Poetry

POEMOTIONS

Text of book

Start of page 121 in the book

Part Five

Youth

Prologue Five 122
Loom and Bloom 123
Visuals Are Out of Key 124
On Seeing Max Wall in 1975 125
Our Certainties Lack Rock 127
Haven't You Noticed How Super I Am? I Have 129
I Knew You Once 131
Free Bohemia 133
A Song of Dear Old Public School 134

Start of page 122 in the book

Prologue Five

These eight poems concern aspects of human youth. That is a condition of life older people look back on and envy - and the young wish to escape from as soon as they can. It poses a conundrum for which I am not responsible and cannot answer. It is not the function of a poet to provide solutions. Still, I offer the following.

We start here with what youth means to the old. An unthinking elder may say: the bloom of youth calcines the soft centre of my soul. The old should realise that, where the bloom of youth is concerned, the visuals are out of key.

Wishing to retaliate against the relentless march of time, a past old 'un might have gone to watch Max Wall performing: how to defeat youth - try age. Then have snarled: we know the essence is not your youth, it will pass. Don't use your mind to abuse your mind. I knew you once when you were very young, and didn't even know how to kiss.

Another aspect of this scenario is the way the jealous old pretend (in defiance of their memories) that pubescent youth is not sexual. Here, in so-called free Bohemia, the old insist we adolescents are innocent children. What I ask is guilty about sexuality? I'm confused about that. Obviously something somewhere is wrong.

This brief study of youth and sexuality ends with a poem about the English public school, now so derided. It is a song of dear old public school, public weal, where the very best bred of our boys invariably were schooled, in the very best-known ways, in the good old, bad old, days.

Start of page 123 in the book

Loom and Bloom

The loom of truth
weaves tapestries to hang on other walls.

The bloom of youth
calcines the soft centre of my soul.

Start of page 124 in the book

Visuals are out of Key

Visuals are out of key:
looks don't match reality.
Youthful creatures whom you see
cannot make delivery.

How could the young go crawling to the old?

Visuals intoxicate
all who live their lives too late.
Young ones cannot truly mate
with old ones left behind by fate.

How could the young be turned on by the old?

Visuals are out of key
for you, old love, as well as me.
Take my arm and walk me free
down into our own country.

Let's lose the sadness of the old.

Start of page 125 in the book

On Seeing Max Wall in 1975

How to defeat youth - try age
try dry and sagging skin
try wrinkles, many wrinkles
wheezing - try wheezing, and coughing
and hair - try thinning hair or a wig
and running eyes, stiff gestures
try feebleness, the burnt-out edge of being
the paper-thin defence against cremation
walk with a lurch, stagger, look stringy
fill watchers with pity even as they laugh

Remind them, remind the young
of what they will come to
they need to see all that, as backcloth
they need it, as contrast, to be defeated
it shows them what isn't theirs
makes them realise
what it is that defeats them

Uneasily the young muscles flex
uncomfortably the clear clean eyes fix
their gaze on the jaded face
it defeats them as they sense the truth
they seek to repulse it for its lack of youth
it lacks that, but other qualities it does not lack
as they do, and now perceive they do

Is it a victory then
to defeat youth
with qualities that youth will gain, but only
when it loses itself?

Start of page 126 in the book

No, it is no victory
but that is one defeat
achievable without victory
an easy defeat
over those poor sweet things
those sweet young things
who have nothing to lose but their looks
and their inadequacy
and no way of losing either but by time

And no way of keeping their looks.

Start of page 127 in the book

Our Certainties Lack Rock

We know the essence is not your youth, it will pass.
Yet I have to confess that to me the essence of you
does lie in attributes like leanness and long hair.

You're fortunate to live in the first recent age
that values these attributes, dresses you
according to your attributes:

allows you to appear
in your gear.
Yet we who are older should warn you

even as you glory, convinced yet uneasy,
in your gear that soon
you will be out of gear.

At the back of your mind you know it:
but the front is filled with the thought
that youth will be with you for ever.

Don't think that, out of jealousy or nostalgia,
I am knocking your youth.
Its beauty is true, and no illusion.

But it is not complete, and lacks
qualities waiting in the wings
to enter at a later moment.

I refer to that moment when
powered wisdom wheels in stringent forces
to stamp on simple youth.

Yet even so there come to me convictions just as strong,
concerning the slight stammering wistful
pointed poignant cut of your straight face.

Convictions that in your youth you now sum up the best,
the best maybe we humans know
only from seeing and remembering -

unwilling from our pinched wisdom
to give it any credit, yet assured
as strongly as by angels in our midst

shrieking soft celestial hymns
beside that slim dressed fitted beauty
that our certainties lack rock.