Jason. Brother in conquest.
Will we ever?
We were going to, once upon an old life.
And now we seriously should, as we were supposed to,
like we can and could and since voicebreak have been able to
(may we please be allowed to have,
as we once had, the eternal passion
which is and was and has always been?),
do what, destiny on tongues, we’ve done for swarms of moments.
Time undid us as we overdid the redoing
until, outdone by stumpier-mused acquaintances
who go from pole to jungle to desert to pole
for popularity, we went insane, gone
from onstage inbook roundtown view
as we underwent our forgoing
of drawing crowds like hedgehogs to an ant sandwich
and drew our own blood, drawn instead
by life’s crooked magnet. We withdrew,
withdrawn and canyon-deep overdrawn, but not yet
over the hill and downstream down to oblivion.
They outdrew us, those buzzword-pistoled
cowboys and cowgirls who knew
what the media-savvy have long known,
perhaps even foreknowing their showers of roses from the playpen,
how to grow among the overgrown undergrowth
until, garland-necked, one outgrows
the verbal blow-jobs that once blew one’s teeth off
and the overblown throwing around the sticky-floored arts centre
of enough cheer clap whoop whoop to overthrow
a Gujarati organ-grinder’s humility,
“please thankyou very very much, maharajah-sahib”
flying out the sweatshop window
to where Icarus and Gagarin flew
and disc upon disc of pear-faced kidnappers have overflown.
We slew all self-doubt, the way
famished bulls have slain herds of under-rehearsed matadors,
with a horn through the temple,
but now we lie around in a morgue of ash
and whiskey and fag-ends of ambition.
We’ve lain around like how Elvis lay hamburger-porky around
with age-neurosis underlying every word and chord
for the world and his pet hamster to see
for too long. You’ve seen how Gorbachev
oversaw the drift into a coma
of the long pig’s most summit-eyed experiment,
who foresaw that? Our creative economy
off the graph and onto the skirting board, how do we beat
an Afghanistan of tabloid-dead public apathy?
Browbeaten by bingo-winged pub landladies
and stationery shop managers into
“yes madam, no sir” counterfeit enthusiasm
in order to eat some own-brand spaghetti for Sunday lunch,
flabby from the dandelion-high expectations of society,
we’ve eaten, overeating to buttonless trousers,
every last bite and bit of code-of-conduct in gravy,
bitten our own necks
just as the vampire bat hidden in the bureaucracy bush
gives us its glorious permission to.
The floor gave way after
the last in my Soviet queue of shrug-abundant walkouts
and with zero misgivings
(perhaps you’ve forgiven me now)
I forbade any further barriers
to all the forbidden drives that drove me onwards
into the double-winged word-forest I’d
striven after since bubblegum and conkers,
to all the freedom-lust riding around
in my cobweb-ridden cerebellum
as I rode off into the sunrise,
the Alemannic sunrise that overrode
all those lost, stagnant voids.
Wheat beer with heads the size of knees,
twice a year lads striding around in lederhosen,
girls all dirndls titties abulge and pigtails,
a blackboard-rubber and some anglo-saxophone authority,
maultaschen and mustard jawohl jawohl jawohl,
I strode through the Black Forest pollen up nose
midges in ears writing and rewriting my story,
you well aware I hadn’t miswritten
a single gutsy sibilant guttural syllable.
Your own star desperate to rise,
desperate as an owlet in a tangle of plastic packaging,
you rose every afternoon in leather jacket
boots fraying jumper and trod through
the well-trodden sigh-begetting stench
of slow-begotten despair. Have you
forgotten yourself?
Wake the fuck up, ice water in face
not gin,
and once you’ve woken,
break into a billion broken smithereenlets
that anti-mirror you’ve spoken to
in circular mumbles for the last eternity and a half,
and speak to me!
Who stole your wand of
dream-weaving pyrotechnic stardust
that you wove every evening into
a thousand superfast-pulsed interwoven
charts of the human psyche? You child of midnight
with your superhuman power,
you froze in time and freeze more and more frozen
with each degenerate slouch round the sun
and didn’t choose it.
It chose you. Doctor Destiny shook you
like a tectonic plate shakes a Japanese nuclear power station
when the gate to your tulip meadow
took one last creak and,
overtaken with rust,
metallic hammerings all along the bars of her brain,
partook in that gargantuan, irrevocable,
into-the-unknown undertaking,
and when your percussion-poet mistook
a flatulent pastor for Christ himself,
rock and roll for Satanism
and your brainchild for a mistake,
and when your dial-twiddler Akis the Greek,
having retaken and retaken
your gooseberry-sour reverbed outthrashings,
forsook you with aloft nose
and claims of harassment,
your life’s work forsaken on his hard drive
like an echoing Napoleon on an Atlantic rock
before he fell,
cycling shorts falling halfway down his toned arse,
under the wheels of an articulated lorry.
All these sharks-in-the-pond that have befallen you
have swollen in your throat
and shorn off your chest-hair
and sawn off most of your left leg
and sown anthrax in your asparagus patch
and shown their gnarled penises to your auntie Ethel
and mown down your pet rabbit with
a swastika-emblazoned combine harvester
and sewn up your mouth with barbed wire
and strewn bear-traps around your guest bedroom
and torn all the signal posts off your train set
and sworn a pact with Lucifer
but I swear to you, as I swore at you that night
across the crackling waves all the way
from Schwabenland, if you wear your fucking cape,
then the outworn earth kilometres beneath you
will bear less and less significance with its
crashing shunting honking pile-ups of bores
all born with a silver spoon
and a bumblebee up their arse,
with its overbearing social justice warriors
out in cloud cuckold mainstream media land,
their party lines garrottes around their necks,
with its propaganda and thought-police
and its sheep all baa baa baa no borders no nations baa baa baa
into the pen of one-world government,
with its shining-toothed, naked-six-packed boy bands
and their autotuned nothings,
their conveyor-belt platitudes,
with its baseball caps,
with its gossip magazines and dog-shit and Hillary Clinton,
you will outshine the lot of them
like the Northern Lights to a girl scout’s bonfire,
like you outshone the wombat-faced publican
with his “two poofs and a paki” heckle
and all the “you’ll never win”
mediocrity-drones, because you will
be winning, old boy,
you will have been winning for some time,
you will have won,
once you’ve spun your pulse-rich nickel-string web
round and round the faces of the servants of the towers
of the empire of the overlords of Denmark Street.
Four years have run their
hairpin-bend-spiky course. The world outran us,
and youth is overrunning
into the mortgage and nostril-hair era.
I came home, overcome with
what had become of Europe, as I swam against
crashing tears of worry and alienation
and other people’s fatheaded, smug-faced naivety
and continent-killing moral vanity,
my life in smithereens, a homeward-bound refugee
from George Soros’s hmmm refugees hmmm.
Right now newts and fishlets
and an apple juice carton are swimming
downstream along the reddening bank
and under a barky chair
on a rope five loops round a collapsed megabranch
while seven ducks out on a team-building exercise
who had swum upstream
begin singing their beaky carton-inspired evacuation song
that rings out across the crisp early-evening moment
as they spring to leafy-grassed safety.
An oafish and soggy Golden Retriever,
gormless grin sprung across his doggy fizzog,
sinks under the ripples, and all his quadrupedal
stinks that had stunk their way
around the bottom eighteen inches of the town
shrink away as though he’d never
drunk anything but freshly-pressed
fairtrade chrysanthemum juice
in his entire flyblown life as,
ladle-tongued, he drinks, outdrinking
all the newts and fishlets under the barky chair
and even the sodden and dissipated rodent
digging away at the river edge.
The deep-dug past sticks to my brain,
and if I strike my memory back back back into the reveries
of wonder-struck youth, when I slunk along
the Lea, the Ching, the Roding’s
fecund frogspawn-mushy mumbling fissures of mud,
a vision swings into view
of the loyal, bulging-hearted, bright-eyed girl
who never flung herself into my loving arms,
who never slung pebbles into those whirlpools
or tennis balls at ebullient damp dogs with me,
whom I never clung to, warm with mulled wine
on snowy December evenings,
who never strung Christmas cards over our
photograph-cramped mantelpiece, because
her existence was never wrung out of
God’s vast soggy tablecloth of creation,
whose non-existence
for a decade or so
stung every muscle and fibre in my body
like a pint of wasps
and hung my heart
from the last rotten tree on the tundra,
that overhung a drop into an icy abyss,
but not anymore.
Love,
or the desire and lack thereof,
hasn’t cut me for years
and won’t recut me now that it’s
shut itself out of my veins
key through pocket-hole down trouser-leg into
a patch of maple leaves somewhere
and quit splitting my sense of self
into emptiness-hit-and-hit-again
maladjustment-slit pyramids and pentagons
that don’t fit together and have never
fit anything anywhere.
Square peg inside a round hole? Maybe,
but not like back across the acts and scenes back when,
music still in my legs,
head over heels or knees over nose,
something still didn’t fit
and, however I put it,
that barricade hurt me again and again and again so that,
oblong peg outside a triangular hole,
ready to burst into a thousand fiery splinters,
every backward bounce,
every thwarted thrust
thrust me deeper and deeper
into a bees’ nest of frustration.
“This fleshy culprit will cost you
your capacity for rational discourse unless we
cast it off!” the doctor forecast.
“Phimosis, but don’t broadcast it.”
Ah, Moses and his tribe,
typecast throughout history, but such wisdom!
And me, pants full of cotton wool,
recast as a cowboy
in a cock and bull story.
I bet you’ll never let that ghetto North Hackney
out of your overcharging memory banks, where
in mouse-riddled sublet rooms full of dented
cider cans and ambitions
on ash-cloudy gin-wet evenings
we set our hearts on hopes to reset
life’s huge drifting race to nowhere
beset with raft-upsetting waves of
absurdity and albatross dung,
or at least offset it with new mental empires
to spread across the empty fraudulent world,
shedding all fear, ridding ourselves of society’s
snake-pit of discouraging, disheartening disadvice
as we bid and rebid for greatness.
Who outbid us?
The overbidding, popularity-hungry
conformists.
Or maybe
we underbid.
The Jews just sat there.
On the upper deck of the charabanc,
folded-armed and expressionless
like obedient babysat grandchildren,
bushy shtreimels on heads,
long black jackets in the late summer blaze,
as though resitting a forensic pathology exam,
as though after a Monsieur Mangetout-style Rosh Hashanah feast
they’d group-shat out an entire open-topped bus
at both ends of which
loudspeakers spat out girly pop music
next to a giant dancing bunny.
Expressionless.
The Spaniards,
a teenage transvestite rockabilly and his entourage,
their faces lit up with fervour
at relighting their London adventure,
slid into the spare room, three or four
or five of them, and never backslid
on paying, overpaying in fact
for the flaking junk-swamp that we underpaid for.
“We’ll repay the invisible landlord
the moment he lays his ghostly finger
on our doorbell and waylays finally
our rent-free alcoholic lives with a plump bill, if he
overlays that squeaky stretch of wood with an actual carpet,
but for now he’s mislaid himself,”
we always said. A Spanish spare room,
don’t ever gainsay, stands as a joyously
less ridiculous idea than my plan for
the flapping great marquee
that stood out in the back garden withstanding
Mother Nature’s earthward projectiles.
Nobody ever understood my intent
for a tent in a tent as an address,
misunderstanding my by-that-point-intense
man-with-chopsticks-in-a-world-of-blancmange
inability to get a job
as straightforward idleness.
“Oh my God, who just got shot?”
No need to reshoot the drama in the girl from Valencia’s eyes
as, in the next room,
I overshot my target again, loaded magazine
in hand, splat splat splat across the kitchen ceiling
walls cupboards oven door,
lose to a flock of moths? Not me.
Lost in bloodlust, I’d caught dozens that night,
some catching the light bulb’s rays
with their six feet up on the edge of the toaster,
some teaching their kids to seek shelter
behind tins of mulligatawny soup
or in coffee. One of them sought
to bring his wife or brother or fifth cousin to safety
upside-down on his back scurry scurry scurry
across the front of the microwave, but
splat! – swiftly-brought-down jar of beetroot my sword,
tea-towel my lasso,
how bravely I fought them, I think,
in that ring of death and Spanish jubilation.
I always thought,
maybe overthought in fact, all night long, that
barrels of cunning
are necessary to outthink a moth.
And never rethought that conviction.
But enough of such persiflage,
the man who had once upon a boom
bought our house, perhaps
in a frenzy of Thatcherite overbuying,
shod in shiny brogues,
clad in clean pinstripe,
made his late, late way to our doorbell
with his plan to remake our beloved ramshackle kibbutz
into a glistening marble pillar
of gentrification, and to
unmake us. Such trickery I’d not heard of since
the Maastricht Treaty. Out, out, everything out!
Over the marshes and far away,
just me and a few Spaniards
and a badger in a box left behind.
(Third or fourth great-granduncle Seamus,
if you’re overhearing me now
from up on your atheist cloud, no, you
didn’t mishear me. A badger.
If you’d ever held such a badger
and storyline in your arms, well...)
What a sight to behold on my grey autumnal way home,
bailiffs bash bash bash on the front door,
a gang of constables upholding
some subsection or paragraph or other
as I withheld myself (anticipation, thumping heart)
behind a wall (coast clear) and then
(oh, such memories of youth)
backward bounce,
thwarted thrust,
bees’ nest of frustration,
Mister Rabbi! Mister Rabbi,
are you selling door-key circumcisions?
Perhaps padlock hysterectomies
are outselling door-key circumcisions these days,
perhaps letterbox abortions
have resold and resold and oversold, all the bloody rage,
but that front door – unbreachable
and that badger – unreachable,
not to undersell myself.
Telling stocky, bushy-bearded Abel in a telephonic fluster
about the glued-up keyhole
and retelling the tale
of the landlord and his chevron-sleeved mafia
foretold nothing but a battered front door
under the cannonball shoulders of a fiery Catalonian.
“Whoa, whoa, amigo! Wind your neck in
and rewind back to last week,
to the night we unwound with whiskey and ketamine
in the room with the badger.
Priority numero uno – find the badger!”
“What the fuck? Badger?”
“The black and white furry bastard.
In the glass box. With the long nose.”
Abel found no sense in my panting, raving prattle
as I ground my brain round and round
for the Latin word for badger,
bound iron-stiff to my duty
to a stuffed animal in a box, before unbinding myself
with a deep-distant memory of a Spanish Internet article on forest wildlife
and a cry of “Meles! Meles! Meles! Meles!”
like a man with a roasted chestnut in his underpants.
In the late afternoon drizzle
you and Abel sent yourselves over a metal fence
like politicians over a question,
bending round the railway line and into the back garden,
crash crash crash through the October leaves
and the back door window pane,
rending subtlety to shreds with the fruits of
every penny you’d ever spent and two
treble-clef-eyed supposedly-misspent youths
in your frantic hands before,
so as not to overspend tickings and tockings
in that glue-keyholed, bailiff-stenched semi-squat,
you lent me two electric guitars
to flee with as quick as the day
you’d fled your itchy-fisted psychiatrist father
upstairs with a cry of “What about emotional intelligence?”
and so I fled with wet fretboards
to a couch in Bethnal Green
as you sped out of the house,
badger under arms,
into clouds of uncertainty.
Various autumns and yom kippurs
and bouts of haemorrhoids had sped by
before, in a weed and speed den
under the watchtowers of old East Berlin,
a brown-toothed big-boobed
high-testosteroned man-within-a-woman
who will never breed,
bred from biologists and soldiers and fugitives
of strong but increasingly-outbred Russian-
interbred-with-Georgian stock,
Koshka her-his name (meow),
fed me, perhaps overfed me
with all the care of a never-to-breastfeed parent,
amphetamine and definitive diagnoses
of Attention Deficit Disorder. Two hunters
in a world of farmers and bankers
and trainee management consultants.
“Inattentive, liebling. Not hyperactive like me”.
Decades of frustration
with loneliness,
with crowds and crowds full of nothing,
with invasion fleets of spoonfed opinions,
bled finally into a plastic cup.
Bleeding hell, mate. What plans
she or he and I read and reread out to each other.
A pumped-up white-nosed spring into the polluter
and off to Paris Barcelona Gibraltar Belgrade
just a sec, did I misread that?
No. Belgrade. And Sarajevo.
But ho hum. Time, plans, lives, entire nations
down the plughole.
And those nights with the windows wide open,
hands in the air,
the Glorious Leader all ein-reich-ein-volk
through a cable that led to an amplifier,
misleading the neighbours we
met the next morning by the recycling bins.
“Ooh, such lovely skin! What moisturiser
did the Führer keep in his bathroom cabinet, Koshka?”
“Sieg oil!”
Then history crept up on us while we slept
under blankets of money and work,
while I overslept, full of dreams
of music and literature, into my mid-thirties.
All at once the great tsunami of history
swept an ocean of cognitive dissonance
in wave upon wave of denial
over Western Europe,
sweeping Germany away from me forever,
my passion, my lifeblood, Germany,
the woods, the wheat beer, the watchtowers,
that golden language up on the mountain,
that career in translation,
prize of a decade-long hike,
yards from my grasp,
away from me forever
as I wept on the floor for the European soul
and still weep,
disoccidented,
in a cheap cagoule.
“What tsunami? What denial? What soul?”
Such mental leaps
as those good good good good good good good good good people
leapt, spiky rusting manacles over their ears,
down onto my back again and again and again,
overleaping reality
with mouths full of long words
that mean nothing at all,
feeble armies of pawns on the shoreline
with their heads in the sand and up their own arses,
“What invasion? What rapes? What brutal terror attacks?”
so now I lean instead towards the Slavic soul,
a real soul
dealt serfdom by misdealing masters
but feeling century upon century the pulsating raging refusal
to kneel down like the crushed Brahmin
had knelt before the mighty Mughal.
I am leaving this malleable subhuman subcontinent,
this vacuous non-culture full of treason,
this gurgling senile lunatic
with its own excrement all over its face
that has cleft all the dreams I had dreamt
into piles of fluff,
the nearly-dead West.
Onward! To the last of the Europeans, to Poland!
To proud, wholesome, intellectually free Poland!
And still I burn,
as I have always burnt,
learning along the way and every
thousand or so miles relearning the fire-dance,
to dwell in the forest of sharp-toothed tattooed giants.
The moors upon moors full of dwarves
spell catastrophe,
empty illiterate catastrophe
misspelt millionfold across the wall
in the same anonymous jargon,
and from my hiding-place in the far-flung corner
I smell the vomit-flavoured spray-paint
spilling into every cockroach-sheltering
nook and crevice.
Time to build.
Time to rebuild our sprawling
directionless overbuilt apocalyptic metropolis.
Time.
