SEX CHANGE AT THE LONDON
HOSPITAL
London muttered in its slumbers
As the pre-med pulled me under.
Rain,
Along gutters down drains,
Clattered like an anchor chain
As I soared
Over the roar of the Whitechapel Road,
Treading water
Above the Ripper’s favourite quarter
(Whose murders
They say betokened a surgeon’s),
And thought I saw
In the London Hospital far below . . .
**
. . . down in the morgue the Doctor leaning
Over women, softly breathing:
‘What is the meaning, the meaning, the
meaning
Of ass and gash?
Her one and zero, semi-colon, exclamation mark,
vowel and consonant, dot and dash –
And who dared brave
Alive this binocular gaze?’
**
From their watchstraps sleepers slide.
Likewise from the surgeon’s knife
Lost among these crowded wards,
Swinging doors, corridors,
Free of my flesh,
I’m bollock-less.
**
‘Hate,’ said the plughole.
‘Rage,’ cried the water pipes.
And from the toilet bowl
A belch of blood said, ‘Where are my
tripes!’
But I was a fleshless soul
Saying, ‘Let me alone.’
‘Scatter and strew him,’
They cried, ‘so the wind blows through him,
And his soul unhoused
Wanders like ours.’
But I’d not dispute
With every murdered prostitute –
Although
False eyelashes crawl
From each plughole;
From every sluice-room tap or spout
Crimson fingernails push out;
And all the walls are questionnaires
Stuck with interrogative pubic hairs.
‘May your grief end,’
I said, ‘out beyond the loo’s
U-bend.’
But still from the plughole’s little prison,
‘Listen!’
And, ‘Go now to where he lies hidden!’
So, over the dead like sandbags
With their cheap rings, tin brooches, torn hats,
sad handbags,
A barricade
Of flayed, splayed, lost, betrayed
Corpses obstructing
Alleys they fucked in,
I’m tracking back, back
To dig up Jack.
**
In Gynaecology
Women turn to me
Glands
That suck our guts like spaghetti strands,
Powder bones
Like merciless millstones,
Crush us
Like the double back tyres on London buses.
O women be good –
I have a mission from our sisterhood.
**
I found
That a great beauty ruled the town,
A striding figure
In robes like a river.
These filled the road.
In their folds
Bright fish, tin cans, gold coins;
Sun flecks, odd shoes, old bones;
With an intertidal
Whiff of urinal;
And drowned men tumbled there
To comfort her.
**
Where he wanders Wapping strand
Mussels squirt on either hand.
At Greenwich Reach this dapper walker
Opens oysters underwater.
He strolls alone the Millwall shore
Where liquid spills from winkle stalls –
And winks thus and tips his cap
Till shapes stir on the fish-shop slab
To watch Jack pass,
Flat faces pressing the glass.
**
I’ll tread
A road woven of my own breath,
Stitched
From a whispered wish,
From a change of mind –
And climb
Till I am welcomed where,
Inventing with wings London’s limpid air,
Birds melt through
Illimitable blue.
**
Who’s he
Shook this shape from your belly tree?
Around, carnivorous eyes of rivals but
He plucked you from those hooks.
Bared like a butcher’s parcel,
Seeing his hard-on
All you wondered was
Oh, oh, is this what I have to want?
Now in Maternity
Clutch your bundle like an amputee.
**
Virginally shy,
I tried to hide my wet insides
(Full as an egg,
Frail as a Sainsbury’s plastic bag)
That multi-coloured
Fell out like a full cupboard,
The cut
Smelling of love.
**
Snug in bed
As meat in bread:
One whose woman smashed his skull in
For laughing when she started coming;
One thrashed by neighbours who overheard a
Sexual joy they thought was murder;
Or blind beggars who’d fought for a pitch
(Accidentally beating a passer-by to death with
their white sticks);
Or two who collided crossing a street and fought
like drowners and were crushed
By the Crouch End bus;
Or all those drowned in the Underground’s
Death camp crowds;
And one whose dick,
Fat tick, parasitic
Belly leech, feeds, feeds
Till I yearned to be free,
And thus, a homeless ghost,
Yearning and lost,
Roam these wards,
Stairs, halls, basement morgues,
And through to the nurses’ room
Where they wheel like a brass band and moo
Through tongueless tubes,
Dragging their burst
Lovers like an afterbirth.
**
Silk and scent
May dress the well,
He defies
Double flesh designed for lies.
**
Their rage
Shakes the Underground’s coloured cage
To unknown
Totteridge & Whetstone,
Unvisited
Upmister Bridge,
Never seen
Edmonton Green,
To Morden, Theydon Bois,
All its web’s far fixing points,
Because he visited with blood
Their outcast sisterhood.
Therefore we’ll sit,
Jostled under plague pits,
Nodding together
Past dry wells, vaults of gold, bricked-up cellars
Through upside down,
Buried, black, London town,
To bare his bones
And shame him like his shit on show.
**
Who
All those years had the use of you?
On a train of London windows,
Through suburbs of rooms and beds like meadows,
How you galloped bareback both astride
Love’s curly-haired hide!
**
Where her finger
Touches the source of the river
I kneel to kiss. And kiss
The threads of her wrist
That move among weeds
In muddy Oxfordshire fields.
I pray over
The veins of her elbow,
Embrace
The strong flow of her waist,
And bathe at last here
In her brown beard astride the sea.
**
Whose hair fills the quilt
On the bed in the house that Jack built?
Why does water flow so slow
From the big sink on the second floor?
And the room of whose shoes?
And why by the bath the dentist’s tools?
And damp as a pubic pad
Whence this wad in the shower trap?
Nevertheless
Spying a spider in the bridal bed
Oh, his dilemma of disgust –
The live spider or the spider crushed!
**
The old go slower and slower
And here like bicycles at last fall over.
But bright-eyed
Under the high tide of his hair line,
(When searchlights found
Bombers swelling over London town,
And the bulging truncheon
Of some constable on point duty at a busy junction,
And bursting from earth the Tube between
Aldgate East and Stepney Green)
Girls’ flanks
Were tauter than motorbike petrol tanks,
Their lovely lack astride
Like the missing bit on women’s bikes.
The dick is homeless now
That he fought for once with the sweet girls of
London town.
**
My heart exposed
Is chambered like a Chinese word.
My guts depict
The names of God in Arab script.
I’m a monochrome tome
Trailing a Playboy centrefold,
A page from Gray’s
But in a state of nature, though, without the
names.
‘Look!’
Says Jack, ‘This is my book,
I leave behind as
A bible for the finders.’
**
On my belly something like the words ‘I
am’
Consisting of two little roundy bits and one long
one.
Which is a sort of tap or spout
For venting madness out.
**
Each
On a black beast
Steers through
Chambers of the gleaming Tube.
Bright, bright
Tiles and lights;
Black, black
Bristle-backs,
Crotch mats,
Hidden, ridden rats or bats,
Ill-steered beasts
That strain the leash –
And howl by night,
When each to each are grappled tight.
**
Closed
To the lightest toes,
The deftest feet,
This wild street
Where none may go
Commands me to its shining floor.
**
I’ll take his hand
To scatter over Southend strand,
At their command.
I’ll grind his teeth
Deep in the dirt on Hampstead Heath,
Spill a parcel
Of tibia and metatarsal
At Walthamstow and Woolwich Arsenal,
Spread his knees
Wide to the tide by Surrey Quays,
And thus appease
Their ghosts’ unease.
And roll
His skull’s old three-holed bowling ball
From Soho to the Albert Hall
To slap his soul
Out of its gate
Into their hate.
**
As through a hospital robe
Her bare back shows,
Works
The rich earth
And thick with England slides
Into the making tide.
O river enrobed,
Splendid in green and gold,
I spread my knees
Like you to the teeming seas.
**
Triangular as Africa the thatched
Forest of my pubic patch.
Now what beast runs free
Under its jungle canopy?
**
I will not listen
To the mouth I sit on
Unless it speaks
Of Rotherhithe and Limehouse Reach,
Explains
The river’s glinting lizard scales
That wrap
Men the Thames has loved to death,
And tells
How tides swell
The sliding thick
River like a dick.
Speak, you rich wet,
Whose sweetness splits my flesh.
**
Ride, wild stream,
Under our dreams.
You mock these streets
Like the running of beasts.
**
Our hearts
Tread alone the reddened dark
Deep where,
Most secret and most similar,
We pursue
Kindness, a home, the warm, the true.
No light, no light
But this universal appetite
At the blood drum –
Unless Jack’s razor edge should come.
**
A naked woman
Reclines across London.
A cut
Churns like gut.
A bare blade
Unassuaged
Finds in flesh
A greater nakedness.
Thus I will consider
Three views of this river.
**
Desiring to be free
Of the veined wart that sickened me,
And instead
Brood the Earth’s egg,
Where the world’s
Axle turns,
The sky-tree
Feeds,
I’ll bestride
God’s unbearable eye,
The sun
We cannot look upon,
Diving clean
Into the river’s shining stream.
**
In fish-skin slippers
I skip across the river glitter,
Splashes snapping at
My ankles like a shark attack,
Man-trap or hang-man’s hatch –
Because this ditch is
Cunniligus for bridges.
Later,
Insoucantly as one might take a
Heathrow Airport travelator,
Passing black Embankment steps
(Water lifting like a dress),
Under loins of London bridges
(Whiffier than Oxfam britches),
I watch my lovers fall
Through petticoats of spreading foam,
Submerging there
Choked on a rope of woven air –
Because this sump
Makes London a cunt.
**
What got your tongue,
Dumb mouth among
Fish-hooks, cat-claws,
Cranked gears, sideways jaws,
Churning of meshed teeth?
Speak!
**
My kiss
Would wear away lips.
I’d grope
And find bone.
Skinny as scissors
With my jigs and figures,
I’d dance on his grave until
Decay castrated him.
**
Tough
As
tree stumps
Back-tooth Roots
Tight knot
Screw-slot
Bunched Muscle
cushion
Soft thumps Of
boxing gloves
Good nut Cunt
**
The tide was down like trousers
So I crossed the rocks like razors
To poke in raggy pools that smelled of pee.
Then the moon silvered the sea
So the pools were mirrors,
With polyps, oysters, blind devourers –
Till I woke,
The sheet foaming over my throat.
**
I dreamed I waked
As lovers on my counterpane
Little as fingers, in single file,
Fell to their fate from my inner thigh.
I groped to a window. Thence I saw
The Thames above, around, below,
Whose all-enfolding waters were
Our common element like air.
A wind of water lifted flags,
Bubbles like balloons flew past,
And over neighbour buildings whirled
Drowned men instead of birds.
**
Out of my bowels
Wolf howls
All vowels
And I cry
“Who, how, why am I?”
The night is a mouth.
Through its roof
Grow fur roots.
And my own fur sprouts
Down into my mouth.
O night fanged with stars.
O moon, old molar
Loose in its jaw.
O stars, moon and all,
Snarl in your black maw –
Because our fur mouths
Together howl out
Till worlds shake
To Ladywell and Mortlake
And answers echo back
From Seven Sisters and Queen’s Park,
For we rouse
With our tongueless howls
The hereto voiceless crowds.
From the horizon
We hear them howling.
**
It’s a home’s heart,
Gold bar, new loaf, warm hearth.
Is hidden as the new moon
That nevertheless rules.
Gathers the world like an eye,
Then looks away.
Among her limbs like loaves
Is a caper or clove.
It’s where her curves
Tighten to a spiral, and at last merge;
Floats like a frisby where
Her lovely lack, propped on nothing, surfs on air.
God gave her dough
One fold more,
Though the seal
Never quite healed.
(Or did the Doctor
Cut Cupid’s wound across her?)
It’s the stair
That isn’t there,
A drowned mouth,
Little vowel, thatched house.
It’s lipped like a splash,
They will rock in its outwash;
And read between
Its nested parentheses;
And let it fly,
From limbs they hope to untie,
And revive
That sleepy middle eye,
Happy at
Her body’s welcome mat.
**
Ivy crawls
Hand over hand over hospital walls,
Out of its magician’s sleeves
Dealing handkerchiefs of leaves.
Where its hairy fingers grip
Thick across the hidden brick,
Dusty spiders on patrol
Inspect each shining parasol.
**
In the gardens, weak and slow,
Roses cold as crystals grow.
For thirst
They suck dirt.
Their food
Is sun, that pale soup.
Thin, in rags,
They shiver by the path
Where I run to my love
Sick with our rich blood.
**
We are sick of the muscular river
Black as a hen-night stripper,
Puddles in gutters that jump
To hug us like drunks,
Pigeons traffic has
Trampled to pads,
The Underground’s
Death-camp crowds –
And so,
Down alleys only cabbies know,
Till London’s tarmac scab
Runs out at last
In mud, rubbish in bushes,
Funny-coloured buses,
A ditch in which
Detumescent Durex drift,
We’ll take a wayward English lane
To sink a spade
Deep in the wicked Doctor’s grave.