The Cloud in Pants: a tetraptych
IM Brian Coffey
Prologue
Your stuffy notions
sit on a spongy brain pan
like a puffed up timeserver
on a standing committee
that never stands
except on ceremony.
The ego lands!
And it is me.
Big shots,
I promise to embolise
your expense-account complacency
with a clot from the infarctions
of a broken heart,
and to sate
brash youthful
disregard when gangrene
sets in.
I won’t wait
for grey hairs
and wordly cares
to soften my views.
I’ll melt down
the chairman’s iron bottom
with a poker, sizzling
spit.
A direct hit,
disordering his points
with out-of-order
interventions.
I’ll solder
his seat to the throne
of supreme deference –
a metal chamber pot
steaming with terms of reference,
previous minutes and what not.
I’ll walk around the plush
boardroom shouting ‘enough’
with the shrill ennui
of an impossible young man
of twenty-two.
I won’t wait
for grey hairs
and worldly cares
to soften my views
(‘How would you behave
if you were in my shoes?’)
*
Sophisticates
play their love on a violin.
For yobbos a drum will do.
They like to bang.
But who,
except me, can turn himself
inside out into
a pair of lips
spitting out pips?
*
You, upper echelons
of bemedalled bureaucrats,
learn this lesson –
the lisping party hack
in his Party hat
should know
that the doily
on a headrest
soils easily.
Best
not to lie back
unless you want to trace
a negative Veronica
on the cambric – a blank
surface rather than a face.
Learn too not to blab your lips
like a cook finger-tipping
through a gourmet
manual –
globs of saliva
will smudge the print.
(Isn’t it
awful
what can go wrong between
the recipe and the dinner,
the Black Cap and the guillotine?)
*
Let me pull
a grimace like the winner
of the Raw Meat Steak
competition.
Or if you’d rather
I’ll go all soggy
like a sunset
distempering night’s shroud.
No longer a man with a mission,
something wet
and tender
– a cloud in pants.
Forget this –
(the scene of the crime
is a beauty spot,
more often than not).
The idyllic does not exist.
I sing instead
men as crumpled hospital beds
and women as clichés.
The world of faeces.
Translated by Augustus Young
Page(s) 97-99
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