Quarter to three: I wake again at the hour of his birth

Thirty years ago and now he paces corridors of dark

In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts

Besiege his fevered imagination – England’s

Imminent destruction, his own, the world’s…

Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections,

Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol

Hold no sway on ward one, nor even being

‘A six language master,’ on PICU madness is the only qualification.

There was the ‘shaving incident’ at school, which

Made him ready to walk out at fifteen, the alcohol

Defences at Oxford which shut us out then petered out

During the six years in India, studying Bengali at Shantiniketan.

He tottered from the plane, penniless and unshaven,

To hide away in the seediest bedsit Beeston could boast

Where night turned to day and vaguely he applied

For jobs as clerk and court usher and drank in pubs with yobs.

When the crisis came – "I feel my head coming off my body’ –

I was ready and unready, making the necessary calls

To get a bed, to keep him on the ward, to visit and reassure

Us both that some way out could be found.

The ‘Care Home’ was the next disaster, trying to cure

Schizophrenia with sticking plaster: "We don’t want

Carers’ input, we call patients ‘residents’ and insist on chores

Not medication", then the letters of terrible abuse, the finding of a flat,

‘The discharge into the community.’

His ‘keyworker’ was the keyworker from hell: the more

Isaiah’s care fell apart the more she encouraged

Him to blame us and ‘Make his life his own’, vital signs

Of decline ignored or consigned to files, ‘confidentiality’ reigned supreme.

Insidiously the way back to the ward unveiled

Over painful months, the self-neglect, the inappropriate remarks

In pubs, the neglected perforated eardrum, keeping

Company with his feckless cousins between their bouts in prison.

The pointless team meetings he was patted through,

My abrupt dismissal as carer at the keyworker’s instigation,

The admission we knew nothing of, the abscondings we were told of

And had to sort out, then the phone call from the ASW.

"We are about to section your son for six months, have you

Any comment?" Then the final absconding to London

From a fifteen minute break on PICU, to face his brother’s

Drunken abuse, the police were kindness itself as they drove him to the secure unit.

Two nurses came by taxi from Leeds the next day to collect him

The Newsam Centre’s like a hotel – Informality and first class treatment

Behind the locked doors he freezes before and whispers

"Daddy, I was damned in hell but now I am God’s friend."

Note: PICU- Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit

Beeston- An inner city area of Leeds

ASW- Approved Social Worker

TO THE SOUND OF VIOLINS

Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming swarm

Of teens and twenties this foetid Friday night

On my way from the ward where our son paces

And fulminates I throw myself into the drowning

Tide of Friday to be rescued by sheer normality.

The mill girl with her mates asks anxiously

"Are you on your own? Come and join us

What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away

As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens

Bannered ‘Orgasm lasts for ever’ and sip unending

Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd,

Being complete in itself and out for a good night out,

A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall

Running from the reality of the ward where my son

Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast

My very existence with words like bullets.

The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces

Again and again. In Leeds City Square where

Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office

In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes

Or white water fountains and the steel barricades of Novotel

Rise from the ruins of a sixties office block.

I hurry past and join Boar Lane’s Friday crew

From Keighley and Dewsbury’s mills, hesitating

At the thought of being told I’m past my

Sell-by-date and turned away by the West Indian

Bouncers, black-suited and city-council badged

Who checked my bag but smiled at ‘The Lights of

Leeds’ and ‘Poets of Our Time’ tucked away as carefully as condoms-

Was it guns or drugs they were after

I wondered as I crossed the bare boards to the bar.

I stayed near the fruit machine which no-one played,

Where the crowd was thickest, the noise drowned out the pain

‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ the chorus rang

The girls joined in but the young men knew

The words no more than me. Dancing as we knew it

In the sixties has gone, you do your own thing

And follow the beat, hampered by my bag

I just kept going, letting the music and the crowd

Hold me, my camera eye moving in search, in search…

What I’m searching for I don’t know

Searching’s a way of life that has to grow

"All of us who are patients here are searchers after truth"

My son kept saying, his legs shaking from the side effects

Of God-knows- what, pacing the tiny ward kitchen cum smoking room,

Denouncing his ‘illegal section’ and ‘poisonous medication’

To an audience of one.

The prospect of TV, Seroxat and Diazepan fazed me:

I was beyond unravelling Meltzer on differentiation

Of self and object or Rosine Josef Perelberg on ‘Dreaming and Thinking’

Or even the simpler ‘Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States’

So I went out with West Yorkshire on a Friday night.

Nothing dramatic happened; perhaps I’m a little too used

To acute wards or worse where chairs fly across rooms,

Windows disintegrate and double doors are triple locked

And every nurse carries a white panic button and black pager

To pinpoint the moment’s crisis. Normality was a bit of adrenaline,

A wild therapy that drew me in, sanity had won the night.

"Are you on your own, love? Come and join us"

People kept asking if I was alright and why

I had that damned great shoulder bag. I was introduced

To three young men about to tie the knot, a handsome lothario

In his midforties winked at me constantly,

Dancing with practised ease with sixteen year olds

Who all seemed to know him and determined to show him.

Three hours passed in as many minutes and then the crowds

Disappeared to catch the last bus home. The young aren’t

As black as they are painted, one I danced with reminded me

Of how Margaret would have been at sixteen

With straw gold hair Yeats would have immortalised.

People seemed to guess I was haunted by an inner demon

I’d tried to leave in the raftered lofts of City Square

But failed to. Girls from sixteen to twenty six kept grabbing me

And making me dance and I found my teenage inhibitions

Gone at sixty-one and wildly gyrated to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

Egged on by the throng by the fruit machine and continuous

Thumbs-up signs from passing men. I had to forgo

A cheerful group of Aussies were intent on taking me clubbing

"I’d get killed or turned into a pumpkin

If I get home after midnight" I quipped to their delight

But being there had somehow put things right.

MARGINALIA

Here is a silence I had not hoped for

This side of paradise, I am an old believer

In nature’s bounty as God’s grace

To us poor mortals, fretting and fuming

At frustrated lust or the scent of fame

Coming too late to make a difference

Blue with white vertebrae of cloud forms

Riming the spectrum of green dark of poplars

Lined like soldiers, paler the hue of hawthorn

With the heather beginning to bud blue

Before September purple, yellow ragwort

Sways in the wind as distantly a plane hums

And a lazy bee bumbles by.

A day in Brenda’s flat, mostly play with Eydie,

My favourite of her seven cats, they soothe better

Than Diazepan for panic

Seroxat for grief

Zopiclone to make me sleep.

I smoke my pipe and sip blackcurrant tea

Aware of the ticking clock: I have to be back

To talk to my son’s key nurse when she comes on

For the night shift. Always there are things to sort,

Misapprehensions to untangle, delusions to decipher,

Lies to expose, statistics to disclose, Trust Boards

And team meetings to attend, ‘Mental Health Monthly’

To peruse, funds for my press to raise – the only one

I ever got will leave me out of pocket.

A couple sat on the next bench

Are earnestly discussing child custody, broken marriages,

Failed affairs, social service interventions –

Even here I cannot escape complexity

Part of me nags to offer help but I’ve too much

On already and the clock keeps ticking.

But better not to interfere. Damn my bloody superego

Nattering like an old woman or Daisy nagging

About my pipe and my loud voice on buses –

No doubt she’s right – smoking’s not good

And hearing about psychosis, medication and end-on-sections

Isn’t what people are on buses for.

I was always shy in adolescence, too busy reading Baudelaire

To find a decent whore and learn to score

And now I’m probably impotent with depression

So I’d better forget sex and read more of André Green

On metaphor from Hegel to Lacan and how the colloquium

At Bonneval changed analytic history, a mystery

I’ll not unravel if I live to ninety.

Ignorance isn’t bliss, I know enough to talk the piss

From jumped-up SHO’s and locums who’d miss vital side effects

And think all’s needed is a mother’s kiss.

I’ll wait till the heather’s purple and bring nail scissors

To cut and suture neatly and renew my stocks

Of moor momentoes vased in unsunny Surrey.

Can you believe it? Some arseholes letting off fireworks

On the moor? Suburban excesses spread like the sores

Of syphilis and more regulations in a decade of Blair

Than in the century before.

To-morrow I’ll be back in the Great Wen,

Two days of manic catching up and then

Thistledown, wild wheat, a dozen kinds of grass,

The mass of beckoning hills I’d love to make

A poet’s map of but never will.

"Oh to break loose" Lowell’s magic lines

Entice me still but slimy Fenton had to have his will

And slate it in the NYB, arguing that panetone

Isn’t tin foil as Lowell thought. James you are a dreadful bore,

A pedantic creep like hundreds more, five A4 pages

Of sniping and nit-picking for how many greenbacks?

A thousand or two I’d guess, they couldn’t pay you less

For churning out such a king-size mess

But not even you can spoil this afternoon

Of watching Haworth heather bloom.

INFAMOUS POET

I never did fit in – at six or sixty one –

I stand out in a crowd, too young or old

And gather pity like a shroud. "Is that real silk?"

A teenager inquired. "As real as Oxfam ever is

For one pound fifty." The vast ballroom was growing misty

And blurred with alcohol I’ve never had the taste for.

"Fuck off" a forty-plus dyed blonde said half in jest.

So I chose the only Asian girl in Squares with hair like jet

And danced with her five minutes centre stage –

I’ve lost all inhibitions in old age. A Malaysian architecture

Student invited me to sit and get my breath back

"Le Corbusier described a house as a machine for living in,"

I quipped; she slipped a smile and sipped her drink and said

"I love Leeds and its people; in seven years I’ve never

Heard a single racist comment, whatever the papers say"

Malaysian girls are rightly known for their sensual beauty

But I made my pitiful excuses and slipped away.

I knew I couldn’t make it, couldn’t even fake it

With all this damned depression in the way.

Leeds boys are always friendlier than the girls,

They see themselves grown older in my years

And push the girls towards me with a glance

"Go and give the poor old man a dance!"

And dance I do and show my poems around

Like calling cards and jot lines on my palms.

Reading Lacan into the night I thought things through

But somehow none of them was half as good as you.

PULLED FROM A LIFE SOME LEAVES

Pulled from a life some leaves in evergreen

Or dressed like fragrant crinoline draped

Over shadows by di Chirico, stolen

From a station where trains never run

And set up in a tableau in the parsonage at Haworth

The three sisters with Chekovian overtones

Stood round the table where their mirrored forms

Await the blast of the last judgement’s call to make them

Take that final walk across the heather mantled moor.

Down vain corridors I searched for some leaf token

Of a life unlived, a faded mignonette or four leaved clover

Down a pathway closed forever by the twists of fate:

The shadows of you gone still took the night

And I was left alone to face the painful light.

IN HARM’S WAY

I was never a film buff, give me Widmark and Wayne any day

Saturday matinées with Margaret Gardener still hold sway

As my memory veers backwards this temperate Boxing Day-

Westerns and war films and a blurred Maigret,

Coupled with a worn-out sixties Penguin Mallarmé-

How about that mix for a character trait?

Try as I may I can’t get my head round the manifold virtues

Of Geraldine Monk or either Riley

Poetry has to have a meaning, not just patterns on a page,

Vertical words and snips of scores just make me rage.

Is Thom Gunn really the age-old sleaze-weasel Andrew Duncan says?

Is Tim Allen right to give Geraldine Monk an eleven page review?

At least they care for poetry to give their lives to it

As we do, too.

My syntax far from perfect, my writing illegible

But somehow I’ll get through, Bloodaxe and Carcourt

May jeer but an Indian printer’s busy with my ‘Collected’

And, Calcutta typesetters permitting, it will be out this year

With the red gold script of sari cloth on the spine

And fuck those dusty grey contemporary voices

Those verses will be mine.

Haslam’s a whole lot better but touchy as a prima donna

And couldn’t take it when I said he’d be a whole lot better

If he’d unloose his affects and let them scatter

I’m envious of his habitat, The Haworth Moors

Living there should be the inspiration of my old age

But being monophobic I can’t face the isolation

Or persuade my passionate friend to join me.

COMING TO TERMS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

Why our son, why?

Every morning the same dark chorus wakes me

And I wonder how I am still alive.

Is the Kleinian recipe for survival.

My Christian heritage tells me.

"Life is a vale of soul making"

Keats reminds us.

Insistently the morning traffic hums

As I sip my tea, list calls to make,

Sigh in frustration at unread books.

For solace I look at cards of Haworth

Moorland vistas of unending paths

Cloudscapes only a Constable could paint

High Withens in a gale, the sloping village street.

How? When? Why?

‘The truth’ - if such an entity exists -

Is that I want to run away.

TO MARGARET, UNFORGOTTEN

Once as an adolescent, evanescent

Yet tangible still to the spirit’s touch,

Then as a ten year old in the shared

Secret garden of our imagination.

UPON BEING ASKED WHY I AM NOT WRITING

Too much gone wrong –

No Muse, no song.

THE DAYS GO BY

Some poems meant only for my eyes

About a grief I can’t let go

But I want to, want to throw

It away like an old worn-out cloak

Or screw up like a ball of over-written

Trash and toss into the corner bin.

I said it must come up or out

I don't know which but either way

Will do, I know I can't write in the vein

Of ‘Bridge’ this time, it takes an optimistic view,

Bright day stuff, sunlight on

Roundhay Park's Childrens’ Day

Or just wandering round the streets

With Margaret, occasionally stopping

To whisper or to kiss.

Now over sixty I wonder

How and where to go from here

Daniel your rolled out verse

Unending Kaddish gave me hints

But what can you or anyone say

About our son, the other one, who from

Such a bright childhood came to such

A death-in-life?

Dreamless sleep is better than the consciousness

Of bitter days; I sit in silent prayer and read

Of Job, the Prodigal, the Sermon on the Mount.

I read and think and sigh aloud to my silent,

Silent self. I write him letters long or short

About the weather or a book I've read and hope

His studies are kept up. I can’t say ‘How much

Do you drink? Is it more or less or just the same?’

Its your own life

But then its partly one we shared for years

From birth along a road I thought we went

Along as one. Some years ago I sensed a change,

An invisible glass wall between us, between

It seemed you and everyone, the way friends

Hurried past, patting your shoulder in passing,

A joke in the pub, the Leeds boy who'd made good

Then threw it all away for drink.

Your boxed-up books, texts in five languages

Or six, the well-thumbed classics worn cassettes

Of Bach, Tippett’s ‘Knot Garden’, invitation

Cards, the total waste, my own and your’s and her’s.

Love does not seem an answer

That you want to know,

The hours, the years of waiting

Gather loss on loss until

My hopes are brief as days

That rush and go like speeding trains

That never stop. You drink, I pay,

You ramble through an odd text-book

And go and eat and drink and talk

And lose your way, then phone

‘To set things straight’ but nothing’s

Ever straight with you, the binges

Start and stop, a local train that

Locals know will never go beyond

The halt where only you get off.

LETTER FROM HAWORTH

Poems do not always satisfy the soul,

The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more

Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas

Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarmé.

I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea

With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped

Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’

Disturbs my reverie and I notice the Big Issue seller

Can find no takers among the ernest camera-ready Japanese

And mid-life couple shuffling into tea rooms.

I long for the enduring love of a woman

Here is God’s glory-hole,

O, women, why are you all so angry?

LETTER FROM KIRKHEATON

I have no camera but imagination’s tinted glass

I cannot pass this crumbling dry stone wall

Without a break to catch the vistas of the chain of Pennine hills

That splash their shades of colour like mercury in the rising glass.

The June sun focuses upon the vivid grass,

The elder’s pale amber, the Victoria Tower’s finger

On the pulse of past shared walks, Emley’s mast

And the girl from there whose early death

We somehow took the blame for: her reach from the beyond.

Still troubles us, the only ones to mourn you, Chris,

Your corn-gold hair splayed like a longship’s mast

You sailed to Valhalla through a sea of passing loves,

The deceits of married men who took your beauty

For a moment’s gift then cast you with your seven year old son adrift.

The sun has gone but birdsong blunders on

As I take courage from the gone, the waving grass,

The sculptured pylons of my shadowed past.

LETTER FROM LEEDS

Would ‘any woman’ find me difficult to live with?

My tastes are simple: space for several thousand books,

The smoke from my pipe stuffed with aromatic Balkan Sobranie,

A leftover from the Sixties, frequent brief absences to fulfil

My duties as a carer, unending phone calls

And the unenviable reputation as England’s worst or best complainer,

"Treading on toes or keeping people on their toes"

Also a warm and welcoming vagina, an insatiable need

For fellatio and cunnilingus, a bed with clean sheets

I can retire to by five with a hot water bottle

To calm my churning viscera while I read

Endless analytic texts, tomes of French poems to translate,

A notorious weekly newsletter to edit, a quarterly to write reviews for

And – I must confess – cable TV so I can access Starsky and Hutch.

I need a cottage in Haworth to go with the wife,

Companion or whatever, to see with me the changing

Seasons of heather from purple September glory

To the browns of winter and wisps of summer green

And meet with Michael Haslam, fellow poet,

Maestro of the moors and shape-shifter supreme.

I write these verses sitting in the marble hall

Of City Station’s restored art deco glory,

The rats and debris of decades swept away,

How much I need the kindness of strangers,

The welcome from my son’s nurses on the

Ward with the highest security rating Leeds possesses,

A magnificent rotunda among lawns and wooded glades,

Air conditioned with more staff than patients-

When visiting times are readily extended to encompass

My moorland walks and journeys to the capital

When I visit Brenda Williams, England’s leading protest poet.

In an Eden garden which spreads its lawned sleeves

To envelop my tobacco smoke which irritates everyone

Or is it a displacement onto the smoker

As I ecstasise the red and yellow splendour of the red hot poker

Defiantly erect among the flowering robes of magnolia?

Here we reminisce of long ago days when our children

Blossomed with talent and showed no signs

Of the unending torment of their adult years,

Depot injections, Red clouds which whirl as in end-on sections, absconding,

Liasing, losing and finding…

A GRIEF

Rivers, tow paths, caravan parks

From Kirkstall to Keighley

The track’s ribbon flaps

Like Margaret’s whirling and twirling

At ten with her pink-tied hair

And blue-check patterned frock

Mills fall like doomed fortresses

Their domes topple, stopped clocks

Chime midnight forever and ever

Amen to the lost hegemony of mill girls

Flocking through dawn fog, their clogs clacking,

Their beauty, only Vermeer could capture

In a field one foal tries to mount another,

The mare nibbling April grass;

The train dawdles on this country track

As an old man settles to his paperback.

The chatter of market stalls soothes me

More than the armoury of medication

I keep with me. Woodyards, scrapyards,

The stone glories of Yorkshire spring-

How many more winters must I endure

WELCOME HOME

‘Leeds welcomes you’ in flowers

Garlanding the white stuccoed tower

Of City Station: red on green

As poetry’s demon seizes me,

Upending all ordures of order.

‘Haworth Moor, Haworth Moor’

Echoes and re-echoes under the Dark Arches

Where the Aire gurgles and swirls

In eddies of Jack the Ripper, cloud-hopping

Jumping Jack Flash but Jack’s the lad I’m not

My adolescent timidity gelding

My desire for the welcoming heavy breasts

And garlanded yielding vaginas.

KISSING COBBLESTONES IN KEIGHLEY

I could bend and kiss them, everyone,

Strong and securing

As cunts are soft and beckoning.

"NB"

( I )

for ‘JC’ of the TLS

Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam

Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there

Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,

Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone –

Vague sad memories of mam n’dad

Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.

Which are the paths I never ventured down,

Or would they, too, be vain?

O for the secret anima of Leeds girlhood

A thousand times better than snide attacks in the TLS

By ‘JC’. Fuck you, Jock, you should be ashamed,

Worse than yours, an alcoholic schizophrenic father

And an Irish immigrant mother who died when Brenda was fifteen

But still she managed to read Proust on her day off

As a library girl, turned down by David Jenkins,

‘As rising star of the left’ for a place at Leeds

To read theology started her as a protest poet

Sitting out on the English lawn, mistaken for a snow sculpture

In the depths of winter.

Her sit-in protest lasted seven months,

Months, eight hours a day, her libellous verse scorching

The academic groves of Leeds in sheets by the thousand,

Mailed through the university's internal post. She called

The VC 'a mouse from the mountain'; Bishop of Durham to-be

David Jenkins a wimp and worse and all in colourful verse

And 'Guntrip's Ghost' went to every VC in England in a

Single day. When she sat on the English lawn Park Honan

Flew paper aeroplanes with messages down and

And when she was in Classics they took away her chair

So she sat on the floor reading Virgil and the Chairman of the

Department sent her an official Christmas card

'For six weeks on the university lawn, learning the

Hebrew alphabet'.

And that was just the beginning: in Oxford Magdalen College

School turned our son away for the Leeds protest so she

Started again, in Magdalen Quad, sitting through Oxford's

Worst ever winter and finally they arrested her on the

Eve of the May Ball so she wrote 'Oxford from a Prison

Cell' her most famous poem and her protest letter went in

A single day to every MP and House of Lords Member and

It was remembered years after and when nobody nominated

Her for the Oxford Chair she took her own and sat there

In the cold for almost a year, well-wishers pinning messages

To the tree she sat under - "Tityre, tu patulae recubans

Sub tegmine fagi" and twelve hundred and forty dons had

"The Pain Clinic" in a single day and she was fourteen

Times in the national press, a column in "The Guardian"

And a whole page with a picture in the 'Times Higher' -

"A Well Versed Protester"

JC, if you call Myslexia’s editor a ‘kick-arse virago’

You’ve got to expect a few kicks back.

( II )

Sweet Anna, I do not know you from Eve

But your zany zine in the post

Is the best I’ve ever seen, inspiring this rant

Against the cant of stuck-up cunts currying favour

I name no name but if the Dutch cap fits

Then wear it and share it.

Who thought at sixty one

I’d have owned a watch

Like this one, chased silver cased

Quartz reflex Japanese movement

And all for a fiver at the back of Leeds Market

Where I wander in search of oil pastels

Irish folk and cheap socks.

The TLS mocks our magazine

With its sixties Cadillac pink

Psychedelic cover and every page crimson

Orange or mauve, revolutionary sonnets

By Brenda Williams from her epic ‘Pain Clinic’

And my lacerating attacks on boring Bloodaxe

Neil Ghastly and Anvil’s preciosity and all the

Stuck-up arse-holes in their cubby-holes sending out

Rejection slip by rote – LPW

WANTS POEMS AND HAS NEVER REJECTED ANYONE

Eamer o’ Keefe with your tinge of brogue

And Irish warmth, Daisy and Debjani

With your karma and cool verse, I salute you.

( III )

"Ecoutez la voix du vent" – listen to the wind’s voice

As Milosz commands "All your griefs,

My sad ones, are in vain" but offering

In recompense soaring sonatas which remain unread

Untranslated, relegated to the reserve stock

Of the Institut Français, along with Fargue,

Jacob and Larbaud while all those Bloodaxe deadheads

Blossom and bloom round poetry’s tomb

Where still there’s room for Ursula’s

Queen’s Medal for Poetry, lacklustre poetaster

From Harry Chamber’s Press at Peterloo –

That Augean stable has too much shit

For even me to clear with my scabrous wit.

I burn to turn myself into the translator of French poetry

For our time and not to waste what little life I’ve left

Attacking Survivors ‘Coming Through’ –

A second-hand title for a third rate book

Of botched and blotched attempts at verse and worse.

TEXTPOEM

Yellow rapeseed

Fields of vision

Whiter than

A shade of pale.

LETTERS TO FRIENDS

I

Dear Eddie we’ve not met

Except upon the written page

And at your age the wonder

Is that you write at all

When so many have gone under

Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours

Blunder following blunder

Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse

Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor

From my chained metropolitan moorings,

O hyaline March morning with Leeds

At its thrusting best, the thirsty beasts

Of night quenched as the furnaces

Of Hunslet where Hudswell Clarke’s locos

Rust in their skeletal sheds, rails skewed

To graveyards platforms and now instead

Skyscrapers circle the city, cranes, aeroplanes,

Electric trains but even they cannot hinder

Branches bursting with semen

Seraphic cloud sanctuaries shunting

Us homeward to the beckoning moors.

II

Leeds voices soothe the turbulence

‘Ey’ ‘sithee’ and ‘love’, lastingly lilt

From cradle to grave, from backstreet

On the social, our son, beat his way

To Eton, Balliol, to Calcatta’s Shantiniketan

And all the way back to a locked ward.

While I in the meantime fondly fiddled

With rhyme and unreason, publishing pamphlets

And Leeds Poetry Weekly while under the bane

Of his tragic illness, poet and mother,

You were driven from pillar to post

By the taunting yobbery of your family

And the crass insensitivity of wild therapy

To the smoking dark of despair,

Locked in your flat in the Abbey Road

With seven cats and poetry.

O stop and strop your bladed darkness

On the rock of ages while plangent tollings

Mock your cradled rockings, knock by knock.

III

In these doom-laden days

You are steady as a pilot nursing tired ships homeward

Through churning seas

Where grey gulls scream

Forlornly and for ever.

I am the red-neck,

Bear-headed blaster

Shifting sheer rock

To rape the ore of poetry’s plunder

Or bulldozing trees to glean mines of silver

While you sail serenely onward

Ever the diplomat’s daughter

IV

Daisy, dearest of all, safest

And kindest, watcher and warner

Of chaotic corners looming

Round poetry’s boomerang bends

I owe you most a letter

While you are here beside me

Patient as a miller waiting on wind

To drive the great sails

Through summer.

When the muse takes over

I am snatched from order and duty

Blowing routine into a riot of going

And coming, blind, backwards, tip

Over arse, sea waves crashing in suburbia,

Saturnalia in Sutton, headlines of mad poet

Striding naked over moors, roaring

"I am here I am waiting".

V

Niagaras of letters on pink sheets

In sheaths of silver envelopes

Mutually exchanged. I open your missives

Like undressing a girl in my teens

Undoing the flap like a recalcitrant

Bra strap, the letters stiff as nipples

While I stroke the creviced folds

Of amber and mauve and lick

As I stick stamps like the clitoris

Of a reluctant virgin, urgent for

Defloration and the pulse of orgasm.

VIEW FROM THE INNER CITY

Leeds this silent solemn Sunday

Tempest Road is clear of all

But wistful birds, parked cars

And vagrant trees.

The surgery and pharmacy are shuttered tight

"Get your medication straight into your bag",

The friendly GP gravely warned, "The junks

Lay in wait to grab and run from those no longer young

The building site’s scaffolding of bone

Masks pristine piles of bricks where

May winds mourn and moan among

The gaping frames beneath a bannered

Street-wide invitation to a "Housing Consultation Initiative"

Flapping desultory and unread

Where last year ‘Beeston in Bloom’ was up instead.

ASYLUM SEEKERS

When Blunkett starts to talk like Enoch Powell

I think of Harold Wilson’s statue in Huddersfield Station

Caught striding forward, gripping his pipe in his pocket,

Hair blowing in the wind.

To flesh I would have asked him to meet the two

Asylum-seekers I met in Huddersfield’s main street

And asked directions from. "We are Iranian refugees",

They stammered apologetically. "Then welcome to this country."

I said as we shook hands, their smiles like the sun.

MORNINGS LIKE THIS

Mornings like this I awaken and wonder

How I have moved so far, how I have moved so little

And yet in essence stayed the same

Always passionate for the unattainable

For Joan Baez to make me her analyst,

To tour Ireland with Eddie and Finbar Furey

To be made a Chevalier des Palmes for translating Milosz.

I remember one road, many roads I did not take

And my heart lurches and my stomach turns

At the vertigo of mystery

At the simplicity of childhood

And its melancholy

At the silence of the moors

Beckoning, unreachable, tormenting me

As I lie helpless at the border of infirmity

With my soul burning and brimming over

With adolescent passion.

Only analysis with its symmetries and asymmetries

Exactness and paradox, scientific as Heisenberg's

Principle of Uncertainty, yet various as the shades of Monet,

Eases me.

Who have died needlessly, disappeared irrevocably

Or changed beyond recognition.

Of my Montmartre, gone under and made over

Into the grey utilities of trade, the empty road,

Sad as telegraph poles, my Sacré Coeur silent and boarded up.

My Seine empty of the barges of Dérain

My Sorbonne absorbed, its students gone

Mornings like this, I awaken and wonder.

THE PARIS COMMUNE

France was born there and it is from there she sings

Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.

We must dig deep, o motherland,

Beneath those heavy cobbles.

Country of the Commune, so dear to me,

My very own which make my blood burn

And that same blood will one day flow again

Between those very stones.

It is there when I see people dance

Beneath the veined clouds under the May sun

Especially when the notes of the accordion

Pied-piped them away from the urgencies of the day.

It is the people’s special gift beneath the waving banner

To have such gentle hearts. Mine beats still

At the kindness of strangers.

After the Night of the Long Knives

That same heart still beats

At the goodwill of those souls buried

Beneath stones laughing and weeping even now.

AUBADE

Dawn’s my Mr Right, already

Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,

The neon lights of Leeds last night still

Sovereign in my sights, limousines and

Pink baloons, tee shirts with green stencilled

Dates of wedding days to come, the worn dance floor,

Jingling arcades where chrome fendered fruit machines

Rest on plush carpets like the ghosts of fifties Chevies,

Dreams for sale on boulevards where forget-me-nots

Are flowing through the hyaline summer air.

I stood with you in Kings Cross on Thursday night

Waiting for a bus we saw the lighthouse on top

Of a triangle of empty shops and seedy bedsits,

Some relic of a nineteenth century’s eccentric’s dream come true.

But posing now the question "What to do with a listed building

And the Channel Tunnel coming through?" Its welded slats,

Timber frame and listing broken windows blew our minds-

Like discovering a Tintoretto in a gallery of fakes.

Leeds takes away the steely glare of Sutton

Weighing down on me like breeze-blocks by the ton,

When all I want to do is run away and make a home

In Keighley, catch a bus to Haworth and walk and walk

Till human talk is silenced by the sun.

INSPIRATION FROM A VISITATION OF MY MUSE

Memories bursting like tears or waves

On some lonely Adriatic shore

Beating again and again

Threshings of green sea foam

Flecked like the marble Leonardo

Chipped for his ‘Moses’.

And my tears came as suddenly

In that dream, criss-crossed

With memory and desire.

Grandad Nicky had worked

Down the pits for a pittance

To bring up his six children

But nothing left over for more

Than a few nuts and an orange

For six Christmas stockings

So hopefully hung, weighted by pennies,

Stretched across the black mantle.

So Lawrence-like and yet not, grandad

A strict Methodist who read only a vast Bible

Hunched in his fireside chair insisting

On chapel three times on Sundays.

Only in retirement did joy and wisdom

Enter him, abandoning chapel he took

To the Friends or Quakers as they called them then

And somehow at seventy the inner light

Consumed him.

Gruff but kind was my impression:

He would take me for walks

Along abandoned railways to the shutdown

Pipeworks where my three uncles

Worked their early manhood through.

It would have delighted Auden and perhaps

That was the bridge between us

Though we were of different generations

And by the time I began to write he had died.

All are gone except some few who may live still

But in their dotage.After my mother’s funeral

None wanted contact: I had been judged in my absence

And found wanting.

Durham was not my county,

Hardly my country, memories from childhood

Of Hunwick Village with its single cobbled street

Of squat stone cottages and paved yards

With earth closets and stacks of sawn logs

Perfuming the air with their sap

In a way only French poets could say

And that is why we have no word but cliché

‘Reflect’ or ‘make come alive’ or other earthbound

Anglicanisms; yet it is there in Valery Larbaud

‘J’ai senti pour la premiere fois toute la douceur de vivre’-

I experienced for the first time all the joy of living.

I quote of their plenitude to mock the absurdity

Of English poets who have no time for Francophiles

Better the ‘O altitudo’ of earlier generations –

Wallace Stevens’ "French and English

Are one language indivisible."

That scent of sawdust, the milkcart the pony pulled

Each morning over the cobbles, the earthenware jug

I carried to be filled, ladle by shining ladle,

From the great churns and there were birds singing

In the still blue over the fields beyond the village

But because I was city-bred I could not name them.

I write to please myself: ‘Only other poets read poems’

HAPPY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY CARCANET BOOKS

Sorry, I almost forgot, but I don't think

Its worth the effort to become a Carcanet poet

With my mug-shot on art gloss paper

In your catalogue as big as Mont Blanc

Easier to imagine, as Benjamin Peret did,

A wind that would unscrew the mountain

Or stars like apricot tarts strolling

Aimlessly along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

POET-IN-RESIDENCE

You are my dream

Of the East

You are my life

In the West

Fused in one

You begin my day

And end each day

With a silent smile

When I die I will

Have only my love

To leave you.

You said I had written

No poems for you

And you had written

Only cheques.

I cannot go on loving

The empty air

No matter how many cheques

That air may bear.

I have a headache

And heartache

Remembering another love

Twenty years ago,

Living and loving and leaving

A city for a cottage

On the moors, the

Hyaline air, the silence

And the distant stars.

I am your poet

Officially or unofficially

You may not know it

But I am.

From the hilly north

I came and sang.

I found myself

At least half-a-swan.

Through all my rage

You see a man

Wanting love.

Through all your calm

I see a woman loving.

TO FOUR PSYCHOANALYSTS

What darknesses have you lit up for me

What depths of infinite space plumbed

With your finely honed probes

What days of unending distress lightened

With your wisdom, skills and jouissance?

Conquistadores of the unconscious

For three decades how often have I come to you

And from your teachings gathered the manna

Of meaning eluding me alone in my northern eyrie?

Chance or God’s guidance – being a poet I chose the latter –

Brought me to dip my ankle like an amah’s blessing

Into the Holy Ganges of prelude and grosse fuge

Of ego and unconscious, wandering alone

In uncharted waters and faltering

Until I raised my hand and found it grasped

By your firm fingers pulling inexorably shoreward.

Did I know, how could I know, madness

Would descend on my family, first a sad grandfather

Who had wrought destruction on three generations

Including our children’s?

I locked with the horns of madness,

Trusted my learning, won from you at whose feet I sat

Alone and in spirit; yet not once did you let me down,

In ward rounds, staying on after the other visitors –

How few and lost – had gone, chatting to a charge nurse

While together we made our case

To the well meaning but unenlightened psychiatrist,

Chair of the department no less, grumbling good-naturedly

At our fumbling formulations of splitting as a diagnostic aid.

When Cyril’s nightmare vision of me in a white coat

Leading a posse of nurses chasing him round his flat

With a flotilla of ambulances on witches’ brooms

Bringing his psychotic core to the fore and

The departmental chairman finally signing the form.

Cyril discharged on Largactil survived two years

To die on a dual carriageway ‘high on morphine’

And I learned healing is caring as much as knowing,

The slow hard lesson of a lifetime, the concentration

Of a chess master, the footwork of a dancer,

The patience of a scholar and a saint’s humility,

While I have only a poet’s quickness, a journalist’s

Ability to speed-read and the clumsiness

Of a circus clown.

LEEDS 2002

Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums

For nouveam riche merchant bankers

Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos

Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton:

Hot tubs, saunas, swim spas, en suite

Satellite TV, conference rooms, disco dinners.

I knew Len, the tubby taxi man

With his retirement dreams of visiting

The world’s great galleries:

‘Titian, Leonardo, Goya,

All my life I’ve saved for this trip’

The same house he was done to death in

Tortured by three fourteen year olds,

Made headlines for one night, another

Murder to add to Beeston’s five this year.

Nothing fits together any more

Addicts in doorways trying to score

The new Porsches and the new poor

Air-conditioned thirty-foot limos, fibre-optic lit,

Uniformed chauffeurs fully trained in close protection

And anti-hijack techniques, simply the best –

See for yourself in mirrored ceilings.

Fifty yards away Millgarth police station’s

Fifty foot banner proclaims ‘Let’s fight crime together’

WINTER BLUES

I wish I had Auden’s penchant

For going about in carpet slippers

Or the late HRH Margaret’s panache-

A chauffered Rolls with six outriders-

This late December day with its sparkle of sun on frost

I’d so much rather be in Haworth’s cobbled street

With cascades of carols in torchlit procession

Or still better with a passionate friend to make love to

By Penistone Crags and then sit in post-coital bliss

In the tea-room, reading Claudel in whispers,

And not as I was, heading for Camden’s

December Trust Board Meeting, of which I’m not a member

But a regular attender, watching the watchers

At a comfortable distance, hoping to hear democracy’s arrthymia.

MY PERFECT ROSE

At ten she came to me, three years ago,

There was ‘something between us’ even then;

Watching her write like Eliot every day,

Turn prose into haiku in ten minutes flat,

Write a poem in Greek three weeks from learning the alphabet;

Then translate it as ‘Sun on a tomb, gold place, small sacred horse’.

I never got over having her in the room, though

Every day she was impossible in a new way,

Stamping her foot like a naughty Enid Blyton child,

Shouting "Poets don’t do arithmetic!"

Or drawing caricatures of me in her book.

Then there were the ‘moments of vision’, her eyes

Dissolving the blank walls and made-up faces,

Genius painfully going through her paces,

The skull she drew, the withered chrysanthemum

And scarlet rose, ‘Descensus averno’, like Virgil,

I supposed.

Now three years later, in nylons and tight skirt,

She returns from grammar school to make a chaos of my room;

Plaiting a rose in her hair, I remember the words of her poem -

‘For love is wrong/in word, in deed/But you will be mine’

And now her promise to come the last two days of term,

"But not tell them", the diamond bomb exploding

In her eyes, the key left ‘Accidentally’ on my desk

And the faint surprise.

SCHOOL SMELL

Composed of chalk dust,

Pencil shavings and

The sharp odour

Of stale urine;

It meets me now and then

Creeping down a creosoted corridor

Or waiting to be banged

With the dust from piles of books

On top of a cupboard.

The double desks heeled with iron

Having long been replaced;

The steel-nibbed pens and

Ink watered to pale grey

Gone too: the cane’s bamboo bite

Has nothing left to bite on

And David’s psalms

Must learn each other.

But it’s there

Ready to spring out

Like a coiled snake skin still envenomed

After years by a suburban hearth.

It was fifteen years ago

But I still remember Smigger,

Our greying old headmaster

In his spats and striped trousers,

The last in our town to wear them,

And his northern accent,

Heavy as Sunday.

"Now then you lads,

I’m not having this

Or I’ll tan you all,"

He’d bawl at a mill-hand’s boy

For drawing cunts on the lavatory wall.

Old Holmes, too, his yellow teeth

And hair all over the place,

One hand trembling with shell shock.

The other with rage, one foot lame

And brain half daft,

Ready to belt you

For moving an eye.

The boys were always

Belching and farting

And tormenting me for my

Long words and soft voice

And they do still

When I sense that stink

In my nostrils.

UNCLE BOB

Shell-shocked from Korea

A grenade that left him

The platoon’s only survivor,

Put him in Stanley Royd

For thirty years.

He tailored there

And out on weekend leaves

He made and mended

Everybody’s clothes,

Crying copiously

While he sewed.

When they cleared out

The chronic cases

Uncle Bob came home,

Shopping for Edna,

Doing the garden;

When the lodger left

Without a word, the police

Searched his room,

The garden shed,

Even the chest freezer.

Oesophageal cancer

Is very final.

John, his son, waiting

To take the house,

Departed for a month’s fishing

Until it was all over.

As a last rite

They put him in the LGI

But I spoke to the houseman privately,

Pulling together the bits of a life

Wholly given over to others,

Fallen comrades, Edna,

The grandchildren

His pension went on.

The houseman agreed to speak

To the surgeon privately.

Edna went first and

At her funeral John,

In frustrated fury,

Hit him over the head

With an empty fish tank.

When secondaries started

I was not told

And in the hospice

He barely lasted

His first weekend.

A MEETING WITH THE PRINCESS

Just a family get-together in a terrace house in Bradford

High tea with a few stuffy aunts I hadn’t seen for years

Their husbands in tow like lost dogs sniffing round for food

But she came all the same, ushered in politely as a friend

Of a friend or somebody’s cousin twice removed though

Everybody was a bit put out at first except me so I got

Sat down next to her and started to chat but people would

Keep chipping in, especially the young men, definitely upper-class

Gate-crashers who kept scowling at her and she kept snapping

Back at them and I said, "There seems to be a problem to do

With suppressed anger, I feel" and even my own son, somewhat

Unrelaxed but a genuine Old Etonian nonetheless, looked a bit

Embarrassed at the kerfuffle, but he kept standing by me wearing

His tails and perhaps it was this that finally sent the young

Men on their way and I managed to get her out for a breath

Of fresh air in the street and eventually we found our way to

Peel Park. Nobody seemed to notice who she was or perhaps they

Were too polite to say or they thought she was another Diana

Lookalike anyway we had some peace at last and forgetting

Protocol I put my arm round her and said, "You’re just ordinary.

Like everyone, even the Emperor of China, that’s the secret of life.

If there is one" and she started to cry softly and still nobody

Noticed and then the people and the park and even Bradford itself

Melted away in her tears.

WYTHER PARK SCHOOL LEEDS FIVE

I stood there in front of forty-five faces

The first day of term, not especially fancying

"Exercises in Mechanical Arithmetic" and so instead

I read a poem from Kirkup in Japan, about Nijinsky,

Hand-written on a fan of rice-paper.

Thirty years later, taking a Sri Lankan girl

In search of her first job around London schools,

A Head-of-English announced "You wouldn’t get away

With that now!" as though I had committed

A crime-against-society.

I remember sending the boys out to change for P.T.

While the girls changed in front of me,

Was it some kind of incipient voyeurism?

And Sheila, my genius-child-poet, about whom

Redgrove said, "Of course you are in love!"

Or was it the poetry, some kind of anarchy,

"He’s quite mad about it and teaches nothing else",

The barely literate student teacher said.

Wittgenstein alternated between junior school teaching

And philosophy

Leavis ranted but read poetry inspirationally;

Twenty years later a stranger on a bus tapped my shoulder,

"What you taught me at nine got me two O'Levels,

That was all I ever got."

MORNING WALK

I step off the pavement

like a precipice

Engage the darting sunshafts

in a duel

In the wall’s shadow I web

my prints to pattern

The moist stone virgins.

The lawns are white-coated

their throats red

With berries and bird-song;

in petrified gardens

Hyacinth tongues lip the wall.

Leaf mou