Chris McCabe

TRY THIS

put the great white in a jazz-trance

gore-tex my heart

lock the statue in its scaffold

as the forgotten paint forms a navel

not just a lycra dress of midnight blue

what we have is magnificent – I mean

in its magnitude, its magnaminity –

I’m not dictionaryflickin here

I mean it

what was what-we-supposed starts to cease
the scaffold crumbles, the statute breathes

and at midnight, or thereabouts

there comes a chance we don’t refute

WHITE FLOWER

A taxidermist resized the great whites of his shoes

to echo & slap down jasmine corridors

– like a seal claps at the midwife’s birth –

past the Department of Human Remains

where no managers go, only an assistant called Jasmine

O, a message was left from the Gods – the overdraft is a sign

Such spaces, these messages, we refute through chance.

We both came in, the room, together : a white flower.

On Lambeth Bridge the 3pm bells & seagull shrieks
meet in the back of a van called READYMIX.

The bandit of the rational rains down
what you knew, already, & passed off as memory.

What you by-passed in discussions of money.

What, as rain (as cherries) you already knew.

There in the conscious : drops its cache.

HOUSEMATES

RE.M. riffled its deck

I must have just nod –

a Fritz Lang on the screen

– I think it was the screen –

it could have been a variant on my recurrent

dream of the vampire in the oven

which had played in my sleep

in black & white for 23 years

Then we were in the bachelor housemate’s bedroom

(this was real)

trying to negotiate a sale on his double oak bed

still unmade in its box

He imagined that by just making it

he could lie down with what we had found,

The room was dark except for a bottle of tequila

in the corner, a stripe of lizard green

with the worm playing dead just to spite us,

He tried to confuse the issue –

I’m not getting involved when he comes round here kicking off –

I said that won’t happen, he’s not like that.

He snorted cynical derision from both nostrils

so I knew this was really about me getting the woman.

I tried a different tact –

Look Anthony we’re tired, we’re two halves the same –

I know you’ve read Plato’s Symposium –

so please just sell us the fuckin bed

HIT THE NORTH

There was an earthquake we had slept through

or the North had slept through the earthquake of our love.

I set a firecracker to your novel You marched a wet tread over my poems.

Domesticity was our tempest : You pulled down the bookshelves

I punched holes in the bathroom door. We gave birth

to a Mr Boy – language sped past like a motorway –

but his ways had the gravitas of the mono.

The Interview Panel were expecting us, they thought

we had brought an axe-head (misheard). Our tool was the accent.

The room trembled its stalemate of silence

I raised the handle to speak

it was in the midlands of that moment that everyone slept

THE LIGHT CAFÉ

There was a powercut in the Light Café. Dwarf cadavers used as pieces on the chessboard floor of black & white tiles. Up all night with the insomniac feline – you stayed behind to attend to the cat-napkin. Fleeced the svelte black fur to enhance your collection of animal instruments. Touchtyped the dial code for Infinity Services. The dealer was a deacon that circled those waiting to be baptized around the font like a training session for self-checkout. The phone rang and he was usurped by a stoned clown called Jimbo. Red hat, red box, he was collected by 46 identical Jimbos in a car that the doors fell off. Nobody noticed : already the Cyclops had gone down on the dancefloor – slipped on loose potatoes - his shirtpocket biro puncturing his one bad eye

XMAS PARTY

ACHTUNG tape holds down

the dancefloor
as if we choose to drive away

GUERNICA in dodgems,

the blind DJ from the funk

hotline exchanges his playlist
at the free bar

– Your gothic heart, black & venial

just loves this – these shapes

we cut

from the sinew mincer

THE POETRY LADDER

I couldn’t get on, someone had gobbed

on each rung so there was no image-traction.

They could have been publishers or estate agents

around the table so I took the marzipan axe

to their foreheads, it broke apart soft yellow cubes

and the only red – as they laughed – was jam.

They tantalised in whispers the sound of my name

in tea-wreaths, smoke-hoops, ale-fumes etc.

I left the room, still with the visor on, to go & build

my own four up, four down (alexandrines)

overlooking the park. I didn’t want clichés for bricks

and anyway, the cobwebs in the railings

looked more like shattered glass to me.

There was no variable tracker for stylistic changes

and although this was meant to last, it could have been

a mere consumable. A twister of statistics

started to shake the foundations like a boolean

pick n’ mix in an upturned dunce’s cone.

Once what I’d made rented out their page each line
came with an inbuilt ejector seat called buy-to-let

which kept the market artificially high. What I objected

to was the influx of foreign writers who took up

so much samizdat space. My readers were tenants

in the slow-build, their imaginations like cellars

harbouring poems that would not pockmark the landscape

(they were evicted whenever I changed styles)

the idea being not to use the same ladder for a whole career,

though market shifts worked against this ethos

– metaphors went out & parataxis came in –

I was the first of my contemporaries to give up

believing in the actual concept of ladder. I realised

I had faith in a poetry wall & my career entered a new phase.