Read Selected Poems for Free Online Page A

charcoaled fingers at our bed, and let
    Me be his pleasure, though Philip sweat
    At his rhythms and use those hateful tricks
    They say he feels like after heretics.
    O let the King be gentle and not loom
    Like Torquemada in the torture room,
    Those wiry Spanish hairs, these nuptial nights,
    Crackling like lit tapers in his tights,
    His seed like water spluttered off hot stone.
    Maria, whose dark eyes very like my own
    Shine on such consummations, Maria bless
    My Philip just this once with gentleness.
    The King’s cool knuckles on my smoky hair!
    Mare Mediterraneum, la mer, la mer
    That almost got him in your gorge with sides
    Of feastmeats, you must flush this scared bride’s
    Uterus with scouring salt. O cure and cool
    The scorching birthmarks of his branding-tool.
    Sweat chills my small breasts and limp hands.
    They curled like foetuses,
maman
, and cried.
    His crusted tunics crumple as he stands:
    Come, Isabella
. God
is satisfied
.

Newcastle is Peru
    ‘Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru!’
    (John Cleveland)
    ‘Venient annis saecula seris,
    Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
    Laxet & ingens pateat tellus,
    Tethysque novos detegat orbes,
    Nec sit terris ultima Thule.’
    (Seneca,
Medea
, 375–9)
    For defending in our Civil Wars
    the King’s against the better cause,
    Newcastle got its motto: FORTIT-
    ER TRIUMPHANS DEFENDIT .
    After Nigeria and Prague I come
    back near to where I started from,
    all my defences broken down
    on nine or ten
Newcastle Brown
.
    A sudden, stiff September breeze
    blows off the sea along the quays
    and chills us; autumn and I need
    your shoulder with a desperate need.
    A clumsy effort at control,
    I faff with paper chips and coal,
    and rake out with elaborate fuss
    one whole summer’s detritus.
    A good draught and the fire roars
    like muted Disney dinosaurs,
    and last week’s Sunday paper glows
    yellowish, its urgent prose,
    like flies across a carcass, spreads
    and fattens on the voiceless dead.
    A picture shows lobbed mortar bombs
    smashing down Onitsha homes.
    The fire sucks in the first cold air
    under the coverage of massacre.
    The fire chatters, almost flies,
    a full-fledged bird of paradise.
    I lay down, dizzy, drunk, alone,
    life circling life like the Eddystone
    dark sea, but lighting nothing; sense
    nor centre, nor circumference.
    A life-long, sick sixpennyworth
    of appalling motion round the Earth;
    scared, moonrocketing till Pop-
    eye and blurred planets stop;
    Switchback; Helter Skelter; Reel;
    the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Big Wheel,
    its million coloured lightbulbs one
    red halo like an empty sun.
    The
Caterpillar
; Hunslet Feast;
    one hand on my first woman’s breast;
    darkness; acceleration so
    we’re desperate with vertigo;
    then chained in solitary
Chair-
    o-planes
through whistling air
    as all the known Leeds landmarks blur
    to something dark and circular.
    Venus, Vulcan, Cupid stare
    out vacantly on City Square,
    and
Deus iuvat impigros
    above the bank where God helps those
    who help themselves, declares
    Leeds purposeful in its affairs.
    Mercator; miles
, school chapel glass
    transparencies to blood and brass.
    And
Self Help
Samuel Smiles was said
    to have waltzed round our first bed
    in our partitioned ballroom flat
    with hardly room to swing a cat.
    Worthies! Loiners! O King Dick
    Oastler and his rhetoric,
    and William Hey, the first to show
    syphilis
in utero
.
    O highlife crocodiles that went
    round one palm tree in the bare cement!
    The dizziness! That spiral stair
    up St Vitus’s Cathedral; there
    the golden cockerel and great Prague
    before us like a catalogue;
    slides. Bloodless mementos, all
    Time-Life
International.
    And now with vistas like Earl Grey’s
    I look out over life and praise
    from my unsteady, sea-view plinth
    each dark turn of the labyrinth
    that might like a river suddenly
    wind its widening banks into the sea
    and Newcastle is Newcastle is New-
    castle
is
Peru!
    Swirled detritus and driftwood pass
    in state the 1880
Sas-
    inena Cold Storage