Poetry

POEMOTIONS

Text of book

Part Five (continued)

Youth

Start of page 129 in the book

Haven't You Noticed How Super I Am? I Have

How do you relate
to creatures whom you see
but who do not
see you?
(You think they don't see you, but
you may be wrong in this, as in so much else.)

Still, it seems they do not see me.
I must accept the evidence of my senses.
All right, assume they do not see you.
At any rate it's true there's no contact
in any sense
but non-sense.

With all my heart, with all my hands, lips, eyes
I would
that they saw me - and made contact.
Get lost! You can't encapsulate
all that they are, all that's included
in their youthful identity.

You can't, with your five senses,
relate to millions, trillions,
of sweet vibes.
So forget it, reject it.
You are not the great I AM
nor even the pit these boys piss in.

Nor yet their skin at night,
their finger nails,
the hair that dangles, swings,
catches the burning light
and turns the cropped churls we knew of old
into sweet fairies.

Start of page 130 in the book

Don't tell me that. Don't tell me to forget,
use my mind to abuse my mind.
Anyway it isn't of the mind this mood, this frenzy
half compounded of the remnants of outward show -
the bits and pieces insecurely glued
to the gangling, ageing, skeletal figure of convention.

Short-haired gits
think they're so cool, so hip
(you must be joking, yes I am).
But yet they have the power
and all we young ones must aspire
to grasp the rotting levers of that power.

Or else forfeit for ever
the chance to be
what we would be,
and not
what the world will make of us if we,
relaxing for a moment, let it.

You should be so naive . . .
If a boy's a pop star, a soccer superstar,
he may gain Elysium while still
muscular, slim and potent -
and beautiful.
But that's out of our world.

O that my howl
of nameless, piercing pain
at the slender frame of that
slim youth, with his long, burnished hair
could register, could be recorded, could effect
some difference among the dazzling planets, the spinning stars.

Instead of radiating cool indifference
until that day, so near,
when it will cease to radiate at all, then cease to be.
Leaving in the world the lost sense of godly beauty,
the hopeless incommunicable lust
for the chaste, pure, virginal young soul.

Start of page 131 in the book

I Knew You Once

I knew you once
when you were very young, and didn't even
know how to kiss.

An eager learner, with an adept guide,
wastes no time - and nor my love
did you.

Your fixed dry lips
not knowing, guessing, reckoning,
still, with a word or two, were moving, dripping
what any poet with his knowing pride
must needs describe
as honey-sweet Ambrosia.

Myself, with no such knowledge,
think with my dizzy eyes,
feel with my cloth ears,
touch with the crashing vulgar hands
of close conspiratorial chamber players
the loud-soft keys.

Back to your velvet skin, your smoothie cheeks, your look
that owes itself to no known Boss.
Back, back to back, your slender buttocks pressed
hard against mine.
Hard - but I digress.
Would that my own slack skin, my very own,
had half the strength, had half the wiry, taut and bowstring quality
of yours.

What stupid, hopeless, saving, splendid sight!
The sight that only youth can give - and then take back;
swiftly, most smoothly, all unthinkingly,
with life an endless forward panorama
and the past not even
a matter for regret.

Start of page 132 in the book

All right, rejoice:
it won't last long;
and when it's gone you will (like me)
keep looking back.

So what
are all these rows
of faces grinning, the greenish awful bone glowing through,
to cast the phosphorescent, sly lost light of death,
decay, decomposition, Nature's round
announcing that
it's taking over all control?

So back to a small back room:
back beyond that, into the paper, into the plaster, even into the brick,
out at last, into the air.
There's no one there, no sound, no anything
to imbue with specks of human light
the endless, awful spaces:
the rocks, the seas, the skies, the huge proscenium stage
that actors far from me bestride;
while I, clenched in a cleft of rock, and buffeted
by glib electronic sounds
cower.

I cowered then because I am . . .
but never mind.
The last resort of those who mind
is to be cryptic, and to hug, close to their breast
the thought that one has been just a little
less cryptic than that comfortable vast majority:
the everlasting, always unchanging, human swarm -
who do not care, and never will,
who do not dare, and do not sacrifice
even the least thing -
and so, refusing to lose anything
lose all.

Start of page 133 in the book

Free Bohemia

My name is Luke; I want to puke.
I suffer leukaemia, here in Bohemia.
They tell me it's Bohemia, but I doubt.
Bohemia means freedom, they say,
but this I doubt, as I go out and about.

As a stiffening boy of thirteen, I suffer leukaemia:
here in so-called Bohemia I endure this blight.
If Bohemia is truly a land of the free
it doesn't seem to apply to me:
nor to my twelve-year old sister Phlox.

Visited by various forms of the pox
my dear sister Phlox also complains of Bohemia,
wherein we both live (or so we are told).
Bohemia means freedom, they say,
but this we both doubt, as we go out and about.

I may be mistaken about leukaemia and the pox,
but we both know something is wrong.
Phlox is now complete, and I too am complete.
For both of us, all that adult apparatus
is now in full working order.

Yet here, even in so-called free Bohemia,
they insist on going on treating us
as innocent children.
I may be mistaken about leukaemia and the pox;
yet obviously something somewhere is wrong.

Start of page 134 in the book

A Song of Dear Old Public School

This is a song of public school, public weal,
almost always boarding school,
where the very best bred of our boys
invariably were schooled
in the very best-known ways
in the good old, bad old, days.

They didn't always enjoy it,
or didn't enjoy all of it -
though many youths delighted
in the thoughtless day, the easy night,
the spirits pure, the slumbers light,
that fly the approach of morn.

From his very first day
an Eton boy had a room to himself.
For sheer cosiness there's nothing to beat
cooking sausages over heat
in a schoolboy's very own room:
not far removed from the womb.

The big dormitory
was the grimmest part of the House.
Two lips had been painted on one of the beams:
new boys had to pull themselves up to kiss them.
When I myself did that, the taste of varnish and dust
came as a gloomy shock.

Start of page 135 in the book

It was homework and rugger
then essays and walks to the coppice - off limits,
then cooking sausages over heat.
I don't remember learning about sex
in the school lavatories:
but I do remember the lavatories.

We boys wore a uniform designed by the Prince Consort
which remarkably resembled
that of the porters and ticket collectors
employed by the school's branch railway.
It confused Lord Derby, who presented his ticket
to a College boy who had come down to meet his mother.

That's all very well
but I have to say still tearfully
how sad I was not to have been told
by the school or anyone else (such as parents)
what my trim boyish body was all about, and how it would grow.
It would have helped to have had the truth about that.

The whole public school enterprise
was open to doubt.
Often I drooping sat,
spending many an anxious hour.
How can the bird that is born for joy
sit in a cage and sing?

I may truly say
that I never learnt anything useful at Harrow,
and had little chance of learning anything.
Hours were wasted daily
On useless Latin verses
with sickening monotony.

Start of page 136 in the book

I have my doubts
on the system of fagging:
it may inculcate subordination on one side
but encourages tyranny on the other.
It may curb the overweening spirit of the heir to an earldom
at the cost of puffing up his fagmaster, a rich shopkeeper's son.

All along I received the curt nods
of schoolmasters responsive to more appealing pupils.
I nodded serenely back, thinking
they are to be pitied, being stuck with us boys.
Later I came to realise
they may have liked to be so stuck.