few of the nation’s

Most interesting bores, all of them disguised with places to go.

“I can’t stay here any more with you. We must get away,

From ourselves, if you like.” “Yes, together.” right away.

The sea shriveling the pebbles, the two of us dancing with spray

Frying chips. She’s right. We should go sometime.

“Please, won’t you come? For the change. The air.”

We could talk. Talk it out. Varying the flagellation.

“Just a few days?” Our love struggles in the grubby paws

Of a painted mythology, jangles inanely in a name.

1970

Match

My god it’s hot in down town New York

where crazy swaying concrete slabs scrape the haze

and shoppers are clubbed senseless

between air conditioned stores

there’s iced coke on every corner

but no one lives here – do they?

in Times Square round about noon

a man shouts out briefly in protest

and pain, a cry like a darting flame

that sucks in air from the roaring city

other vaster news printed in lights

rolls round endlessly above him

the temperature, rising slightly, hangs on another wall

measured nearby it hits 99 degrees

half a mile away on East River appartment blocks simmer

people live there stained black and mad by the heat

that drums like a jack hammer at their windows

life is running short and night will be the time to kill

the man they scratched from the sidewalk,

whatever colour he was first,

has only finished black.

over at United Nations Plaza

a tourist red with heat and rage and fear

dumps abuse like napalm on a bearded passer-by

“Jesus, Jesus, you’re one of those against the war

you Commies hate America,” says the prophet with his fist,

mistaking who is red and who is dead this afternoon

the man on the sidewalk in Times Square at noon

has missed the war

but lived with killing

spilled from his TV.

he slips into the city:

hatred packs the subway,

his pulse races like trains;

danger’s worn as an armband –

fear hunts the barrelled darkness;

anxiety fingers the trigger.

heat fights his wits

yet this time he fires first.

down at the Canyon, out at the caves

they burn you with the cool sanity of gain

outside the sun holds a gun at your head

should you think of escape.

the San Francisco hippies two years on

bear their breasts and beg,

and bless you with their love;

it costs a quarter and a smile

but you’d better be prepared to give.

the Indian drunk at Fisherman’s Wharf

makes a stab at the price of a drink,

rolling like the boats on the quay

with a knife in the hands he can’t control,

and somewhere else another stranger grabs your arm

to tell you the crap you live with if you’re black –

like the LA Greyhound Station gang

who only want you for everything you’ve got.

in Times Square

a man takes a can of gas from a plastic bag;

when he spins the cap off vapour pours into the shakey air

when he raises the can at the scalding street

he hardly draws a glance.

when petrol rushes down his face and arms and shirt

he’s cooled at last;

he disappears in haze

as the air boils the fuel from his flesh,

but he dies from the modest flame of a single match.

1970/1974