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Reading from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus festival, 2012
1. self-mythology; ruin
I knew to tilt the vinyl just enough to warp the sound
but not how to dip my face under water
to see the boy in me drowning.
when the bible said jesus walked on water
it meant every one of us stands
with an ocean underfoot.
most of us sink half our soul to seabeds.
in my coming-of-age
I tethered my boyhood to a sunken ship.
boy soul, the son I could’ve been.
at nineteen young luxx was all fur coats and lingerie
bowie grinning off the record player,
kid-come-woman still learning how to swim
preoccupied with being the opposite of men.
shaved bare and shitless, tits up and clothes strewn across the room
ain’t no costume colder than that of the young woman.
2. Carl Jung; analysis
i've seen you, big man, locking
horns as if the world were closing
in. a single seed in both fists
show me your overwatered harvest,
lady soul perspiring through your skin
(she always escapes, btw
an underwater with wings).
with a record skipping on the deck,
you press yourself into a woman
you just met, lamplight pouring shadows
round the room.
Jung named an animated foreign body
in the ocean of each of us,
saw men clawing back towards the womb
warned us if we neglect our opposite
sex- soul could lead to death.
gender. the oldest weapon against ourself.
3. Amina Coming; disorder
bowie knew
when the tides come
her scent will intoxicate you
rising from drain holes
open windows
air vents blowing smoke
of thin cigarettes
you will drown in her
grinning too / unsure of why you’re grinning too.
big man, the abyss is always watching you.
look at us:
dusting eternity off our knees
rinsing shadows down plug holes
wiping soul off reading glasses,
we ain't clean right through.
she will be your living end.
my boy soul became suspended
beneath the record player needle,
abandoned song
humming haunt into my nudity.
water is how we measure fright.
if I had been all soil and winged,
I could've pretended I couldn't hear him
echoing through the emptiness,
chasing me to hospital beds.
big man, you were in the bed beside me
no beetle cars, or musky scents.
we both swallowed too much sea.
you looked a lot like a part of me.
4. Amina Fought and Won; spiritual development
this small blue we shiver on
is a costume party
but at 4am when the tides come in
we’re tender, bare faced,
clothes strewn across the floor.
that breadcrumb trail of surrender.
naked, walking round the room
extractor fan blowing through a soul
you can’t be told
has always been chasing after you.
my boy soul was not my living end
I lay that belief on you.
the lady of your soul grins, laughing;
she will change your point of view
don’t be afraid of the shadows who seduce you.
flooding into this room
that grinning, half-sung, still singing
soul, will come will go.
I say: Please… can I join you for a few moments in this sort of conjuring -I’m a fan?
He says: Sure. I’ve taken the pulse , I’ve taken the temperature here
in the afterlife, I’ve run so far away from myself and your hot bodies
I’ve parted the willow trees hair pained myself in the water
I’ve studied the breathing moss
sampled some of the delights of the underworld
all its potions and charms their versions of snails
and the true earthworms and the hollyhocks and I’ve
tamed my ear brought it down so close to hunt down
the music and it’s all so inhalable and bright and all it’s all so so so
And I say : Tell me more, those are totemic lines…
And he says: You poets. You poets are all the same…
So much for your stomach-churning ambiguity
and your personas and sad fishing performances
here the poets take off their putrid costumes
this is a party with a commitment to the
afterwards where the errant rules, where the delinquent poets
are outed and placed in the middle of the treeless field
naked as dusk -this is the afterlife after party
of course I’m not going hand it to you on
a steel platter in all straight lines.
And then he says:
I’m going be wearing
my best version disguise painted
in madder root -like those quick footed clowns
all oozy like the mushrooms we picked
and I’ll tell you something else
I find new words here, language
for the word when you ready yourself
for a photograph tilting your head right back
just so and a new word for the moon snug in its pocket
embalmed and drunk in its bright yellow liquor
I say: ok tell me about lyrical beauty again
I say if feeling is first then can you tell me how it is for you
bring me out poem if you can..
And he laughs says: all the sound engineers have gone home but
Ok ….
I’ll attempt something in this dharmic frame
In the blind moments of this insane
Uncoupling from the breathing world
It kind of feels pure and pellucid as pain
And yet writers reign
In full rhyme
And I say-thank-you.
Thank you,
Aladdin Sane
And.. he goes quiet and says:
It was brave of me right to try on
the other parts myself right
all earthy and sweat and
so blurry and the audience there
bright or brittling like icicles
caught in the mouth of a cave?
That’s the version of a life I’m re-Sampling ,
it’s so beautiful and insane, the fire ants in their fedoras
travelling along the delicious veins
of the flowers …what a fucking party.
Then he says:
You poets are all the same
wielding your knives in the rafters
practicing your moves
but have you truly watched that man,
there in the shadows
are you watching him cut out his heart
not content for the music to resolve itself
sympathetically ..syntactically-unfolding -long cord of breath
watch that man,
feed him the question to the answer
we knew all along
when the song begins to sting you have to stop.
There are worse fates than falling in love with a tightrope walker
but I don’t wanna hear em. My third wish was that I wanted
to be really, really stupid. And hideously ugly? And hideously ugly, yes.
Like statues offered to the dead, statues of chimneys, dreams nursed in the limited world, dreams
slapped out of our mouths like cigarettes in a dressing down –Hold on that expression, cut to the
window. Back to the bed. Arm draped across the balustrade. Deep in the gulf of vice and woe –I
dropped you off an hour ago.
We’re very concerned and amused by your actions,
a waiter eating our orders in the houses of illusion.
Let’s say you’re so lonely you hire a professional friend for £28 an hour. After several hours driving
around with him in a van, selling limited edition denim from industrial estate carparks to queues of
worried looking men, it occurs to you that you are paying £28 an hour to work. Worse yet he’s not
even particularly friendly – when you try to start a conversation he makes a little talking mouth signal
with his hand and shakes his head. So you ride in the back with the rare jackets and jeans, some of
which retail at thousands to the right buyer. They smell of oil, they smell embalmed. They have names
like Lost Circus and Instant Princess and Sore Afraid and Sufficient Boyfriend. At the end of the rail: a
pair of dark grey jeans with rusty studs and a patina of red dirt. The price tag says £15,800. They were
buried in the Colorado Mesas. You ask your professional friend why people pay so much and he says
They just want something real and slides up the divider.
The first thing a narcissist will tell you is that you’re such a good judge of character.
The best protection is total silence.
The difference between a smile and a grin.
The van has been motionless for some time. Your friend has fallen asleep at the wheel. You open the
back doors of the van and you start sliding the racks of denim onto the road, over the verge and into
the river below. You watch a bleach-washed jacket float away then collapse on itself like an ice shelf.
You must go and meet some real people – it was your second wish;
The first was to be lonely. An establishment folk hero
in the advert before the advert. But I do love life, I do.
It is possible, with a little discipline, to replace suicidal ideation with a long-term inner life as a space
pirate. Picture instead pulling back on the thrusters, the ship wobbling as it leaves the bay, leaning into
your massive chair as you cruise past Neptune, jettisoning eight hundred tonnes of nuclear waste near
the Kuiper Belt and then being gunned down by police ships. You ruined it.
It doesn’t matter. We’re all a little torn
between the sermon and the ode,
hagiography and reprimand,
It’s the same whenever we have the microphone, as if there were a record to set straight; let me tell
you about what he tells you about, what pleasures he shall ever find, his brands and sorrows. When he
wakes up he will scream, My jeans! My jeans! What have you done? And you will say, I had to get the
jump on you, I thought I did, I knew I did, I had to get the jump on you – besides, betrayal is so
beautiful.
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