cedo illi qui plus nouerit in ista peritia satis quam ego [historia brittonum]
I: the earth
i am shocked by the old more than the new:
this discovery of ancients,
living loveless lives among the potsherds,
bones, struck flints and coins.
their inhumanity, insubstantiality, infirmity
choke the silent earth with forgotten unnamed relics.
we laughed at the drawer
in our grandmother’s sideboard
which smelled of face powder
and whose creased and faded photographs,
tea-stained envelopes, angina tablets,
kidney stones rattling in a plastic phial
and sixpenny chocolate bars
held more memories and emotions
than our childish heads conceived.
the past is strange to me, and shocking
in its intensity, immutability, loss.
two men peer at each other
through a hole in the toilet wall.
they know the lovelessness of a ceramic life.
to them the past is nothing
or nothing more than the present.
peering eyes glimpsing ... nothing.
we can despise their inhumanity, infirmity,
insubstantiality, but by what right
do we denounce them as unhappy?
before father was bald
he took me, chubby short and smiling
to feed the pigeons in trafalgar square.
it was my birthday and the sun shone on me
– the sun always shines on my birthday –
because I was four years old.
the weight of a pigeon balancing,
beating wings, on my open palm
was more than I could bear.
father helped me hold it up
and I knew that I had failed:
my infirmity was not right for men
and my manhood was lost in failure.
potsherds dancing in a museum case.
potsherds dance beneath the plough.
the past remains. potsherds dancing
in my dreams dictate to me the future.
and if i come to rome, and if i come?
the bones lie still beneath a bleaching sun.
the sand devours them with an appetite
so infinitesimal it may be weeks
before the dry repast is done.
then suddenly the wind will belch
the bones from their shroud
the dust from this ancient of days
which prowled the desert
unseen by man in its intensity.
and the intensity of those peering eyes!
inquisitive and prying, seeing… nothing.
nothing but the ruins, nothing but the rubbish.
nothing… nothing.
the rubbish and the ruins.
the ruins and remains.
II: light and darkness
the city streets are silent;
a grey wind fingers at a carton
and lifts it gently,
tumbles it along the path
through stinking streams
of lager piss which seep
from behind black carrion-filled
mounded dustbin bags
and trickle slowly to the gutter.
soho, city all too real,
rises above the dreaming tramps.
the uncompromising light of morning
slices into buildings with its naked shadows
and gnaws at the frozen feet of subculture
walking to avoid unwanted sleep.
is there a certain way
into the light behind the stars
which waves and tickles
through uncertain night
into the certainty of dawn?
and what if daybreak never comes?
i looked and saw that it was good,
and it was good.
III: land and sea
who has not stared out
across an olive winter sea
and thought of icebergs,
blubbered seals and sliding penguins
happy in the freezing waste?
who but i would sit,
naked at the water’s edge
and peer out across the olive waste,
shifting, heaving, but eternally same,
and wonder if i might not glimpse
a rising whale?
and i have flown
not from the earth but from the sky
not to the earth for there i walked
when once i was alive
with delusions and illusions
that my death would cause an echo
in the torture-caverns of the night.
on these footworn marble steps
an olive sea returns to life
as shells turned grey lapidified
burst out into the city light.
here there are no bones
but shells and pebbles,
wracks and driftwood.
when i think of loss
i think of the sea:
the nostalgia
of a cross-channel ferry
and the taste of breton oysters.
if i have faith and no belief
or if i have belief and no faith
or if i have both faith and belief
or neither;
if i have honour and understanding
or dishonour and intolerance;
if i were a rich man or a poor;
would the december sea be blue?
IV: the fruit of the earth
i have a self-repeating dream
that i will turn into a leg of ham
to be sliced and sliced again
around the central bone
and bled and served with mustard
on a plate of bland desires.
i met you once before,
when we had no compassion.
you dressed in black and held the secrets
of how plants grow, of why we speak
and crystalline formation. in truth,
to me you were a near divinity.
if you do not speak tonight
i shall call down curses from the gods
to rot your liver, knot your guts
and send you fire where you had wine before.
in my dream i wear a citric crown,
a pope beneath a peach, a king below a cross.
across the river stands a soldier,
about to sever from its grinding ropes
this pontoon bridge of empty boats
and bar the way to gold-walled rome.
out in the olive wastes
where squid are surfacing in shoals,
an island breaks against the foam
and welcomes heroes with their legions.
age can but wither them
and what beauty made, unmake.
the praises of the past
are sung uncomprehendingly
by minds too small to want to know the truth,
which need the comforts of a myth.
and so begins a list of dates,
of battles, kings, inventions
by which we medievalise our children
in chants to learn by rote:
ten sixty-six, ten eighty-seven,
eleven hundred,
eleven thirty-five, eleven fifty-four…
and killing understanding
we strangle willingness to learn.
those eyes will pry no more
through stoppered glory holes.
they split my head in many pieces,
divided them amongst themselves;
some they ate and some they burned
but two they buried in a pit.
and so my skull becomes posterity;
this bone which formed my thoughts
and unformed in one stroke my memories
when the axe came blinding down.
do not laugh at my infirmity
for death is not a simple thing
and imports more to the living
than to the recently deceased.
V: creeping things
i shall take nothing from this world
for i nothing can return
and to nothing shall return.
a life is not a thing of ease
from the senseless gasping choke
which wrenches us to consciousness
to that last which rips us from it…
there’s no joy there.
and no more shall ever be
while my sole remaining hope is death.
all flesh is sexuality
from that first flesh which begets
and bears us with its genitality
through the communion of human contact
to death’s orgasmic shudder.
and i have been here many times,
walked within this bright subculture,
danced with potsherds in my schemes,
rejected many another subculture
draining each after the other,
assimilating each after the other,
until i have no need for more
and the assemblage of subcultures
becomes me.
it is this that i find shocking in the past.
ah yes, my friend, we spend our time in trivia,
squandering precious god-accounted hours
on pursuits we cannot follow
in a chase whose end we fear.
here among the hibernating souls
where night drips into our black innocence
with the purity of absolution,
a pope, splendid and resplendent
in the triple crown of centuries
plucks at yarrow stalks
and meditates upon his petrine patrimony.
the night grows heavy along the street
silently forces it way into every corner,
every alley, sinking to the edges of the world.
oh why do people look unhappy?
city smiles are reserved
for drunks and for seducers.
plaster masks become too fragile
to change; a habit becomes solidity
because we believe too strongly
in the meaning of a gesture.
we believe a curling of the lips
can touch another’s soul
(or that, in smiling,
we have exposed our own).
the smile unreturned is bitter,
and only the old consent
to smile with the solitary young
except where guilty complicity
is believed. and yes,
i have belief but no faith.
VI: man and woman created he them
my heart of stone is struck
by the striking of a flint
to light a roasting fire
where ghosts of faces hide behind the flames
their voices taunting me,
threatening to trade me,
to betray me
for a taxable handful of coins.
i will be hanging on a christian tree
before this fate occurs to me.
my heart of bone is struck
and striking screams subversion
causing offence
by the merest brushing of thumbs
as we two are thrown together
by the throwing of the train
and as we come together
in the coming together of our hands
and the brushing of our thumbs
we announce ourselves
as lovers. prying eyes see.
the rubbish and the ruins.
the ruins and remains.
nothing.
VII: repose
outside, beside a stack of boxes,
rotten fruit and a yellow skip
containing the sad remains of walls
a woman in a dark-stained coat
has been rummaging amongst,
a poet works his words into a shape
and curls them tight around the scene.
making love and war
we propagate the race.
it is not i who acts this torment
but another, torn and intent
who whispers meaningless
and unrequired phrases
into his lover’s upturned ear.
pursuing still among the ruins
with his peering eyes
which ever and always
have seen… nothing.
the rubbish.
the ruins.
the remains.
nothing…