PLAGUES

It was the machines that went rust
and collapsed into lakes and ran red
among the boat oil and chemical spill.

Sumped in the marshlands, the mayflies
were swarming with sex and the frogs
multiplied like oleaginous oligarchs.

They struck up the dust with the drill,
but it was their fingers that itched
at the bites in the sand grained heat.

Whether it was oxen or mosquitoes
or tsetse or goats or wasps,
we flinched some at hooves and wings.

It came from the lab and killed horses,
dogs, livestock and pigs.
The pyres released virals into the crops.

What we have burned. What is ash.
It is fallout. A snowfall of radium
that dusts our skin with boils and rash.

Strange weather that coats
the Statue of Liberty in ice and snow.
Hurricanes belching from cooling towers.

Stripped cornfields. Grasslands stripped.
The factories stripped of their guts.
The workers stripped. Stripped bodies gassed.

They shone so many lights there were shadows
in every direction. So much light
it was impossible to see through. Dark truth.

If you painted lamb's blood on your door,
a lamb died in vain. Man made the future
and it swept them aside like a scourge.

Listen to the poem here: http://soundcloud.com/gavin-hudson-1/plagues

ALL HALLOWS YEAR

I saw her peering from a black cab circling Seven Dials;
a paper-thin, powdery leer, a skeleton's smile

in a blue velvet cowl. I swear she held a scythe
and carried a burning torch that blazed

and blackened windows where it passed. Her ladies
in waiting were succubi, a swarm of flies

who stalked behind the carriage, stone-locusts
wearing the brick of the buildings to dust,

swept smoke blown, people going bone, gone ghost
after the funeral march. The taxi turned hearse.

Danse Macabre. Dogs and children thinned, scourged,
emaciated in the flow. Meanwhile the corpse, gorged,

fattens and bloats until it reaches the Thames edge
where it emerges and floats. The river runs black sludge.

Storm drains. Red and blue ministers drown in the bilge
pumped water. The streets are rinsed with blood.

AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

It is evident that Christ and his cult
of veneration, that held sway
over everything from coronations
to making cups of tea is on the wane.
Just as superstitious as these Egyptian
tools for removing the brain
through the nose, or these crude Greek
figurines of Eros riding wolves and Aphrodite
spawned from shell. In the Japanese room
the tour guide talks them through
a miniature cabinet of lucky gods
and a fat, gold–plated grotesque that promised
wealth. It puts one in one's place to know
this earthenware bowl once carried water
for religious rites two–thousand years ago.
The thumbs can't have been no different
as they wet the infant's forehead.
I can smell the incense on his soft,
priestly fingers. And his voice, murmuring 
the sacred prayers over burnt sacrifices,
echoes through the museum 
like a drop of oil in a deep vase.

FOUR ADVERTS FROM A SOCIALIST STATE*

with Danny Broderick

*NB This poem is the result of very deliberate discussion into the future of advertising under a socialist system. It represents a pure distillation of theoretical formulations of future production. It is very serious.

Baked Beans. Yes.
Bread. No.
Eggs. Tuesday.
Milk. Yes.

MENIERES

for SM


I was helicoptering over the Gambia,
the blades whirling around my head, thundering
the dust up in windmills and eddies.
My ears were spitting white hot sparks,
the air cleaved open by the chopping rotor
and I was violently sick. I was looking
for something that didn't move. Something static.
The world was a tumble drier. Churned blankets
and clothes. A pile of rags caught up
in the agitator, turned. I was falling out of the sky.
Spiralling down. Corkscrewing pavements
and smack I was under. Diving bell deaf.
At these pressures you're listening through wool.
Movement is slower. You're floating
among the fish with hook teeth and marble eyes.


*update! Thanks to Spangle McQueen now with sound: Click Here for Soundcloud

This poem was comissioned for charity by Spangle McQueen. It is about the condition Meniere's Disease and the funds raised by the poem will go towards the Meniere's Society. I would like to thank Chris Packham and the forum members of Meniere's Disease UK.

BONES

for LA

I'm not sure if I love Booth

or Hodgins or Sweets the most,

but I think it's Sweets.

But I think it's Hodgins

when he id's beetle excreta.

But I think it's Booth

as he shoots bad guys
and looks hot with guns.

But I think it's Sweets

who reads minds with lips

like a pursed heart.

But it's Hodgins, if only

for Angelina who is amazing

and his baby. Sweets

for his eyes and piano

charm. Booth when his tough

hide sheds with a bourbon

and Bones comes through.

THE SILENT MAJORITY

I went for them in working class towns,

where I'd heard their curtains twitched

at the sight of an asian or black man

bicycling through the main street.

Were they a whisper? Because I couldn't

hear their complaints in the kebab

shop or curry house, the drunks

were more focused on Bhuna and rice

and the police were untroubled

by women (whose husbands were out

at the rugby club dinner) in fear

of their vaginas being penetrated

forcibly by Polish migrants with vodka

laced breath. Their lights went out

at 10 and 11 pm and they went to bed.

Silence descended on the town like a shawl

on the shoulders of a sleep-dead aunt

and the majority snored.

GIRLS I KISSED AT CAMM'S SCHOOL (A KISS AND TELL)

for JB

Kathryn Walker was my first in nursery
and again in reception, and once
in year three under a table on maths
rotation and three times in Lincoln.

I kissed Joanne Bainbridge at the same
time my sister and Andrew Bainbridge
were marrying each other via
a shoebox of plastic rings and letters.

Jessica Baines, Gemma Dodd, were both
girls I tongued under the weeping
willow in year five and Jessica Baines
invited me to her 10th birthday party.

Finally, Jenny, I think, at least once,
and Katrina Cooper and Rebecca Wright
and Sarah Bailey twice.

INSANE DOWNHILL BIKE RACE IN CHILE

It's aluminium in freefall
where the front wheel
bites on the corners at angles
that skirt the whizzing pedals
dangerously close to the rails
and it's all downhill
and down steps that tilt
under thuddering suspension felt
in the elbows, and built
down through the helter-skelter
of houses that somersault
along dirt tracks, a town off kilter
where dust clouds melt
into air and the rider is held
for a second in sky cleaved
from the mountainside
before the handlebars dive
terrifying coaster-high slides
thundering on through sighs
where the bike climbs the sides
of the huts, trembling at heights
before it veers off and decides
to drop down breakneck miles,
of rattling adrenaline,
sidewinding between tight files
of squealing applause, whines
from the brakes, skids, turns
and arrives at a finishing line.

FOR ALL OF THE BOYS IN YOUR YEAR

For all of the boys in your year,
who you dated or kissed with your
girlfriends at discos or on our
front step before our mother
or father swung open the door
to shower your tipsy selves where 
you stood in hall light, I loved their
expressions of surprise and hairs
downing their lips and chins with beards
that were adolescent, yet far
from the boys in my year who were
still in that acned, awkward, weird
moment, when the pubescent herd
turns to a million hundred
points of the compass and the birds
flock out of the sterile pastures
to search new nests in older hearts
by thudding, vigorous wing beats.

HONEYMOONERS

for S

We were Spongebob Squarepants in Love,
living in pineapple sized soap dishes
by bath tubs of bath salt infested water.

We were Blue Lagooned on a seashell ship,
adrift in the atolls of a glittering Pacific
moored to nothing but our sun-bronzed selves.

When we surfaced we were twined in kelp,
your legs knotted in my arms and our lips,
crusted with barnacles, locked in a kiss.



This poem was commissioned for charity. You too can commission one here for just £2. Follow the instructions:
http://www.justgiving.com/Gavin-Hudson1

THE FREE MARKET

Here everything has a price. See the snaking lines of men

queuing around the echoing hall of barking butchers

to cut out their eyes. £10 for your sight!

To cut off their hands in the slicing machines.

£10 for a touch! This is the desk in the entrance foyer

where you can humiliate yourself for strips of bacon fat.

£10 for your dignity! Kiss goodbye to that dress madame,

those plastic pearls about your throat. Here you are no-one.

Sit over there and answer that telephone.

These are the children with cough candy for teeth

and liquorice fingers, biting each other in piles 

like starved pups eating their mother. £10 for your bubs 

if full for my starving daughter. Smoked sausage, kippers, finny haddock! 

The ladies and gents leer from the stalls in the fish parlour.

They lick their teeth with oil slick tongues. £10 for a leg!

£10 for a touch of the flesh. Nothing is free, but money

is not the only currency here. £10 for your boy for the night!

£10 for your kidney! Here is small beer for your refreshment.

Vicks for the smell. Opiates for pain for as little as a finger.

Everything for sale. Come buy. Everyone has a price.

THE FALSE DICHOTOMIES

I drink my coffee with tea 
that is sweetened
without sugar or Sweetex 
and take it black
with milk, UHT and cream.

And I love with my heart
and my mind
the young and the old,
those eccentric scientists 
who blow me away with poetry.

We are physical, spiritual
existential bodies,
born in the celestial spheres
of blood and dung, 
and you 
are an open field.

IT WAS

for H B–W

It was failing at maths, sweating outside
exam halls, aching for sex, a faceful
of acne that wrecked my fumbling attempts
at boys. Some idiot said, your school days
are the best of your life. It was blind fear
in corridors and changing rooms, hunted
by richer, fitter, prettier kids, who
had the right brand of shoe and designer
jackets. It was the friendships I fostered
among those shadows I hid inside. It was
playing it straight for the gallery, while
dancing another life under lasers
and spotlights. It was Cossack and Freedom,
a lie that I told. It was my first kiss,
the first time I shaved and wore cologne.