A Pretty Sight Read online

  We pushed some buttons. Got kitted out in handcuffs,

  leather, safety pins and razor blades. Nicked stuff.

  Punch-ups. Three-chord songs with aggro-lyrics.

  Style as revolt, arrogance over ability, violence

  if the music failed. Like Rotten said, it’s worth

  going where you’re least wanted,

  since there’s so much more to achieve.

  SOC.

  Were you an actor, or a rhapsode?

  SID.

  A what?

  SOC.

  A person skilled in reciting verse. Who takes the stage

  at festivals with words stitched together so dramatically

  that the rhythm of the music loads the crowd with feeling.

  Years ago I met another rhapsode, who came from Ephesus.

  I convinced him that the passion of his art passes through him

  from gods into the audience; in effect he becomes possessed.

  That when the beat and tone are right, frenzy builds,

  and like the bacchants, he can momentarily lose his mind.

  SID.

  Yeah, sounds about right.

  SOC.

  When you look down upon the spectators

  from the platform and see them weeping,

  awestruck at the power of your tale, is it proof

  you are a conduit between the gods

  and the common crowd?

  SID.

  Are you taking the piss?

  SOC.

  What was the source of your enthusiasm?

  SID.

  Speed. Heroin.

  SOC.

  Are these some other, newer gods? What was their purpose?

  SID.

  Purpose, mate?

  SOC.

  Let me ask you this:

  do you claim they brought disorder

  into your minds, while still protecting you?

  SID.

  Yeah.

  SOC.

  Tell me, what is the meaning of virtue?

  SID.

  Fuck off.

  SOC.

  Remember, I was once like you, the stubborn

  rube who stood against society’s rules,

  then was put on trial for revering new gods

  and corrupting youth. I too pulled faces

  at the world, and shouted down

  the ruling powers. Didn’t a jury find you

  guilty of crimes against the state

  and sentence death?

  SID.

  I got fixed for good before they had the chance.

  SOC.

  What was the vehicle of your death?

  SID.

  Drugs. It was the drugs, mate.

  SOC.

  Me, too. This was equally my fate.

  SID.

  Oh yeah? What did you in?

  SOC.

  Hemlock.

  SID.

  Where’d you get it?

  SOC.

  It’s brought by ship from Crete or Asia Minor.

  SID.

  Must be good.

  SOC.

  The effect is satisfactory. Your legs feel heavy,

  then retreat from feeling anything,

  as if a cold blade went tickling up your thighs

  to snip and trim off portions of your body

  with a thousand nipping cuts. It leaves a chill,

  a glaze that frosts toward your heart,

  pinching off your breath. It was the punishment

  they prescribed, all because I asked

  too many questions and failed to compromise.

  Ever since, I’ve been cited as an example

  of how to live the good life. You see the paradox?

  SID.

  Listen, geezer, fuck right off. I wasn’t

  looking for a dialogue, just the karzy.

  But if all this tripe you’re laying out

  is meant to serve me up as some stunned muppet

  for your logic to outsmart, I’ve got a few words

  you might need to chew on first,

  since I’d hardly time to write some weepy memoir.

  All that’s left of who I was

  are press interviews, Pistols footage

  and video of me in skids, scarred and junkie-thin,

  dancing to an Eddie Cochran song in the sheen

  of a scuzzy mirror. When I came on the scene,

  I was just naive, then turned volatile;

  they shoved me in the spotlight, stitched me up

  with all the drugs and hype, then threw me to the wind.

  I couldn’t get my head right, and never surfaced.

  Since you’re so keen on painting

  you and me as being two bin bags from

  the same rubbish, I’ll tell you what: the question

  isn’t virtue, but how you exercise it.

  You can’t know if a wheel rolls till you nudge it

  down a slope. So where was all that search

  for virtue’s definition when the pro-Spartan Thirty

  lodged their regime in your democracy’s agora

  and started topping the opposition?

  Suddenly, you were keeping mighty quiet.

  Remember Heraclitus: ethos anthropos daimon?

  You got yours, didn’t you?

  SOC.

  Are you suggesting I deserved to die that way?

  SID.

  No, mate, I’m just saying you must have seen

  it coming, like I should’ve, coppers everywhere

  and the tabloids predicting the end of the world.

  Backing slogans like ‘No Future,’

  I had to go the distance, didn’t I? Once the Pistols

  imploded, I’d have been a pretty sight, in silk

  and power tie, tugging a handgrip on the Tube,

  counting off the platforms on the way to the office

  and some thicko with a Green Day T-shirt shouting,

  ‘Hey, weren’t you Sid Vicious? Yeah, you did it

  your way, looks like!’ I think I see that now.

  This afterlife must be the best detox going:

  a clear head and all this time to wonder

  what I think, now there’s time to think it over.

  SOC.

  You speak as if the person you refer to

  were someone else, a completely other soul

  than the one you’ve left behind.

  SID.

  Look, I don’t know. There’s no fucking logic

  in it, right? How can we know ourselves?

  We change. We backpedal. We try again.

  One of you blokes once said the soul’s

  an activity, not a state. That would give me hope.

  That way, I could’ve worked through the trap

  of being me forever. What a laugh.

  This still isn’t you or me talking anyway,

  just proxies in a poem. We never got to play

  our parts; you’d your man Plato spinning

  yarns about how ridiculously smart

  and virtuous you were, while I got Gary Oldman.

  So what’s one more tosser playing puppets

  with his hand up our collective arse?

  SOC.

  So who are we?

  SID.

  A monkey’s tea party, for all I know.

  Counterweight to the comfortable

  and approved. A fishbone in the throat of those

  who never bothered asking

  whether wealth and power were such

  gasping pursuits. But what’s a better way

  to go than making one unholy noise

  when you’ve got the world’s ear?

  You might’ve been an annoying prat,

  but I’d back you every time, even while

  you were turning blue across a mattress.

  At night, I hear feedback so constant

  I think I haven’t dreamt it. There’s

  no wind here, no
sky or streets,

  not even a proper pisser,

  and I’m with my mind all the time.

  Dance

  ‘I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box of smoke?’

  – Osel Hita Torres

  An older, more informed friend of mine

  said, ‘It’s easy, step to one side

  and sway, then turn to the other, like that …

  Lift your arms, and for fuck’s sake, don’t count.

  Snapping your fingers is okay. C’mon,

  break it up a little, not once and once

  and once then once to each side, you trout,

  try a few moves between.

  It’s like a trance.’

  I was terrified in junior high

  as the cool kids shuffled in orderly rows

  under the eyes of our teacher chaperones.

  Prism shards sluiced off the mirror ball.

  I escaped to the halls, toing and froing

  the next hour away, the clues

  dawning on me that being a teenager

  was just a field test on an alien planet,

  for seven years, to experiment with alcohol.

  What were we doing, sneaking mickeys

  in jean legs, risking a tab of acid,

  slipping out to cars? No instructions,

  no prescribed numbers of downs or yards

  were set to measure our progress.

  In back seats, sweat squeaky on vinyl, trying

  to syringe pleasure into each other’s skin,

  results rarely startling or sacred, but like

  meditation, a worthwhile erasure of the self.

  I tried sitting in lotus position once, but kept

  thinking I could use a drink. A short-term

  escape from the pain we earn, these

  games we play to get out of our heads.

  You roam El Raval’s archipelago of bars

  while debating Cassavetes and Kurosawa

  with some girl or boy who’ll break your heart,

  the hurt with street cred now, framed

  in a long shot you learn to hold.

  Umbrage

  I’d spread the word that you’re pretty slow

  because you’d implied I was less than bright,

  and there’s one more thing I’d like to know:

  are you wrong or am I right?

  If a past disorder caused you trouble,

  be it gastrointestinal, tooth or sinus,

  if a privileged birth raised you in a bubble,

  I’m afraid that’s no excuse, your Highness,

  for the back-stabbing habits of an asshole.

  If you’re really itching to put me in my place,

  fine, let’s drop the gloves, and like Picasso,

  I’ll happily rearrange your face.

  And while you carve mine to a tragic mask,

  we’ll raise a chorus of the same old song,

  since there’s one more thing you’d like to ask:

  were you right or was I wrong?

  Drought Journal

  The sky’s stretched so white

  noon stings, bleached

  of shade. In the street,

  baked chrome blinds

  as a car passes with sudden

  starred light, and the lawn’s

  a clump of stiff leaves

  below the asthmatic scratchings

  of the linden’s crown.

  Chrysanthemum heads wither

  and crisp like rust; the choked

  veins of perennials are edged

  with brown, flattened to the stem.

  Power lines buzz above curb dust.

  A cyclist ticks by

  beside the construction site;

  men chew bread,

  looking flayed and stunned

  in the faint, bent shadow

  of a backhoe’s boom, the jackhammer

  planted on the asphalt like a heroic

  Soviet prop. The ballpark,

  empty, roasts like the Negev,

  just sand and brittle tufts

  of grass, where Christ might

  appear through the haze

  and do a deal for one gulp

  of bottled water. Sprinklers

  whisking in the yards can’t

  stave off the parched decay,

  their thimble-shallow spray

  sponged dry by sun in minutes.

  At 4 a.m., we wake

  to the window banging back

  on its hinges, and the downpour,

  a day-for-night burst

  of blurred white in street glow,

  rain slashing down

  and the dry roots slugging it back.

  Terms

  He stood at the front of the lecture hall,

  rushed to explain the important themes

  of the Twentieth-Century American Novel,

  last class before midterms.

  Our essays were weak; he wanted us

  to get this, to sift the full impact

  of the novel’s plot, a book he clearly loved.

  It was a quintessential early-winter day, sky

  the colour of pasta water, stirred with flurries,

  and the small break of Christmas before us.

  The painted vents blew hot, drowsy breath.

  ‘Now, one more thing,’ he said, then talked

  of the cancer they’d found, his treatments

  and the chance of success. There’d be

  a TA for the rest of term.

  He blinked at his watch; the time was gone.

  Silent, we loaded books into knapsacks.

  ‘Good luck on the exam. Reread your notes.

  And please, remember the motifs,’ he said

  as we poured toward the door,

  ‘of the white horse and the pillar of smoke.’

  Hare

  Time sawing its hinds,

  it crests the pasture’s rump,

  countless long-jumps

  in a row, a pelted arrow

  fletched for lift.

  It shakes off sleek and quick

  as too flat; its stride taps the course,

  a triple-time tattoo through sprays

  of heather and gorse,

  where it winks, framed in haze.

  Though it’s said to pound

  rice cakes on the moon,

  a trickster or Aesop’s fool,

  it refuses to be other than real

  when you see it running. Pity

  it can’t sing while the hound bears

  down with that boggle-eyed stare

  chugging the void

  on a whisk of gangly limbs

  to muzzle all zags and hearsay.

  What would it sing? Psalm,

  plainsong, tin pans,

  cable in a squall,

  cymbal crash, cackle, drag

  on a rutted brake pad,

  chanson to sum up our fable

  before its raw chords are shot,

  before its shot chords are ash.

  Memento Mori

  Before I am called into dinner,

  you call out, ‘Come here,

  come look,’ lifting a cracked wand

  of bone from the dry manure

  you turn in your hand

  and weigh. Kicking around,

  we hunt for more parts of the set,

  limbs or rib slats fanned

  out like smashed bracelets

  mislaid in the clover.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say, ‘it’s late.’

  You turn the thing over and over.

  Circa Now

  (Rhapsody)

  Likely we’ll have no language

  to resemble the ones we use now

  when the LAGEOS satellite finally drops

  to Earth. Silver, with a solid

  brass core, its arc set

  to track our planetary shift

  unti
l its highly stable orbit

  deteriorates in the year 8,000,000.

  Any sense of its first purpose

  will be lost to whoever

  might still be here. What they’d

  look like, eat or dream is anyone’s

  guess, but we fixed a plaque inside

  with drawings of the Earth, circa now,

  and another one with future coastlines

  fanned out like a stretched accordion

  to show them how the world might look

  after 80,000 inches of continental drift,

  one every century. If anything’s left

  to inspect those shifted silhouettes –

  our prodigal land mounted in a dimpled,

  silver ball – they might just

  read them as portent, threat or tall saga

  cooked up by a far-too-distant race

  to understand.

  •

  In Fort Kochi, Kerala,

  a long day of walking the baked stretch

  of Bazaar Road past the ferry terminal

  to Ernakulam. Textiles, pots, oils, ceramics,

  paper and tobacco spilled for sale

  from the open shutters of the shops.

  Goats nudged garbage while the touts

  called out to please look

  at their leather sandals, sarongs

  and elephant tea cozies. The dance

  of haggling, offers

  and countered head shakes.

  Mosquitoes devoured your bare legs

  under the batik tablecloth

  as we sat for biryani and curry.

  I’d spread the newspaper out,

  looking for news of home

  in a tiny font. But read

  a report of the Italian snail

  thriving on the grounds

  at Cliveden and a theory about

  how it got there: stowaway in 1896

  on a marble balustrade

  imported from the Villa Borghese.

  Structures of one empire humped