Jerusalem

Into an intermediary zone.

  As from some party in an upstairs flat

  He hears the rosy-cheeked man’s howl of pain,

  Forced to do that which goes against the grain,

  Then sinks back to Fat Kenny’s habitat,

  In darkness with the lamp-bulb clearly blown

  And finds, now the experience is done,

  His host slumped on the couch; him in his chair.

  The jumping up and pacing, it would seem,

  Were merely part of his unearthly dream.

  Exhausted, leaving questions in the air,

  He slides into a kind oblivion,

  Knowing, as all thoughts into shadow pass,

  The dead to be a literal underclass.

  Out of grey nullity to consciousness

  He comes, reluctant, one fact at a time,

  Aware of self, of where he is and when,

  His body in the chair. Eyes slitted, Den

  Notes, after the stark, solarised sublime,

  That there is colour, though not in excess

  Nor well-distributed. The sun, discreet,

  Leans through the curtains to bestow a kiss

  On Kenny’s slumbering paunch. Beneath Den’s tongue

  He finds and spits out the exhausted bung

  Of salvia then, needful of a piss,

  Rises unsteadily to his bare feet

  To navigate that unfamiliar place,

  The hallway with his bag, Fat Kenny’s coat,

  Then up loud, bare-board stairs to find the loo.

  Fully awake now he peers down into

  Stained porcelain, the filthy toilet’s throat,

  Its exhalations lifting in his face

  As memories rise too, sharp as a knife:

  The porch of Peter’s Church, his student loan

  And, oh God, did he suck Fat Kenny’s prick?

  He’s overwhelmed. It’s all too much, too quick.

  Den retches and with a despairing moan,

  In its entirety, throws up his life

  For some few minutes, doubled in a crouch,

  Then flushes. In the rattling pipes, trapped air

  Bellows in anguish like a minotaur.

  Mouth wiped, Den clumps back down to the ground floor

  And the mauve gloom of a hushed front room where

  Fat Kenny still sleeps, supine, on the couch,

  Extinguished pipe clasped in one pudgy hand.

  Though keen to leave, Den feels it only right

  To say goodbye. “I’m off, then.” No reply.

  He notices a flat, green-bellied fly

  Orbit the still, shaved skull and then alight

  But though he sees he does not understand

  Why his host shows no sign of coming round.

  “I said I’m going.” Den begins to feel

  Uneasy and as he steps closer spies

  The motionless breast and unblinking eyes.

  With realisation comes a shattering peal

  Of sudden dreadful and incessant sound,

  A circling and swooping banshee roar

  That shivers glass and sets dogs barking but

  Appears to have no source save him. Den screams,

  An improvised Kurt Schwitters piece that seems

  Expressive although inarticulate

  And backs in the direction of the door

  Which, unlocked, yields at once and opens wide

  Whence dazzling rays pour through the gaping hatch

  To blind him. Crumpled sleeping-bag forgot

  And slammed door ringing like a rifle shot,

  Den takes off without bothering to snatch

  His shit-smeared sneakers from the step outside

  Or to look back. In truth, he doesn’t dare.

  The grass is cold and wet – Den has no socks –

  As he sprints past the tower blocks – nor a plan –

  But then in Crispin Street he spots a man

  Whose pale blue eyes and thinning flaxen locks

  Are oddly reminiscent, but from where?

  Upon Den’s lips unspoken epics burn

  And seek release, drugged visions that might be

  As those of Coleridge, Cocteau, Baudelaire.

  By now he’s reached the guy with sparse blonde hair

  Who eyes the gasping boy uncertainly

  And asks “Are you alright, mate?” with concern

  Made clear. Is Den alright? Aye, there’s the rub,

  He thinks, one with De Quincy and Rimbaud,

  Preparing for an image-jewelled account

  To spill forth as though from some Bardic fount

  But all he can come out with is “Yes. No.

  Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub.

  That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub.”

  His mouth won’t stop. “They wouldn’t let us go.”

  Won’t pause. “Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out.

  It was a pub”, as if that were in doubt,

  Language bereft of any metered flow

  With words recurring, echoing like Dub

  Through burned-out ganglia. The stranger’s stare

  Is quizzical. “Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate.

  Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept

  You at all night?” Although Den’s barely slept

  He knows the man is trying to judge his state

  Of mind. “Which was it, anyway? Up where?”

  “Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub.”

  Den babbles, but the blond man nods his head.

  “Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that”, and then

  He mentions, in the corners, little men.

  Den strains to comprehend what’s just been said,

  Brain washed, or at least given a good scrub.

  “Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”

  Seeming to understand the man takes out

  Some cigarettes and offers one to Den

  With calm acceptance bordering on Zen

  Then lights both. Den squints. What is it about

  This quarter of the unforgiving town

  That brings such things? His saviour tells him how

  He isn’t mad but will take time to mend;

  Provides more cigarettes; offers a tip

  On where to rest, suggesting a small strip

  Of grass with trees at Scarletwell Street’s end,

  Adding “They’ll be in blossom around now.”

  With syllables become a syllabub

  Den calls his benefactor a good bloke

  And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill

  But looking back to find the stranger still

  Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke,

  Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”,

  Then carries on down the long slope again,

  Barefoot, skirting jewelled spreads of powdered glass,

  To the T-junction at the bottom where

  A single house stands near the corner there

  Amid a great amnesia of grass,

  Its presence making a stark absence plain

  Yet with no clue as to whose residence

  It is, its windows with closed curtains hung.

  Beneath trees further on he takes a seat,

  With freight-yards making the dressed set complete,

  Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among

  The lyric rubble of experience

  In search of rhymes. The solitary abode

  Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,

  Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.

  Lighting his cigarettes each from the last

  Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend

  The dead man in his house just up the road,

  That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains

  At the idea of it; cannot begin

  To analyse nor even quite define

  How jarringly abrupt that end-stopped line
.

  Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within

  The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain

  But finds instead its own signature tread

  And sensibility. Den’s narrative

  Thus far, he sees now, lacks maturity,

  A consequence of inability

  To put forced stanzas by and only live

  His language, though it goes unread

  And unrewarded. No more self-deceit.

  He’ll go home, face his folks, work in a shop,

  Pay off his debt and wait for the day when

  He’s had a life to write about. Just then

  A scuffed blue Volkswagen grinds to a stop

  At the round-shouldered curbside up the street.

  A dreadlocked woman climbs out to assist

  Her passenger, a thin girl of mixed race,

  The younger of the two and yet more frail

  With bandages in lieu of bridal veil

  Surmounting her exquisite, battered face

  And wedding flowers clutched in one trembling fist

  To emphasise the matrimonial air.

  Their car left at the corner of the block

  One helps the other slowly up the hill

  Out of Den’s line of sight, though he can still

  Hear their muffled exchange before they knock

  The door of the lone house that’s standing there,

  This summons answered after a long pause.

  There’s conversation too hushed to make out

  Before the women, minus one bouquet,

  Return to their parked car and drive away,

  A striking vignette which leaves Den in doubt

  Regarding its effect, still more its cause,

  But then, the world won’t scan as poetry.

  Arse chill with dew he reconstructs his night,

  The things he’s done, the dreadful place he’s been,

  Crowned with the first dead man he’s ever seen:

  A stripped-down attic statement, still and white,

  Without a trace of ambiguity

  Or adjectival frills, that can’t allude

  To anything. Den needs a modern voice

  As had Blake, Joyce, John Bunyan or John Clare,

  Words adequate to these new ruins where

  We may describe the wastelands of our choice

  In language that’s been shattered and re-glued

  To suit these lives, these streets. He thinks he’ll sit

  For one last cigarette then phone his mum.

  Somewhere uphill behind him sirens wail

  Diapasons of disaster and yet fail

  To mar his sudden equilibrium,

  The snow-globe moment’s placement exquisite

  In time’s jewelled action, where future and past

  Shall stand inseparable at the last.

  GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN

  Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams.

  Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the world compress to an impasto skim.

  War and collapse are chasing displaced populations all around the planet in the way that jumping jacks appear to follow fleeing children. The continually adjusted now – a hairline crack between the stupefying masses of the future and the past, friction- and pressure-cooked – is a hot interface which shimmers with string theory and the ingrained grievances of Hammurabi, seethes with slavering new financial mechanisms and fresh epithets describing paupers. From daylight America the shock of former Enron bosses at their guilty verdict is announced and in the deafening crash of their dropped jaws cascades of ruin are commenced. Cut to interior, night.

  Mick Warren tosses in slow motion, mindful of his sleeping wife and trying to minimise the mattress-creak. The roll onto his left side is a campaign staged in increments with its objective, once accomplished, yielding nothing save a differently-aligned discomfort. Marinating in his own brine on these sultry slopes of late May, shoulders pummelled by the working week just gone, insomnia reduces his well-trodden consciousness to the schematic mansion of a Cluedo board, thoughts following each other into minimal crime-scene conservatories attempting to establish whereabouts and means and motive. In associative freefall he is soon adrift in board games, bored games, sleepless mind advancing square by square according to delirious and self-inflicted rules of play, a Chinese checker choreography of half-ideas that leapfrog and eliminate each other in their struggle to attain thoughtless oblivion, the pegboard’s emptycentral hole. Cluedo slides lexically into Ludo, Poirot parlours reconfigured as the stylised paths of palace gardens wherein varicoloured button dynasties conduct their patient courtly intrigues. Ludo … Mick thinks he can distantly remember his big sister telling him the term had some kind of significance, but for the moment it eludes him. Words and wordplay aren’t his speciality and he is thus averse to Scrabble, name alone too reminiscent of his frantic, rat-like mental processes when trying to extract coherent language from an angular furniture-sale of consonants or from an ululating funeral lament of vowels. It’s not a proper game like football, this messing about with spelling, words and all that business. Where’s the fun in that? It strikes him that those who profess a fondness for linguistic torments of this nature are most probably just trying to look clever. He recalls the odd times he’s heard somebody extolling the delights of ‘Dirty Scrabble’, but nobody can have ever really played that, can they? That can’t possibly exist when for a start there’s only one K in the box. Attempting to displace some of the duvet-captured heat he’s broiling in he kicks one leg free of the covers and luxuriates in the resulting calorific bleed. His bedbound brain diverts itself annoyingly in the consideration of annoying games. New angle.

  Levering by stealth onto his back he fancies that from overhead he must resemble one of those stone medieval knights, asleep on cold sarcophagi with petrified retrievers at their feet. There must have been a Middle Ages battle game at one point, he supposes, keeps and castles, jousting and the rest, although he can’t call one to mind. Amongst the various John Wadham’s pastimes of his younger days, historically-themed entertainments had been thin upon the ground, the focus mostly on a modern world then trying to compose itself from out the bombsite rubble of the 1940s. He remembers one called Spy Ring, plastic head and shoulders busts of men in trench-coats and fedoras inching between foreign embassies, an accurate embodiment of Cold War machinations in that rules of play were by and large impenetrable and made no apparent sense. Alma and Mick had given up on it almost immediately and consigned the whole thing to an oubliette beneath the wardrobe, an effective and achievable detente. Monopoly, he thinks, has always been preoccupied with a hard-nosed modernity, a compensatory ritual to suit those long years of post-war austerity, imaginary Weimar wheelbarrows piled with confetti-coloured currency in which to lose your ration book, if only briefly. In his childhood play, he realises, he’d been largely quarantined within the present day. He thinks he can recall Napoleonic stylings to the packaging of Risk, the game of global strategy that made world domination by Australia seem unavoidable, but then megalomania, he decides, has always been more timeless than historical. It’s like a leather jacket, never out of date. Tight close-up.

  Blinking lids descend like long exposure shutters on the slate-blue irises, si
licate debris swept discretely to the corners. Pupils expand, saturated, blotting up the midnight ink. It comes to him that all human endeavour is a game of some sort or, more properly, a great compendium of games that are obscurely interwoven and connected, a confounding complex of pursuits with pre-set difficulty levels where the odds are always with the house. A game, he thinks, is surely any system with an arbitrary set of imposed rules, either a contest which results in many losers and a single winner or some non-competitive arrangement where the pleasure of participation is its own reward. And obviously, unless the rules are those of physics they are arbitrary in one sense or other, made up by somebody, somewhere, sometime. Capital and finance are quite clearly games, probably poker or roulette, at least to judge by those Enron executives who’d featured on the evening news before Mick went to bed, trading in future markets they’d invented out of thin air and were trying, unsuccessfully, to will into existence. Actually, that kind of play, rogue traders and all that, it’s not like poker or roulette so much as it’s like Buckaroo, seeing how many gold-prospecting pickaxes and shovels you can hang on the spring-loaded donkey of market credulity before, inevitably, it explodes and startles everybody.

  Status, reproduction and romance, political manoeuvring or the cops-and-robbers interplay of crime and legislation, all of it a game. His sister’s exhibition in the morning which he’s partly dreading, partly looking forward to; all of the paintings, all the art, it’s just a different sort of game that’s played with references, nods and winks to this or that, the highbrow clever-dickery that it alludes to. Bed-sheet creases print a river delta on Mick’s back and in his restlessness it strikes him that civilisation and its history are similarly bagatelles, deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess match when it’s more the random ping of Tiddlywinks. It’s ludicrous, as if the species had developed higher consciousness in order to invent a more elaborate form of noughts and crosses. When is everybody going to get serious? Even when people are engaged in slaughtering one another like in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s just Cowboys and Indians run disastrously out of hand. The last time Britain had been twat enough to interfere in Afghan matters, with the British and the Russian Empires staging their almighty pissing contest in the hundred years preceding World War One, they’d come right out and called it the Great Game. Perhaps the toppled pawns back in their flag-draped boxes for a final toytown tour of Wooton Bassett could be viewed as forfeit tokens in a game, although he can’t see what’s so great about it. Wearying of this internal shuttlecock, this back-and-forth, he opts to take another run for goal, the goal being insensibility. Closing his eyes is purely aspirational as he commences the commando roll onto his right side. Pull back to a streaming, howling stratosphere.