Selected Poems Read online

  Begging for pure sex, one unembarrassed friend

  To share my boredom and my bed – One masta want

  One boy – one boy for bed … and like an elephant

  That bungles with its trunk about its cage,

  I make my half-sloshed entrances and rage

  Like any normal lover when I come

  Before I’ve managed it. Then his thin bum

  That did seem beautiful will seem obscene;

  I’m conscious of the void, the Vaseline,

  Pour shillings in his hands and send him back

  With the driver, ugly, frightened, black,

  Black, black. What’s the use? I can’t escape

  Our foul conditioning that makes a rape

  Seem natural, if wrong, and love unclean

  Between some ill-fed blackboy and fat queen.

  Things can be so much better. Once at least

  A million per cent. Policeman! Priest!

  You’ll call it filthy, but to me it’s love,

  And to him it was. It was. O he could move

  Like an oiled (slow-motion) racehorse at its peak,

  Outrageous, and not gentle, tame, or meek –

  O magnificently shameless in his gear,

  He sauntered the flunkied restaurant, queer

  As a clockwork orange and not scared.

  God, I was grateful for the nights we shared.

  My boredom melted like small cubes of ice

  In warm sundowner whiskies. Call it vice;

  Call it obscenity; it’s love; so there;

  Call it what you want. I just don’t care.

  Two figures in grey uniforms and shorts,

  Their eyes on quick promotion and the tarts,

  Took down the number of my backing car.

  I come back raddled to the campus bar

  And shout out how I laid a big, brute

  Negro in a tight, white cowboy suit.

  II

  Advanced psychology (of 1910)

  Bristled from thin lips the harmattan

  Had cracked and shrivelled like a piece of bark.

  She egged me on to kiss her in the scented dark,

  Eyes bottled under contact lenses, bright

  And boggling, as if for half the night

  She’d puffed cheap hashish to console

  Her for the absences, that great, black hole

  Pascal had with him once, l’ abîme ouvert

  He thought was special but is everywhere.

  He cackles from Heaven at the desperate Earth.

  We permit ourselves too much satiric mirth

  At their expense, and blame the climate, so

  I touched her bosom gently just to show

  I could acknowledge gestures, but couldn’t stroke

  Her leathery, dry skin and cracked a joke

  Against myself about my taste in little boys.

  Then the party drowned us in its noise

  And carried us apart, I, to my jests,

  She, to her gesturing with other guests.

  I’ve seen her scrawny, listless husband still

  Such rowdy booze-ups with a madrigal,

  His tonic water serving for rare wine

  Toasting the ladies with O Mistress Mine;

  Sort of impressive. I confess such prick

  Songs make me absolutely bloody sick,

  But he can sing them straight at his third wife.

  Changey-changey! But they can’t change life,

  Though they meditate together with joined hands,

  Though his psyche flutters when he thinks he’s kissed,

  Cuddled and copulated with New Zealand’s

  Greatest, unpublished, woman novelist.

  III

  All night a badly driven armoured truck

  With grinding gears crunched on the gravel, shook

  The loose louvres and the damp mosquito mesh,

  And glaring headlights swept across my flesh.

  Back to loneliness, pulling myself off,

  After a whole White Horse, with photograph

  And drag, a Livingstone with coloured plates,

  That good old stand-by for expatriates

  Hooked on the blacks; again have to withdraw

  Into myself, backwards down a corridor,

  Where in one of many cold, white cells

  They play cold water on my testicles,

  When I should be breaking out … must … must

  Matchet the creeper from my strangled lust.

  The sticky morning comes and some loud gun

  Fires short distance shells into the sun.

  Patrols and shots; the same trilingual drone

  Goes on about curfews through a megaphone.

  A new anthem: tiddly-om-pom-pom

  Blares the new world like a Blackpool prom

  And promises corruption’s dead and lies

  Riddled with bullets in three mortuaries.

  An American’s got it all on tape.

  The proclamation: murder, looting, rape,

  Homosexuality, all in the same breath,

  And the same punishment for each – death, death!

  He plays it back to half-seas-over, hushed

  Circles in the bar. I flush with defiant lust.

  Now life’s as dizzy as the Book of Kells.

  Thank God for London and Beaux/Belles.

  I must get back again. I must, but must

  Never again be locked away or trussed

  Like a squealing piglet because my mind

  Shut out all meaning like a blackout blind.

  Next door, erotomaniacs. Here, queers,

  And butch nurses with stiff hoses mock

  As we grow limp, Roundheads and Cavaliers,

  Like King Charles bowing to the chopping block.

  IV

  Insects strike the clapper. The school bell

  Clangs for nothing. Nothing; and her little hell

  Begins when darkness falls. Her garden moves

  With mambas, leafage like damp leather gloves,

  Cobras, rats and mice, and bandicoots,

  The drunk maigardai and their prostitutes

  Who help them pass their watch. Time drags

  For such lonely, unlovable old bags.

  There’s too much spawning. Men! Beasts! Ticks!

  Spawn in their swarmfuls like good Catholics.

  She wanted children but she gets instead

  Black houseboys leaving notes beside her bed:

  Madam your man is me. Where is the yes?

  Putting pressed frangipani in her dress.

  She’s not as desperate for a go as that.

  She has her gaudy parrot and her spayed, grey cat

  For company. Babar’s a champion impressionist

  Of whisky noises when his owner’s pissed.

  She pretends he’s learnt it when he’s heard her wash

  And offers visitors a choice of squash.

  Darkness. The swoosh of soda and the glug

  Of Scotch come from Babar as that drunken thug

  She hired as a watchman and must fire, treads

  Down her phlox and pees on her arctotis beds.

  She knows what he’s up to. Brute! The garage door

  Swings on its hinges for the watchman’s whore.

  And now they’re rocking. One cracked heel

  Scrapes after purchase on her Peugeot wheel.

  Rustle and gasp, black creatures claw

  At one another in her packing straw.

  You never know in these hot climates; coups

  Can throw the whole white quarter on the booze.

  Whisky and danger. Ah who knows? Who knows?

  Some drunken Public Works might still propose.

  But she wouldn’t have him. No, not her. Boy!

  She’ll give you the sack for those grunts of joy.

  V

  Northwards two hundred miles, an emptiness

  As big as Europe; Sah’ra; Nothing
ness.

  South six hundred, miles of churning sea

  Make of the strongest swimmer a nonentity,

  Bleaching the blackest flesh as white as spray.

  The sea makes no demands but gets its way.

  The campus wants its pep- and sleeping pills.

  It’s not diseases, but the void that kills,

  The space, the gaps, the darkness, that same void

  He hears vibrating in clogged adenoid

  And vocal cords. Through his cool stethoscope

  He hears despair pulsate and withered hope

  Flutter the failing heart a little, death

  Of real feeling in a laboured breath.

  He knows with his firm finger on a pulse

  It is this Nothingness and nothing else

  Throbs in the blood. Nothing is no little part

  Of time’s huge effort in the human heart.

  There’s love. There’s courage. And that’s all.

  And the itus et reditus of Pascal.

  He’s not asked out to drinks or dinner much.

  He knows how the slightest sweatrash on the crutch

  Scares some and with good reason, whose child’s whose,

  Whose marriage depends on sjamboks, and who screws

  In Posts & Telegraphs, and reads instead

  His damp-stained Pensées on their double bed.

  The Nothingness! Lisa – she couldn’t stand

  The boredom and packed off for Switzerland.

  She sends him a postcard of a snowblown slope:

  Boris, ich bin frei … und friere. He can’t cope

  Here alone. There’s nothing for a sick MO

  Sick of savannah, sick of inselberg,

  Sick of black Africa, who cannot go

  Ever again to white St Petersburg.

  2. The Railroad Heroides

  I

  A lake like lead. A bar. The crowding, nude

  Slack-breasted, tattooed girls made lewd,

  Lascivious gestures, their bald groins

  Studded with wet francs, for my loose coins.

  I’m surrounded by canoes. Cadeau! Cadeau!

  I fling out all my change, but they won’t go.

  One paddles underneath and pokes a straw

  At my bare ankles through the gaping floor.

  I’m on my fifth warm beer. I need my cash.

  I crunch her knuckles hard, and yell out: Vache!

  Then as she pulls my sandals: Tu, vache noire!

  They rock the rotten stilts that prop the bar.

  My boatman saves me, and for ten francs more

  Canoes me blushing to the nearest shore.

  I lie back like a corpse Valhalla bound

  And sleep. Only a wet, withdrawal sound

  Sucks at my ear. I dream. I dream the sun

  Blackens my bare balls to bitumen.

  II

  Again I feel my school belt with the snake-

  Hook, silver buckle tauten and then break

  From the banisters I swung off. Suicide –

  The noose’s love-bites and a bruised backside.

  I laughed a long time and was glad I fell.

  The white wake swabbing at the woundless swell,

  The swashing, greasy pool, the spindrift fine

  As Shelltox seasoning my lips with brine

  Makes sadness shoreless and shakes sullen grief

  Apart like gobs of spittle. Off Tenerife

  French soldiers from Gabon dressed up as sheikhs

  Waltzed amidships and blackamoors cut cakes

  Iced thick with tricolours. The Marseillaise

  Boomed from the tannoy and the easy lays

  Beamed at the officers. I flung your zig-zag

  Tuareg ring and the red, goat-leather bag

  I’d bought for our swimming things into the sea

  Placating nothing. A little lighter, free

  To saunter in fancy dress the festooned decks,

  In the midst of plenty, hungry for good sex,

  I found a lonely woman. I got you off my chest,

  But had to have my hand held and I lay

  All night with my confessor, fully dressed,

  Afraid of my terror, longing for the day.

  III

  Bordeaux – Paris – London – Leeds; I get

  Cold and tachycardia in my couchette.

  With weeks of travel thudding in my brain,

  Bilges, ship’s engine, and the English train,

  Too much black coffee and cold lager beer

  I find sleep impossible. My throbbing ear

  Bangs on the pillow with an angry thud –

  It’s you, it’s you, with a sound like blood,

  After the bloodshed, if your tribe survives,

  Pounding a big man’s yams among young wives.

  IV

  Leeds City Station, and a black man sweeps

  Cartons and papers into tidy heaps.

  3. Travesties

  ‘… the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a pansy into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.’

  (Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)

  Distant Ophir

  (after Hieronymi Fracastorii, Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus, Veronae, MDXXX)

  ‘Westerners, who laid the Sun’s fowl low,

  the flocks of Apollo, now stand and hear

  the dreadful sufferings you must undergo.

  This land, where you are now, is that Ophir

  your flashy maps show off like jewellery

  but not yet yours to own, nor domineer

  its quiet peoples until now quite free;

  cities and new sacraments you won’t impose

  until you’ve suffered much by land and sea.

  Self-lumbered pilgrims of San Lazaro’s,

  brothels and gold bars bring you no joy,

  porphyry and rape bring no repose!

  You’ll war with strangers, bloodily, destroy

  or be destroyed, your discoveries will cost

  destructions greater than the siege of Troy,

  worse wanderings after with more thousands lost,

  comrades you fitted out search parties for

  hutches of bleached ribs on our bare coast.

  You’ll go on looking, losing more and more

  to the sea, the climate, weapons, ours and yours,

  your crimes abroad brought home as civil war.

  And also Syphilis: sores, foul sores

  will drive you back through storm and calenture

  crawling like lepers to our peaceful shores.

  The malaise of the West will lure

  the scapegoats of its ills, you and your crew,

  back to our jungles looking for a cure. –

  You’ll only find the Old World in the New,

  and you’ll rue your discubrimiento, rue

  it, rue Africa, rue Cuba, rue Peru!’

  And away behind the crags the dark bird flew.

  And everything it prophesied came true.

  Note. Hieronymus Fracastorius (1483–1553), the author of Syphilis, was born, as perhaps befits a true poet, without a mouth. The fact is celebrated in the well-known epigram of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558). Fracastorius died, after an apoplexy, speechless.

  4. Manica

  ‘An experienced doctor has said that he has never seen tropical neurasthenia develop in a man with a sound philosophy of life.’

  (Notes on the Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates, London,

  The Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene, 3rd ed., 1960)

  I. The Origin of the Beery Way

  The Coast, the Coast, a hundred years ago!

  Poisonous mangroves and funereal palms,

  Victorian hearse-plumes nodding victims in

  To bouts of wifeless boredom and El Vomito,

  Shacking with natives, lovely Sodom’
s sin,

  Boozers with riff-raff in their British arms.

  Reports put down ‘futility & worthlessness’ –

  I’m just a big colon: kick, kick, caress,

  Administer, then murmur beau, beau, beau

  Like some daft baby at your Mandingo.

  From dashi, dashi to cadeau, cadeau,

  Armed with my Dettol, my Od-o-ro-no,

  My African Personality, I go

  For a bit of the old Français finesse,

  Not work at your ballocks like a kid’s yo-yo,

  Then buck you off them like a rodeo.

  With prudish pansies I am passionless.

  My sex-life’s manic like a bad rondeau.

  I need to forage among Francophones.

  A real beaubarian and buckaneer, that’s me, Yo Ho,

  Bottles of Black & White do me for rum.

  I soft-shoe shuffle on the white man’s bones,

  Windborne or brittle as a popadum.

  Omar, not Khayam, the Gambia’s mad Marabout

  Changed the Commissioners’ bullets into water;

  Into water being Moslem. I, being atheist,

  Am full of more potent potions when I’m pissed.

  A century later, full of Guinnesses and Stars,

  I’m God’s own Heaven, and as I slash I shout:

  The white man’s water turns back into fire!

  Braving castration at their scimitars,

  And single-handed put Islam to rout,

  And vanquish the missions with my bent desire,

  Spouting a semen capable of slaughter.

  Flat on my back, beneath the Galaxy, I fear

  This burning in my groin is gonorrhoea.

  II. The Elephant & the Kangaroo

  The first rains slap the leaves like slow applause.

  My nerves are soothed by it.

  The insects’ constant grind has been put down.

  It means a night indoors;

  nothing doing in the town;

  power failure; all the dives unlit.

  The imported apples begin to look like shit.

  The Star beer’s warmish, the cut fruit brown.

  Chops will be rotting in the Lebanese Cold Stores.

  The rainmaker wraps away his amulet

  and hugs his gods to see the great downpours.

  So the world comes back into its own

  and all the houses through a stage-scene gauze

  of wavering, driven rain and drunkenness. It

  goes on spinning and will not run down.

  In cool bush-shirt and shorts I sit

  feeling the world spinning, the spinning floors

  between the brandy and verandah. Laterite.

  Bush, like effigies of bush, is washed of it.

  A clean green everywhere and it still pours.