Bloodshot Monochrome. Patience Agbabi

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СКАЧАТЬ admire strange skin (ogle PVC spacesuit).

      Alien would conquer world

      from business epicentre, with S-Curl

      but the lens regressed to sand, attacked my eye

      and blaxploitation sci-fi

      turned film noir.

      I left in dark glasses,

      in a black cab like Metamorphosis,

      each streetlight burning in my vision

      how fact (I could be blind for life) shot fiction.

NOT A 9/11 POEM

      No, postmen don’t get postman’s block.

      They may deliver the wrong letters

      but are never stuck for a line break

      or line. If you think writers,

      poets are lazy, give them enough real work

      to sweat out their poems, a tragedy

      like 9/11 and a week

      to work on their wordplay

      and watch them divide

      into poets for spontaneous

      overflow and poets for emotions made vivid

      months later in the aftermath, the stillness

      but since there’s still no peace there’s still no poem, no postmortem.

‘GANGSTERS’

      shot straight into the Top 10 and school

      uniform was dead. Ties tapered,

      blazers trailed and we all murdered

      to look as miserable as Terry Hall

      or mad as Jerry Dammers whose smile

      was a few keys short of a keyboard.

      We didn’t get the 2-tone metaphor;

      know the rankin’ rude bwoy model

      was Peter Tosh; that the Wailers

      preached ‘Simmer Down’ in ’63 to stop

      rough an’ tough on the dancefloor,

      but for ska to rule the airwaves

      Sometime people got roughed up. We knew what it meant, ‘music to die for’.

THE LONDON EYE

      Through my gold-tinted Gucci sunglasses,

      the sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime

      strikes the convoy of number 12 buses

      that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.

      Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting

      to you, Hello! . . . on . . . bridge . . . ’minster! The aerial view postcard, the man writing squat words like black cabs in rush hour.

      The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.

      You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.

      We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble

      where I think, ‘Space age!’, you think, ‘She was late.’

      Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .Beat™ blinks, replies

      18·02. We’re moving anticlockwise.

ON TURNING ON THE TV TO CATCH,BY CHANCE, SOME QUAVERING BARSOF ‘SUMMERTIME’, THAT VOICE, PITCH,BLACK AS A SEMIBREVE, SCARSON THE FACE FILLING THE BLANK SCREEN,THE BLURRED BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGEOF JANIS JOPLIN’S SYNAESTHETIC SCREAM,ALL HIPPY HAIR AND CLASS A VINTAGE;MY REACTION MIRRORING MAMA CASSAT MONTEREY WATCHING ‘BALL AND CHAIN’CLIMB TO A CLIMAX; THE HEAVY BASS,THEN JANIS TAKING IT DEEP DOWN DOWN –TO THE BLUES, THE DEEP SOUTH, THE NEXT FIXOF ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND HEROIN AND SEX.

       Wow!

COMEDOWN

      The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. Milton, Paradise Lost

      It wasn’t the rent boy we met in Heaven

      who looked fifteen and called us dollies,

      with his social worker as an accessory

      I thought was his boyfriend, leading us up

      to the party full of lacklustre women

      in tight polyester, and upstairs, not

      the Skin with the spider’s web tattoo

      for a face, that bled red light in my skull;

      nor the ugly man who said Full of fuckingspades and half-castes as soon as we entered whom I misheard, the social worker doing his damnedest to sugar the pill: it was taking a drug that made us innocent enough to leave Heaven and end up in Hell.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

      In Hamburg, me and Anna, who is German,

      and a man across the street attacks us, spitting

      his violence; the air is cold, and bitter

      faces gather like rainclouds, like an omen

      and my gentle friend counter-attacks but later

      refuses to translate and that’s the killer,

      her silence, like a shroud; I feel the colour

      rage in my cheeks for lack of that translation

      reminding me of school, that French exchange,

      a simple sentence, Parce qu’elle est noire, delivered at such speed and with such hatred it stung me: to encounter so much rage; more, for being judged solely by colour; but most, the fact it had to be translated.

NORTH(WEST)ERN

      I was twelve, as in the twelve-bar blues, sick

      for the Southeast, marooned on the North Wales coast.

      A crotchet, my tongue craving the music

      of Welsh, Scouse or Manc. Entering the outpost

      of Colwyn Bay pier, midsummer, noon,

      nightclub for those of us with the deep ache

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