gallipoli
I. Mixed with the mud
the friend who waved
lilacs.
And here hung
those callow lips
the mosquito
kissed - bones
beneath a cairn
on Skyros.
Placing a wreath, the Queen surveyed
the beaches with a quizzical eye.
II. Music may allay our passions
among the wastage
and the memories
of a bombed museum; scatterings
of Byrd and Weelkes
revive a peace
that passeth
with the final echo's
refinement.
III. Too many beautiful girls
fellating
chocolate-bars.
Who will save
my darlings from the power of the dog?
I have bought enough dreams already;
the universe
has expanded beyond me;
I have learnt to consume
other people's wars
and vitamins.
IV. one two three
me mother caught a flea
she put it in the teapot...
The street was a canal for miraculous crossing,
the dead could count a hundred
back to life, the tribal chase renew and spill
stridently into the dusk. Brown powder settling,
the dusk. And the houses
lost a dimension, blackening. The night,
a submission finally. Voices receding
down endless heroic avenues.
V. Galloping on New Brighton sands
the poet did not think of death.
One week before the Armistice. Was dead.
In his bag
the English epic's final throw,
aborted at the Sambre canal.
And it is all nothing - the spaces between
the particles, the voids beneath microscopes,
the voids beyond telescopes. It is all the same.
Gold to airy nothing beat. Bones in mud
and bones beneath cairns.
VI. Our world implodes slowly. At least
let us discredit the Trojan war. We
are experts at the demythologising game.
Last year's heroes had their say but we
exposed their dirty secrets in good time.
In my city, Wellington
does not attend a single function;
too high and mighty, his metal gob
is stuffed with metal plums.
Agammenon
achieved nothing, nor Menelaus. Only
Odysseus took longer, getting home.
All corpses rot the same. Wormes meate.
And kisses make no-one
immortal.
Limbs and torsoes
fill the pantheons.
VII. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime.
'The ovidising game of mythical circumlocution.'
Discuss and illustrate.
We who have learnt
the fountain of perpetual adolescence.
VIII. All that at University. And sending home
poems
to schoolgirl bitches and choirgirls
ambiguous with piety.
And a boy
rode New Brighton sands
before me
while the mud
was being churned
elsewhere
and
the atom
split.
IX. ...and made a cup of tea
the flea jumped out
me mother gave a shout
in came the bobby...
Even now
the mud is being churned elsewhere.
I have bought enough dreams already.
Page(s) 84-86
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