Poems

A canny cousin taught me the handshake trick. I was ten or eleven. Small for my age, but quick As a flash, after a smiling approach, I could duck Beneath my arm and get the affable chap Locked in a Half-Nelson. Thing about tricks is   You shouldn’t use them too often. This I learnt when I approached a strong young American, hand Extended, smile applied. He took that hand and Had me floored. Saw it coming, Howell. Pinned beneath him, head against the concrete,   I broke down, shamed in front of everyone. Of course they cheered, the lot of them. I know I got what I deserved. But how could I tell anyone What contempt I felt then for myself? It Was sickening. That was the end of my trick.

After breakfast, our bonuses in the bag, time sheets collected, the weekend begins. Down by the battered garages near the burnt-out Escort, our apprentices go for it: first to find one gets chips for his dinner. Stanway says to take it behind that steel-shuttered house, top of the estate, and for all of us to be there, midday. In the unkempt garden, we watch Stanway – 56, kids at uni, wife a pharmacist – chucking bricks. The wider the screen, he says, the bigger the bang. One of the lads promises an old black and white from his nana’s spare room, at last taking a real interest, can’t wait for next week.

My soul, my shadow, the dreams I stare into the night are wounded. I kiss my mirror-self. The lips with which I bite are wounded.   I am a year filled with venom, every season is autumn: leaf-filled evenings, the snaking twilight are wounded.   The signs of the stars – my Scorpio, my Libra, Sagittarius pierced by his own arrow’s flight – are wounded.   The snorting bull, on whose proud horns the Earth is caught, is heartsick. His heart, my heart, breaking at our plight, are wounded.   I have no country, no land, not even a room the size of a grave. No sky. Centuries of starlight are wounded.   My father gives me food/ gave me water: childhood’s homework. Beneath dust and blood, the pages are white, are wounded.

Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s place: pleasure, talk, a handshake, the deal. No choice to be made about right or wrong, ideals or love, one song over another. Buying and selling is Ferrari’s trade, attending to his business of the day, the rake-off on sex, liquor, hookahs.

In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.

I’m not the kind to fidget, fray or fret.I’m truly a soul at peace – ask anyone!The savoir faire for which I’m widely knownhas optimised my odds in life’s roulette.Am I the underdog to back? You bet!With equal yin and yang, in union,I have a personal hotline to the Zone.I relish risk, I rise to every threat.I’ve had my share of darkness: when light fails, the surest step can miss the track. And yetthere dawns within me now a marvellous sunwhose rays enflame a pair of golden scales:a perfect equilibrium of regret –for all I’ve done and all I haven’t done.

He walked each day the same, Picking around Inside his broken, frameless mind For bits of comforting, Pushing his feet With care among free leaves On pavements his for the walking Where no one stopped him with talking : A hatless, witless man. He knew the shabby parts Picking around: The tree-wreck of a rusty car, Nettles and rags and flattened tins, The mouldy mats That leaned box-stiff and damp In ditches, his for the taking. Elsewhere some hand would be making New things to rot for him.

was a down-and-out in awe of a pencil salesmanin a café, midtown Manhattan.Handsome like a movie star, the salesman turns on his sales patter,speaking loudly peachy keens and aw shucks and I am fine here Sandra in The Big Apple, but honeycould you look in my…and the street guy’s envylike a furnace, his eyeslike beads in a forge,and then it happens...just as sales talk goes the wayof big smiles and I gotta go Sandra,the balding bum, in a worn-out windbreaker,soiled loafers, shirt open at the navel, stands up, walks across to the salesman’s table, and says: I am going to be an actor.

Lit up and out of tune she’d bawl to make her ten green bottles fall but near the end, its song and dance, they came down like an avalanche; decades of empties drained and tossed in stairwells, basements, cellars, lost to blackouts or, pulled back once more, a locked ward off a corridor it took a white gowned summer of heat and gauze to wheel her down. Dried out by autumn, washed and dressed, she’d idled into brittleness, stick-thin with rage, with nicotine, the doped rice paper of her skin too yellow now, too old, too wrong to bottlebank a singalong or raise, hoarse from its shattered past, through lacerations of smashed glass, her voice again, uproarious.