the fourth member of fiction's Trolleybus Trinity, As a whole, the support I have received has amazed me. reading aloud but is never the same twice because sections are included so there are connecting bits in brackets. It is unusual to publish an unfinished poem but it is the best and most urgent thing I can offer).
There was a child danced with a child The music stopped I stopped reading The Wretched of the Earth Because you cannot read it all the time.
My stomach felt like outer space.
The sunday papers all sounded Like bidders in a slave market.
I ate rapidly, alone, Because I couldn't sit and eat with anyon Or look at anyone.
I glanced into the television's eye. It was both bright and blind.
I was full of useless tears.
I did not use them.
Who was the hooligan who ripped off all your skin, madam?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
Below my window a stone wall begins, swerves past a tree, drags its weight upwards, almost collides with a second tree, breaks for a gate, resumes and skitters over the horizon.
I watch the way it rides, blonde stone in the blonde light of Yorkshire.
Are you bored by pictures of burning people? You will be bored to death.
Does the word capitalism set your teeth on edge? Your teeth will pop out of their gums. Because your imagination tastes like a desert, Do you believe the tidal wave of blood has evaporated?
They did the dying.
You did nothing, Not a gesture, not a word, not a breath, Not a flicker of one line of your face.
You said: There is nothing I can do. As you said it you seemed so proud In the chapel-cold porridge of fear Crouched the spirit of Edward Lear Through the hole in his head His agony bled Till he changed to a whale And spouted a hail -Cholomondley Champagne and the best Babylonian Beer.
There was a wretched danced with a wretched. The music began to burn My brain socialist My heart anarchist My eyes pacifist My blood revolutionary (This section is about a friend who shot himself earlier this year)
All that pain double-bulging under your forehead. I wish you could have taken a handful of today's Yorkshire snow and pressed it to that pain.
You rummaged for peace in the green country, in the eye of the sun, in visions of Tibet, brain-shaking drugs, black magic, police stations, among the stones beneath the stones.
But the stones, which seemed so calm. Screamed into life in your hurt hands.
Simpler than you I simply wish you were alive walking among this snowfall.
I'm glad that all your pain is dead.
(Commercial break) (This is an unfinished poem which is still being written in a peaceful room. It is for or left out according to the feelings of the reader. It jerks from mood to mood, Everloving Stickemup the Family Adhesive Stick to Stickemup and Stickemup will stick to you... (And turning back to the enemy, chanting to a rock beat) Your breath is like deodorant, your blood like Your idea of paradise an infinite Forsyte Saga, Your head belongs to Nato and your heart You're the square root of minus zero, playing Sit tight in your tower of money Sit tight in your tower of money You've got a problem of identity, oh what an intellectual shame, You've got a million pseudonyms but can't recall your maiden name.
You cannot tell your face from your arse or your supper from your sex, But you always remember who you are when it comes to signing cheques -Sit tight in your tower of money Sit tight in your tower of money In case the atmosphere catches on fire The first thing to do will be to burn 1 pulled on my solid granite gargoyle suit, borrowed a hunch from Sherlock Holmes and swung down from the turrets of Notre Dame just in time to rescue the naked Andromeda who was chained to King Kong in the middle of Red Square, Milwaukee. Mark Antony immediately denounced me to a mob of Transylvanian peasants, who hurried me to the nearest oasis for a good guillotining.
Luckily for me the Flying Nun was power-diving lown for a suicide raid on Moby Dick.
She noticed my plight, shot out a tentacle and scooped me into an echo chamber full of Dusty Springfields, thus foiling the machinations of Edgar Allen Fu Manchu, the Jackdaw of Zenda. So you will understand why I am delight to be here tonight to introduce ladies and gentlemen, I give you - Miss Marlene Bronte.
Grass pours down the hillside.
The stone wall gradually turns green. A dead tree can keep its balance for years.
Many thin men saying: No.
But of course we've got to inside-out ourselves and splash around in our own juice and the juice can't shine if you don't throw it up into the light and of course you're hard to hit if you keep dancing and harder to hit if you make up your own dance as you dance and of course Tarzan is more exciting than Cecil Day Lewis because he can MOVE, swinging through jungles of club-footed prose, into your eye and out your navel, and of course there's no perfect music, no perfect words, only the ridiculous beauty of man and woman silly with each other, pulling off their skins and swinging them round their heads....
Many thin men saying: No.
(Insert by a friend who thinks he is not a poet)
You can't win. Mary Queen of Scots invented hish heal chnac •to organise a week-end seminar IS TO CHANGE THE WORLD.
I'm sure they're not aimed at me.
to Mozambique.
noticed it was April socially-minded cows They crushed us;
so many newspapers, so many magazines, so many TV shows, And one wants to ask him: What did you expect?
the newspapers, the printing shops, All this at your disposal? and trying to imagine bed with Celia in the afternoon His words saying - quote I had anticipated only antagonism.
And I look again at the address to the Imperial War Museum And I should be feeling solidarity as a demonstration of solidarity and with Tim Daley the poet locked away for four years EDITORIAL BOARD:
DESIGNERS:
DISTRIBUTION: John Weal. the first thing to do will be to form a committee on Little-Known Conflagrations in Italian History or The Rise and Fall of the Safety Match in THE ONLY REASON FOR WRITING The icecubes in my bloodstream decided to I'd buy a moustache like everyone else but I'm too attached to golden syrup.
There are hailstones big as hailstones but Yes, Mozambique, I sutdenly want to go Suddenly it hits me that it's May Day and I hadn't even And was gazing over the floodlit fields at a group of And laughing to myself about the time Allen Ginsberg bared to arse to the people in a whizzing train And marking passages in a book of Fidel Castro's speeches -Quote - And then you hear a revolutionary say:
they organised 200 radio programmes, so many of this and so many of that -That they would put TV, radio, the magazines, Or are you unaware that those are the instruments of the Designed explicitly for crushing the revolution? Unquote. And I was also thinking of the pirhana fish bank manager's soul And I was looking through the BBC Folk Club Magazine And I was looking forward to a bit of And my eyes kept returning to a letter from the poet Tim Daley, The liquid blue handwriting between strict blue lines, Love be praised, I was wrong. Unquote.
HM Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, Du Cane Road, London W.12. Tim, aged twenty, who took his petrol bombs Because the Museum was teaching children war. And so when it suddenly hits me that it's been May Day all day I think yes so I should and yes I do and so yes I write this down with the cows, who have now moved on, with Allen Ginsberg, who has now moved on, with Fidel Castro, as he moves socialism onwards, with Celia who moves me as we move together so that England may be safe for the dead.
The Black Dwarf Tariq Ali, Clive Goodwin, Fred Halliday, Douglas Gill, Jolin Hovland, Bob Rowthorne. Sheila Rowbotham. Adrian Mitchell David Wills, Mike Newton, Philip Taylor, John Crowley.
CIRCULATION AND ADVERTISING: David Kendall.