It was back in the dazzling years in which Saturn
was locked on his screeching and slicing return
and I had allowed a young lady to flatten
and paralyse me with refusals to learn
the primal rules of human conduct.
I hadn’t realised at the time
(and so I just floundered and gasped like a landlocked
squid) she patrolled a borderline.
In other words, Lucy was a nutcase.
One minute she loved me, the next she would say
that I was a silence-deserving cuntface
for standing up for myself on the day
that she suddenly snarled she should give me a smack.
Some said I was wrong ’cause I answered her back.
Her love-cloaked heart did not look barren.
Such is the case with Borderlines.
Her lips produced no wailing siren.
I saw no barbwired ‘Achtung!’ signs.
She’d never made a cup of coffee
in eighteen years, perhaps that was one,
or the time she went all sulky and stroppy
the day that I laughed at her after she’d sung
that it was a long way to Temporary
instead of the correct Irish town,
or the fact she’d thought the way to ensnare me,
the first time I’d kissed her, from eyelids down
to wrists, was to thrust and thrust her crotch
at me like a broken bottle of Scotch.
She was bigger than me, nearly five foot eleven,
half of which was orange hair.
I called her the Norse word for fox, which is ‘Reven’,
and loved her with battleaxe raised in the air.
For twenty-six winters no girl had inspired me
and I had inspired no girl in return.
The human race alienated and bored me.
No-one encouraged my passions to burn.
Then suddenly, up popped this fantasy-catcher,
this Valkyrie goddess with fire in her veins
who hated New Labour and Margaret Thatcher
and self-righteous middle-class liberal clones,
whose poetry had the nerve to rhyme
(and rhyme with skill most of the time).
She wrote that her therapist had a breakdown
(which I assumed was just a joke).
She wrote that, in an increasingly fake town,
the London Cockney is ready to choke,
that we belonged to this tribe’s choking remnants,
outflanked by Jafaicans and money-faced twats
and rebels whose slogans all drip down from governments
and cultureless robots in luxury flats.
Lost on an unchanging ocean of blandness,
this girl was the solitary love of my life.
Why does nobody understand this?
How else could I have netted a wife
while stranded on a sterile sea
of sickening, endless conformity?
I bounced along the streets of Highgate
as though they were a trampoline,
filled with joy at uncovering my soulmate,
filled for the first time with genuine,
true happiness, all the flowers saluting
in the supernatural air,
God or Fate beaming and patting
me on the head as Lucy drew near.
Two loners alone in the world together.
Enfolded in her long pale arms,
I wished we could be enfolded forever,
lying there reading each other’s rhymes
as I showed her Iamb and Trochee and, best
of all, my frolicking friend, Anapaest.
As we lay there, exhausted, still covered in yogurt,
she whispered that it was ridiculous how
much (and I’m not saying this like a braggart)
she was in love with me. She said, “Wow,
you don’t just want to strip and fuck me,
you’re not like any bloke I’ve met,
you want to kiss me, stroke me, hug me,
lick rhubarb ice-cream off my feet.”
Therefore, it was more than a little unnerving
when, our love just nine days old,
she was washing herself and my bladder was churning,
I tapped on her bathroom door, and she scowled
that she ought to slap me for breaking her peace,
with chainsaws in her eyes and voice.
I softly warned her, “Well, no. If you hit me,
then I’ll hit you back,” which I thought was fair.
I may have adored her like rye adores whiskey,
but I wasn’t her punchbag, that had to be clear.
“Well, I reckon,” she continued,
“I could have you in a fight.”
To a man who wasn’t Hercules-sinewed,
this felt like more than a one-armed threat.
I slipped out the door and fumed homeward. For hours
she would not say sorry or anything else.
“I’ll speak when I’m calm,” her text-message glowered,
as though it was my fault. With hammering pulse,
lost between love and self-respect,
I told her to fuck off. Well, what d’you expect?
It’s said that human communication
is only seven per cent words.
The face, the body, intonation
and how two pairs of eyes cross swords
make up the ninety-three remaining.
The only aerial in the world
to receive the fuzz-free, full, unfading
signals that Lucy, who grimaced and growled,
decided that morning to suddenly broadcast,
is me. All other antennas receive
just seven per cent, but what beamed from her topmast
my lecture-hall friends knew best, they believed,
as they told me reacting to pain was “immoral”,
but unprovoked female aggression was “normal”.
Did something explode in an orangery?
I reeled, acid-blinded, that way and this,
covered in pith like a bomb injury,
the pith of stinging self-righteousness.
Strangled with silence, I couldn’t be choosy
or keep a firm grip on the values I prized.
I had to give in and say sorry to Lucy,
just like my liberal friends advised.
I begged her to talk so we’d sort out the problem,
blaming myself so her silence might stop.
She read my apologies and snubbed them
as though my heart was a piece of crap,
leaping in three days from being lovestruck
to “Please leave me alone. Good luck.”
But nothing could dampen my fire for this fruitcake,
which felt like being chained to a rock
for two or three years with a deafening toothache
in all of my teeth and a wasp in my sock.
I scrabbled for every last twig I could clutch at
to spark some feeling in Lucy’s breast
and grasped from a more and more desperate budget.
My liberal friends said I was obsessed,
as did Lucy’s parents who, likewise retarded,
threatened and abused me for trying to speak,
my humanity hunted and discarded
by the morally mollusc-weak,
by a tribe of emotional gastropods
squelched fast in a destruction squad.
Her parents drank and smoked and gambled
and didn’t seem to do much else.
They squelched around the house and mumbled,
avoiding the subject of mental health,
in fact, avoiding any subject
at all. I never saw them laugh,
or smile, or touch, or turn their snub-necked
heads to one another to half-
inquire how the other was feeling.
Nor did they ask me who I was.
Yet, Lucy insisted, they found me appealing
because, like them, I was working-class
and (unlike them) had an education,
passion, love and imagination.
Bob and Mary said I was the finest
boyfriend in Lucy’s almanac.
They changed their mind because I was honest.
So I tried to get them to change it back.
The liberals all scoffed, “You wrote to her parents?
How weird! How insane! How obsessive of you!
No wonder they view you with such an abhorrence!
Get over it! All you need to do
is move on and fall in love with someone
else, it’s easy, just go to a bar
and find a woman who makes you go “yum yum”,
then talk to her, and there you are.
Just pick a nice girl and stop making a fuss.
Just do what everybody else does.”
My confidants at this precipice moment
all sprang from families up on the hill.
They’d learned how to yodel their swift disagreement
towards a cliff-edge, and to smile as they kill.
With emotion-disputing superb moral fitness
they caught the whole world in their minuscule net,
relationships they hadn’t witnessed,
the minds of people they’d never met,
the heart of a man whose load was carried
through deserted streets as far
from where their cosy judgements hurried
as Moscow, Mercury or Mars,
then tossed this junk away in the second
they took to decide what it was. I felt sickened.
There was no retreat that I could hike to.
All anyone did was rationalise
the behaviour of a certified psycho,
spit blame at me, or ram clichés
like bold-print signposts up my nostrils,
without realising there’s not so much fish
in the sea as lifeless kelp that rustles
in a virtue-signalling swoosh,
in waves upon waves of toxic proclaiming
that its soul glows like the sun,
and adds its rustle to the wailing
monotone moral unison
of a dumbfounding ocean of choppy and windy
agreement with whatever bullshit is trendy.
The human race and life no longer
made an earwig’s nipple of sense
as I circled my brain with unquenchable hunger,
“Should I whip myself and cleanse
my brutal soul to a penitent restart?
Are all these virtuous pacifists right
that it’s “normal” to ignore your sweetheart
after challenging them to a fight?
Is standing up for yourself just aggression?
Do humans not have to cooperate?
Is love nothing more than a sordid obsession?
Can women hurl threats as their fancies dictate?”
while Lucy cavernously echoed
around my heart like a stuck record.
Five years beforehand her sickness was triggered
and Lucy was shipped out of school
when a gang of her classmates chortled and sniggered,
kicking her head like a rugby ball.
Then came three years in a specialist unit
reserved for North London’s twelve loopiest kids.
One year is their usual and absolute limit,
then off they must crash through society’s midst.
Most likely she’ll stumble through adulthood frozen
still at the emotional age of thirteen,
causing an argument or several dozen
like both of her parents appear to have done.
It’s crushing and tragic and baffling and scary
and a long long way from Temporary.
She’ll never, for as long as she’s breathing,
love anybody, including herself.
The realest emotion she feels is self-loathing.
Between what appears and what is, flows a gulf.
She cares more for her poker addiction
than any living joker or Jack.
She was dealt a king of a clubbing affliction
and spades of pain to make her brain crack.
That’s why she’s a heartless, broken person,
a selfish, spineless saboteur
who can’t say sorry, give, or reason.
I thought that it was me and her
against the world, but it was the world
and her against me. And all hope was stone-cold.
I begged Bob and Mary to show some compassion
and listen to what I had to say,
which was that I’d learned about Lucy’s condition
and loved her unconditionally
and I’d do anything that I could to support her,
the last thing I’d do was cause her any pain.
They oozed at me, “Shoyger, get lost, you stalker!
You’re not to speak to us again!”
So I begged her friends to act as umpire,
as a reconciling force.
They ran from my pleading as though it was gunfire,
as Lucy had ordered them to, since of course,
I was a stalker, a villain, a pest.
Then she told the police she was being harassed.
Not one cock-flannel had the courage
to deal with the fact that I exist.
Not one dumb sack of bottom-porridge,
whether Christian, Hindu or Pacifist,
was interested in dispelling bad energy
or in restoring good karma and peace,
or encouraging Lucy to turn back to therapy,
her only hope of real happiness.
Not one emotionally illiterate
ostrich-headed cement-eyed turd,
not one slime-coated slippery invertebrate
like those that had brought Lucy into the world
without love or devotion or decency,
not one toilet sandwich, would speak to me.
Not one piss-ejaculating parcel
of paedophile’s vomit that knew this girl,
not one mouse-clicking robot-faced arsehole
in the office that housed her hamster-wheel,
would treat me like a human being.
And here I learned with a shock that choked
my soul and set my dark hair greying,
the human race is burka-cloaked
in the slime of indifferent hypocrisy.
Everyone boasts about how much they care,
but slinks away as though faced with leprosy
when someone arrives with an abattoir
of pain rebounding around their mind
and grasping for a helping hand.
It wasn’t a thundering revelation
causing my jaw to sink to my knees
that Lucy’s diagnosed condition
is a hereditary disease.
Her parents would rather this fact was kept secret
than their daughter got better with help,
they’d rather deny her sick psyche a refit
and bludgeon a passionate heart to a pulp.
If only she’d mentioned the horrors she’d wrestled,
then I would have held her through gale-swept rain,
I’d have carried her back below the threshold
of therapeutic discomfort and pain.
I would even have tolerated her silence
and random sudden threats of violence.
Around this time that I was learning
what a wonderful species the human race is,
and that mighty emotions like heartbreak and yearning
are just a tick-box behavioural quiz,
and that trying to reason with people is stalking
and self-defence is morally wrong
but threatening your boyfriend is fine, I got talking
to a trafficked-in Balkan girl who seemed strong
in the face of the violence from which she’d migrated.
Ariana was younger than Lucy – sixteen.
The poetry that she created
and I read off a computer screen
was spiked with rape, with moral lapses,
menstruation and gunshot corpses.
Both these girls wrote train-crash stanzas
in language I did not expect,
of close escapes from deathly dances
and how their little worlds were wrecked.
Their little worlds were just a couple
of miles apart on London’s face
but I had met them in a bubble
in a corner of cyberspace.
Suddenly, one afternoon, Ariana
told me her parents had mangled her brain
from Islington all the way back to Tirana
and that she could no longer stand the pain.
She asked if I knew anywhere
where she could stop and breathe some air.
I pointed her in the unusual direction
of Keith, a bespectacled bald-headed bloke
of fifty, with whom I’d shared a connection
since he was longhaired and forty. He broke
every convention that I could imagine,
his plump gut stuffed in a sloganed shirt
with many a rusty anarchist badge on.
In recent years he’d shared his flat
with various teenage waifs and misfits
who I supposed would earn their keep
by rustling up assorted titbits.
Keith was certainly no sheep.
An indiscriminate befriender,
he wasn’t fussed by age or gender.
Keith had been a woodwork teacher
in a girls’ school, years ago.
His occupational departure,
which came as a cash-starving, life-freezing blow,
was born of the fact that his social circle
included girls in their mid-teens.
By now he had been out of work all
decade long, fattening his sketchbooks with reams
of fairies and plucking an old balalaika
to “Daisy, give me your answer, do”.
His brother went sailing round Lake Titicaca
and bought Keith a hat that said ‘Peru’,
but woollen stitches cannot curve
and so it looked like it said ‘Perv’.
It was towards this man I pointed
Ariana. She moved in.
She cooked ćevapčići and planted
artichokes and changed the bin,
sang qifteli ballads to soothe Keith’s parents,
both of whom were on death’s porch.
She’d packed her bags and made a clearance
while her family were in church.
Her older brother Yosif quickly
chopped his way into her email account
and emailed and emailed me asking exactly
where his sister could be found.
But I couldn’t just say, “She’s in Chingford”. His sister
made clear if I did it would be a disaster.
Her brother, her mother, her father, had hurt her,
I don’t know how. She wouldn’t give more,
apart from to state that each one was a nutter
and that her father had broken the law.
She shuddered, “Please don’t talk to Yosif!”
but I know it’s wrong to ignore someone’s pain.
He sounded so desperate. I wondered, “Who knows if
he’s truthfully box-of-lobsters insane?”
I told him his sister wasn’t in danger
and that she was living with champion folk.
I tried to be soft, though I knew it would injure,
and added she’d run from her family to seek
a new life, but that if he waited a while
and gave her some space, then they might reconcile.
I strained both arms to help both parties
but Ariana’s mind was a wall,
so my hands were shackled, my human duties
rebounded like a tennis ball.
At this point the police came knocking
and asking where Ariana was,
and complaining to me that her parents were shrieking
at them each day to do their jobs,
and warning me that these wild Albanians,
despite the flying fists in their home,
had formed the craziest of unions
to track me down to the streets where I roam,
with a private detective, a legalised stalker,
to force me to point them the way to their daughter.
Their daughter and Keith dropped round for Jalfrezi.
I served extra rice for his corpulent gut.
And then, like Sir Edmund but more whoopsadaisy,
with Keith in a Soviet general’s hat
and long blond wig, we climbed some alders,
elms and larches on Black Heath.
With Ariana perched on his shoulders,
he shouted “Help!” and I turned to see Keith
with his trousers round his ankles. I called back,
“Put the girl down and pull them back up!”
“No, there’s no time!” he, hiding his ball-sack,
yammered outside a glass-loud pub
full of eyes on a freak who preferred to insist
that I pulled his trousers back up to his waist.
And then, one day, my doorbell hooted
and through the spyhole I discerned
a spoon-reflection-esque distorted
vision of two faces, pained
as cancer, Eastern European,
middle-aged, behind my door.
I froze like I’d been turned to iron,
half-naked in the corridor.
The woman was basically Ariana
but prettier, with more years and curves.
She whispered an ‘Ave Maria’
and mimed a cross in trembling swerves,
then opened the letterbox of a stunned poet
and poured the name of her daughter through it.
They scuttled up and down the pavement,
up and down outside my house.
The police, when summoned, made less movement
than a one-legged K-holing mouse
glued to a fridge, for ninety minutes.
Then, like Christmas, they arrived
with fucking hells and Gordon Bennetts
while the mother yowled and raved,
“He has my daughter! He has my daughter!
Alfie Shoyger, I beg of you,
please, talk to us!” I peeked and caught her
stretching to me, her face shot through
with uncomprehending agony,
despair, confusion, tragedy.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of horror
in that howling woman’s eyes.
No wakened soul could make the error
that on that face were written lies.
No worthwhile human could relinquish
empathy, their heart sapped cold,
for such a face that burst with anguish
at the absence of a child.
No Christ nor Buddhism nor Shinto
could help this woman to repair.
Nor I, stood by that third-floor window
glancing down into despair.
What could I do? My wrists were tied!
I turned away, wet-cheeked, red-eyed.
Anchored to my garden railings,
orders barked into her ear,
she thrashed out guttering grief-choked wailings
of “I’m not going anywhere!”
When four or five more truncheon-wavers
poured out of a second van,
there came an end to her endeavours.
It took the arms of several men
to prise her out of my front garden
and lock her up inside a cell
where, for a night, she’d be no burden
if the guards ignored her well.
She, her husband and her son
were banned from hassling me again.
However, a mere restraining order
can’t deflect a shipwrecked Dad
from his quest to salvage his daughter.
He followed me along the road
and with an ocean of desolation
spanning his face, his palms outstretched,
said he was past all consolation
now Ariana had been snatched
from him, his life had no more meaning
and he was ready now to die.
He was grasping for me to relieve his pining.
I felt his pain. How couldn’t I?
He begged me to talk face-to-face
with him and his son. Did I have any choice?
They knew where I lived. Did I have then much option
except to trudge into a hotel bar
and sit and submit to my total absorption
by a stranger’s domestic brouhaha?
Yosif was eight years my junior.
He told me that my words were lies
and sipped his macchiato while frothing with mania,
boring my skull with his power-drill eyes.
Yosif said he loved his sister
more than he loved himself, and risked
provoking the truest response I could muster
when he glared at me and asked,
“Do you know what it feels like when somebody who
you really love won’t speak to you?”
I could have said, “Funny you ask me that question,
I have an inkling how it feels
when the only person to seem like a bastion
of all my ambitions and all my ideals
decides that she will never even
check that I’m still breathing again
as I contemplate sticking my head in an oven,
my “friends” claim this is all normal as rain
and I thirst for a mirage each minute, each fortnight,
each year, with loneliness throttling my heart
and morning on morning I gaze at the sunlight
feeling my soul has been dragged through the dirt
as I crawl on my knees through humanity’s desert
if that answers your question, Yosif. Does it?”
I could have said that, but instead I said nothing.
Instead I just sat there and stared at this boy
and remembered the octopus-limbed handcuffing,
the speared-whale look in his mother’s eye,
as this scowling lad and his big-faced father
said Ariana had left home
because of me, said I was her lover,
said I’d been imprisoning her for some time
in one of the rooms of my flat in West Greenwich.
This was the first I’d heard of it,
but enough was enough, I needed to finish
this piffle before my identity split.
I promised I’d bring the girl straight to their door
along with an officer of the law.
The Keith I phoned had not stopped grieving.
His father’s soul, not long before,
had beamed away. When Roy was living
he’d been a sailor in the war.
The young and overwhelmed lieutenant
controlled the back half of a ship.
He didn’t quite know how to face his opponent.
The Messerschmitts raided. The front half let rip
with the booms of the bulldog-nostrilled battler,
but Roy was perplexed and did nothing at all.
The back half surrendered to Adolf Hitler
and Roy was court-martialled. His sentence was cruel:
for the rest of the war he sat docked in Tobago
eating bananas. He was told, “Go away, go.”
Sixty years later, behind a decanter,
calligraphic menu and soup spoon, he turned
to his wife as Courvoisier rendered him blunter
and said, “Do you know, I would never have joined
the navy, my country would never have beckoned,
and we would never have met, my dear,
if Hitler hadn’t started the Second
World War,” then swivelled in his chair
to face the fruit of his long-neglected
loins who sat there chomping corn
above plump bellies, and further reflected,
“And you two boys would not have been born!”
then stood up and couldn’t have sounded sincerer,
toasting with snifter aloft, “To the Führer!”
Keith explained that Ariana
had left Old Blighty’s shores for good.
She’d left with a man who was now her partner,
one of the best friends that Keith had,
a thirty-year-old tube-driver named Michael
with Spanish blood and curly hair.
Together then, by van and cycle,
armed with phrase book and spare tyre,
they’d both gone tinkering round Europe.
So, Michael was Ariana’s horse
and, I supposed, I’d been her stirrup
and Keith the saddle beneath her arse.
But while they were trotting round France and Moldova,
what was I going to say to her father?
He was waiting and frowning outside Greenwich station
as was his custom. I said to him, “Look,
I know that this sounds like it’s circumlocution
but, well, the thing is, I take it all back,
I’m afraid I can’t help you. Your daughter’s in Scotland.
I don’t know where. Sorry. I did try my best.”
He scratched his big face as I tried to be subtle and
explain to him gently the chance had been missed.
“Let’s go to Scotland!” he burst out with vigour,
“Somehow we can find her!” I softly said, “No,
I’m sorry,” and hoping to God that the saga
was on its last page and that I could just go
and write a new story, I shuffled away
and stared into space for the rest of the day.
The months prowled by as Ariana’s
father carried on and on
waiting for me on street corners.
I told him (not lightly) to leave me alone.
So did the police, who took statement and statement
(the police and I were quite close by this point).
His private detective still made an assortment
of rude-voiced phone calls with no restraint
to my boss, to my auntie, to Keith one morning
as he sat playing “All the Ladies Take
a Shine to my Helmet”, a song he was penning
about a fireman. Week after week
the Albanian persisted. He did not cease
until he was in court and I changed my address.
Ariana and Michael slipped back to London
twice, to get their dose of Keith.
I wasn’t informed. She’d said she’d abandon
the city where her parents live,
forever. Keith made a jaunt round Albania,
downed Raki and snored beneath eagles and hills.
I wasn’t invited. Yosif’s mania
remained robust in repetitive mails.
If I was the type with no speck of compassion,
I would’ve just told him that he was “obsessed”.
Instead I advised him to face his condition
and talk to a psychotherapist.
Not that my own mental health was superb.
My brain was a limping, grief-squeezed cube.
My brain felt squashed into a bottle
wired up to a machine
with switches and levers and motors that rattle
and dials that squeal up and down when they turn,
being prodded and spanked by a nine-headed squirrel
with boomerangs instead of legs,
called Colin, inside an old cider barrel
being rolled by an army of ginger-haired frogs
on skateboards made from Swedish oxtongue,
yogurt pots and urology books,
along a barbwired fence that screams ‘Achtung!’
on planet Saturn as it makes
its tortuous journey back again
to the place where it was on the day I was born.
Keith’s mother died. A splendid lady.
She doted on the Albanian girl.
She’d always wanted (and that’s not greedy)
a daughter with a cheeky smile,
pigtails and a frilly bonnet.
Instead she got a stupid cunt
in a llama-wool hat with ‘Perv’ written on it.
Instead she got a son who spent
his pot-holing holiday in a harness,
wedged like a sprout in a warthog’s throat,
then getting winched out and photographed gormless-
faced in a French newspaper, she got
an unemployable funny old soul
with Buffy the Vampire-Slayer on his wall.
Old Lily beamed away, bequeathing
both her sons their childhood home.
The house in which Keith had done most of his breathing
was signed and dated and stamped his own.
By uncanny coincidence this was the moment
Ariana and Michael chose to come back
and nestle in Lily’s old bed without payment,
while I was grasping for work and stuck
with a landlord threatening me with eviction.
And then, while ambling one day down Keith’s road,
my veins froze as an apparition
swept straight past me. Ariana’s Dad.
He did nothing at all. He had nothing to say.
He didn’t even glance my way.
Flabbergasted, I phoned Ariana
and warned that her Dad was patrolling her streets.
She replied in a voice full of panic and drama,
in chavvy half-Jafaican spits,
that if I was lying then I was disgusting,
then I was the lowest, most underhand
piece of excrement ever existing,
and did I get that, and did I understand,
’cause she knew I was living like flotsam and jetsam
and if I was going to lose my home
then it wasn’t her problem, but was this a stratagem
to force her out of Keith’s spare room?
I told her to fuck off and ended the call,
which Keith said was not very nice at all.
What made her imagine I might have been lying?
Why couldn’t she smell the acrid truth
that if, as she guessed was the case, I was dying
to crowbar her out of the Palace of Keith,
then inventing her father wasn’t the worst case
scenario I could have flung in her way,
I could’ve just pointed him there in the first place,
what made her imagine I needed to lie?
Days later, she heard from her long-obscure cousin
whose husband’s employment agency
had noticed, among the dozen on dozen
they read every day, Ariana’s CV.
She’d led her father straight to her herself
and could not blame this on anyone else.
Not far behind Daddy came Mummy and Yosif
sidling up and down the road
and eyeing Keith’s windows with obvious motive.
Ariana and Michael froze and hid
behind the curtains, their dreams all shattered,
horror streaming from their eyes.
But her engineless hovercraft full of spluttered
stationary accusations of lies
stood docked in her harbour. She never said sorry,
just like she had never expressed any thanks.
She never admitted she’d treated me wrongly
or that I’d helped her escape from her jinx
of a family, her schizophrenic mother,
her hated father, her twisted brother.
Keith had another, boxy, spare bedroom
full of books and tents and junk,
giftwrapping a couple of feet of headroom
between the ceiling and top bunk.
As my eviction day slunk closer,
I asked if there was space for me.
He answered he’d have to talk it over
and ask the others if they’d agree.
To Keith it didn’t seem to matter
that I had known him for twelve years
and always said and thought the better
of him, or that the house was his.
Ariana and Michael said yes, they could lever
me in (as long as it wasn’t forever).
Young Ariana was determined
that the draining-board stayed clear.
As though becrowned and robe-of-ermined,
a friendskin throne beneath her rear,
picking her nose with a diamonded sceptre
that took many hours and servants to make,
vigorously as a helicopter
she’d wag her finger if beaker or fork
remained undried and breeding bubbles
by the sink, or if I put
a cornflakes box in the eminent couple’s
bit of the cupboard. She told me what
to do, and she did the same to Keith,
but he wasn’t the sort to display any wrath.
I asked him why he let this ingrate
who didn’t inject a penny in rent
believe she had some kind of mandate,
stamped on the wall in the boldest of print,
to boss him around as though she was a monarch
in his house, the house that he owned,
and treat him like a serf or eunuch.
He shrugged his shoulders, sighed and frowned
that he couldn’t deal with confrontation,
especially not at a moment like this
when his brother, who lacked filial emotion,
insisted that they sell the house,
when his grief was still raw for his Mum and his Dad,
so we ought to just do what Ariana said.
By this point I was taking rather
a lot of drugs. One afternoon
I offered some to Ariana
and Michael, off a tablespoon.
We strolled beside the river, tranquil
as a horse licking the knees of a pope
before Ariana dropped an anvil
in a bowl of kumquat soup.
She told me the police had warned her
about Keith. “My God,
really?” I said “I don’t under-
stand what the when did
but Christ, I’m surfing
the Milky Way are you certain?”
Weeks later, back in the land of the sober,
clearing the garden with Michael and Keith,
poking branches and bits of caber
into a blazing, crackling hearth,
smoke-clouds rendering me tearful,
I listened to Ariana harangue
that she knew I felt she was ungrateful
but she didn’t owe me a single thing,
that she could’ve escaped from her family without me
and wouldn’t apologise for or rescind
her acid-tongued accusations about me
lying to her, and did I understand
and did I get that, ’cause as far as she knew,
I was lying back then and was still lying now.
I gaped for a moment, then loaded my rucksack
and made my way towards the door.
“Don’t go,” said Keith, who thought I should backtrack.
“Why do you do this? You’ve done this before.
You give up on friendship far too quickly.
Ariana could be a really good friend.”
But I’d lost my patience with Keith and his sickly
castrated failures to comprehend.
I fled to Bristol, became a squatter,
watched a policeman get floored by some stone,
sniffed enough powder to nearly find Buddha,
broke into a house where a poet was born,
met the first girl to deserve my heart
and fucked her on a roundabout.
The last I heard of Ariana,
she and her family were friendly again,
which marks the end of this brain-spanking saga.
Keith, that worldly prince among men,
had met the railing-clutching mother
whom Ariana had called “a disease”
and Yosif, the power-drill-eyed brother
whom Keith had told me not to appease,
who Keith had said had more than likely
defiled his sister. Yosif bought
Keith some chips, which made him rebuke me,
“These people are nothing to worry about!
What was your problem? They’re really nice!
He bought me some chips. I rest my case.”
According to Keith these people had never
harassed me at all, I was making it up.
They hadn’t stalked him, so they hadn’t me either.
That was his argument, bottom to top.
He must’ve imagined it then, being pestered
by private detectives on the phone,
and the day Ariana’s Mum was arrested
for breach of the peace outside my home
and the social worker who told him the story.
According to Keith it was all my fault,
as he’d told me I should’ve ignored all their teary
requests for my help, should’ve given them nought,
and had I listened? Oh no, not me!
But they’re wonderful people, that’s plain to see.
And so I learned, down this deep chasm,
the world is full of empty scum
who are faker than a whore’s orgasm
or fat kid’s sick-note stained with jam,
as fake as every loud opinion
from a spoonfed student’s mouth,
from every gagging government minion
prizing doctrine over truth,
as fake as Angela Merkel’s compassion,
as microphoned puppets who equate
everything evil with everything Russian,
as fake as the freedom of an EU state,
as fake as all the news we’re given,
bombproof passports, nine-eleven.
And scum with their heads so far up their arses,
so full of the virtue they don’t really have,
so full of the virtue that Fashion enforces
and every five minutes they feel they must prove,
that they cannot see the bomb-crater they’ve blasted,
can’t see the psychopath stood at their side,
can’t see the puppet-masters who’ve twisted
and twisted them into fratricide,
can’t see the armed soldiers or truckproof barriers
guarding every city bridge
and Christmas market, can’t see the warriors
of Allah swarming over the ridge,
can’t see our once-great civilisation
imploding in frenzied masturbation.
