She sang trawling shanties, a parlance now gone. Sipped gin shop draughts, the grubby corner of The Wooden Dolly, modest below booming piano. Lingering spice of Tyne upon her, she washed clothes to its waves, stirred pots to its turnings. Some horizons were buoyant, a spot grew larger, becoming her husband, others empty, a returning keel. Winters cracked fingers stinging fish-gut, summers breezed sheets on a line. She could wring the neck of a pigeon, ignore gurgles in a sack of kittens, kiss a scuffed knee making it better.
From thickset specky windows
he eye-balls
the tough job warp and weft
of the launch pad
as it floats itself
for the copter’s sea-strip.
Then the kitchen’s remodeled
—Tony bumps the eggbeater
off its base
buoying the bobbish sponge-backed slab,
hosing it into the bowl
to plane a cruddy pan.
In a fumbling presto
it slips into quick-sight
blades limiting a circle,
a cascade lighting on horizon.
Landing’s right as a trivet.
“Freeman & slave, patrician & plebeian, lord & serf, guildmaster & journeyman, in a word oppressor & oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
—Karl Marx
Barons in black satin, hands white snow, pitching cold conversations. Chrome yellow crushed under thighs as they sat. Bewigged, ruffled, well-groomed men. Madonnas of unmanageable purity looked on. A griffin in this domain, stone, about to bark. Cold nudes, seven, dancing love tarantellas, demolishing the male gaze, marble flesh. Even Greek athletes wrestling hold desire, muscular beams ends. A crowd of busts gathering slips of dust on teak-lined shelves.
Remembering the House of Windsor clearance sale is a dumbfounding sensation. When the canvas of The Conquered City was removed, all that was left was a bucket, detergent, scuffed Marigold gloves.
It’s a quest of outstanding debt
though the landings were rid this morning.
She procures them with go-slow hands,
the insidious skin-poppers of junkies,
infectious puncturers on grey concrete,
a falling-off of blood-letting
on scuppered walls, spit, ammoniac acid.
She walks the mainline through the nerves
of this tenement.
And now she is a failsafe net,
a one-off she can bunker,
the nipper of her steady flame,
John, John, dead and gone,
sarcomas last spring snuffed him out.
She was herself a vein zapper,
shot up thunder from the heart,
whiz warmed up
on an unneigbourly candle.
The cough’s a blue funk
and the t-cells overspending.
Irked by the tremors
more than once she’s pipped herself
with thrilling little tingles
seesawing memories on the highwire.
