Weekend 

A Weak
Weekend
Awakening

a sleep asleep as sleep;  see the nightmare naturally

apologised for happening

personified disguise

the world-would weekend

a difficult forgetting way

to wake awake a wake

between sleeping and waking

is the complex simplicity

the double conscious half-conscious

everything of nothing

a crushed awareness crumple-car-like

mingling in collision light with flesh with steel

between waking and sleeping

last night awoke from a nightmare to see

me sleeping beside it in the same bed,

naturally I didn’t apologise

   for any especial extenuating

circumstance or suggest that any

one else might have been there instead,

if that’s the way it happens to happen

then very clearly it possibly does

   and making no attempt in return to

disguise the improbability of

its own personification it told

me very quietly that the world would

be finished by the weekend . .. but of course

   at the time it’s difficult to comprehend

exactly what a thing like this is all

about and I forgot to ask last night

precisely what I aught to do, I may

have got the words confused as well

   there’s not much though I can do about it now,

I’ll just have to sort  this next week out

myself as it comes, if this is the way it happens

to happen then no doubt in fact it does

and the world will be finished by the weekend/

   and the world will finish by the weekend/

my world would be finished

by the weekend

like strangeness through a hangover

the visible world fills with shapes,

I come opaquely into life

between perception and perspective

depthless in sensation and hangover,

behind perception in the terrible space.

I start to move as if with purpose

in a possible world of probable loss.

and fumble among forms, seeking definitives.

if yesterday was Saturday, today is. . .

anything.

Sunday
Service

a defining drone, the church fills

voices together, a certain faith, in reverence

    the priest comes greened, half purging conversation

    with his rattle of people rising, scratching

into prayer and flowing in response

to feet, and knees, and seats —

    dull hypnotic

    secret permutations.

clambering up to myself — I have to laugh —

in unison, a fascinated monkey mouthing imitation,

    unheeded, unselected by ritual, almost unevolving:

my refuge of mythology, one retreating prayer,

    incantations easing out of meaning

as Pater Noster knowledge

    breaks, spreads,

    laps over mystery,

till the priest again appears, settled nested

beyond stone pillars that echo like God

    in loudspeakered omnipotence, when I

think through a sermon that presses out virtue like grapejuice

    and ferment myself among the congregation

gathering my uses for no obvious ends

    but knowing this knowing to be my own terms

    and so far owning, though not always in order,

that I only sit

and breathe and think.

everywhere around people tinkle in readiness

for some improbably early collection:

tedium and plate: tiny children burst out running in the aisles;

the voice of god has become small and distant

giving blessing to his income;

    and the groan of the Credo is gulped like consecrated wine

hardly observed beyond those it excludes;

    the patter of words run into sacrament,

    continual prayers and still chatter,

tones of mysteries and rosaries,

fingers, automatic clatter,

    invocation and its

    pattern of words

                       wringing my ears

    and bells and bells

    of miracles

and, necks bent, sink, knee-stretched legs struggling down, wrinkled women,

black, floored purposes fight out, with age, a sacrifice of motion.

fulfilled, and blessed, and real, people crush soon in the doorway

as the priest prepares to leave.

I watch, parched, what I’d hoped for

spill out into the morning, swilling

back over the town for this week.

it seems

that I’ve spent all my life on simply existing:

I’ve drained the account which might trade for meanings

and missed all the discount by not shopping around.

suddenly

all transactions must cease from the weekend,

cheques start to bounce, my credit card’s void,

there’s no dividend yield from my share of ideas.

Changes 

I think

there may still be some change:

everything in bed will earn a few bob —

some coppers for snoring, more for a turn,

and something like a sackful for immovable dreams.

when I get up each day this week to stand

what it’s worth on the bathroom’s sliding scales

I’ll maybe weigh a little heavier

the things I’ve got in mind: performance

of the ritual arming of civilised man,

holding the power to destroy the Order

in Nature by putting my socks on first,

and the Small Room that contains the secrets

of the universe, strained out so rarely

in the thinker’s mind, being redeveloped

to occupy the whole ground floor — I’ll go

there early in the morning to release myself

with a flow of instant understanding,

then Saturday‘s last few cereal flakes will

conjugate sublimely with milk

to be the ultimate quintessant Breakfast

which precedes the last of reprobate acts

on the journey of the soul through chaos,

in the battle to make it to the shops on time:

an exploding umbrella left on a bus.

there at the zenith of communication

I’ll greet acquaintances without a word

with intuition of the lousy weather,

then I’ll apprehend a Total Significance

which will be the very last thought I have,

infused with random immortality

and absolute on the edge of extinction —

thought like going to bed, or thought

like a use for the common cold, or

thought like the one last coffee spoon

that ever set a drink in motion.

I wonder if there’s still a shop

where one can go with ideas to swop.

I drag my speculations through the morning,

walking out of Sunday further than

the countryside of private woods and as far

as the wet easy leaves distend, where I

pace out the estate of belonging to myself.

The Castle 

a man in a hat and a raincoat is

looking out to land: we exchange the virtue

of the afternoon. do you believe in

castles? says the man who dressed like god

as I lean beside his lunchpack and his flask

of tea… sorry? I reply.

the sun is warm in the shelter of the walls

and I’d only wanted to be here alone,

so I lie, smile, tell him that I couldn’t tell;

but he already knows this cynical tale

and he closes the scene with a small sad grin

I can see as he slides from view: across

the courtyard, through the walls, lingering,

lifting and sinking like a balloon,

deflating down the path that drew me here,

his plastic mack ideal flapping in the wind

about his knees, nervous, diminishing,

holding very tight to a very trilby mind.

alone with the clouds that whip across the sky,

touched thinly by the tattered strips of sun,

and with that flapping figure there below,

I’m closer now to flags of abstractions

that clattered once with symbols on the tower_.

he is a flag and flying in my present —

I raise an ancient cannon in my head,

take aim and taper, and dismember the man

who probably didn’t dress like god at all.

then I take my place by a breach to guard

the view that settles in dust along

the battlement wall, filtered from years

through the ruin’s slow solitude;

the afternoon has stretched across the sky

while mindless sheep ebb gently on the down,

and the castle imperceptibly becomes my own.

a white gull swayed by the will of air

ready as a leaf to wisp away is pressed

beside me without motion on a heavy

liquid sky — it washes to the sun

and spatters my face with wind as sea,

as the turf beneath soaks in my feet.

and I trail curiosity between the dungeon

and the tower feeling almost allegorical,

yet too full of detail to fill out the pattern

of grass and rock: each wall within walls

escapes explanation, and space between

spaces relate no relations, only earth and stone

to hold open interest while looking lasts.

all surviving history refracts mine here,

for my pillage of the keep twists the line

that solves its secret of perpetual decay.

the keep is flaking consciously as birds land;

a statue of a tower stump loses

its crownless head to the mocking rubble,

and lichen-pocked and rotting rocks

still lapped by ancient scars of burns,

fester into running scars down walls

as if they burst inside.

from the battlements hangs a stiff corpse of stairs

which I stumble down in broken questions

of which dropped first, the castle’s execution

or its slow corruption to today.

I know of castles

once served by sea, and I think of the tide

that has retreated so far from here since then;

and all the beachcombed mystery of what

this castle is is mine.

impatient I swerve —

and where’s the man who should be selling guidebooks?

is he on a day trip too, having spread

the ground plan back there on the ground for me?

and where is the plastic-mack-and-flask-man?

perhaps he’d understand if he was here,

if he was ever here at all

the air growing cold has worn away

the sun from the afternoon, leaving it

a wind-burned blister breaking on the sky;

a black crow heaves itself to land again

and limps for food across the sodden turf,

staying hunger during a moment to flag

some chilling omen with its leaded wings.

I raise my collar against the day

and hunch my jagged way on to the hill

lonely as a convict with his liberty.

the sheep are still grazing their territory

of grass, no older than they’ve ever been

as they move in disinterest round my legs,

that are to them as real as any other

blade of grass that’s pressing for the sun.

it hardly seems to matter now that there

really is so little to spell from a castle

this late in the day; I stand a while

looking behind inside the air as if

I walked on tops of trees: the castle falters;

I turn away: it softens in the wind.

turning myself towards returning I experience a thought and land poem.

Thought
and Land
Poem

subtle as ferilizer

agricultured into metaphore

I take the thinking-in-land way

back, but sink with questions

in the fields’ mudwelcome,

deepening in three dimensions,

closed by abstracts in four,

besieged and distracted by choice;

on the many of footpaths I merge

and separate along

indifferent to the possibilities

at each twig of decision,

till a narrowthroughing lane

nerves me with direction

from cells of random reason

towards a bleak

road field between —

a kind of seeping vacancy

             run through the root of ideas

in a ground solution of supposing.

at a town near coming back

allotments I seed from neglecting

the unturned truths left in earth

by spades of experience,

and stretch away with grass

in a park-passing land

from the grey barren crop of

closer path patterns;

then my room-defined

knowing — I plot my point here,

a one strip of belonging

preserved out of furlongs;

and the needed water-body-

closet functions where I

stubble out with thought

unharvesting my seated notions:

here concentration

roots my pad with doodles

sown, closed-circulating,

in its food-chained permanence

of

: days that grow to actions, actions to

their values, values into meanings,

meanings to beliefs, beliefs into

themselves beyond the days and these

past the breaking of thought: the

everything of thinking

(I turn behind to pull

the chain) flushed away to

farms of oblivion.

decision

Decision
Time

yes, I think I need to put an end to thought.

waking on Monday is never the worst thing in the world –

there’s always Coronation St, and swede, and getting up;

the weekend’s cocoon shrivels just the same

and leaving it is just a part of going on,

even if I happen to find I’m a caterpillar still

and not a thing of beauty and perfection;

there’s a cigarette, and a cup of coffee waiting,

and a shave, if I bother – because there always is –

and time to read down history in columns of news,

then all the consolations of what I couldn’t do if I wasn’t myself,

like all those who didn’t wake this morning

on account of dying overnight:

their last week was nothing like a work of art,

no butterfly wings to stretch to what they might have been,

just ragged with flakes they’d never have remembered,

very much like being themselves, I suppose;

then having read the paper I can go and do

the things they did before they left so suddenly.

but first, when I’m ready, I need to think seriously

about crawling out of bed.

Monday
Morning

there’s a wonder in the early streets like frosts on windows

come to life in water moving

while the virus of the new week reaches

to an anything that just might happen –

such as spring — having heard the whether forecast:

a dead bloody Monday — if it was₀

daylight slowly drains drowned streets,

oranged still under permanent sodium,

fills them with light and unelectric motion,

stirred steadily to a lost identity –

and morning: black grey, thick grey, mist grey, forming.

blank bloody morning — if it was.

buses run fluid with drab energy,

a dense trail of ants to dismember

dead cats in city hedgerows:

down the road and nonchalant as nature

the juice of people is secreted in passionless hysteria.

rotten bloody bus routes – if they were.

going coming buses, each, both, running

two ways, seek an indifference

like suspended animation,

and the dance of two crowds foams to the traffic island

not having agreed to stay their own side.

stupid bloody traffic lights – if they were.

someone should think of perpetual motion

for science to harness their uncertain moments,

to replace the computer with office staffs;

and I’d like to map out the route of everyone here,

each line, like the tubes, in a different colour.

stupid bloody poet – in their way.

battered, a necessary freak, I’m only nearly

obscured beneath some helpless car,

with these amoebas, spreading where there’s room,

all incorruptibly simple by chance:

drops of urban water evaporate from the morning.

wonderful day for December – as it is.

Simple
Poem

hey road, you can leave me here,

pass me in the fast lane –

I’m slowing for you now;

think I’ll fasten my safety belt

to the lake on your shiny park_e

 hello pigeon, glad you look glad

walking my pace apart down there;

did you wait for me long?

think I’ll learn your pigeon steps

miming mine nearby.

simplepoem

as it is_.

perhaps I’ll try it your way

having run out of work, till I

run out of time.

till Tuesday

hello (by phone) you must be another person

which maybe what I need myself this week.

can you remember when you smiled

so carefully careless

last year at the party which was drunk?

I dragged you to a bedroom where,

for as long as it took, we made

mad passionate conversation —

I could tell in an instant that you

were on the other side of me,

are you coming to a film?

I’d like to see what happens.

(I’m only trying to be nice and liking

is a word I can use with impunity):

I like your impunity, dear, very much.

goodbye.

maybe I’m another person now instead.

meanwhile and twelve feet tall

up on the screen the story unwinds,

tragically large

One of
Two
Possible
Cures

the prophet of doom

stands on the steps of his imminent disaster,

kicks his last few days in a can

down aimless pavements.

“I know what’s wrong with me,” he says to the

hospital receptionist as he fills out his form

the doctors are leaving for a long weekend

having earned enough the first two days.

at some point in the process of introduction

comes the change from red to green, green to red

illusion to real

losing to realisation.

“I’ve read all the books, you see,

there’s only one of two possible cures,”

he tells the nurse who gives him tea

orderlies pack the hospital

back into a cupboard for the night.

“sorry mate, if you only knew the trouble it takes

to change a bulb when a light blows out,”

echoes an ancillary down empty corridors –

he too is filling out forms

by the glow of the street outside

“there are too many cases nowadays

of mistaken identity, that’s why we

have to be so sure,” says the guy on the gate

who lets him pass out with a smile –

ambulances are intercepted for smuggled bulbs and forms,

stretchers lining the groaning pavements.

“there’s nothing wrong with you my friend,” says a

cop in the woods of drunks and shops:

habeas corpus to you, old chum,

we’ve got all the bodies we need.

then a series of chance encounters

and standardised communications:

“take that you bastard, if you won’t smile like us”

provide an overwhelming spontaneity,

the kind which cannot treat an illness

or eliminate symptoms confirmed

in the Home Doctor manual, page 365.

during the doctors^‘ long weekend

the prophet of doom in solitary confinement

on the blind side of a one way mirror

inadvertently poisons himself

with one of only two possible cures

(“we know what’s wrong with him now,”

says a doctor to the coroner at last.)

and abandons the world to a hollow rattle of cans

propelled indefinitely down lonely pavements.

paralysed I grapple with my coat; the dark

world rumbles and thuds with seats.

then lights are restoring the fact of the cinema:

I twist out a smile for her without nerves

and feel to the exit senseless in a crowd of senses,

feelings hardening like mud, and kicked

to dust beneath the feet of the foyer crush,

she is quiet too — but what did you think of the film?

she is quiet too — I suppose you know

it’s really allegorical of someone

who will meet his end with this weekend;

she argues with questions in her look;

I say it’s alright, it’s a joke, and push

through the glass door, the warmth running out.

Flying
Away

we breathe from the air of our clasping hands,

an energy in an imminent smile

thrusts our silent conversation

as if into space along a shore;

and motion between our arms on the long sand

ripples through thought of making the sky —

an inch of movement

edging itself for direction

springs taut muscles

that break the steadiness of our sudden legs into the dark:

beating our feet into shingle

acting out against the crisp granular night,

aching for the pain,

our running flings the beach beyond each step,

each stride striking out the next to break past

positives of you and I and here.

we burn like the birth of a star

bursting for the source of its energy

extinguishing our own identities,

open into what we are

and ready to vanish.

but the empty beach stumbles back on our faces,

crushes us slowly

down to the walking

pavement,

and separately we have not flown away.

but tragedy is terrible still, her face cold;

certainty is dull and her mouth set:

you say simply that the film was for me,

but really all of us are for the film;

and she’s curious what change in me this is,

while that someone I once knew has been melted

down in her crucibled maturity

and remoulded in this different kind of friend.

or putting it another way, we fail

to be each other with such beautiful symmetry.

she waits beside me like a myth, while I flick

through frames of needing, trusting, making love

till her bus comes.

Cycle
Lights

I’ve engraved the thought on a wall

with empty eyes,

I’ve turned away reading a sad stone message

in the path,

and I might still be with her if

I were there

holding hands on the brickwork with circles

of the cycle lights,

saying goodnight in the instant that

streetlamps cut:

a somewhere I could always return with eyes

full of walking

to outgaze my wish.

whenherbuscomes

more,

Time
Table

walking.

Wednesday stalked

awkward to town,

brought thus right up against

the bus stop and the timetable

i feel i ought to need to go

somewhere since there must be still

some different sights from these when i can’t

surrendered from cover to

cover a distance

with a shroud of motion

the nerveless bus

shuttering.

The Very
Lateness of
the Apple
Crumble

and: when I get there ... there’s a restaurant and roast

pork, with waiters paid to smooth, dish

out food tables as if I was their most

fortunate subject ever to be granted his wish:

and then: they don’t come: they leave me, punished with doubt

for what it was I did, whatever wrong it was —

for the tone of my order, my approach to peas without

due care for their shape: and then they don’t come, because

they forgot, or want me to have this spare time to think in,

or meditate on thinking, or time to nearly

emulate a saint and seek unworldly distinctions,

passively awaiting the last part of the meal: nearby

they prophesy I’ll subside to words and fumble

complaints at the very lateness of the apple crumble.

Points of
Departure

Wednesday afternoon

return

to the point of departure

return to a room

afternoon

and return

afternoon afternoon

afternoon

afternoon

afternoon to evening

and all

the possible things

I could do

tonight

starting with going to bed, finishing

with wishing I had, and being between

what in hell can I do for a change

to evening...

in the ever of nothing-ever-happens

I wait for the daylight when I’ll wait

for night when I can wait for day when ...

days scrape on caterpillar

tracks, levelling, preserving under mud

ageing metal-crumpled men moulded

to indifference, shaped to specifity:

slower and slower till even the instant

of death lasts in an odour of measure;

diminishing in repetition

each action smaller than the last, the week

closing on my room like a shrivelling apple_.

what in hell can I do ...

and all...

by dark in the dense smoke corners of boredom

alchemise nothing to words to continue:

and all the standard problems solved,

exclamation marks replacing questions;

all ideas resolved in studies

of a hundred critics’ spelling of “relevance”;

and persistent as strays the scratch of social

frictions on the door step pricking less urgently than

the bite of my own fleas for rehabilitation.

… what in hell...

the possible things...

here, filed in a metal drawer,

this evening, televised for my entertainment:

cobbled in with introspection,

listening to philosophies clattering through streets

after rain, and the discovered necessity to

invent, lest god should exist, my hiatus.

… for a change …

the possible things...

writing, pencilled in imagination

to a girl who once touched me with lustless sympathy,

a letter to a friend who sees the spring

reduced to plastic flowers, yet still in verse,

and news from half a dozen people

I don’t expect to hear from again.

… what...

I could do „..

eyes holding the unminded scrutiny

of two severed tickets for a film, believing

“Thank you, come again” on the back.

…do…

tonight...

interested still that tomorrow

might be something different, overwhelmed

today should have been so ordinary.

the return to the point of departure

when this is return and the point and departure

point and departure

point

I am / its centre / the room

no inside inside / the snail death

and retreat of whorled darkness

point

the break / the door / outside as burnt paper

the shell / light quenched / coated / door slamming

the leaded corpse exposed to air / door slam / shell crashed to dust

point

ashes winnowed from the doorstep

once

i was there

point of departure:

standing here naked

except for a watch and a pair of socks,

you contemplate your instrument of life,

a dull maroon Parker pen

and sigh that everyone seems to try

to be different from everyone trying to seem

to be different

from everyone

till you think you can’t quite decide

whether no one is left to be everyone

or whether just everyone’s

you,

till you are no longer even who you are.

and you are

a final removal from everything,

valid for being the nooneparticular

and certain at least for not being sure:

since everything,

you said, was different,

it certainly would be different now,

but it’s not, it’s different, whatashame.

though that’s hardly cause now to penetrate

whiteness, to release your ink when you might

have gone to bed, or walked the cold stone streets

in your socks.

: point of departure

seven steps from the doorway a pavement

eighty a main street

and release from the singular.

naked in a hall of mirrors, two-way, distorting...

the town through the holes in digestive biscuits...

everything ugly as insomnia ...

malicious with cold a tramp pokes

down a road of empty waste bins.

a bald headed man among machines

in the all-night laundromat watches

his dirty problems revolve before him,

and nurses are returning to digs in pairs

heeding plausible tales and shivering

past with glances, half raped already

in dark places by rustling shadows

of shrubs where a girl went once alone.

pubs spill out

twenty to eleven

streets swilled with voices and mouths:

“I saw your wife today Mr Singh; she said

I could come back another time, Mr Singh,

for more;” then the eyes of Mr Singh.

a woman at a bus stop

counts the coins in her purse

slowly for a second time₀

bars wash out

ten to eleven

and “excuse me sir”

thrown like jetsam,

swirling mangled

senses, “please sir

would you have a…?”

easy to ignore

the last prayers

of a man sinking;

his carved face persists,

he holds his hand out

to a private silence:

in some quiet corner he offends

with feeble transience “do not obstruct these doors –

they are in constant use”.

then white on the roadway

the signs reread an earlier act

KEEP TO RIGHT

KEEP LEFT

BUSES, TAXI, DANGER, SLOW

KEEP CLEAR

STOP DANGER

DOCTOR

DOCTOR

with marks of blood

spilled by a boy steeled dead,

now tensing for the cry of the hollow slouching shell:

a one no longer even who he is,

a scene repeated with its fascination,

a tragedy deleted from its silence.

everything singular …

the town through holes ...

naked.

on Thursday I find another bus queue

pick another stranger with eyes unlike mine

and ask her to a film

believing those two severed tickets that read

thank you come again.

it’s one more knot

on the string of chance encounters

and standard systems of communication.

overwhelmed with the spontaneity

she follows me into the chill dark

till we are frigid with mutual certainty

like the cold smooth greeting of neon on damp camber

a dim reflection of a lost real shape.

we walk in silent obligation

loosening streets on the alien town

as if this were the end of a long affair

regardless of which end it might be.

spools of frost on hedges and lawns

unwind on the evening

in the same spectacular shows

as every other night of the week.

snow starts unable to disguise our purpose so far:

the shape of her legs poised on the cinema steps

the warmth of her body pressing through doors

a crystal wonder of water freezing on glass.

then frame by frame

I obscure the Tuesday film again in thought,

each as different as particles of snow,

no further change to the texture of the floor;

later, questionless, I take the snow queen

to her castle home

bathed in the warmth of expectation.

The 
Sword
and the
Lamp

drunken valleys and forests fall back into echoes

hurled behind in the yearning for northern mythologies.

the gentle grassland rolls motion in a ball,

wraps speed in the tension of wind

while unseen in the darkness is the hand

that clutches the sword

and the rider astride the white horse of the downs.

across the impossible space of kingdoms a

lamp glows steady and passive,

bent among crags carved by fiery winter ice. the

angry claw of a cloud hangs at an armslength

hunched to the rocks and bound by premonition.

shadow over shadow,

lowland castles founder on the easy downs

as rider and mount, insubstantial in grass and air,

follow out that sheepish rounded land;

and the sword, high and dull like a prowling bird,

is blunted on the night.

burning and resolute,

standing as stone fast against the torrent,

the lamp strikes jealous havoc ledge by ledge.

higher and farther where rocks

arch crabbed bodies through sodden turf

the rider pushes up the howling face of the hills.

the sword on its northward quest

beaten dry by the clashing wind

slices the space between passage and encounter.

the lamp opens crevaces in rain and cloud

and bares the sky-torn earth with her light

flat stones smoothed my months,

dead sedges, leaves like knives:

streams are the only trace for the rider and the sword

nearing an end in the courtyard moors.

beyond the next peak lamplight catches a turning hilt;

a blade shivers, splinters on the guttering flame.

Don’t worry, it
will soon be over

                 and after and now as the day. ye

                 t and on

                  bu

                                                                                           t and on

                                                                                                    ye

                                                                          t and but the day’s

                                                                                               break

overswells the Second Break.

a holocaust to smash, obliterate.

the thought of it, the two dimensional mushroom,

fuck and thrown up, to make and unmade;

screams preserved in jars preserved in screams

screams to tear with numbers, screams and tears

swelling with heavy unearthly encumbrance, the

tares of the continuum.

as if it will soon be

over, ruins where the flowers

grow, over all. grown over

from the start to the finish

fuck the. as if it will be, was once,

ova. over only words.

yet to find the holocaust to break it,

break it first, break it fast

                                                                         till the words break

over the second version, overtime

from end to end: the numerical version

where one holds no ideas beyond one,

only one to go, the original version:

to count oneself, to think along

the paving stones on the counted pavement

till one is carried out feet first over

a threshhold with or without an idea,

within or without an idea, counter to counter,

now there is sufficiency in smashing a sparrow’s

brains out on your windscreen,

and what a piece of cake is man,

what a pair of feet to come and go

with unnoticed plosion of failure of failure

beneath the small squeak of fate’s shoes.

the world at your feet, as if it will soon be

over. 

Myths of 
Love

and after it’s gone

and the sense grows up that nothing was there

it feels like nursery paper on the wall

with the need to belong to what is no longer,

though why perpetuate the myths at all?

for the moment died, now milky cells, now mystery

when time is alone with the beginnings of life.

and now that a girl goes

and the day grows, there’s still something there

that peels like nursery paper on the wall;

needs have dreams that no longer matter,

but why perpetuate the myths at all?

for fairies die, the Santa Claus, then Christ

when the edge of the world is so close in the dark.

as the day is going

and the week grows up an anything is there

to steal like paper from damp brown walls;

questions linger with unheeded matter

of why perpetuate the myths at all?

since god will die, and art and death

when Saturday lies in a Sunday’s soil.

something falls from an unknown woman’s

single bed at five on Friday afternoon,

flees in the street’s disgorgement

ahead of her return from work

and again like every day among the UFOs

swept along by the great tidal bore

of the town as it builds the scifi tension

for the space the weekend brings

at the petrol station the week is wound down

to speak to the pump attendant peering in,

the night is wound down

on a hundred thousand people ticking over

with just enough gas to get by.

the library closes on the pages of a dictionary

incapable still of evaluating words,

the supermarket rings up rolls of profanity

double wrapped by the world of the dark.

The Pub
Quiz

the pub deliberately illuminates a

group of three friends welcoming the

advent of a fourth:

“don’t stanza round

sit down, compose yourself.”

“you’ve grown loose ended.”

“you haven’t moved your feet all week.”

“yes, I’ve been there, making up the couplet

that will end all random connections.”

one friend shaded by a petal

writes his life in incidents of beer,

another has an endless sentence

to describe the way he feels:

they follow it out to the point

where he pushes back the door and orders a round

and they lose themselves in DIY sound;

a third sardonically replies in declensions of his own,

his gearbox, your steering wheel,

the condition of BL.

“I lie awake imagining gas,

spend the day just sleeping off

the view from my window;

maybe that’s why I haven’t been around.”

“you are figure at night across fields

invisible, existing only

in the drag of a cigarette.”

“I know that it’s real.”

“you should put your ruins

in the care of the D or E,

your skulking demolition orders

make us feel insecure.”

“yes, yes that’s true.”

“if you really want to end it all

you can drive my mini through a wall,

I cannot offer more.”

“you don’t understand,

you’ve missed the point:

I’ve missed the point

don’t you understand?”

“oh cut the talk, he’s sick can’t you see.”

“balls, he’s normal, they said so on TV.”

“he’s just a little more ...

implausible than you and me.”

indecision hangs, left slowly to distend

its tongue, asphyxiated by a spent weekend,

“he can’t be right.”

“not quite.”

“he might.”

silence burns away the parcelled

parcel conversation

passed from chair to chair;

a wind-fact faction breaks

it open and a charred scrap of paper

lifts in the warmth of the air inside:

no one has anything

more to say.

shapes disintegrating,

one power remains,

that of recognising change,

                                                       tonight a place at the centre of

                                                                                              urinals

                                                                     instead of at one end.

disintegrating shapes disperse.

Late today

then, sounds,                                                                                  

late:

tamboura

is the fridge humming from the kitchen;

tabla

a lorry shuddering

on the hill outside;

strange music

spiralled in cacophony:

sitar

today. 

A Week in
Smoke

someone spoke

maybe he woke do

they know him

(wrote a poem)?

was it a friend

ideas to lend?

at least at home

there’s safety underground,

won’t leave a tome

for weak ends to confound

some other bloke

who never wrote

“here lies a man

who didn’t pass away but died,

no wish to scan

forever, hardly even tried”

the week in smoke,

some kind of joke?

perspective:

Show Trial

Saturday and all last week at a town near you

the street explodes with alien life forms

savage and solitary in swarming crowds –

panic flames of frozen figures spurt from the car park tower,

walls and walkways open in arcade disaster,

swallowing the population

as shoppers grow in hitchcock hysteria;

like a fevered room of harsh enormities

nine-foot-tall illuminated faces

peer out ahead and purposefully take stock

of just the first five seconds of shock;

bergmancouples propelled in mutual silence

carry destiny in the pores

of their puffed up made up cheeks,

their lips barely touched by saliva;

children fling out across the pavements

like spaghetti desperadoes seeking shelter or gain,

and monsters at the supermarket tills extrude

human features hammered together

in cellared laboratories and moulded

for consumption in their cutting room homes.

the frames of the street

jerk in three dimensions,

shudder perspective into motion;

the traffic prowls as incidental music

while a town lost to normal catastrophe

freezes in an ultimate special effect,

and misses the terminal case with one

of only two possible cures

(a man in a raincoat and a hat)

shopping for the weekend

then Crystel Tuesday passes by

scaling high rise blocks

with superhuman desire,

hailing a party tonight:

please come, she says,

and the light fuse blows

on overload or underload

on all that went before:

girl shop street town space Saturday

vanish from the screen in an option of expectation

tonight.

proposition:

the world will be finished by the weekend

the world will finish by the weekend

or a world

will be finished by the weekend

co-ordinates:

a party somewhere on Saturday night

much like a party a Saturday

or a year ago:

many people strange to each other

some breaking down the strangeness

others exploring

two discovering the strangeness between them

postulation:

strangers will meet a strange end in strangeness

the case for:

“I had a dream”

“but you know that dreams are not the end”

“dreams are truth”

“just images

another truth within the mind

outside themselves”

“I have no other truth

do you?”

uncontested evidence:

the street reassembles in a crowded room

the traffic vrooms up and down the stairs

pallor of glasses

panacaea of smiles

grasp of arses

and inspection of piles

it’s the last remembered thing from a week before

the past dismembered thing from a weak before

the acne of cosmetic girls

that bursts in mirror eyes

the social disease of the CAMRA crew

documentised by their social dis-ease

people in fever, a room of harsh enormities

not known faces that crack in remoteness

that lock two people in reciprocal voids

“thank god you’re here I

wanted so much to say”

the room storms in on the conversation

like security police belying their name:

doors, windows, arms, screams fly open in crescendo,

songs interrogating sense with a throb

of unanswerable questions,

stroboscope dancers beating up their dreams

while the bare bulb on the dangling cord

is a bursting efflorescence;

visual evidence is thrown into doubt

by the statement that colours are indescribable

as a soft spoken saviour creeps out of the crowd.

expert witness:

can I turn you on man

     with my cube of silver foil with

obscure public preparation,

     my secret ritual, with my

hand rolling rosary

     candle, insense and time: my wafers of

shit are the body of Christ

     and you gulp down smoke like wine.

can I turn you on man

     with friends beyond your scan,

with fellowship, communion

     the worship of mind and man,

with truth locked in confessionals with

     the way things really are

you’ll feel the force within a tree

     the space between the stars.

can I turn you on man

     with a woman you can feel,

a laughing luscious crazy love,

     the way things should be real;

yes I can turn you on man

     with the blessing of the dead: I’ve got

all the wine that you can take

     if you have got the bread.

summing up:

the thin cigarette man grabs the arm of the Crystel girl

“no, please smile again, please smile,

I’m feeling your hand for my words,

there, sit there for godsake,

take a seat, take a seat, take a whole

theatre for the show tonight.”

knowing every line of a speech by heart

leaves the rest unquestioned.

“yes,” is her line returned.

“but tonight I know there’ll be no rest,

so you must understand that I’m real,

not a prophet of doom with chocolate sex,

not even one of two possible cures:

whatever it is that’s happening now

is happening for us all

whatever it is that happens to happen.”

“no,” she says, “another time maybe.”

“then it’s goodbye then, goodbye,

and goodbye when i get

when i get there

if i get there this time

while i wait

while i wait for a time

for a wait for a time

hello and goodbye

no returns only rooms

what in hell can i do with

goodbye

with the point of departure

without point in departure

an accident or joke

and goodbye and goodbye

in truth and in order

in order to tell you goodbye

goodbye for godsake goodbye

when goodbye is the only form

of standardised

communication

goodbye goodbye

corroboration

this is the time of tension between birth and dying

the place of solitude where three dreams cross

for me and TSE

Dream 1:
Last Bus
Street
Photograph

the upper deck clicks exposes

an outside scene set in a

glance of car – coated shape there –

 crossing impact – closed

a motorist just trusts the wheel, feels

cuts quickly eyes out –

at sees

one grim shock-gripped man puts

his slim umbrella out

concernwards

a cyclist’s passed bent gaze back

shapes his sudden open-

question look

watching-girls’ cries hang gasped,

sick glimpsed, heads struck back with

reflexed contact

the curb-ground  friends’ hand sweeps the

anguish grated in his eyes

grotesquely street-wide

the driver’s face creases tight, screech

-of-brakes taut, tyrebitten,

gnashed and knowing

while a dumbed and someone‘s dulled blood lump

shudders down camber

lead and guttered

the instant person incident is stilled

exposed —

traffic gropes offside past a hat in the road,

the bus is fussed to the next stop

then the next.

Dream 2:
A Journey 

on his journey

afar with bags –

on foot and turned to wave

     with certainty

on the road – blind

in mist breathing

on his footsteps winding tightly

     with promises

onto the cleft

mountain edges  –

on a dot before extinction

     with change of time

the track-fact freezes on his dragging feet

that grate his eyes out

following ground up

earth fixed

     there will be entering soil

     there as if the sea

a rock face is eyeless, mouthed with fallen

streams between cheeked black gabbro

bleak capped

and unspeaking

     then is crevices of rocks

     meeting terms with stones

his wrinkled lines of walking write against

pace-aching flints kicking him

back, stooped to save

breaking

     all will bend in the strata

     with permanent life

a hermit of the mountain lives here hidden

only where his care is cold in the cave of age,

for the water in a January sun cannot

seep through the air or soak to the heart of his cell

     a monk who has knelt

     on the steps is bent to the temple

     and towards all things

sleep here is naked with the woods, he rises early

with the cramp of earth, his strain is breathing and his

seeing is the wet easy leaves –and each day now is

memory that restless starlings clattered in his eaves

     all action waiting

     is the winter –  and his koan

     is as old as thought

there will be wild ducks on lakes when the sun shines after

winter’s circle without food – he knows they populate

a purpose which survives for spring, that they never

dive out crying through the ice, out of sky and light

     the journey ends

     all-shining a lake across

     the surface of the sun

sun sinks on to evening

glowing from beneath the clouds

and brighter than day

he wakes at the lake edge source

uncertain even of change

and terrified to quench the pain that he brings

     unshaped abstracted in the level light the old

     man enters the rocks with the spring

and vanishes utterly just out of life

Dream 3:
The Burial
of Heroes 

after the steel driven on flesh, and the steel

light of the bloodlet day

is the passing of time.

silent filing soldiers crusted with the earth

that buries their dead, drudging back to green lands,

draw a line across their highland’s history,

where indelible flames over the moors pray

to the ruined ancestral homes, and castle stones

restore the ancient hovels of the skeleton hills,

and a black crow counts the day carrion and past

the whip of hands and swords above the wind,

the rattle of metal that strangled the gasping plunge

of the burn die back now in rubbled mountain rain,

with the husks of heroes sunk in the slaughtering hills.

dull brown grass, deep heather

the colour of blood hardened;

grey toned graves mourned

in monumental rocks;

and the gorged flesh of water, strewn

unburied, runs in open

landscape scars sucked to the glen

that preserves the thunder of battle,

for the heroes still live in the land’s frayed veins,

maintain in their darkness the earth’s perpetual

retreat, and host again beneath the shrouding

mists, honoured in a requiem of rain.

arrows grown to thistles, pikes to tree-dwarfs

point with the wind, stoop down towards the valley,

down where a castle stumbles at the heel of a lake,

while the arms of the dead are raised against the metallic

wind and the merciless spears of rain, their stone

gaze awaiting the clearing sky, the sign

to move again upwards with the helm of the mountains.

after the steel driven to earth, and the steel

darkness of the bloodlet land

is the coming time

voices in a void give unwelcome welcome to a new born year.

Yet Another
Sunday

and still

it comes obliquely into life

as the visible world fills with shapes

like strangeness through a hangover.

and still another Sunday

between waking and sleeping

in the simple complexity

the half-conscious double-conscious

nothing of everything

the crumple-car-like crushed awareness

mingling in collision, steel with flesh with light

between sleeping and waking.

yet still another Sunday

holding nothing more to span two Saturdays

than the lines of unlikely tightrope words.

and later still

in sleep or in a crowd

with the trees or while a sneeze

on Monday or one day

is wonder how it was

the world has been passed by

the weekend.“

WAY OUT ⟶

“WEEKEND” was started as an undergraduate exercise in 1969. It was eventually finished after gaps of several hundred lines and more than a decade of growing old because finishing things is even more satisfying than starting, if a lot tougher.

I still believe the initial motivation was right — to get out of the mould of short pre-packed instant-impact disposable-experience poems which I found all around at the time. I was fast losing my senses of balance, direction and gravity by imitating this approach, and I wanted to try hanging a few things together for a change. Admittedly life is not renowned for its consistent and connected experiences, although that does not stand in the way of novelists or the writers of obituaries.

This is not an argument for recommended the foregoing corpus to be laid in state as a particularly distinguished example of poetic form. But it does answer those who suggested I should have included a table of contents so that readers could pick out the bits they liked best. I would rather see “Weekend" buried without ceremony than have people rummaging about at an autopsy to

find the constituent organs which most benefited or weakened its health.

I dare say that mature reflection followed by a thorough revision prior to publication would have eliminated some of the more obvious weaknesses. But mature reflection is hardly in the spirit of a poem which attempts to achieve effects with poor puns and intellectualised lavatory jokes. Whatever else it might be saying, “Weekend” is an effort to show that poetry can be fun without being mindless. I hope something of this came through.

MJW April 1982 

Update 

Notwithstanding the above rather pompous outro, which appeared in the printed version, I’ve backtracked a little on my refusal even to identify the separate short poems which were assembled, with links, to create “Weekend”.

For one thing, that approach has tended to bury some of my better short poems. And titles are bound to add something to the reader’s understanding of what is going on. So, late in the day for this web site I’ve given some of the sections names. Text in italic often, though not always, indicates what’s going on in the poet’s subconscious. Hopefully it was already reasonably clear that the non-events of each day of the week start on a fresh page, which is probably more important than signalling where my favourite bits appear.

MJW May 2018