Wednesday, April 15, 2009
i really want to go to london. anyway this comes to you with an idea from iain sinclair’s lud heat and info from wikipedia, as well as a playlist i made of songs about london. today’s recommended london songs are the magnetic fields’ “all the umbrellas in london” and noel coward’s “london pride”. this is not great, i apologise.
PEAR TREE
There were no vampires left in London.
They buried you with a stake in your heart
six feet below the junction, and Commercial Road
continued on. You were below like a sewer
or a river forced to hide itself, and your skull
became clean, ready to be a souvenir,
quite separate from the rest of you. Old skull,
who knows what happened, but a junction is no grave
and a stake is no cool stone. There was no escape
for you, you made sure of that. 100 years after you died
Latvian revolutionaries were shot in the East End,
anarchists burnt to death, and the House of Lords
lost some power. The Titanic launched and its sister,
The Olympic, swam. The Mona Lisa went missing,
was stolen, or whatever…
………………………………… . . . …….… but what of your skull?
London grew around its absence. The rivers swelled.
oh god, what. i apologise. i made a playlist of anti-police songs earlier. in case i didn’t make it clear enough in the poem, i am not a fan of the band the police. and right now i’m listening to black flag’s “police story”, so, yeah.
DETECTIVE
I first knew you when we took a squat
in the centre of London and had to share a living space.
The ceiling felt as high as St Paul’s, and in the evenings
while people elsewhere watched television, I read
detective novels from Whitechapel library and you skinned
apples from the market and cooked all kinds of food
that I couldn’t name now, but I laughed when it burned
and you’d put it in front of us all anyway. We ate
because girls and boys in houses with unforced doors
take what they can get. We never went to the police
when we got back and found the lock broken.
You were wearing a blazer and jeans, and all your shirts
had been stolen. One of my dresses hung low
from a light fitting, and buttons trailed out the door
like breadcrumbs. Our feet were birds.
The Police hummed out of the radio endlessly
and I didn’t understand it at all, I cut you a shirt
from an old skirt and had never felt less
like sending an SOS to the world. I hoped
that a hundred million others were nothing like me.
wtf. just, what. i apologise.
PRACTICAL CRITICISM
“Your shoes are going to fall apart
if you wear them outside often,” she said,
and the loose tongues of her doc martens
were laughing. “You’re making a basic error,”
I said, and scuffed the side of my shoe
on the garden wall we were passing.
“What if I don’t want my shoes to last?”
I asked, and the sky above was so cyan
that I could see the ink bleeding through
her backpack and across my sleeves.
“We need to wear sunglasses all year round
now,” she informed me, but I smiled.
I don’t look good in sunglasses. I bought an icecream
even though it was November, and my mouth
was bluer than I ever remembered the night.
MARY CELESTE
Three captains died. The decks stank of something
we wouldn’t name, then crashes and fires tried
to take us out. A storm shored us in Glace Bay,
Nova Scotia, your mouth a wide anchor ring
when they took her from us. I don’t care about the name,
you said, but you swirled Celeste around, sighed,
said Amazon was stronger, Mary was spray
when she’d been a surf, a sea. You became
too boring for me to stand. Winchester said
he’d take her as far from the Americas
as she could bear, and I left you without
a forwarding address. When I later read
how they found the Celeste, empty, papers
gone, all I saw was you, the clear deck, anchor out.
BERLIN
“The world is my garden,” you said. Our lives
are just a series of severe coughs
strung together by menthol days and antibiotic nights.
I get on the train and my eyes water, my hair
smells like lime. I am fresh and green here,
where the 20th century closes in on itself, and decades
pull each other apart while I walk between them.
I don’t wear makeup, but my false eyelashes
flutter like a masquerade mask, the tips are pink
like the back of my throat. “I’m allergic to Berlin,”
I told you, and we stood at the window
and whispered to each other in German.
I vow never to elope again.
this is not what i wanted at all
HAPAX LEGOMENON
They can still pin meanings to words
that only exist on paper once. Some of it’s guesswork
but sometimes words are built out of other words
and they can be rent apart for clarity. I will
cleave letters instead of syllables,
pull apart their clasped hands, spit words that everyone knows
like it’s swearing, like it’s wrong. I’m writing for student papers
now, just let them catch me – every article a new hapax legomenon,
each typo’s a badge, and any time they misspell my name
I will become something new.
i apologise for this. it’s very short and way past midnight but i had NO ideas, so i just remembered when a girl asked me (over msn, not in person, so it wasn’t a “wow, you’ve got fat” type of deal) if i was pregnant. i was not pregnant.
APOCRYPHA
It’s like when someone you haven’t seen for ages
asks you “so, are you pregnant?” and it’s plausible
because so many other girls are, why not you.
You say “no, that didn’t happen, that’s not happening,
trust me,” but you are not a legend, and it’s just lies
or whispers, and you’re going to overwrite them.
only just gone midnight, i’m getting better
this poem is brought to you by this photograph
WITHOUT LOVE
Australia is going north. Corals star out towards the surface
like tiny grabbing hands, each polyp its own country
inside a palm. The clear miles that stretch out
might as well be metres. Each arm’s span
is a forest, and the hands are lives. I’m sat
in a glass-bottomed boat, hugging my knees,
looking down, and I can see every fountain I ever spat in
filled with rings and tiny coins as they blossom
out to other things. I’m not a smoker
and I’ve danced across the boards, but corals die
whether I drink or detox, and the ocean floor
is a battle re-enactment. The times we ducked from disaster
reverse and the punch that hits us turns us soft.
It’s raining on The Great Barrier Reef
and we might as well be polyps, the skin on my palms
stings from the salt in the air and you complain
that all the food tastes like brine. Drink up.
Watch the water turn dark. Clasp your hand to mine.
am aware that i’m still clocking these in at post-midnight, but whatever. i can’t stop listening to the decemberists’ eli the barrow boy.
THATCH
I hid our treasure in the straw
so that the thieves wouldn’t find them -
the hoard above the eaves
was of greater worth than the jewels
I lay out on the windowsill.
When the house caught on fire
the roof was destroyed, but at least
nobody knew the things we’d lost.
sorry it’s post-midnight again. expect tomorrow’s to be late too. also this is Quite Awful. ps, the unnamed song referenced here is meant to be ‘get me away from here i’m dying’ from tigermilk by b&s, fact fans. but it could really be any song. if it was by another sunny day then it’d tie in fairly well with a poem i wrote last year, which is amusing and i only just realised. i need to go to bed now.
THANKS
“it’s getting kind of hard to believe
that things are going to get better” - Jason Segel
I still wake early when the alarm goes off
because you hid it before leaving and left it on repeat
for the rest of time, or at least
until the battery goes. The song you chose for the alarm
was a nice touch. Some days I don’t want to lose it.
Some days I feel like calling you and crying
down the phone “Stuart Murdoch is dead to me now
and Belle and Sebastian haunt me at every turn.”
I feel like you quilted the message into my duvet
so that when I huddle up in the cold
I hear you laughing, can’t sleep, just replay
all the bad things I ever did to you over and over
while all the bad things you did slip away.
