“MY DADDY CAN WHISTLE”
With
crimson cheek and bulging eye
Your
daddy stuns each passer-by.
His Schubert song
and Mozart air
Make double-decker drivers
stare,
And
(braking hard on Blackpool Road)
Ten-ton lorries shed their load.
But
most of all your daddy stills
The
local birdlife’s tweets and trills
With
soaring talent that equates
Their
artistry with squeaky gates.
Already birds are well
aware
That
humans rule the upper air:
The
roaring aircraft’s metal wings
Have
shown their own are hopeless things.
And
now your daddy triumphs where
They
ruled supreme. It’s so unfair.
For, walking
you through Ashton Park,
His
music mutes the tuneful lark
And
through the trees on Tulketh Brow
The
rowdy wrens are silent now.
Oh
see that sulking sparrow turn
Resentfully
to chew a worm!
A VERY HIPPY
CHRISTMAS: (A LETTER TO DEVON)
Here’s
hoping, Clive, they’ve stopped your dope and dole,
And
scrumpy’s what there’s awful lack of, Annie.
If
not, I’m sending from this northern hole
To
the land of clotted cream and black Afghani,
Of jam and acid tabs and skinny dips,
GREETINGS AT CHRISTMASTIME begrudged through twisted lips.
“Sid,”
you say, “so tell us, how’s the weather?
Cold
we suppose, all icicles and sleet,
And
the snow, down here a swan’s shed feather,
Is
ready-blackened when it meets the street.
Ice cracks the cobbles, even sunrise stalls,
And dogs with lifted legs are welded to workhouse walls.”
True.
And when it’s clear it’s cold. Rivers freeze,
Running
in a tunnel under dull glass
Round
bicycle bones. We’ve teeth on the eaves
And
spikey like a bed of nails the grass.
A low sun in a corner of the day,
As weak as watercolour yellow, turns away.
Today
I nipped outside to grab a nice
Shovelful
of coke and nutty slack.
Instead,
with contact lenses formed of ice
And
stalactites of snot, I staggered back
To hug the empty hearth and curse in vain
(Through windows double-glazed with frozen sheets of rain)
The
tribes of fearsome folk who crowd the town,
Who
toil upstream against the level gale,
Coughing
creatures with a barbed wire frown
And
faces like places where April fails,
Who spring and summer through will still complain
For the lead necklace of December days again.
Tonight
I risked my life and had a jar.
The
landlord’s wife was cheering on a fight.
Her
husband hadn’t time to tend the bar
With
helping someone set a cat alight.
It was a girl trying to get it lit:
One of the posher sort, the type that doesn’t spit.
I
blushed: she laughed. I shook: she bit my ear.
With
football forwards’ thighs she pressed my knee
Till
I ejaculated thus: My dear,
Your
weight is wealth, it’s like gold, like rich fee,
And heavy as treasure your precious head.
“Are you trying to say I’m fucking fat?” she said.
I
said, Oh tell me how to serve you best,
What
track to take till Time’s tread shall tire;
What
foe to fight, what golden fleece to fetch;
Tell
me, tell me, I’d win you your desire
Though bought with crimson coins my dead head bled.
“All right. I’ll have a pint of bitter then,” she said.
I
said, Oh party of my life and soul
Remove
the ticking apple of my heart
And
bite. We are one of a kind, a whole,
A
part of a heart that is never apart.
“The only thing we have in common,
Is you’re a man and I’m a woman.”
So
I left, wheezing through the freezing night
Where
winds will whittle you to the white bone;
Where
the streams and the smiles are locked up tight
And
cold enchants whole bus queues into stone.
A skull-like moon leaned over with a grin
On suffering Sid, alone at the cold world’s rim.
But
look. Through all this summer only hides,
Waiting
where May-blooms clutch their roots and hold
And
keep the secret – Life – that still abides
Though
mean mid-winter grips, vice-cold.
I too will clutch my root and hold and stay
And be daft with the daffodils, dreaming of May.
It’s
a dream of how Eden begins:
Bursting
the doors of dawn on the first day
His
whiskers full of lightning-bolts and grins
On
green scene, flower bower, hoe-high hay,
God like a Devonshire morning has come
Where I lie, smiling at last, asleep in the sun.