Politics is a long walk, not a cab
on expenses.
It does not speed through our
darker towns
swerving round the fallen, past
the crowds.
It is the service of the
outstretched hand,
the conversation, the trying to
understand.
Some lives are a slow turn of the
arm, same
line and length day after day;
others deceive
with variation, changes of pace
and angle,
occasional days that skid through
fast,
that you can only stand up and
applaud.
The universe is barely credible,
its mass in excess of what is
visible,
its meaning opaque, intangible.
Most of us exist and die,
illegible
and void. Others are indelible,
named by every atom, irreducible.
It’s not easy in the Big Easy,
friend,
and making it big is the biggest
joke,
but a bluesman’s a bluesman right
to the end,
and life’s hard, and then you
croak.
You sit down to play; the kit
becomes
an orchestra, a symphony of drums,
super-heavy, hi-hat like a ticking
bomb,
paranoid snare and depth-charge
toms,
kick-drum beating rebellion in
sixteenths,
no compromise, no sell-out, no
relief.
Sooner or later we will return
to an Eden of our own; yours
will be lush and romantic, bass
amped up and folded back until
it becomes a hymn to lost youth.
Even through the soup of medium
wave
I heard that glimmer of guitar, a
six-string
smile, riffing like a wink. Song
devises codes
of joy; you broke every one, over
and over.
Some songs blunder in,
shouting their own names,
angry, but with no solutions.
Others wear different skin,
turn inertia into flames,
kindle private revolutions.
America wears a disguise of song,
usually too long,
torn between the loud and the
lush,
and always too much.
You sang anguish into a soft spell
all by yourself,
and when I dial you on the
telephone
nobody’s home.
In One! A double - no, a treble
bed.
In Two! The only colours; black
and red.
In Three! The working man and his
pleasures.
And Bully’s Special Prize! The
drama of small measures.
Butter and
fillet steak comes up
to room
temperature in the old kitchen.
In the yard a
motorcycle clicks as it cools.
I hear laughter
like the clink of cutlery,
and I set a
place at the table for one.
I watched you
write me into a poem,
your old shirt
cuffs ironed to a shine.
We are all in a
sonnet for the unlucky,
far from who we
want to be, known
only to
ourselves and those who mine,
like you, the
language of subtlety.
We love our mavericks; deft,
defiant, playing impudent one-twos
with two fingers in the air,
a betting slip and a phone number
hidden in their wrinkled sock.
I stumbled across you in the
labyrinth
of childhood; serpentine,
seductive,
waiting around the corner in a
place
where television was a two-way
mirror,
and yearning was love without a
script.
Here are roses and a meat cleaver,
Scotch & Threat and hearty
laughter,
a slug of pain for a luckless
lover.
Life is large, but you were
larger.
Have you met him yet?
The empty man at the empty desk,
gloriously flat, outrageously
bland,
playing a ‘Don’t Know’ in a slough
of ‘Strongly Disagrees’.
If you would speak up, know this;
the right word is a wedging of
doors,
a filling of lamps, a bending of
bars,
a flare shot into the sky, a hand
raised to say no more, a tuning
fork
before the choir sings, maybe not
today or tomorrow, but sometime.
A celestial On Air light blinks
and the airwaves open up.
The music is drowned out
by the wild sounds of a zoo
where animals cannot sing
and the jocks are not serious.
Here is a song sung in code,
in chant, howl, shriek, moan,
sung as in future days, old
now but once new, stoned
yet stone cold sober. Don’t
turn the light on; leave it alone.
The screen role demands
a particular Englishness;
weary, morose, soft hands
but hard eyes, finesse
but not flash. I wonder who
might fit the part? You.