THE POOR

You will find them under any upturned flowerpot

in any middle-class backyard. The dirt estates,

where living is sky high, 13 floors up in a piss-stained

lift that stinks of filth. They live anywhere the coppers

daren't come, where dodgy goods can be sold, unhassled,

in pubs and NCPs. It's a fluid market of heroin for TVs

taxed from houses in less affordable postcodes.

Here cash4gold flows through fingers like vodka

tumbles down throats. Each day they try

and plaster the waterfall, try breaking even, but nothing helps.

No-one helps. The most desperate chuck themselves off,

solve their misery in one final leap. The tabloids they read

call them mad or evil, pap them living their high-life

on dole sponsored caviar and Lidl baked beans.

They aren't helpless, just hopeless. Even key workers,

who brave staffies in rooms they'd refuse, won't bring money,

just scorn for their parenting. Nobody listens to anger.

The poor. The worst of the litter. Gas them! Wouldn't it be easier?

THE GRANDMOTHER SHUFFLE

for MH

My Grandmother shuffles the cards in her palms,
but boxes them. These days her palms

are smaller, she remembers. She remembers the Luftwaffe
bombing Coventry better than dinners. She boxes them.

She does not notice. The shadows are creeping
over the kitchen like Luftwaffe. Those gentlemen

she courted in Birmingham remember the prick
of her hat pin. They got too fresh. It was only a first date

that slipped from her grip like a butterknife.
The Luftwaffe are thunder, sending her running

under the stairs. Now she is shuffling.
Her small palms boxing the names of her nephews

and grandsons.  She remembers them like a husband.
They get fresh each time they meet. The Cathedral is burning.

TWEET

in support of Paul Chambers


#twittertrial Strange world, when a bluebird sings on canaries for faking down the pit. Clowns goster at powderpuff explosions. No screams.

IN CLAY WOOD

28/5/2012

I knew something was wrong

when the softness underfoot

resisted my tread. Something 

stiffer than fox mess

with brittle parts turned out

to be the carcass of a bird

that was dead some time.

The moment that you realise

you are not alone in the undergrowth,

that a pair of eyes is watching you

hop about on one foot,
scraping the offal from your sole
on bark, makes you cry.

Then the surprise,

the flowers around you take flight.

They were butterflies.

GOODBYES

for MH

Trains are leaving stations leaving

women waving handkerchiefs from windows

leaving lovers, aching in their braces, on the platform,

standing, leaning in the heat, leaving wives

for others, children, lovers, waving off

the past and turning from their grief and tears

to laughter, leaving wrinkles round their eyes

and mouths, their stockings falling down,

their trousers loose, growing thinner, smaller,

older, turning inwards, turning bone, leaving life

and lives, the quiet in their eyes that says goodbye.

Soundcloud recording of this poem here: http://soundcloud.com/gavin-hudson-1/goodbyes

GOING HOME WITH

I'd pick them up in bars, target the suited boys

on gin and slim, fingering the white space

where the ring had been. I'd be drunk, need

to find a bed to kip in. I was hotter then, attracted

fat, married business types like a run on a bank.

The men would take me home. I'd be all

Mr. Passive in the cab, call them sir, let them spit

champagne in my mouth. I loved them

feeling me up like a wife. Some of them paid.

Some didn't. Others just talked.

AT THE LOCAL REFUSE AMENITY SITE

It is Sunday and it reflects off the dull white sides

of the knackered washers stacked like Lego

in a tower they're building still as they rattle off trailers

and out van backs. The car park's chocker. It's a perfect

day to unpack all that crap that's been clogging

the wash house and backyard for weeks. People are smiling

as they rush to the barriers and sling their household waste

over the fence and onto the growing sea of plastic bags

several feet down. I lend a hand to a woman with a lampstand,

eager to be part of it. It's a day-trip. there must be stuff here

stretches back twenty year or so and some just come

to trudge the dusty labyrinths of electricals, to scour the bags

for those family heirlooms that disappeared up hoover pipes

donkey's since, or salvage what can be got from fridges

with fucked motors gently going to rust. And then there's the men

who shunt and pile and sweep the site, who, today,

have peeled themselves down to their reflective waistcoats

to make the most of the hot day's sun before the refuse sweats

and that sweet, repulsive smell hits and spoils.

 

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Morning is cracked like an egg: bust-yolk/
thick head. Coming up marmalade
spread over crisp brown toast and pancakes
drowning in honey. I am deaf
to alarms bleating time to get up and lost
on a wave of syrup thick booze.
This is my breakfast of champions
for winners. I raise the can like a trophy
and catch sun-rays in a gold-plated mouth.

4 LITTLE BENS

for BC


The telephone had been telling lies
and made you glum.
I wish Alexander Graham Bell's father had been crushed by a train.
I wish the patent office had shredded the application.
The telephone has been telling lies
and made you glum.


*


Love poems
aren't always about the hottest torsos and the biggest cocks
aren't always about love
are definitely not 
about heartache.


*


I wanted to remember you
like an egg. FRIED!
I wanted to cheer you up
like an egg. SCRAMBLED!
I wanted to surprise you
like an egg. CUSTARD!


*


Nothing happy ever happens
to the unhappy.
Just as frogs never get settled in rain. 
I will love you like spawn
loves the lake and mosquitos.
This is one sticky Spring!

CLINKERS

for DM

Old poem riddled
dead ash in a cooling hearth —
unloosed strange cinders.

VENUS

Venus awoke.

Dragged herself out of bed.

Slept two thousand years.

She looked a wreck.

In the mirror she said,

"By Juno look at me!

I look like the living dead,

like the arse of Cerberus,

the crotch of Pluto,

and with the legs of Arachne —

two hairy spindle sticks,

two fleshy pipe cleaners

all bent up and skewed.

"No, no, no," she cried,

"this just won't do.

I once was more beautiful

than Earth herself.

Now I'm a slum,

a shacked-up shanty town."

So she reached out;

with one engulfing swoop

she tore up the trees

and used them for rollers,

grabbed at a passing shark

and its fins were a razor

with which she duly shaved her legs.

Then, with acacia sap and pampas grass,

waxed her bikini line,

her upper lip too, and then,

when she'd finished her shaving and scraping,

crimping and cutting,

she admired herself in the full–length mirror,

and then she starved.

Didn't eat for forty days.

Spent what she saved

on new clothes and shoes —

a small, black Versace,

$300 Jimmy Choos.

She managed to get down

to a petite eight stone.

At which point she threw up.

All the vengeance and greed

that made her so fat?

She yelled and she spat.

And then, when she was done,

only seven stone six,

but still not enough.

She blamed herself

for her enormous rear end.

She cursed herself

for her two flat backs.

So, flicking through a women's mag,

she came across a dubious ad

that was just what she needed.

She ripped it out and dialled the number

and yes they could squeeze her in Friday

and not, it's highly confidential of course!

Friday came.

It rained. Venus,

in head–scarf and dark glasses,

stepped down from the number 32.

She checked the address.

This couldn't be it;

so small, so poky, so dirty

and so dark.

She took a seat under a broken fan.

Took a number and waited

and waited and waited

and waited.

Then, Venus?

and, Would you come through?

She clutched her handbag

and tucked her face in her scarf,

checked no–one had heard

and went through.

The consultant was kindly,

but overweight and squat.

His hands were all clammy and hot

as Venus shook them and sat down.

Her body cramped.

Her stomach turned

as the doctor, like a tailor,

got out plastic, blue markers

and tattooed his proposals all over

her soft, milky, white breasts.

After wards he took a red and scored

a love–heart on her buttocks,

huge and pendulous.

Two months later they undid the bandages.

when Venus looked in the mirror she screamed,

"I look ugly!

What are these scars and lacerations?

And bruising? I look blood–shod.

I'm a fucking fractured Icarite.

Where is my beauty? What have you done?

What done?"

Whence she covered her reflection and smashed it.

Digging her nails into her chest,

she ripped a hole,

but instead of the thousand-petalled

bloody expectancy, came the unfamiliar,

slow and sinister ooze of silicone.

"Great Juno!" she roared,

"Why won't you let me bleed?"

And Juno heard on her cloud and looked down

and, although swept with pity,

could do nothing

for she didn not understand

where she was

and who her god was.

Meanwhile on Earth,

Venus rain wailing ward to ward,

breaking mirrors with her fists

while unraveling her scalp's weave,

until her hands were matted with hair,

sticky with silicone and wet with tears,

but still she could not bleed.

Exhausted, she gave in.

She went white.

Paler and paler every night,

until translucent to the eye

and cold to the touch;

one of those ugly glass figurines rocking

on the edge of sanity's mantlepiece.

FIVE SHEFFIELD MONOSTICHES

Sheffield is a cave for the tide to boom and creak in. It echoes. Echoes.
*
Sheffield woke the Kraken with a spit of fire from Vulcan's crucible. It burns.
*
Sheffield burned a brewery that bombed, thirsting liquor up Moorhead. It flows.
*
Sheffield was a flood that drowned children and teapots, smashed doors and tibias. It kills.
*
Sheffield ghosts itself in phantasmographs and cinematography. It is double exposed.

PRAIRIE STORY

Y'all know the bitch who ran from Güber's Farm,
the one lives in the forest
off highway fifteen. They say
she's got distemper, sure barks
at the wasps. One night I disturbed her
knocking over trash; she turned,
black,
          yes,
                 and foaming at the jaw.
I almost puked with fright, ran
to get my gun but she was gone.

Knew a man hit her with his Cadillac,
goes white as he tells it.
She threw no shadows on the moonlit road,
had been nosing the roadkill
when the headlights surprise her.

He'll show you dents — nine
thumps in the right side fender —
bitch must have fought back.
Güber told me she's as strong as tractors.

Folks are terrified:
Three young ones maimed in Lower Salem,
babies taken. High price
for the steaming corpse.

Dog Warden's been missing weeks. 
Can't catch a bitch like that. she can outrun jeeps.
I heard she's got a fetish for chicken wire and burger joints.

URBAN LEGEND

for SM

The only urban legend I believe
is that deadly spiders travel 
from the tropics in banana crates 
and are hiding under buckets 
in our cellar–head or shed 
to bite our fingers when we need
to mop the kitchen.

I have seen them, and their nit-like
bodies, pretending to be hands
in webs as wide as duvets
underneath the floorboards.
At night they come up
through the carpet like dragon's teeth
and scurry and creep up the walls
and in shoes. 
Our feet are afraid of death.

Nothing can kill them. They live
in my dreams and are covered
in neon stripes that say,
in flashes of yellow and red,
We are coming for you. We are coming
over continents in bunches
of bananas to murder you.

THE LAST MEAL I EVER ATE WITH YOU

for AM


I was frightened to chew my beef
in case it triggered my mouth.
I'd primed it like a trap
to let the wasps out.


In case it triggered my mouth,
I swallowed my chicken
to let the wasps out —
a haze of nails.


I swallowed my chicken
and spat out bones.
A haze of nails
went off like a bomb


and spat out bones.
I'd primed it like a trap.
Went off like a bomb.
I was frightened to chew my beef.

COLOURS

Jumble sales of conversation pile by you,
assorted and singular, though 
never inconsistent, digressional.


As for the rest? It is true
death is a preoccupation. There will be
another and another and another and blue
means more to we than other colours;
samphire, cardinal, turmeric to others.

CHEATING

I listened hard to the kind of sense he spoke, but crushed
his girlish, goodish moly underfoot — Fuck That!
and became porcine, my swine snout truffling in muck.
There to be unmanned, made animal, anything
furry or feathered in the hot, closed stench
of the pen. Us beasts were brutish, lusty, grunting
in the crush, trampling each other to be first
to the trough, the pile so deep it seemed
there was no end to the udders and hooves,
no up, no down, just the salted taste of hide
bristling over my tastebuds and I thought again
of Hermes; that youthful messenger with the soft,
brown hair on his arms, those sensible brown eyes,
the kind of sense he spoke, the white flower crushed
underfoot, and in this lesson I find my face
buried deep in the anus of a friend, my eyes
screwed tight shut, the tongue take black root:
My head's full of him — These Lies! and truth's
the silent moly flowering in my mouth.

REBEKAH BROOKS SWEARS TO TELL THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

I don't recall. Don't remember. Never discussed 
that with the minister. Maybe mentioned. It could 
have been a party or a birthday. The Prime Minister 
never came. Wasn't there. We didn't threaten
any secretary of state. We persuaded. Put the facts. 
I don't recall. I never brought the BskyB bid 
into conversation. Maybe mentioned. Was never 
impolite over crudites. Didn't intrude on foreign affairs.
It may have been my decision. Maybe not. The Murdochs 
never told me. Not my brief. Not my remit. As CEO 
I oversaw two papers, not the corporation. Wasn't there. 
Wasn't me. Didn't text. Rupert who? David who?

BAD POTATO WEATHER

The nightjars are blacking the sun out
with rainclouds of feather. Poor scratching
in the waterlogged soil for lungworm
and beetle. The potassium's peaking
round mid-afternoon, making sailors afraid
of lithium in spinach barrels. Flood warning
by dawn. This is bad potato weather. The kind
to sink dormice and make millionaires 
of stoats. In ferns, toads burp at frogs spawning
in rivers that burst, coursing new valleys
of acid erosion. Stone turns to leek in the riptides.

GRAPPLING THE DEVIL

We were women in love. The Devil came,

unannounced, through a storm of tobacco and whisky

to fight me. He said he called weeks in advance,

but no telephone had rung in the house for a month.

He stripped himself of his steaming boots and shirt 

in the hall, circled my chair on red wine slicked hooves 

and asked me to dance. We were clumsy at first,

fumbling at each other's torsos. The Devil slipped

through my palms like egg yolks and I rolled

from his reach. Then he got firm, pinched at my waist

and hips like an uncle. His hands were large,

lifted and turned me over his arms and under

his chest. I felt his forked prick swollen in my thigh.

I twisted my wrists in his fists, but his ankles

pinned mine. I was locked in his frame, his shape,

and all his snorting, lusting, spitting sex was in me.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SHIP

after JMW Turner


These buckets are heavy, brim—
ful of apples from market.
The meat in my basket smells sweet
against the chimney smoke. That bloke
by the bridge, in the shadow of The Ship,
looks queer — 'sif he'd do himself in
an' 'er stubborn horse is braying, refusing
to go near the shouts of the traders.
Bet he thinks he's for the knackers.
Grey weather coming, I see.

AT FOXTON DAM

It was June when we came to the fishing lake.

The midges were hazing the water for sex.

Fisherman sat at their poles in silence, deaf

to the blasts from the open-cast. It would change.

I showed him the plaque with the plans

for the nature reserve, said the hole

would be filled with marshland and heron.

No human would set foot beyond the barbed 

wire fence and patrolling guard. He said

he would like to see that, but I said, 'no,

it's off limits.' Instead, we scrambled

up the bank to the pit edge and looked down

at the diggers and trucks fetching slag.

SUBURBS

after Edwin Morgan


Through the neighbour's window, a cat disturbs the ironing.
A cat disturbs the ironing and knocks over plant pots.
Knocks over plant pots and smashes the dishes.
Smashes the dishes and skulks to the cellar.
Down there salted meat is cured.

HE COULD HURT ME

He could break me. Take me up
in his arms and throw me or cut me,
stick a knife in my bowel and gut me,
wear leather boots and parade me
around the showground. He could fire me
from a cannon into the mouths
of a gasping crowd, watch them swallow
me down, sneering and cheering. He could
lick me or whip me or beat me or bite me
and I'd never throw the towel in.
I'd give him that. I'd give him that.

UNTITLED

NHS staff have been warned to expect

storm weather and floods. Tsunamis

of alcohol related hepatitis will burst

through the automatic doors in A&E.

They have been told to be underprepared

like the police for the fallout of Friday night

violence in city centres. Blood will come

like a flood. A riot of scalpels and syringes

held to the throat — Give us your money,

you bastards, or we'll burn you. The Fire Brigade

are on strike. 999 is a disconnected number

and nobody gives a shit if you die.

In Westminster MPs stand on the roof

catching fivers in nets. The bonfire of services

turns ash into cash and the unscorched snatch it.

CHINESE WHISPERS

'Nita's cat died.
No I don't know a 'Nita either —
not even an Anita.
Who's she? 
                   Is that her natural colour or dyed?
Someone else has died! The dog.
'Nita dyed the dog the way Jane bathed Peter.
Look, there's a picture.
                                       'Nita's hot!
Some days I want to take a 'Nita home...
                                        an' eat her.
Wish I knew a 'Nita or Anita.
But how you gonna greet an Anita
                                        with your stutter?
Let's start over.

SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT

1.


I couldn't say it. I was afraid.
While ever it stayed in my mouth
I could taste it like the word yes.


It floated on a sea of saliva.
My jaw trembled like a fish.
I wanted to throw it up in the air.


If this was the feeling of never,
it was the feeling of always.
Possibly. Maybe. Yes. Yes. Yes.


I wanted to keep it locked in a box.
Out of light. Unobserved.
I wanted it to be true and not untrue.


Then came your eyes and your words
and your science to explain everything.


2.


In this theory, I become two people.
The first is naked on a rumpled duvet,
sweating in the undisturbed evening.
Moonlight paints the hollows of his body.
The second is naked on a rumpled duvet.
Under his head, a chest rises and falls.
Moonlight paints the edges of their bodies.


I dream of a life I never lived.
Under my hand, my chest rises and falls.
In this first life all I do is dream —
I dream of a life I never lived
with a man I swore I never loved.
In the second life all I do is a dream.
I drift between rooms aching
with love for a man who swore he loved me,
lingering in the scent of a well made decision.


I drift between rooms aching,
sweating in the fretful evening.
Scent. A decision lingers unmade.
In this theory, I become two people.


3.


This is the
single life theory.
At a word
the wave collapses
leaving a 
wasting of water.
At the shore
there is no choice
What is left 
is devastation
This is the 
single life theory.

ELIOT REFRACTED

At the violet hour other echoes

inhabit the garden; a voice that was broken

with sorrow — a tedious argument of insidious intent.

After the event he wept, forgot

the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell

and, clawing at the pillow slip,

Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,

by sea-girls wreathed converse with spirits

and find themselves disgraced. The vacant

interstellar places between desire

and the spasm held the housemaid

on his knees. The undertaker wiped his feet.

When the police dog returned to his beat

there wasn't a single one left in the street