there was a great man so great he couldn't be criticised in the light who died and for a whole week people turned up their collars over their ears and wept with great gossiping
houses wore their roofs at a mournful angle and television announcers carried their eyes around in long drooping bags there was a hush upon the voice of the land as soft as the shine on velvet
the whole nation stretched up into the dusty attic for its medals and black ties and prayers and seriously polished its black uncomfortable shoes and no one dared creak in the wrong places
anybody who thought he was everybody except those who were nearly dying themselves wanted to come to the funeral and in its mourning the nation rejoiced to think that once again it had cut into the world's time with its own sick longing for the past
the great man and the great nation had the same bulldog vision of each other's face and neither of them had barked convincingly for a very long time
so the nation turned out on a cold bleak day and attended its own funeral with uncanny reverence and the other nations put tears over their laughing eyes v-signs and rude gestures spoke with the same fingers
(2) aden
tourists dream of bombs that will not kill them
into the rock the sand-claws the winking eye and harsh shell of aden
waiting for the pinch
jagged sun lumps of heat bumping on the stunned ship knuckledustered rock clenched over steamer point
waiting for the sun to stagger loaded down the hill before we bunch ashore
calm eyes within their windows we walk (a town must live must have its acre of normality let hate sport its bright shirt in the shadows) we shop collect our duty-murdered goods compare bargains laugh grieve at benefit or loss aden dead-pan leans against our words which hand invisible knows how to print a bomb ejaculate a knife does tourist greed embroil us in or shelter us from guilt
backstreet a sailor drunk gyrates within a wall of adenese collapses spews they roll about him in a dark pool
the sun moves off as we do
streets squashed with shops criss-cross of customers a rush of people nightwards a white woman striding like a cliff dirt - goats in the gutter crunched beggars a small to breed a fungus cafes with open mouths men like broken teeth or way back in the dark like tonsils
an air of shapeless threat fluffs in our pulse a boundary crossed the rules are not the same brushed by eyes the touch is silent silence breeds we feel the breath of fury (soon to roar) retreat within our skins return to broader streets
bazaars glower almost at candlelight we clutch our goods a dim delusion of festivity a christ neurotic dying to explode
how much of this is aden how much our masterpiece all atmospheres are inbuilt
an armoured car looms by
the ship like mother brooding in the sea receives us with a sigh aden winks and ogles in the dark the sport of hate released
slowly away at midnight rumours of bombs and riots in the long wake a disappointed sleep
nothing to write home about except the heat
(3) crossing the line (xii)
give me not england in its glory dead nightmared with rotting seed palmerston's perverted gunboat up the yangtse's arse - lloyd george and winston churchill rubbing men like salt into surly wounds (we won those wars and neatly fucked ourselves) eden at suez a jacked-up piece of wool macmillan sprinkling cliches where the black blood boils (the ashes of his kind) - home as wan as godot (shagged by birth) wilson for whom the wind blew sharply once or twice sailing eastwards in the giant's stetson hat saving jims from the red long john give me not england but the world with england in it with people as promiscuous as planes (the colours shuffled) don't ask for wars to end or men to have their deaths wrapped up as christmas gifts expect myself to die a coward - proclaim no lives as kisses - offer no roses to the blind no sanctions to the damned - will not shake hands with him who rapes my wife or chokes my daughter only when drunk or mad will think myself the master of my purse - will lust for ease seek to assuage my griefs in others' tears will make more chaos than i put to rights
but in my fracture i shall strive to stand a ruined arch whose limbs stretch half towards a point that drew me upwards - that ungot intercourse in space that prickless star is what i ache for (what i want in man and thus i give him) the image of that cross is grit within him - the arch reflects in microscopic waves through fleshly aeons beaming messages to nerves and typing fingers
both ends of me are broken - in frantic storms hanging over cliffs i fight to mend them the job cannot be done - i die though if i stop how cynical i may be (how apt with metaphor or joke to thrust my fate grotesquely into print) the fact is that i live until i stop - i can't sit down then crying let me die or death is good (the freedom from myself my bones are seeking)
i must go on - tread every road that comes risk every plague because i must believe the end is bright (however filled with vomit every brook) - if not for me then for those who clamber on my bones my hope is what i owe them - they owe their life to me