Long Pass Read online

  briefly to camera, Remington ‘58

  full-chambered with blanks. Steer. Hide.

  The uniform surface of the sea

  speaks of the gross magnitude of a suffocating

  nothingy fullness settled over by its surface.

  Your child’s handful of gaze skates out across its plain

  its low waves and points of light in the late sun

  unprocessable tonnage of data

  happily encompassed in this moment of you, your attention

  agitating butterfly-like at the horizon. Twelve years

  you’ll meet someone called

  The painter is frustrated to be always

  painting onto something, to be

  concealing precisely as he displays.

  The odour of the tincture he requires

  to mix the precise tone of cerulean

  tastes the air with the tongue of an old lover; so

  the body of his work is just overwhelmingly seascape.

  ‘What are we as a species if not a carving out from the wooded, wet earth we evolved in reciprocal counterfactual to? I am the sum of a string of a white man’s failed relationships. I am a messy desk and a stack of unread books, the constant dull subpoena of alcohol and tobacco.’ See the way the tone veers uncontrollably? and I reach for the lead of type, the steadying semicolons and pilcrow and the scattering of inverted commas. And I reach to steady myself against the balustrade of a formulated phrase, and I tally the scars on her forearm, and I count the days, closing like a five-barred gate.

  and Rome burning

  becomes the world. But no,

  focus. Greece,

  Greeks: ‘…this

  incoming fire meets a fire moving

  towards it, and the outgoing fire

  leaps out like lightning

  while the incoming is quenched

  in moisture’, which is Plato,

  flicking his basically unconvertible

  fifty cents into the

  frankly unnatural

  science of human sight,

  that wishing well,

  that reservoir – the seascape

  they’re inseperable from.

  Every state

  steady enough

  to be expressed

  is the result of a negotiation between chaos

  and chaos. But so

  since Plato it’s sight has been

  the burning rope bridge

  by which we approach the world

  firstly, and not

  taste, or hearing, because the world is mostly

  human faces, the flickering of the

  sad, uncertain smile onto and from your

  Greek lips, delivering

  ‘But in what measure the quantities should be mixed,

  it would not be wise to say, even if one knew.’

  See how the tone veers uncontrollably under the pressure of what presses up from everything uncaptured by the implicit network of rules, the script, the proscriptions of grammar. The bowl struggling to contain its oranges; the signature its mark of presence; the painting its subject; the cards their interpretation; the icecaps their carbon; the translator his reading; the gendered body its outrageous fusillade of demand and counter; the mother her child and child her mother; the poem its egotism of ambition; the painting its subject; the skirting its malevolent clad. The hotel room its design, its unconscious inhabitant. The hide its steer; the cowboy his flowering weakness; the last letter from the frontier its creepy desire; the past its lovers; the explicatory framework its political positions and general gross mass of presupposition; the gullies their forest of nouns; the race the thriving narrative of race; the memory its content; the game its rioting players; the world its ruthless inhabitants; the currency its inflation; the scrimshaw its skeleton; the skin its skeleton of ideology; the gesture its whole personal history

  The gutsy tango of information through

  this thick triple sec–and–candyfloss broth,

  the fibreoptic bordello of undercooked pork-knuckle

  and skittering haptics, of dancing girls

  in paroxysms of echoic memory,

  the dopamine-stoked homunculur designer

  ransacking his cowboyish saddlebags of

  sovereign instants for the face of a first love

  who is no, not the same, changed

  by the light of even a moment’s exposure.

  Steer. Hide. To be

  at-one-with implies

  being reached into,

  too. Cowboy. Fool. And until then

  the silver-grey fifty-cent piece and your mother

  and notice only now the blue of her eyes,

  And what could be plusher than experience? The intense

  cornicing and fretwork of imagination and memory

  inlaid in everything like veins, like the pipes

  of a sprinkler system in a paper mill. Description

  is the finest fire-proofing we have,

  an insulation from the inhumanity

  of the too real. It is the cell wall we tap on,

  with the zinc frame of our pince-nez, our faint signals

  to the intriguing criminal next door – the world as is,

  that thief, that fraudster, that arsonist.

  THE BIG HOUSE

  Amateur musicians start up unexpectedly so

  a kind of music I know nothing about –

  baroque or symphonic, or chamber – plays,

  in slow notes, flat with the smell of instant coffee,

  and dry toast, and unmarked hardback books, across this

  hangover of mine, couched in its now-useless hideout, which

  overlooks the grand-house’s grounds, across which flit

  unknown birds, thrushes maybe – blue-tits, swallows –

  like a display of emotion I shouldn’t think

  I could put a name to it’s so joyful.

  HISTORY

  A version of ‘History’ by Robert Rozhdestvensky

  History! / Picture me, a young man, so / naïve, so deeply

  believing / and sincere / over your

  absolutes, your palette / of trues. Your / precision of gradient

  and angle, / indisputable as a math; / less questionable

  than cliché. / But boys / age, become

  grown. Your wind / shades their skin / and the seconds now

  are demanding account / of the centuries. / I write

  in the name / of the seconds…

  History / has the fructose / beauty of

  dawn. History / has the grand / grind of poverty,

  structuring people anew / before / scuttling off

  in the face of their / degradation. History / correct

  and senseless. Recall, / now, how frequently / you’re called

  appalling, though / breathtaking, or / noble though shocking,

  shameful, / cruel. / How you depended

  on passing / fashion, on ego / and conception:

  on dumb façade. How you / shrunk / from the dictators

  who measured you / by their own / invented versts and the scrabble

  of inches. / Proclaiming your / name, they

  stupefied the peoples, / claimed / your protection, and made

  worlds / lands. You have allowed yourself / to be

  powdered, / history, again: rouged and / made up,

  again, and redyed, / and again fitted / for a suit of new black.

  You were / redrafted / to that

  army / of / raucous cries

  specialising / in switching ‘great men’ / for people:

  History! Whore. / History! Queen. / You are not

  the dust, drying / in archives. History, / clutch these whispering fingers,

  open your / living heart / to the people.

  Look, / how / sensibly

  your founders, / your / managers and copers

  are waking, / are / swallowing their

  humble breakfast. / They are hurrying
/ to kiss their wives,

  their goodbyes. The greenery / of scent covers them, so / excitingly, the high

  sun / beats in their eyes, / the horns

  flourish their / noise, / and the imperturbable smoke

  rises endlessly / from the chimneys; / cries its tired praise against

  the still sweep / of skies. / You will,

  history, / you will be yet / the most exact

  gauge and measure, / the sweet geometry / of pressure. You

  will be. You must. / It is so / longed-for.

  2. Windmills

  ESCAPE TO THE RESERVOIR CAFÉ

  These days I order my coffee black, like an actress

  making it. I take a seat, feeling either landlocked

  like a thinking-man’s seagull or like a B52 held painfully

  in reserve. And the concrete-locked sailboats outside

  say Topaz Sailing System on them, and the people

  boating on the reservoir all say Swarovski Coping System

  in them. The water fails in the February grey to glisten,

  but the whitenesses of loosed gullfeather can act up,

  stand in. Like I understudy the reservoir,

  heft my participation mystique like a medicine ball between

  my stomach and the low wishbones of my cheeks.

  I check my phone continually, like an agent.

  The lake and my indoorsman idea of the lake go at it

  like boxers, hell-for-leather, like-for-like, then seem briefly

  to embrace, like boxers often will. The reservoir

  is like a lake. The café an elsewhere. I check my phone,

  and head outside to join the Portuguese man ostensibly

  manning the till – now disking bread disconsolately to the seagulls –

  and to listen to the wind and the construction-work, the wind

  and the seagulls, and the asthmatic crackle

  of a cigarette with too-little tobacco at its filter end.

  And to gaze like an actress across the wind

  and the reservoir’s shocked terrain. And Chris Isaak

  whispers ‘Wicked Game’ to the deserted café behind me It’s strange

  FOR THE VERY LAST TIME

  In those days, the brusque burlesque of certain barriers

  between us and the world

  of others dissolving

  in the viscous base solution of chance.

  The clicky physics of a parabola

  in high-impact plastic

  entrance-permissioned for the depthiest passages of that

  needful hopey den you pass through and into,

  recursively. Those days

  of all self-contained matter smug in its primacy

  over the web of certainties you carry. In those days

  all tenets of epistemology shot, a small man

  held up against a plasterboard wall,

  his inherited tailored waistcoat

  coming open at the seams, becoming

  not a waistcoat. In those days, becoming rags.

  In those days, as in the roughhouse of expression, trusting yourself

  to the warm hands of chance and suggestion.

  In those days as in war a sudden starkness

  of the bonds held within opposition, the threads binding pawn and peon

  alike. I’m sorry. In those days the colourful percussive language

  of men staring their own weakness

  in the eyes, and with all the rich rags of our century’s manliness

  staring it down. The insignificance

  of their disappointment. In those B.O.D.S

  a destitution hard to find

  elsewhere. Find a level: chance and cash

  are the same thing remember. In those days,

  the monolithic impersonality of the House,

  glistering and rebarbative,

  fraying at its industrial edges like an empire,

  drowning in its own convoluted bureaucracy.

  In those days the concussive exponential manufacture of hope.

  The berlinesque coming down of walls,

  the flood of one thing into another. Hope,

  cash, the steady percussion of loss paper. So much paper.

  Those days an amphigory of loss, a clunky YA parable of

  forfeiture, unfurled across the thousand instalments

  of scrawled-on A6 betting-slips. An aspirational language

  coating the nasty little facts like a sugar.

  Remember this. The higher the register

  the more to hide, the drawn

  staked rhetoric of desperation. Days held in structure

  by flashes of your own unbearable face.

  In the inch-thick Perspex of the bandit shield.

  That is you look unbearably yourself. So that

  something like a history intrudes, narrative and sinewed,

  accreting like a debt around a single, unpayable bill,

  a cloud around its particles of dirt.

  The tacky eschewal of ignorance. The becoming rags

  of past caring. Those days. In the disappointment

  of their insignificance. A small man, held up

  COMPREHENSION TEST

  Complete the sentence

  How blank longs for greater blank

  Try to bear in mind it’s never

  a case of changing one thing for another

  WHAT YOU’VE DONE

  i.m. Rachel Jardine

  or one thing you’ve done: thrown yourself

  more hugely amongst

  my neat web of signification, so that

  ballet comes with a picture of you tacked to it,

  so that Sartre has your scar by its

  right eyebrow, and jumper your crazy smile,

  and blue your birdlike nerves, your neatness,

  the neat math of your thoughts, your thoughts.

  And bloom, after the car-park of Bloom St., puts you

  somewhere before Joyce’s Bloom, but after –

  even still – after a picture of an unnamed orange flower

  from a textbook, under the German for flower. There’s really

  no connection the net of implication

  like everything comes apart in your hands.

  INCAPABLE THOUGH THE CARDS ARE

  of putting paid to the alarming rumours threatening their concept of self and reputation

  of enacting the dumb charade of their own explanation

  of unseating the tsar who’s refusing their appeal for self-definition

  of checking the bizarre ludic explosion of their own plausible interpretations at the hands

  of the anarchic cackling deconstructionists

  of piecing together the shards of last night’s string of massive revelations

  of tuning the guitar on which their anthem will imminently be composed

  of bribing the guards to their own typically unmanned control-room

  of turning the dive-bar’s increasingly drunken chatter into uninhibited self-confession

  of guessing the value of the coins in the cookie-jar of their budget for party political broadcast

  of programming the VCR to record the pivotal climax

  of what they’re told will be, by far, their next favourite box-set

  of unlearning the disarming modesty which so trivialises their social personae

  of bribing sufficiently the bards who already are busy recording their legend

  of going the whole-nine-yards to a true Buddhistic-style self-realisation

  of chairing the seminar tasked with the slow process of their own exegesis

  of hacking up conclusively the catarrh from the windpipe through which they will sing themselves

  of definitively influencing the pronunciation of their own name c.f. Burma

  of waving au-revoir to the charming if unoriginal beau of

  just saying so of insisting of telling all of us just what in fact you are.

  IN THE PROC
ESS

  The microscopes began proffering all their mad doxological detail

  in desperate excess of anything our species was ever likely to survive

  long enough to see. It was then all these billionfold trivialities erupted,

  immigrated woozily in to our formerly quiet, tidy lands,

  all stamping tinily and wildly proclaiming

  the randomness of the deal. It’s the blackjack hand

  of your mind laid against the cruel pontoon of the world,

  all twos and fours but the point

  is that it feels as if there were rules,

  incapable though the cards are

  of specifying the guide for their own interpretation.

  Ach! I misspoke. What I mean to say is this:

  there’s a timeless fairground to-and-fro

  between the reduced and therefore

  manageable thing and the sprawling unmappable

  backstreets of the actual,

  that’s all. In every Western ever seen

  the spittoon by the beauty-queen bar-girls

  is half-full with what has been

  chewed over and jettisoned, obscene and therefore

  fascinating. And never a hand of poker played fair.

  And although that was then, still the rule-card for bridge

  should properly never be shuffled into the pack before dealing:

  that’s the trick and the travesty both. It’s our fractional moments

  of access to the appropriate software for editing

  those rule-cards which make all future rounds

  of the tournament so chaotic and also

  hilarious: the odds-on favourite,

  a former philosopher in a looming nimbus of a hairdo,

  clapping a well-read palm to his temple in outrage,

  dislodging his prescription spectacles in the process.

  THAT ROGUE LONGING