LINES ON LEAVING A MADHOUSE
‘A strange set-up.’
-
Alphonse Daudet: La Doulou
There was basket-making in a weedy garden
space
And through the windows and down the lawns
was the sea
Most of us had a few days’ stubble on our
face
And through the windows and down the lawns
was the sea
The corridor was a long and thin and a
narrow space
And we moved in line along it like Great
War gassed
We saw and heard things inside-out and out
of place
And we moved in line in halflight like
Great War gassed
One of us was so far gone he could not
read
Who’d once read for a living and we knew
his face
By times the very ill are stupid and we
shunned his need
Who’d once read for a living and we all
knew his face
On a weak, flowerless Monday they let me
go
A hundred yards to the main gate and the
world
In my eyes the light of the asylum’s mad
afterglow
Down a hundred yards to the main gate and
the world.
TETHYS IN THE BATH-HOUSE
My
name is Tethys and like many girls my age
I’m
everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Though
I’m brilliant at running a bath.
I’m
a centrefold girl, a bit of sauce, my face
Can
be viewed on the tiles of every bath-house
From
here to Phrygia, the buxom well-fed
Lass
whose ass could do with a hearty pinch –
I
know how men think, let’s not pretend. Their
Bit
of Phoar! I would! Made up in hasty
paint
On
cheap tiles, that’s me. Before I gave myself,
The
tubby girl in the street, to that piss-head
Painter
- who made a fair few bob out of me,
I
can tell you – I had a few things going.
I’d
been round the block even then, street-wise
As
a tarrier’s rat up a bale of oakum
But
I was girly-daft enough to think your man
Was
going places. If he was, he didn’t take me.
Then
I saw my round face over a bath-house
Door
- he’d only sold me to a tile-maker for
A
decoration. Such a divine child, my
mother said;
Now you’re everybody’s.
Men
gave me the Have-I-Seen-You-Somewhere?
My
world tightened. Plashing about, me staring
Down
on them, the minnow-pricked
Everybody’s
and nobody’s, that’s Tethys.
I
can be found in the bath-house, wide-eyed
On
the tiles. No one’s goddess, me.
{In Greek mythology, Tethys came
from an illustrious background, and married her brother, Oceanus. In spite of this, she
plays no active part in Greek mythology, though Homer mentions her briefly.
Here she is reduced to a tile illustration in a bath-house.}
COUNTERWEIGHT
The café window’s crazy with loud
travestis
burrowing into the night –
rue Amours-Perdus, les flics ladling macho like butter
over a biscuit-coloured road –
in veriflamme, a windowful of cabaret
camp, hands flying like birds
You’d
go over, you said. If I wasn’t here, you’d go over.
Go over, like changing sides,
hang out an alien flag, go all Marlene:
No, though the camaraderie looked
attractive
and we have only our straight selves and
seldom laugh
and don’t do sex any more. Paris begins to
rain.
The street lightless, sodden as a mourner’s
handkerchief. Kabyle music, an upstairs
window
open to a thin terrace, the railing frail
as flayed bone. Taxis rat-fast.
The weight of things unsaid.
words stoppered in the gullet. This is what we are.
THAT’S ALL
On a clear blue night my father and I
leaning on the balcony
Listening to the Singer sewing-machine
prick of automatic weapons
Carry over from the far side of the city
Under Black Mountain where the council
estates live.
WEATHER
The
radio’s rancid with weather warnings
We’re
not talking
The
garden is demolishing itself wind-blow by wind-blow
This
is a fruitless, flowerless season
No
good can come of it -
There
are terrible things in the world; there is our silence.
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