For Dennis Hopper

The goon at the rumble
with a switchblade knife,
or laid out under fireworks
with starspangled crazy eyes
leering into a microphone
on the highway at night
in a steel black Cadillac,
or bursting through the mirror,
in dreams he walks with you.
He will haunt American cinemas,
bug eyed, gritting his teeth
as the house lights go down.

Where is he now? In some
candyland, huffing cocaine
from a sherbert straw,
or stumbling into an audience —
lights, camera, Dennis Hopper
this is not your life.
And he looks confused, as if
the trappings of the old world
ought to live on in the new.
He sips tonic water, growing strange
as he answers all the questions,
the audience become uneasy,
he now sees the Totenkopf
coming down out of the lights.
As in a dream the scene shifts —

the show continues, but he is old
and doesn't recognise his body.
He is drunk, lying in the street,
realises he can reach and touch
every one of the stars.
He is still being interviewed,
and to every question he replies
"Hollywood's mad dogs are dying"
and laughs a barking laugh.
The applause is overwhelming
as he lurches from the floor
into the air, clutching a bottle of spirit.
Curtain.

In Heat

In the park on the first day of summer
a woman is stalking with a limp
in a cardigan, her glasses singeing her face
past dogs fighting and fucking
and pissing gaily in the shade
where students are dreaming with red eyes
and red skin, sinking into their wine glasses
or sinking into the ground.
The dogs bark and leap like lumps
of charcoal into the echo,
hissing of the barbecues
like armies of smoky tambourines
and the dogs are burning,
tattooed men are chewing at their legs,
the housewives yip and skitter
into bunches of daisies.
A hay fevered child rolls sneezing
through a dream of rape seed fields,
in sun-stroke, in sunburnt mercy,
as the men are baring their chests,
as the women are itching at their breasts,
as the dogs are loving endlessly
their scruffy, blunted bitches.
Old women shine like raisins under the trees,
glinting eyes like diamonds, watching the kids
with hunger of marrow and black thoughts,
thoughts of age and hunger, hidden in woodsmoke,
their hands moving like a spell.

As the children wake among the flowers
the park is tumbling in a furnace dream
of sizzling meat and broken guitars,
and their parents are beetroot naked
barking at the sun.

Vessel

In the 21st century
the world has become an engine.
Miles underground, the great dynamo
rages in the act of dreaming,
pouring out a violent music
through the caverns of the earth,
its energy doubling and doubling,
lost at the surface in a craze;
the lights of every city being born,
every ancient empire failing.

They are sparks of the great wheel,
a glinting in the eye of this
diver through an ebbing galaxy.
We are conduits, cells frying
in a bath of blue electric,
seeing each other's spasms and splits
in music, as it uses us
within its brief communications,
expressions of parts of thoughts.

We hear them, sometimes dreaming
at the fringes of our world,
asleep beneath the cliffs as waves
rattle over from the further shore,
we are carried back on this electron
into a history of atoms,
the biology of ancestral stars.

Last Song at Night

With your millions pounding grain
your orphan towns and citadels
and pyrotechnic animals
in the electric alley of Gods

With the smoky chapels
stacked sadly in your valleys
the ground that stumbles
finally to the sea

With the mourning songs I hear
over your first born rivers
in the ancient night coming
the faces of your ghosts

With our tired, tired hands,
you are the father we can never hold,
only push our sunburnt faces
into the cool, dark earth

With your oceans we know like death
and the tiny, dry acne
on which we live, by candlelight,
glad of idols and maize

With your feasting clowns
loving lonely in the same evening
we have lived in all our lives
like children of other children

With your music that moves us
in tears, dancing, fire
at the tips of every limb,
as we are your children too

I can't help falling in love with you

Nocturne

The trees, and their sea green leaves
are caught in golden light
as the sun goes gulping like a carp
through jet streams and glass

to bury its face in a bed of pebbles.
The trees, smell like being young,
mint & algae, dead frog of bruises
that told tales among the plums

that like a lush drank up their puddle
in a dream of the garden of youth.
The trees, that tonight crane their necks
through the window, over the cradle,

singing to the newborn a grey song
that it will dribble on, softly nightfall
as the planet burps and rolls over.
The trees, go back to sleep, shh

that are holding up a star pricked canopy
as dinosaurs come plodding, wise and sad
down the silent avenues, beneath
the scabby arms of our loving forest.

The trees, you are peaceful now
that glower in a galaxy of towns
crying about the past, blind with grief
and your dinosaurs are forever real now,

stalking hugely into the deep black river.
The trees, on a long blind pilgimage
go sleepily back down messy lanes
dressing themselves in hay and flowers,

napping in the land of donkeys
with their heads buried in their roots.
The trees cat call you at dawn,
you are lost under white sheets

waking into a dalmation world.
The blackbirds are bursting from the pie
as the trees rip livid from the earth
and thunder as a choir into the atmosphere.

As you rise in smoke and sweat and robes
the trees are bickering in the clouds.

Harlequin

The harlequin of New Cross comes
singing reggae walking past kebab shops
with a tyre around his waist
with a traffic cone his crown
falling into every pothole on fire
doused in hotsauce and ginger.
The ladies beam and pelt him with gold
from their wrists, scrabble at his thighs
tear off their burkhas and hijabs
and run home to bathe in beer.
He's drinking malt with the Ghanaians
covered in mayonnaise and flour.
They clap his shoulders, offer fishes,
bake his eyes red and roll him
battered out into the street
where he feasts on beef brisket and shrimp.

Children dance all around him,
swing from his red and green tailcoat,
prank on his chicken ribs, his bells.
He grins like a piano, plucks goats' eyes
from behind their ears. When their mothers
come wagging tongues like steaks in scolding
he waltzes them across the drains
crooning to them like the Caribbean sea,
leaves them breathless, bosoms bowling,
holding baskets of mangoes and figs.
Twilight, he quits the drunken town.
Cartwheeling, throwing off his clothes,
his crown, he gives a glorious cockadoodledoo
and leaps like a lion into the sky.

In the garden

In the garden
poplars crack and leaf
a fox eats daffodils
sparrows begin to bloom
gurgling in the trees
ivy drops like smoke
branches lose their rags
a squirrel chews its foot
falling from the fence
pidgeons crash unconscious
into the bramble bushes
the roses come humble
with twenty kisses
the crow is stalking
from behind the tulips
the ground is broke
the soil is soaked
the rotten stump falls
in love with woodlice

At night the rain
will wash the reeds
drink the ants
coronate the bees
now the starlings crackle
around the king
the badger wakes
and eats its young
owls shed their wings
deer are mating
in the sun
while in a ditch
frog lies bleeding

Host

The pontiff has a whale eye
turning like a planet in his head.
His bone groans from the weight,
the other eye is cowed and red,
squashed bloodshot in a corner
with his nose, his lips.
His skull is like a shell
exploded, the rest lopsided, bent
to fit this ball of blackness in.
Tears of oil fall when it
turns to heaven, when it blinks.
At night his body is shaken
as it rolls back over hours
finally baring ropes of nerves
encrusted with salt.
These seem to grow each night,
boring into the socket
until the old man gasps
and the parasite sings darkly
out of his closing throat.
The priests whisper together
the eye has found its throne.
They go to him, and see
the other eye has fallen out,
the human mouth is gone.
The pontiff's body rises,
robed in blubber, ghost of bone.
The eye sings out
as it drinks them in.

Pop Idol

O Coca-Cola
let us kiss your horny feet
look on us weeping ink
you chink of belly light
you sickly constellation
you sudden racing heart
you dizzy god of us
with a gazillion microbes
rinsing in your caramel
let us lie in your wake
bearded with creamy froth
dreaming of black diamonds
dreaming of nougat
dreaming of the dog
that barks you slickly
in the faces of the stars
dreaming maybe of death
the brown hair of children
ploughing up a thirsty earth
the gaping gulch.

O Coca-Cola
O let the levee break
crows are exploding
crops are burning
the planets are moving
the storm is coming
the children are dying
the king is going blind
the veil has dropped
there is such drought
O pope us with black love
blind us with black light
cake us in your grace
stomach our salvation
we are but purée before you.

Beer Bear

I was walking past an alley
when the beer bear leaned out,
grabbing me and pulling me in.
It burped in my face, took
a couple of healthy swigs
and fell backwards into a bin.
It crawled out, covered in slop,
eggshell, bits of fat and fruit,
shaking, starting to moan.
"You're a disgrace," I said, "look
at all this shit all over you."
It threw up everywhere, hunched
against the wall, then turned to me,
face dripping snot and spit
and growled "This is nothing new."

I remember it was so handsome,
toothy grin and pristine fur,
on the label of every brew.
It talked to me for hours,
about the baiting, the back door,
the way they screw you
out of every cent, pay in perks,
dope you up, finally kick you out
or just dump you at the zoo.
They way they bring you down.
It crushed the bottle in its paw
and tried its best to stand.
"Fuck the world," it said,
"I'm going to get out of this town,
walk until I'm in the forest."
When I left the alleyway,
it was face down, starting to snore.