for Mowie
It’s never fun to have a tooth pulled out,
But suffering with abscesses is worse!
They make one want to pound one’s fist and shout.
Still, no one likes to have a tooth pulled out.
If I were you, I’d sit and glumly pout,
Then fill the air with every sort of curse!
It’s never fun to have a tooth pulled out,
And abscesses can piss off ‘cause they’re worse!
for Michelle
Even though it may seem like a good idea
at the time,
if you’re a poet, avoid making the rash promise
to a write a poem for someone,
no matter how highly you esteem them.
For a poet’s life is a cavalcade of infinite distractions:
the line of the hills;
the flight-path of a crow;
the mesmerising architecture of naked winter trees,
all viewed from the poet’s window.
But, the one thing I have learned from experience
is that I never learn from experience,
and I have long since known
that I am terrible at following
my own advice;
and thus, I made that promise.
Such a poetic promise is little more
than a testament to my consistent absent-mindedness
and my almost professional commitment
to mastering the art of procrastination.
A poem is a debt repaid
to the mysterious beauty of the imagination,
but this poem is the repayment a different debt:
the one which I owe to one of my cousins,
whose magical impulse
to take a DNA test
led to the discovery of my father,
my family, and myself and its Celtic soul.
A poem, I thought, in a moment of misplaced optimism,
a poem would be my best and only way
to balance this impossible debt –
even if only in part, even if unsuccessfully –
for this saviour who vanquished my ignorance,
and who replaced the awful abyss of not knowing
with the magnificent palace of perfect mirrors.
After staring out of my poet’s window,
misdirected from the pen and the word
by the artistry of the world outside,
with its hills and its birds and its trees,
I discovered that there were no words.
There were no words
to express this new yet timeless connection,
this unfamiliar, familial love,
the description of which falls beyond the scope
of any poet,
even one who was gifted the mirror in his soul,
by the cousin of all cousins,
who happens to be my cousin:
Michelle Niland-Sena.
I am wondering how rock’n’roll
this Brummie rock’n’roll bar is
when the barman passes me
my bottle of apple and mango J2O
and moves on to the next punter
without such much as a whisper
of the word ‘glass’.
Ah, that rock’n’roll.
As I ponder what might have happened
had I ordered a Jack Daniel’s,
I watch the first in a triumvirate
of hardcore beatdown bands
whose earnest endeavour
it is to redefine the word loud.
The new loud leaves eleven stranded
in a mosh pit with vaporised ear drums,
as it travels towards the outer reaches
of infinity.
The audience-mob responds
by beating to a pulp
the spaces in between them (mainly).
Blurry, amphetamine, windmill arms flail,
like a 1984 Morrissey on fast forward,
and a small army of boots stamp
on what I am convinced
must be some form of fire,
invisible to my tired, middle-aged eyes.
Courtesy of a text from an old band mate,
my mind rewinds to the brief rock’n’roll adventures
of my own youth.
Ah, how charmingly jejune we were
back in the day
when we tried to conjure up
such a thing as melody
and drank whisky
from a bottle.
I am good at being irked by the world
to such an extent that
I have written about my irked-ness
in more than a few poems.
‘Look,’ people will one day say,
when they’ve finally got round
to discovering my poetic output,
‘there goes Fergus the so-called poet,
transforming the petty wretchedness of the world
into his little wordy works of art,
one minor irritation at a time!’
And, being me, I would take this as an opportunity
to be irked at their presumption
that I was writing about some irky thing or other.
For there is only so much irk poetry
which one may tolerably create
before a poem about flowers, or trees,
or the movement of clouds in the sky
makes its unwritten presence felt,
as it struggles to emerge from the nowhere of ideas.
Here comes a flock of birds, painted black
on the canvas of today’s blue-grey sky,
heading for the familiar horizon of the Malvern Hills,
a line of poetry more poetic than any I will ever write.
It’s a shame today isn’t a person,
then I could ask it
why it was being such an insufferable arsehole,
such a dick, such a total and utter twat.
‘I’m not just a list of slightly taboo body parts,
you know,’ it might reply.
‘Fuck off, you ingrowing toenail,’
would be the start of my retort.
‘You receding hairline; you beer gut overhang;
you slightly too long and crooked nose;
you troublesome, arthritic knee.’
But the day would just sit there,
with its clear blue sky, its bright November sun,
and its slightly above average temperature
for this time of year.
As I took a break from insulting the day,
I would look out of the window
to follow the flight of a crow
as it disappeared into the branches of a tree.
‘Are you going to continue your list?’
it would ask, ‘Because I have better things to do.’
I would let the day know that it had nothing to do
as it was just a day; a mere abstract noun.
‘Poets who live in glass houses
shouldn’t throw stones,’ it would reply,
before saying something really profound
which rather undermined the force of my tirade.
But, as I’m the one with the pencil and the notebook,
I wouldn’t write it down, and what does today have,
apart from the upper hand
and a rapidly decreasing lifespan?
After spending every hour not getting along
with the day, I finally arrived at tomorrow.
It’s a better day than yesterday, even with all of the
grey,
and the cold, and the threat of rain.
‘You see?’ the day would have said,
‘It was you all along,’ and I realise that, maybe,
we could have been friends after all.
Do you remember that time
when I mistook our red watering can
for a cat?
No, of course you don’t,
because I never mentioned it,
(‘Until now!’ as my class of 2000
used to joke),
out of the embarrassment which comes
from confusing red watering cans
with tortoiseshell cats.
Rather like the time
when I mistook a pot plant
for a cat (catalogued
in a poem some years ago),
and the time, just now,
when I mistook my black shoes
in the hall
for a cat.
All of which has me thinking
that maybe I could mistake anything
for a cat,
like those times in the past,
when everyone mistook my smile
for a smile.
is the unlikely phrase which crashed on to
my consciousness as it was receding last night,
like an outgoing tide, but an outgoing tide
which was determined to have one last unwelcome surge
of wakefulness before the nothingness
of slumber got the upper hand.
‘Ignore it,’ I say. ‘It’s meaningless tosh.’
‘Meaningless tosh,’ I say, ‘is just the sort
of tosh upon which much of what I write
is founded. Also, good luck trying to sleep
without committing it to paper.’
Admitting that I have a point (or two),
I turn the light on, get my notebook out,
and scribble down the words: Lions don’t wear
sunglasses. Put the book down. Turn the light off.
I close my eyes and hope the tide of consciousness
will once again recede. Count backwards from five hundred,
getting sleepier… getting sleepier…
when, out of nowhere, You are made of custard.
‘Stay back!’ I say, like some poetic King Canute.
But this won’t work; the tide will not be told.
‘Don’t turn the light on. Do not write it down,’ I say.
‘It’ll only encourage the idiot
who keeps throwing you these morsels of madness.’
But it’s too late. The light is on. The notebook
is out. The words are being scribbled down.
I wonder if the cause of this sleep delay
is the basis of poetry,
or the basis of poetic angst,
as the light beside my bed goes out for good.
The tide stays out as I sail away to sleep,
where, eventually, I meet a pride of lions.
What if the crazy people are right? they say,
raising their eyebrows from
behind their spectacular
sunglasses.
If you were to tell my sons
what a calm and fair-minded man I was
when seated behind the wheel
of a moving vehicle
they would take this as proof of the existence
of at least one parallel universe
and ask you what other me-related miracles existed
in the realm of your alternative reality.
Perhaps this other me would be capable
of listening to Today on Radio 4
without expressing the wish
to hurl the offending radio
at an innocent kitchen wall;
and he wouldn’t rant about the vacuity
of the interviewer
and the transparent dishonesty
of whatever charmless airhead,
masquerading as an MP, was on air,
to vomit out some unconvincing defence
of whatever shambolic government policy it was
that said fraudulent mediocrity
was pretending to care about.
Maybe this imposter,
for he certainly isn’t me,
could watch a psychological thriller on TV
without exclaiming, ‘Well, he obviously the bad guy!’
the second that a shifty-looking actor
hit the screen.
I would hope that you could explain
that this non-me-me
had learnt to be more consistent
in his musical tastes,
having realised that there isn’t enough
cognitive dissonance in heaven and earth and space
to accommodate the notion that you can like
both The Smiths and Duran Duran.
But you won’t tell my sons any of this,
because parallel universes don’t exist,
and, therefore, neither do you,
and I will forever remain
what the psycho-analysts refer to as
a work in progress;
and my sons, as they gain that self-awareness
which only comes with age and experience,
gradually realise, to their disappointment,
that the apple never falls
very far from the tree.
You are the music
while the music lasts – TS Eliot
The sunset while the evening fades,
the stars which shine in distant galaxies,
the smell of fresh-cut summer grass,
the autumn wind upon your face,
the mountain path upon whose surface you ascend,
the universe and everything that’s in it.
The world is peopled with linguistic dunces;
fools who do not appreciate the true nature
of their own foolishness,
which is to stab their mother tongue in the back
every time they open their moron mouths.
The clumsy word assassins. The meaning murderers.
Timewasters extraordinaire.
Those whose self-appointed task
is to transform the language into a wasteland
of bombed out ugliness.
To listen to them
is the auditory equivalent
of having to look at a skyline of modern architecture
for your summer holidays.
Are they unconsciously playing a game
of Who Can Confuse the Listener the Most?
That the world of chrome and glass
lionises these lunatics
is, as they would say, on point.
After all, aren’t their hearts made of
the same plastic as their credit cards?
Aren’t their smiles as authentic as a Happy Meal?
At least their disdain for beauty in all things is
consistent.
Look at the buildings they inhabit
and realise that it couldn’t be any other way.
Everything’s infected now, even the world of poetry.
Poetry? Pah!
Nascent poets,
if you think that you need one of these fatheads
to provide you with inspiration,
in the form of a gormless writing cue,
then I have some bad news:
abandon writing, it’s clearly not your thing;
you may as well take up something
like hammering nails into balloons,
rewiring all of the apples in your fruit bowl,
or building a full-size model version of your house
out of cat hair and resentment.
Hey! I love your poems, man!
Where do you get your ideas from?
‘Oh, them,’ you should say. ‘Well,
like all of the world’s greatest artists,
I get my ideas from a Workshop Facilitator.’
The eulogy for the slow death of civilisation
is being delivered ten thousand times a day
in order to facilitate an optimised future going forward.
I glance at the clock,
not because I want to see the time,
and thus calculate how much of the day
I have already expertly wasted (all of it)
but simply because it is there.
‘Shut up,’ I say to its impertinent silence.
‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you
that it is rude to point?’
I seem to have it in for the clock today.
‘And what sort of face
has three hands anyway,’
the anyway pointing to my petulant mood,
like the clock pointing its accusing hour hand
at the number eleven.
If the clock is aspiring to be some form of
Hindu clock God, it should give up now.
Three hands is not enough hands
for such an endeavour
and it’s never going to work.
I replace the clock
with a hand-painted Italian plate,
artfully depicting a Tuscan scene,
having decided that, for today at least,
I am in the mood for something timeless.
Meandering through a half-filled notebook,
I find, among the many thoughts,
one, which, at the time of writing,
seemed like a good idea at the time.
People aren’t lentils. Insight? Wisdom?
Poetic foolishness? All three or none?
For a moment, I wonder what it was which
inspired me to write this stupid thought.
And then I remember, but before
I start to fashion my explanation
in verse form for this astonishing truth,
I decide to leave the poor phrase alone.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I
laughed.
‘You can’t sip wine,’
and brought the bottle back to my lips.
Observing other people and myself,
I think that it must be the case –
we all find criticism easier
than silence.
I want my poetry to be useless,
like an ornamental teapot.
‘The teapot should be used
for brewing tea!’
the cry goes up.
‘And words are there
for making sense!’
But this is something which
I do not always stick
to in my poems, some of which are merely
ornamental teapots.
Again I ask myself the question,
‘But what is God?
Ineffable,
I hear my long-dead teachers say.
Ineffable?
the English teacher
I used to be replies.
A word without a definition
is just a sound.
Start a poem with a fact –
Gibbons are funkmasters.
Elaborate –
and this is why they love ice-skating so much.
Throw in the odd poetic-sounding
non sequitur –
Has purpose arrived in your life yet,
or the unexpected extinction of
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
Is this why we write?
Is it?
Somebody answered, ‘I don’t know,’
but I don’t know.
The basics of living,
and a doomed attempt
to make sense.
Instead, I fashion meaning
from meaninglessness.
Like that year when I had the sunset
gift-wrapped for your birthday.
Dissatisfaction is the cornerstone
of the human psyche.
That, and all of the constant
interruptions.
Have you ever considered lying down on your bed
and never getting up again?
The best thing to do with all of your opinions
is to scrumple them up.
Set fire to them. Dance.
Sunlight can fall
on the glummest of people,
even those obsessed with books
telling them how their lives should be lived.
You know that feeling you get when you’ve taken a DNA test and three weeks later you get a 1st cousin match for someone with the surname Niland and you think that sounds a bit like Hyland no wait oh fuck…
You know that feeling you get when you’ve finally met your mother and she gives you the relevant details to help you find your father like his name Christopher Hyland and his date of birth 6th or 8th September 1940 and his place of birth Dublin and his occupation telephone engineer and you go to Dublin to start the search et voila! there he is in the Register of Births Christopher Hyland born Dublin 6th September 1940 and you think well this is going to be pretty straightforward you fool but when you follow all the leads up over the next nine years and there’s no trace of him anywhere births marriages deaths internet GPO overseas employees list GPO pensions records UK telephone directories letters to all 180+ Hylands in the Dublin telephone directory letter to local paper church records contact with illegal access to National Insurance database revealing nothing so much as nothing nothing and yet more nothing so you go back to Dublin to start all over again because you must have missed something but after four increasingly frustrating days of further despair you have a Eureka! moment because what if his mother died in childbirth which leads you to checking Deaths for the 3rd quarter of 1940 might produce a lead and you find the impossible the absolutely totally unbelievably impossible truth but there it is in black and white like an anvil leaping out of the page and smashing you simultaneously in the face the guts the heart but there it is and you read the recorded death the actual death on the 10th September 1940 in Dublin four days after he was born on 6th September 1940 in Dublin the death the death of your father Christopher Hyland aged 4 days old wait what actually no really I mean what and you can’t quite believe what you’ve just stumbled across as you deduce that your father whatever his name is appears to have done a Day of the Jackal identity theft number for he seems to have assumed the identity of a dead child for reasons which must surely be nefarious but you don’t quite abandon your search and some time later quite a long time later you realise that you’ve now been searching for twenty six years and all you have are some insane conspiracy theories about a man who assumed the identity of a dead child came to England to work on telephone exchanges was he IRA was he a spy and during your weekly therapy sessions you slowly work towards the realisation that you are going to have accept that you will never ever never ever ever never ever know who your father is because there is literally nowhere else to look well you know that feeling right it’s quite shit really isn’t it?
Don’t be taken in by the propaganda:
a one-horse open-sleigh is no sane person’s idea
of a comfortable mode of transportation
in which to go gallivanting about
during the immediate aftermath
of a period of low atmospheric pressure
which has contributed to the formation of ice particles
somewhere high above your head, resulting in
the eventual transformation of a previously sensible-looking
landscape
into a scene of uniformly bland whiteness,
otherwise known as, ‘Oh, fucking hell, it’s been snowing
again.
Do we really have to take the children outside
and thereby give birth to the lie that we are somehow
fun people who enjoy life?’
But back to the one-horse open-sleigh.
To start with, horses are prohibitively expensive to buy,
to maintain, to keep fit and healthy, exercised and fed,
(yes, that is an example of unnecessary repetition, isn’t
it?),
and the horse itself probably isn’t exactly thrilled
about the whole harnessed to a sleigh part of arrangement
either,
seeing as horses are, by nature, wild animals,
who like to go around doing wild things –
like ‘being a horse’ –
and who have not evolved to live in a shed full of their own
shit
only to be taken out to – for example –
pull a group of giddy and over-excited, simpleton, idiot
humans
in an open-sleigh during freezing conditions on hazardous
roads.
Horses are sociable beasts,
much like people (well, some people),
and a singular horse attached to an open-sleigh
will be acutely aware of the terrible juxtaposition
between the moronic humans it is slavishly pulling –
without, I might add, the horse’s consent –
and its own sense of alienation, isolation, and enforced
equine solitude.
‘Oh, what fun it is to ride on a one-horse open-sleigh.’
Unless you’re the horse.
And even if you’re not the horse,
but one of the exploitative open-sleigh passengers/tossers,
the phrase, ‘Oh, what fun!’ will not be flying around your
head
as you fly through the freezing air,
which is afforded the opportunity of freezing your face off
due to the open-top-ness of the sleigh.
But by all means jingle some bells –
even ‘all the way’, which seems unnecessarily suggestive
and has me wondering if the whole song isn’t some
veiled metaphor about misbehaving al fresco style
during the anonymity afforded by the cover of a blizzard,
and which no one else has yet noticed.
Oh, what fun it is to stay in a centrally-heated home
indulging in whatever method of oblivion-inducing
ingestion is your thing,
while waiting for sensible weather to return.
