Jerusalem

  He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent

  To shelter in this all but disused church,

  A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves,

  This sentry-box in lieu of an address.

  Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men

  With targets, goals to which they must adhere,

  Themselves regretting the proffered career

  That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den

  Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness

  In this, his latest of unfixed abodes.

  Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing,

  Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out,

  A student loan he dare not think about

  Here in his hutch, its corners harbouring

  Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes

  When all he’s ever craved is poetry,

  The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had.

  To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear

  Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair

  Nor the reproof of hard-up Mum and Dad

  Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee.

  Thus one door closes, while another shuts

  Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup.

  To doss in Saxon palaces and forts

  Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts

  So with a sigh he stands and gathers up

  His bag as though it were his spilling guts,

  Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night

  With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:

  Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,

  Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.

  An unaccustomed surge of urgency

  Propels Den out into a tired rose light

  From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,

  Across worn flags that vandal time deletes

  Where names and mortal numbers disappear,

  Erasing status, sentiment, and year.

  Dead information sulks beneath these streets

  And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld

  Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,

  The war memorial’s black memo-spike,

  Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls

  When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,

  Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like

  Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate

  Then over Marefair, observed with disdain

  By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;

  White hair and beard, officious little sod.

  A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,

  He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally

  As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane

  Towards a new low and a legal high.

  Why did he come here to pursue his goal?

  These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,

  Here to a town that nutted off John Clare

  Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.

  These are the yards where sonnets come to die

  As with the local poet he’d been shown,

  The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze

  He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.

  Rousing from reverie barely in time

  Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays

  Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,

  To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end

  Between the shabby flats where it cuts through

  To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he

  Must brave declining visibility

  Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into

  The shadowed valley of the psalm descend

  Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,

  The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.

  He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom

  Only to misstep in the gathering gloom

  And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp

  The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.

  He calls himself by an unflattering name

  Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,

  Making for where the high-rise windows glow

  From sombre violet altitudes and so

  Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,

  Scraping one foot behind him as though lame

  And, too late, suffering anxiety

  About his bald host, whom he barely knows,

  Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound

  Like the most selfless altruist around.

  Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,

  Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,

  But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass

  Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense

  From brief illusion, a great cog of night

  That smoulders and revolves then fades from sight.

  He frowns and, finding the right residence,

  Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass,

  Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane,

  His benefactor shimmers into form.

  “Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died?

  Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.”

  While Den complies, allowed into the warm,

  His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain

  Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall

  Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?”

  Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee

  Where books on psychopharmacology

  Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point

  On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball

  Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red

  Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds

  In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug

  Into an origami doodlebug

  Then lights the stout white paper fuse which leads

  To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head

  That explodes into giggle, gab and cough.

  Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood,

  Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke

  And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke,

  If in return for lodgings, dope and food

  Dennis might be prepared to suck him off.

  “Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity.

  I’m offering pizza and me special stash.

  This hooker wanted some. Said I could do

  Her up the arse, but no. I’d promised you.”

  Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash

  Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity,

  All the hard bargains that it will entail

  Keeping on the right side of a front door.

  He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save

  Time done while waiting for the microwave

  To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor

  Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail

  And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead

  On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest

  Such poetry as might be had among

  The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue,

  Attempting to maintain an interest

  In De Profundis while he’s giving head

  But failing to recall a useful quote.

  Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things

  Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme

  Save chance events acted at the same time:

  Just as the heartless oven-timer pings

  Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat.

  They eat in silence. Den discovers he

  Can still taste his aperitif and hence

  Does not enjoy his entrée. When they?
??re done

  The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one

  Announces that it’s now time to commence

  With their ethno-botanic odyssey

  And shows Den the datura he has grown,

  Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page,

  With the Salvia Divinorum which

  Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch

  That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage

  The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone.

  “I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see.

  I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke

  The other later.” They both masticate

  The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.”

  So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak,

  Den gulps and swallows apprehensively.

  He pales, as if at the approach of some

  Fierce, underlying pandemonium.

  Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall

  So that how long he’s sat he does not know.

  The dismal room has undergone no change

  Save that its cluttered details now seem strange

  To him, and meanwhile simmering below

  His tongue the bitter vegetable ball

  Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run

  Into his belly, past the teeth and gums

  To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone.

  Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan

  As he by subtle increment becomes

  Uncomfortable in his own skeleton

  And catapults up from his seat to pace

  The room, thus to assuage his restlessness

  While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk

  Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk

  At the delay, this possible to guess

  Through study of his well-upholstered face

  Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue.

  “Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz

  I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares,

  Circling an endless rug between the chairs

  As, barely knowing where or who he is

  He wades in a dissociative fog

  Alone, the lights on but nobody home,

  Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid

  The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat

  Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that,

  Some little tramp on crackling celluloid

  Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome,

  All colour fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den

  In antique garb now waddles through the gloom

  Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk,

  Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk

  While in the upper corners of the room

  Are gruff, gesticulating little men

  In similar attire, homunculi

  Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace

  The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call

  Their taunts, where dirty grey light seems to fall

  As from some higher mathematic space

  Or proletarian eternity

  Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow

  Seizes them both. Perspective is askew,

  The jeering imps made large as, by degree,

  Den and his colleague rise towards them. He

  Has the sensation as he passes through

  Of fusing with the drab planks from below,

  Emerging on their far side in insane

  Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor

  To nightmare. He discovers that his skin,

  Now naked, is that on a manikin

  Grown from this attic of the charnel poor

  With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain,

  Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum

  Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled,

  As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he

  In floor, is seized by the fraternity

  Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled

  Up to inebriate Elysium:

  “The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch

  Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut,

  Enjoy that good night out without the wife

  Pursue an after-hours afterlife

  And want for nothing save a head to butt

  Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.”

  Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell

  Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy

  The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate,

  Its touted goodness decades out of date,

  Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye

  Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele

  Of smouldering reprobates who swirl and curse

  About him as he struggles there beneath

  Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat

  Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat

  While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth,

  Though some of his confederates are worse.

  There’s one whose features crawl about his face,

  Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be.

  Another, a raw-knuckled harridan

  With smile as threatening as any man

  Sways to an air that falls conspicuously

  Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space,

  Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives

  To find its source, soon managing to spot

  The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums,

  Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs

  Disconsolately, yet perk up as what

  Appears to be their ringleader arrives

  To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who

  With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes

  Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view

  Him, if but briefly, noticing that two

  Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs,

  One memorably fair though lacking hue

  And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out

  But draws the mob’s attention with his cry

  That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown,

  Jesting as they attempt to tread him down,

  His careful lyric ear affronted by

  Their hateful voices everywhere about.

  “He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg,

  Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.”

  Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit,

  Is held down by the leering female brute

  Who’s carving her initials on his arm

  Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg

  Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet,

  Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout

  As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire,

  Resurfacing to hear the bard enquire

  If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about,

  Told in reply that he’s just down the street,

  At which the children leave. The cackling throng

  Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways.

  They kick Den harder as the band begin,

  They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin

  And as the joyous, tumbling music plays

  These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song:

  “Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we,

  Up here near fifty year now, man and boy!

  Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale,

  So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail!

  Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy

  Our pie-eyed paralysed posterity!”

  And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some

  Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes,

  Target for every last ethereal thug.

 
Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug.

  Not even memory of his name remains

  Nor life prior to this warped delirium

  Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal

  Competes now with the music’s weave and wail

  As the two writhe in what appears to be

  A pissed-up paradise or purgatory

  Where bygone barbarisms still prevail

  And the perpetually present poor are real,

  Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass

  Before distraction having the semblance

  Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums,

  Frog-marching there before him as he comes

  A mangled man whose babyish countenance

  Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass;

  Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime

  And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?”

  The vagrant phantom loudly now decries

  His captive’s deeds and whimpered alibis

  Though Den, just then pressed down beneath the floor,

  Cannot discern the nature of the crime

  Yet sees its punishment. For his offence

  The prisoner, stripped of his torn attire,

  Is made to kneel, unsure what to expect,

  While Kenny, wooden phallus teased erect,

  Learns that the roughneck revellers now require

  An act unnatural in every sense.

  As both performers start to moan and bleat

  In their abrasive coitus they enthral

  The spiteful, spectral spectators, who sing

  “We’re jolly and we smoke, but here’s the thing.

  There’s some stuff that we care for not at all

  And serve rough justice here above the street

  Where all the arseholes of the ages meet,

  Thereby democratising Milton’s fall

  With Satan overthrown and mob made king!”

  Den feels as if he may be settling

  Back to a real world almost past recall

  Through spit and sawdust at the phantoms’ feet