Selected Poems (19 page)

these fixtures are fought out on ’s Man, resigned

to hope from his future what his past never found.

The prospects for the present aren’t too grand

when a swastika with NF (National Front) ’s

sprayed on a grave, to which another hand

has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

Which is, I grant, the word that springs to mind,

when going to clear the weeds and rubbish thrown

on the family plot by football fans, I find

UNITED graffitied on my parents’ stone.

How many British graveyards now this May

are strewn with rubbish and choked up with weeds

since families and friends have gone away

for work or fuller lives, like me from Leeds?

When I first came here 40 years ago

with my dad to ‘see my grandma’ I was 7.

I helped dad with the flowers. He let me know

she’d gone to join my grandad up in Heaven.

My dad who came each week to bring fresh flowers

came home with clay stains on his trouser knees.

Since my parents’ deaths I’ve spent 2 hours

made up of odd 10 minutes such as these.

Flying visits once or twice a year,

and though I’m horrified just who’s to blame

that I find instead of flowers cans of beer

and more than one grave sprayed with some skin’s name?

Where there were flower urns and troughs of water

and mesh receptacles for withered flowers

are the HARP tins of some skinhead Leeds supporter.

It isn’t all his fault though. Much is ours.

5 kids, with one in goal, play 2-a-side.

When the ball bangs on the hawthorn that’s one post

and petals fall they hum
Here Comes the Bride

though not so loud they’d want to rouse a ghost.

They boot the ball on purpose at the trunk

and make the tree shed showers of shrivelled may.

I look at this word graffitied by some drunk

and I’m in half a mind to let it stay.

(Though honesty demands that I say
if

I’d wanted to take the necessary pains

to scrub the skin’s inscription off

I only had an hour between trains.

So the feelings that I had as I stood gazing

and the significance I saw could be a sham,

mere excuses for not patiently erasing

the word sprayed on the grave of dad and mam.)

This pen’s all I have of magic wand.

I know this world’s so torn but want no other

except for dad who’d hoped from ‘the beyond’

a better life than this one,
with
my mother.

Though I don’t believe in afterlife at all

and know it’s cheating it’s hard
not
to make

a sort of furtive prayer from this skin’s scrawl,

his UNITED mean ‘in Heaven’ for their sake,

an accident of meaning to redeem

an act intended as mere desecration

and make the thoughtless spraying of his team

apply to higher things, and to the nation.

Some, where kids use aerosols, use giant signs

to let the people know who’s forged their fetters

like PRI CEO WALES above West Yorkshire mines

(no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!)

The big blue star for booze, tobacco ads,

the magnet’s monogram, the royal crest,

insignia in neon dwarf the lads

who spray a few odd FUCKS when they’re depressed.

Letters of transparent tubes and gas

in Düsseldorf are blue and flash out KRUPP.

Arms are hoisted for the British ruling class

and clandestine, genteel aggro keeps them up.

And there’s HARRISON on some Leeds building sites

I’ve taken in fun as blazoning my name,

which I’ve also seen on books, in Broadway lights,

so why can’t skins with spraycans do the same?

But why inscribe these
graves
with CUNT and SHIT?

Why choose neglected tombstones to disfigure?

This pitman’s of last century daubed PAKI GIT,

this grocer Broadbent’s aerosolled with NIGGER?

They’re there to shock the living not arouse

the dead from their deep peace to lend support

for the causes skinhead spraycans could espouse.

The dead would want their desecrators caught!

Jobless though they are how can these kids,

even though their team’s lost one more game,

believe that the ‘Pakis’, ‘Niggers’, even ‘Yids’

sprayed on the tombstones here should bear the blame?

What is it that these crude words are revealing?

What is it that this aggro act implies?

Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling

or just a
cri-de-coeur
because man dies?

So what’s a
cri-de-coeur,
cunt? Can’t you speak

the language that yer mam spoke. Think of ’er!

Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?

Go and fuck yerself with
cri-de-coeur
!

‘She didn’t talk like you do for a start!’

I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been.

She didn’t understand yer fucking ‘art’!

She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!

I wish on this skin’s word deep aspirations,

first the prayer for my parents I can’t make

then a call to Britain and to all the nations

made in the name of love for peace’s sake.

Aspirations, cunt
!
Folk on t’fucking dole

’ave got about as much scope to aspire

above the shit they’re dumped in, cunt, as coal

aspires to be chucked on t’fucking fire
.

OK, forget the aspirations. Look, I know

United’s losing gets you fans incensed

and how far the HARP inside you makes you go

but
all
these Vs: against! against! against!

Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke
.

It’s reading on their graves the jobs they did –

butcher, publican and baker. Me, I’ll croak

doing t’same nowt ah do now as a kid
.

’ard birth ah wor, mi mam says, almost killed ’er
.

Death after life on t’dole won’t seem as ’ard!

Look at this cunt, Wordsworth, organ builder
,

this fucking ’aberdasher Appleyard!

If mi mam’s up there, don’t want to meet ’er

listening to me list mi dirty deeds
,

and ’ave to pipe up to St fucking Peter

ah’ve been on t’dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!

Then t’ Alleluias stick in t’ angels’ gobs
.

When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void

what’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs?

The cunts who lieth ’ere wor unemployed?

This lot worked at one job all life through
.

Byron, ‘Tanner’, ‘Lieth ’ere interred’

They’ll chisel fucking poet when they do you

and that, yer cunt, ’s a crude four-letter word
.

‘Listen, cunt!’
I
said, ‘before you start your jeering

the reason why I want this in a book

’s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!’

A book, yer stupid cunt, ’s not worth a fuck!

‘The only reason why I write this poem at all

on yobs like you who do the dirt on death

’s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’

Don’t fucking bother, cunt! Don’t waste your breath!

‘You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn’t know

and it doesn’t fucking matter if you do,

the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud

but the
autre
that
je est
is fucking you.’

Ah’ve told yer, no more Greek … That’s yer last warning!

Ah’ll boot yer fucking balls to Kingdom Come
.

They’ll find yer cold on t’grave tomorrer morning
.

So don’t speak Greek. Don’t treat me like I’m dumb
.

‘I’ve done my bits of mindless aggro too

not half a mile from where we’re standing now.’

Yeah, ah bet yer wrote a poem, yer wanker you!

‘No, shut yer gob a while. Ah’ll tell yer ’ow …

‘Herman Darewski’s band played operetta

with a wobbly soprano warbling. Just why

I made my mind up that I’d got to get her

with the fire hose I can’t say, but I’ll try.

It wasn’t just the singing angered me.

At the same time half a crowd was jeering

as the smooth Hugh Gaitskell, our MP,

made promises the other half were cheering.

What I hated in those high soprano ranges

was uplift beyond all reason and control

and in a world where you say nothing changes

it seemed a sort of prick-tease of the soul.

I tell you when I heard high notes that rose

above Hugh Gaitskell’s cool electioneering

straight from the warbling throat right up my nose

I had all your aggro in
my
jeering.

And I hit the fire extinguisher ON knob

and covered orchestra and audience with spray.

I could run as fast as you then. A good job!

They yelled “damned vandal” after me that day … ’

And then yer saw the light and gave up ’eavy!

And knew a man’s not how much he can sup …

Yer reward for growing up’s this super-bevvy
,

a meths and champagne punch in t’ FA Cup
.

Ah’ve ’eard all that from old farts past their prime
.

’ow now yer live wi’ all yer once detested …

Old farts with not much left ’ll give me time
.

Fuckers like that get folks like me arrested
.

Covet not thy neighbour’s wife, thy neighbour’s riches
.

Vicar and cop who say, to save our souls
,

Get thee behind me, Satan, drop their breeches

and get the Devil’s dick right up their ’oles!

It was more a working marriage that I’d meant,

a blend of masculine and feminine.

Ignoring me, he started looking, bent

on some more aerosolling, for his tin.

‘It was more a working marriage that I mean!’

Fuck, and save mi soul, eh? That suits me
.

Then as if I’d egged him on to be obscene

he added a middle slit to one daubed V.

Don’t talk to me of fucking representing

the class yer were born into any more
.

Yer going to get ’urt and start resenting

it’s not poetry we need in this class war
.

Yer’ve given yerself toffee, cunt. Who needs

yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own
.

Ah’ve got mi work on show all over Leeds

like this UNITED ’ere on some sod’s stone
.

‘OK!’ (thinking I had him trapped) ‘OK!’

‘If you’re so proud of it then sign your name

when next you’re full of HARP and armed with spray,

next time you take this short cut from the game.’

He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried

and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign

the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried.

He aerosolled his name. And it was mine.

The boy footballers bawl
Here Comes the Bride

and drifting blossoms fall onto my head.

One half of me ’s alive but one half died

when the skin half sprayed my name among the dead.

Half versus half, the enemies within

the heart that can’t be whole till they unite.

As I stoop to grab the crushed HARP lager tin

the day’s already dusk, half dark, half light.

That UNITED that I’d wished onto the nation

or as reunion for dead parents soon recedes.

The word’s once more a mindless desecration

by some HAR Poholic yob supporting Leeds.

Almost the time for ghosts I’d better scram.

Though not given much to fears of spooky scaring

I don’t fancy an encounter with my mam

playing Hamlet with me for this swearing.

Though I’ve a train to catch my step is slow.

I walk on the grass and graves with wary tread

over these subsidences, these shifts below

the life of Leeds supported by the dead.

Further underneath’s that cavernous hollow

that makes the gravestones lean towards the town.

A matter of mere time and it will swallow

this place of rest and ail the resters down.

I tell myself I’ve got, say, 30 years.

At 75 this place will suit me fine.

I’ve never feared the grave but what I fear’s

that great worked-out black hollow under mine.

Not train departure time, and not Town Hall

with the great white clock face I can see,

coal, that began, with no man here at all,

as 300 million-year-old plant debris.

5 kids still play at making blossoms fall

and humming as they do
Here Comes the Bride
.

They never seem to tire of their ball

though I hear a woman’s voice call one inside.

2 larking boys play bawdy bride and groom.

3 boys in Leeds strip la-la
Lohengrin
.

I hear them as I go through growing gloom

still years away from being skald or skin.

The ground’s carpeted with petals as I throw

the aerosol, the HARP can, the cleared weeds

on top of dad’s dead daffodils, then go,

with not one glance behind, away from Leeds.

The bus to the station’s still the no. I

but goes by routes that I don’t recognize.

I look out for known landmarks as the sun

reddens the swabs of cloud in darkening skies.

Home, home, home, to my woman as the red