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This Free PDF Notes Contains Indian rebellion of 1857 Questions and Answers in Hindi PDF Notes, 1857 Ki Kranti GK Question, 1857 REVOLT REVOLUTION FACTS MCQ QUESTIONS QUESTION For Upcoming Exams. The revolt of 1857 was the conscious beginning of the Independence struggle against the Britishers. The revolt of 1857 – India's First War of Independence, Mutiny of Sepoy, What was the cause of Indian rebellion of 1857 period leaders, facts, commanders, combatants, Place in Hindi. The revolt began on May 10, 1857, at Meerut as sepoy mutiny. 1857 की क्रांति से जुड़े Questions and Answers in Hindi PDF is very important to crack any competitive exam in India. प्रिय पाठकों आज Examtrix (examtricks) की टीम प्रतियोगी छात्रों के लिये Indian rebellion of 1857 Questions and Answers in Hindi PDF Notes, 1857 ki Kranti GK in Hindi, 1857 की क्रांति के 500 महत्वपूर्ण प्रश्न नोट्स शेयर कर रही है. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 is also called the Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy Mutiny, India's First War of Independence or India's first struggle for independence. The Revolt of 1857 (Also regarded as India's First War of Independece) was an extremely important event in Indian history. It was initiated by the sepoy of the company which arouses the accumulated grievances of the people against the Company's administration and of their dislike for the foreign regime.
Hello Dear Examtrix.com (Exam Tricks) followers, In this post we are going to share an important PDF on Indian rebellion of 1857 Questions and Answers in Hindi PDF Notes, Most Imp 1857 Revolution (Kranti) Questions. The mutiny and great revolt of 1857–59 – When soldiers of the Bengal army mutinied in Meerut on May 10, 1857, tension had been growing for some time. The immediate cause of military disaffection was the deployment of the new breech-loading Enfield rifle, the cartridge of which was purportedly greased with pork and beef fat. Revolt of 1857 PDF which is very useful for each and every competitive exam in India. At this platform we share 1857 Revolution (Kranti) Questions Handwritten notes pdf in Hindi-English and 1857 की क्रांति Questions and Answers in Hindi Free Pdf Study material for Competitive exams.
Today, we are sharing SSC CGL free notes, free upsc ias material. This Free PDF Notes (Indian rebellion of 1857 Questions and Answers in Hindi PDF Notes) Indian Mutiny, also called Sepoy Mutiny or First War of Independence, widespread but unsuccessful rebellion against British rule in India in 1857–59. Begun in Meerut by Indian troops (sepoys) in the service of the British East India Company, it spread to Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, and Lucknow. In India it is often called the First War of Independence and other similar names. Revolt of 1857 PDF is important for various exams like UPSC, IAS, RAS, UPPSC, MPPSC, BPSC, SSC CGL, CHSL, CPO, IBPS PO, SBI PO, Railway, RRB NTPC, ASM, Group D, State PSC, Sub inspector, Patwari exam, LDC Exam, Revenue office Exams.
The first war of independence, often termed as a mutiny by the Marxist and the British historians, had started on May 10, 1857. 162 years on, it is important to revisit what happened during those days as Bharat continues to bear the consequences of fault lines created by the British government in the post-1857 era. The origin of these fault lines lie in the fact that a concerted attempt was made to curb the cultural nationalism, which formed the core of the first war of independence.
Mangal Pandey on 29th March 1857, killed senior officers on parade and started the revolt. Course and Spread of the Revolt: The revolt spread to Berhampur in Bengal. On 24th April 1857 about ninety men of the Native Cavalry stationed at Meerut refused to accept the greased cartridges.
The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the Company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 mi (64 km) northeast of Delhi (now Old Delhi).
Due to all the epicentres being far from each other, there was communication gap between the leaders of different parts of India. Today, on the 160th anniversary of the starting of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, here is all you wish to know about the rebellion.
In this article, we are sharing you with complete notes on Revolt of 1857 in Hindi & English.
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राष्ट्रीय महिला आयोग (NCW) की स्थापना – 31 जनवरी 1992
केंद्रीय प्रशासनिक न्यायाधिकरण (CAT) की स्थापना – वर्ष 1985
भारतीय दूरसंचार नियामक प्राधिकरण (TRAI) – स्थापना: 20 फरवरी 1997; मुख्यालय: नई दिल्ली
भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कृषि सहकारी विपणन संघ (NAFED) की स्थापना – 2 अक्टूबर 1958
12 अप्रैल 1961 को इस व्यक्ति ने पहली मानव अंतरिक्ष उड़ान भरी – यूरी गगारिन (सोवियत नागरिक)
पहला मानव निर्मित पृथ्वी उपग्रह जिसे 4 अक्टूबर 1957 को बाहरी अंतरिक्ष में प्रक्षेपित किया गया था – स्पुतनिक-1
PFRDA द्वारा संचालित दो प्रमुख पेंशन योजनाएं – राष्ट्रीय पेंशन योजना (NPS) और अटल पेंशन योजना (APY)
भारतीय पेंशन कोष नियामक एवं विकास प्राधिकरण (PFRDA) – स्थापना: 23 अगस्त 2003; मुख्यालय: नई दिल्ली
भारतीय सांस्कृतिक संबंध परिषद (ICCR) – स्थापना: 09 अप्रैल 1950; संस्थापक: मौलाना अबुल कलाम आज़ाद; मुख्यालय: नई दिल्ली
स्वतंत्र भारत के पहले शिक्षा मंत्री – मौलाना अबुल कलाम आज़ाद
होम्योपैथी के जनक – डॉ सैमुअल हैनेमैन
विश्व बौद्धिक संपदा संगठन (WIPO) – स्थापना: 14 जुलाई 1967; मुख्यालय: जिनेवा, स्विट्जरलैंड
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## Adrian Henri,
Roger McGough,
Brian Patten

* * *

### THE MERSEY SOUND

#### Restored 50th Anniversary Edition

## Contents

Adrian Henri

_Tonight at Noon_

_Adrian Henri's Last Will and Testament_

_Liverpool Poems_

_Without You_

_Love is..._

_Morning Poem_

_Drinking Song_

_Song for a Beautiful Girl Petrol-pump Attendant on the Motorway_

_Poem for Roger McGough_

_Song of Affluence_ or _I Wouldn't Leave My_ 8 _-Roomed House for You_

_Love Poem/Colour Supplement_

_On the Late Late Massachers Stillbirths and Deformed Children a Smoother Lovelier Skin Job_

_Great War Poems_

_Country Song_

_Holcombe Poem/Poem for a Girl I Didn't Meet_

_Me_

_Hello Adrian_

_Adrian Henri's Talking After Christmas Blues_

_The Blazing Hat, Part Two_

_Pictures From an Exhibition_

_Love Poem_

_Wild West Poems_

_Poem in Memoriam T. S. Eliot_

_Where'er You Walk_

_The New 'Our Times'_

_In the Midnight Hour_

_I Want To Paint_

_Don't Worry/Everything's Going to be All Right_

_Mrs Albion You've Got a Lovely Daughter_

Roger McGough

_Comeclose and Sleepnow_

_Aren't We All_

_A lot of Water has Flown under your Bridge_

_On Picnics_

_Café Portraits_

_The Fallen Birdman_

_The Icingbus_

_You and Your Strange Ways_

_At Lunchtime A Story of Love_

_Icarus Allsorts_

_Why Patriots are a Bit Nuts in the Head_

_Sad Aunt Madge_

_My Busconductor_

_What the Littlegirl Did_

_Goodbat Nightman_

_What You Are_

_There's Something Sad_

_Vinegar_

_M._ 66

_The Fish_

_Dreampoem_

_Mother the Wardrobe is Full of Infantrymen_

_A Square Dance_

_Let Me Die a Youngman's Death_

Brian Patten

_Party Piece_

_Little Johnny's Confession_

_Where Are You Now, Batman?_

_A Green Sportscar_

_After Breakfast_

_Sing Softly_

_Seascape_

_Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworths, A Song_

_I'm Dreaming of a White Smethwick_

_Sleep Now_

_Song for Last Year's Wife_

_Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself_

_Maud,_ 1965

_The River Arse_

_Room_

_A Creature to Tell the Time By_

_Schoolboy_

_Delicate John_

_On a Horse Called Autumn_

_A Talk with a Wood_

_Travelling Between Places_

_The Fruitful Lady of Dawn_

_In a New Kind of Dawn_

_On the Dawn Boat_

_Looking Back at It_

_The Beast_

_Acknowledgements_

_Follow Penguin_

#### PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

##### THE MERSEY SOUND

ADRIAN HENRI, 1932–2000, trained as a painter, taught at Liverpool Art College in the 1960s and exhibited widely throughout his career. His early paintings and poems drew on popular icons, consumer products and cityscapes, often with a Surrealistic twist. His live readings, and an ability to juxtapose everyday images with highbrow cultural references, shaped several generations' perception of what poetry could be. He also fronted the poetry and rock band Liverpool Scene, and went on to collaborate with pop and classical musicians. His _Selected and Unpublished Poems 1965–2000_ were published in 2007.

Born in Liverpool, ROGER MCGOUGH had a number one hit, 'Lily the Pink', with The Scaffold in 1968, and helped to write the script for the animated film _Yellow Submarine_. He has published more than a hundred books for both adults and children and won many awards. In 2001 he was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool and received a CBE from the Queen for services to Literature in 2004. His trio of Molière translations – _Tartuffe, The Hypochondriac_ and _The Misanthrope_ – have recently been notable successes in the theatre. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Roger is President of the Poetry Society and a familiar voice on Radio 4, where he presents _Poetry Please_.

BRIAN PATTEN was born in Liverpool in 1946. When he was fifteen he began publishing _underdog_ , a little magazine which featured the early work of both Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, along with other local and later international poets. The majority of his poems included in _The Mersey Sound_ were written when he was still a teenager. His collections of poetry for adults include _Little Johnny's Confession_ , _Notes to the Hurrying Man_ , _The Irrelevant Song_ , _Armada_ and _The Collected Love Poems_ , while his collections of verse for children include the bestselling _Gargling With Jelly_ and _Juggling With Gerbils_. His novel for children, _Mr Moon's Last Case_ , won a special award from The Mystery Writers of America Guild, and his interweaving of international folk and fairy tales, _The Story Giant_ , has been hailed as a modern classic. He is the editor of _The Puffin Book of Modern Children's Verse_ , and his _Selected Poems_ are published by Penguin. Patten's work has been widely translated. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2001 was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool.

## ADRIAN HENRI

* * *

## Tonight at Noon*

(for Charles Mingus and the Clayton Squares)

Tonight at noon

Supermarkets will advertise 3d EXTRA on everything

Tonight at noon

Children from happy families will be sent to live in a home

Elephants will tell each other human jokes

America will declare peace on Russia

World War I generals will sell poppies in the streets on

November 11th

The first daffodils of autumn will appear

When the leaves fall upwards to the trees

Tonight at noon

Pigeons will hunt cats through city backyards

Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches and on the landing

fields

A tunnel full of water will be built under Liverpool

Pigs will be sighted flying in formation over Woolton

and Nelson will not only get his eye back but his arm as well

White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights

in front of the Black House

and the Monster has just created Dr Frankenstein

Girls in bikinis are moonbathing

Folksongs are being sung by real folk

Artgalleries are closed to people over 21

Poets get their poems in the Top 20

Politicians are elected to insane asylums

There's jobs for everyone and nobody wants them

In back alleys everywhere teenage lovers are kissing

in broad daylight

In forgotten graveyards everywhere the dead will quietly

bury the living

and

You will tell me you love me

Tonight at noon

## Adrian Henri's Last Will and Testament

> 'No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a fryingpan owns death.'
>
> William Burroughs

_To whom it may concern:_

As my imminent death is hourly expected these days/

carbrakes screaming on East Lancs tarmac/trapped

in the blazing cinema/mutely screaming I TOLD YOU SO

from melting eyeballs as the whitehot fireball

dissolves the Cathedral/being the first human being to die

of a hangover/dying of over-emotion after seeing 20

schoolgirls waiting at a zebracrossing.

I appoint Messrs Bakunin and Kropotkin my executors and make the following provisions:

1. I leave my priceless collections of Victorian Oil Lamps,

photographs of Hayley Mills, brass fenders and Charlie

Mingus records to all Liverpool poets under 23 who are

also blues singers and failed sociology students.

2. I leave the entire East Lancs Road with all its landscapes

to the British people.

3. I hereby appoint Wm. Burroughs my literary executor,

instructing him to cut up my collected works and

distribute them through the public lavatories of the world.

4. Proceeds from the sale of relics: locks of hair, pieces

of floorboards I have stood on, fragments of bone flesh

teeth bits of old underwear etc. to be given to my widow.

5. I leave my paintings to the Nation with the stipulation

that they must be exhibited in Public Houses,

Chip Shops, Coffee Bars and the Cellar Clubs throughout

the country.

6. Proceeds from the sale of my other effects to be divided

equally amongst the 20 most beautiful schoolgirls in

England (these to be chosen after due deliberation and

exhaustive tests by an informal committee of my friends).

Adrian Henri

Jan. '64

_Witnessed this day by_

James Ensor

Charlie 'Bird' Parker

## Liverpool Poems

##### 1

GO TO WORK ON A BRAQUE!

##### 2

Youths disguised as stockbrokers

Sitting on the grass eating the Sacred Mushroom.

##### 3

Liverpool I love your horny-handed tons of soil.

##### 4

PRAYER FROM A PAINTER TO ALL CAPITALISTS:

Open your wallets and repeat after me

'HELP YOURSELF!'

##### 5

There's one way of being sure of keeping fresh

LIFEBUOY helps you rise again on the 3rd day

after smelling something that smelt like other people's socks.

##### 6

_Note for a definition of optimism:_

A man trying the door of Yates Wine Lodge

At quarter past four in the afternoon.

##### 7

I have seen Père UBU walking across Lime St

And Alfred Jarry cycling down Elliott Street.

##### 8

And I saw DEATH in Upper Duke St

Cloak flapping black tall Batman collar

Striding tall shoulders down the hill past the Cathedral

brown shoes slightly down at the heel.

##### 9

Unfrocked Chinese mandarins holding lonely feasts in

Falkner Sq gardens

to enjoy the snow.

##### 10

Prostitutes in the snow in Canning St like strange erotic

snowmen

And Marcel Proust in the Kardomah eating Madeleine butties

dipped in tea.

##### 11

Wyatt James Virgil and Morgan Earp with Doc Holliday

Shooting it out with the Liver Birds at the Pier Head.

##### 12

And a Polish gunman young beautiful dark glasses

combatjacket/staggers down Little St Bride St blood

dripping moaning clutches/collapses down a back jigger

coughing/falls in a wilderness of Dazwhite washing.

## Without You

Without you every morning would be like going back to

work after a holiday,

Without you I couldn't stand the smell of the East Lancs

Road,

Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned

by skeleton crews,

Without you I'd probably feel happy and have more money

and time and nothing to do with it,

Without you I'd have to leave my stillborn poems on other

people's doorsteps, wrapped in brown paper,

Without you there'd never be sauce to put on sausage

butties,

Without you plastic flowers in shop windows would just be

plastic flowers in shop windows

Without you I'd spend my summers picking morosely over

the remains of train crashes,

Without you white birds would wrench themselves free from

my paintings and fly off dripping blood into the night,

Without you green apples wouldn't taste greener,

Without you Mothers wouldn't let their children play out

after tea,

Without you every musician in the world would forget how

to play the blues,

Without you Public Houses would be public again,

Without you the Sunday Times colour supplement would

come out in black-and-white,

Without you indifferent colonels would shrug their shoulders

and press the button,

Without you they'd stop changing the flowers in Piccadilly

Gardens,

Without you Clark Kent would forget how to become

Superman,

Without you Sunshine Breakfast would only consist of

Cornflakes,

Without you there'd be no colour in Magic colouring books

Without you Mahler's 8th would only be performed by street

musicians in derelict houses,

Without you they'd forget to put the salt in every packet of

crisps,

Without you it would be an offence punishable by a fine of

up to £200 or two months imprisonment to be found in

possession of curry powder,

Without you riot police are massing in quiet sidestreets,

Without you all streets would be one-way the other way,

Without you there'd be no one not to kiss goodnight when

we quarrel,

Without you the first martian to land would turn round and

go away again,

Without you they'd forget to change the weather,

Without you blind men would sell unlucky heather,

Without you there would be

no landscapes/no stations/no houses,

no chipshops/no quiet villages/no seagulls

on beaches/no hopscotch on pavements/no

night/no morning/there'd be no city no country

Without you.

## Love Is...

Love is feeling cold in the back of vans

Love is a fanclub with only two fans

Love is walking holding paintstained hands

Love is

Love is fish and chips on winter nights

Love is blankets full of strange delights

Love is when you don't put out the light

Love is

Love is the presents in Christmas shops

Love is when you're feeling Top of the Pops

Love is what happens when the music stops

Love is

Love is white panties lying all forlorn

Love is a pink nightdress still slightly warm

Love is when you have to leave at dawn

Love is

Love is you and love is me

Love is a prison and love is free

Love's what's there when you're away from me

Love is...

## Morning Poem

(for Deirdre)

'I've just about reached

breaking point'

he snapped.

## Drinking Song

He became more and more drunk

As the afternoon wore off.

## Song for a Beautiful Girl Petrol-pump Attendant on the Motorway

I wanted your soft verges

But you gave me the hard shoulder.

## Poem for Roger McGough

A nun in a supermarket

standing in the queue

Wondering what its like

To buy groceries for two.

## Song of Affluence or I Wouldn't Leave My 8-Roomed House for You

I wouldn't leave my little 8-roomed house for you

I've got one missus and I don't want two

I love you baby but you must understand

That feeling you's fine and kissing you's grand

But I wouldn't leave my little wooden wife for you

Water tastes fine but money tastes sweeter

I'd rather have a fire than a paraffin heater

And

I wouldn't change my little 8-roomed life for you.

## Love Poem/Colour Supplement

It was our first great war

And after the first successful sortie

Into the nomansgland

between her thighs

We waited anxiously every month

for poppysellers to appear in her streets

## On the Late Late Massachers Stillbirths and Deformed Children a Smoother Lovelier Skin Job

The seven-day beauty plan:

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones

Will cause up to 1 million deaths from leukaemia

Forget not, in thy book record their groans

Now for the vitally important step. Cream your face and neck

a second time

No American president world-famous for beauty creams

responsible for the freedom and safety of so many young

offenders

TODAY'S MEN OF ACTION

The Triple Tyrant Macmillan Kennedy Watkinson

The West governments are satisfied as to the moral necessity

to resume Racing from Newmarket

EXTRA SPECIAL!

Atmospheric testing: A test card is shown

continuously from 10 a.m. until 15 minutes

before slayn by the bloody Piemontese

why pay higher fares?

There is always trouble when President Kennedy the jovial

gravel-voiced little sailor

defends glamorous Olive Oyl from contamination of the

atmosphere

EXTRA MONEY their moans

The Vales redoubled to the Hills

Another fire blazes in the city of London AND ALL THAT JAZZ

Do you draw your curtains with a walking-stick?

The mutation was caused by a heavy dose of radiation

received

by the Mother at Hiroshima

This baby's eyes and nose had merged into

one misshapen feature in the middle of its

forehead, lost 6" from Hips

sufferers can now wear fashion stockings

Early may fly the Babylonian wo

followed by

TOMORROW'S WEATHER

The Epilogue

close down.

Cut-up of John Milton Sonnet XVIII On the late

Massacher in Piemont/TV Times/CND leaflet.

## Great War Poems

  1. The same old soldiers walking along the same old skyline
  2. Dead hand through the sandbags reaching out for the cream-and-white butterfly
  3. mud/water under duckboards/mud/rats scamper in starshell darkness/mud/smell of shit and rotting bodies/mud/resting your sweaty forehead on the sandbags OVER THE TOP the first men in the lunar landscape.
  4. 'What did you do to the Great Whore, Daddy?'
  5. Poppies slightly out-of-focus and farmcarts bringing in the peaceful dead.
  6. The ghost of Wilfred Owen selling matches outside the Burlington Arcade.
  7. Seafog. Red flaring lights from the shorebatteries. The roar of shells rattle of machineguns. Water running in the bilges. My feet slipping on the damp cobbles of the quayside.
  8. DON'T BE VAGUE – BLAME GENERAL HAIG.
  9. four white feathers clutched in a blood-stained envelope
  10. a skull nestling in a bed of wild strawberries/boots mouldering green with fungus/saplings thrusting through rusting helmets/sunken barges drifting full of leaves down autumn rivers.

## Country Song

_'Lily of the Valley (Convalaria Majalis, fam. Lilliaceae). Grows wild in N. England. Commonly cultivated. Flowers in May. Berries red when ripe. Leaves particularly poisonous because three constituents depress the heart, like Foxglove.'_

What are the constituents that depress the heart?

_the scent of lilies in darkgreen silences under trees_

_milkweed and ragwort and sunshine in hedges_

_small flowers picked amongst trees when it's raining_

A year ago

You planted lilies in the valley of my mind

There were lilies at the bottom of my garden

And ferrys at the bottom of my street

Now

I sit here in sunlight with the smell of wild garlic

Trying to taperecord the sound of windflowers and

celandines

Wondering

What are the three constituents that depress the heart

Without you here in the country?

## Holcombe Poem/Poem For a Girl I Didn't Meet

walking on the moors thinking about how I didn't meet you

yesterday

heather underfoot and mist over Pendle

the moor changing like an animal/brown to green grey to

purple with the weather

sky blue at the edges

like a letter that came too late.

_... Undine rising from the waters her golden hair_

_dripping in the moonlight... dead bird on a fence blood_

_dripping from its neck... Isis searching the rushes_

_for her murdered lover... small girl with a fishingrod_

_in a rushing valley full of ferns... the last supper_

_followed by the Four Just Desserts... watching the_

_white mocking figure at the edge of the Dark Forest_

_... beating naked blondhaired girls with_

_longstemmed purple flowers... Osiris judging_

_the dead mist rising up the valley seaweed tangled_

_in her moonlight hair..._

trains

moving through valleys

chimneys

springing from hillsides

streams

tumbling through boulders

clouds

tilting from the horizon

and

me

on the moors

thinking about the girl I never met.

## Me

_if you weren't you, who would you like to be?_

Paul McCartney Gustav Mahler

Alfred Jarry John Coltrane

Charlie Mingus Claude Debussy

Wordsworth Monet Bach and Blake

Charlie Parker Pierre Bonnard

Leonardo Bessie Smith

Fidel Castro Jackson Pollock

Gaudi Milton Munch and Berg

Béla Bartók Henri Rousseau

Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns

Lukas Cranach Shostakovich

Kropotkin Ringo George and John

William Burroughs Francis Bacon

Dylan Thomas Luther King

H. P. Lovecraft T.S. Eliot

D.H. Lawrence Roland Kirk

Salvatore Giuliano

Andy Warhol Paul Cézanne

Kafka Camus Ensor Rothko

Jacques Prévert and Manfred Mann

Marx Dostoievsky

Bakunin Ray Bradbury

Miles Davis Trotsky

Stravinsky and Poe

Danilo Dolci Napoleon Solo

St John of the Cross and

The Marquis de Sade

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Rimbaud Claes Oldenburg

Adrian Mitchell and Marcel Duchamp

James Joyce and Hemingway

Hitchcock and Buñuel

Donald McKinlay Thelonius Monk

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Matthias Grünewald

Philip Jones Griffiths and Roger McGough

Guillaume Apollinaire

Cannonball Adderley

René Magritte

Hieronymus Bosch

Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred de Vigny

Ernst Mayakovsky and Nicolas de Staël

Hindemith Mick Jagger Dürer and Schwitters

Garcia Lorca

and

last of all

me.

## Hello Adrian

(for Adrian Mitchell)

Hello Adrian,

This is me, Adrian. I hope you had a nice Christmas as it finds us here. We had that nice Mr and Mrs Johnson to tea who's president of something but they didn't like those yellow people from across the road. Christmas had us a bit worried but Santaclaus in his big Red Cloak came down her chimney and now all those cards with cribs on won't be in bad taste after all. Very strange things have been happening lately. People keep falling off cliffs and into bed with me. Last night I met Paul McCartney in a suburban garden wearing a moustache drawn by Marcel Duchamp. I keep wanting to sign shelves of tins in Supermarkets. Everytime I go for coal the coalplace is full of dead Vietcong. Birds have eaten the berries off our plastic holly. I think it's going to be a hard winter.

Today is New Year's Day, should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot? I don't know but my stomach feels funny. I have sent messages to the leaders of the various parts of my body asking them to end the fighting NOW. There's no shillings left in the meter we'll have to roast a leg of pork over the gasfire. Someone's left the front door open O My God we might have had thieves murderers nutters queers anyone coming up here. Now someones taken the cat and left a shovel instead.

People keep offering me nebulous schemes for making my fortune in various of The Arts. A girl told me 'I had a dreadful time on Christmas Day, Uncle Gerald kept putting his hand up my skirt'. There were huge punch-ups in Woolworths on Christmas Eve. I have seen the entire Works of Charles Dickens on the telly this Christmas... Oliver Twist going to see Miss Havisham with Tiny Tim... Scrooge skating with Mr Pickwick... Pip stealing handkerchiefs to give to Little Nell... I can't stand it any longer if those Chuzzlewits call again we're _definitely_ not at home. I'm making New Year Resolutions again but I'm not likely to meet her _this_ year either. I'm going to have my poems on Cash's Woven Nametapes put inside schoolgirls' gymslips. I'm going to treat white Rhodesians as equals. I've forgotten all the others already.

I think Spring must be coming. She brought me a bunch of plastic violets yesterday. I can hear the noise of the ice-floes breaking up on the bathroom floor. There's still no one waiting by the waterfall: I looked again today.

I really must close now as the Last Post is sounding, so hoping this finds you as it leaves me love to all at No. 18 from all at No. 64.

Adrian

## Adrian Henri's Talking After Christmas Blues

Well I woke up this mornin' it was Christmas Day

And the birds were singing the night away

I saw my stocking lying on the chair

Looked right to the bottom but you weren't there

there was

apples

oranges

chocolates

... aftershave

– but no you.

So I went downstairs and the dinner was fine

There was pudding and turkey and lots of wine

And I pulled those crackers with a laughing face

Till I saw there was no one in your place

there was

mincepies

brandy

nuts and raisins

... mashed potato

– but no you.

Now it's New Year and it's Auld Lang Syne

And it's 12 o'clock and I'm feeling fine

Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot?

I don't know girl, but it hurts a lot

there was

whisky

vodka

dry Martini (stirred but not shaken)

... and 12 New Year resolutions

– all of them about you.

So it's all the best for the year ahead

As I stagger upstairs and into bed

Then I looked at the pillow by my side

...I tell you baby I almost cried

there'll be

Autumn

Summer

Spring

... and Winter

– all of them without you.

## The Blazing Hat, Part Two

This is the morning that we burnt a cardboard hat

flames licking the inside of the brim

This is the morning that the thunder hung like great black

flags over the city

stirred by gusts of wind

This is the morning that they opened a new motorway

leading from my house to yours

This is the morning that I decided I wasn't getting enough

roughage

and went on a diet of broken milkbottles

This is the morning that Death left her cloak behind

after the party

This is the morning that a beautiful schoolgirl woke me

with a cup of coffee

in a vision

This is the morning that we saw

words written on water

This is the morning that beautiful girls with Renaissance

faces played Hindemith records

at dawn

This is the morning after the night

before

This is the morning after the night

had strewn Canning Street with purple toiletrolls

This is the morning that we saw a 4-year-old boy

whipping an imaginary blonde lovely

This is the morning that Death was a letter

that was never scented

This is the morning that the poet reached out for the

rolled-up Financial Times

followed by a dreadful explosion

This is the morning that you woke up 50 miles away seeing

sunlight on the water

and didn't think of me

This is the morning that I bought 16 different kinds of

artificial lilies-of-the-valley

all of them smelling of you

This is the morning that we sat and talked

by the embers of the blazing hat.

## Pictures From an Exhibition

(Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54–64 Tate Gallery
London April–June 1964)

No. 54 Jean Dubuffet 'Déclinaison de la Barbe' 1. 1959

_'as-tu cueilli les fleurs de la barbe?'_

Jean Dubuffet I wander the dark pebbles of your mind picking beardflowers.

No. 73 Joseph Cornell 'Hôtel de l 'Étoile'

cool pillars of the hotel/in the

night outside the stars are always

so white/the sky is always so

blue/silver moon waiting patiently.

No. 84 Mark Rothko 'Reds - No. 22' 1957

SCARLET

ORANGE

ORANGE

ORANGE

SCARLET

CRIMSON

SCARLET

No. 291 Robert Rauschenberg 'Windward' 1963

_printed oranges are painted_

_painted oranges are painted_

Angry skyline over the gasworks

A Hawk sits brooding inside a painted rainbow.

Nos. 10–13 Josef Albers, Studies for 'Homage to the Square' 1961–2

look.

see.

long ago.

now.

No. 314 Bernard Requichot 'Sans Titre – Chasse de papiers choisis'

_chasse aux papillons:_

'Here Be Tygers' –

– the fruit in the tin has a thousand eyes.

No. 349 Jim Dine 'Black Bathroom No. 2' 1962

black splashes on the white walls

interrupting the commercials

TURN ON THE GLEAMING WHITE SINK

AND POEMS COME OUT OF THE TAPS!

No. 139 Victor Vasarely 'Supernovae' 1959–61

No. 50 Louise Nevelson 'Sky Cathedral III' 1960

Black

Black

Black

Boxes

Black

Light

Black

Moonlight

Black

Emptiness

Black

Dust

Black

Boxes

Black

Black

Black

No. 247 Richard Diebenkorn 'Ingleside' 1963

Look through the Supermarket window/up the highway

the hill rises steeply/hoardings and magnolias bright

in the sunlight/white walls black freeways trafficsigns

at intersections/green lawns dark hedges/colours

clear and bright as the packets in your wire basket.

## Love Poem

(Sections from a work still in progress)

_East Lanes
Road Poems_ | Snow scattering on the windscreen/blowing from the drystone moors/I think of you.
---|---
| My central nervous system has gone: my ganglia aren't even on the AA map. My heart is single-line traffic, one way only.
_London Poems_ | On the tube after seeing Rauschenberg the tube a huge construction where he had
cunningly
| got people reflected in the windows and
posters moving past
| You and Père Ubu holding hands in Piccadilly
Walking off into the COCA COLA sunset
_'Heather Holden,_ 16, _Haslingden Grammar School "Haslingden Moors with Snow" '_ | Beautiful/Hair falling over eyes/hands cold
holding sketchbook/
crowded noisy schoolroom/postercolours/tiny
blue uniform
frozen at the corner of a field/waiting to meet
her first lover after school
_Hate Poem_ | 'To know know know you
Is to love love love you'
And I don't.
_Love Poem_ | ANY RECORD IN THE TOP 20 ANYTIME
IS OUR TUNE
_Assemblage of Objects and Mementoes_ | An empty Colgate tube
An almond with ALMOND written on it
breakfastpink gingham shirt & red waistcoat like
tomatoes
| a bar of rock lettered all through with your
name and a plastic flower
| a pair of your old navyblue schooldrawers
| an empty Drambuie bottle & an empty packet
of export cigarettes
| a signed copy of this poem
| a chocolate Easter Egg
_'Bluetit Patrol 2nd 15th Rossendale Girl Guides' Summer Camp Arnside_ 1960' | A photograph:
Little smiling girl in bra and knickers sitting
in a summer field
A red bra with I LOVE YOU written inside
one of the cups
A painting of a shocking pink heart with
your name scratched on it
| Some rusting scissors and a decaying fan from
a dead King's treasurehouse.
_Manchester Poem_ | Our love is watched over by all my masters;
Picabia watches from his cacodynamic eye
| Max Ernst looks on as impersonally as when he
watched
| the Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus
| Guillaume Apollinaire in Piccadilly Bus Station
| watches the unlikely couple walking the cold
streets
| Monk takes his hands off the keyboard and smiles
approvingly
| The Beatles sing lullabys for our never-to-happen
children
| Quietly in the shadows by Central Station
| William Burroughs sits dunking Pound Cake in
coffee waiting for the last connection
| and sees us through the window
| Bartók has orchestrated the noise of the tulips in
Piccadilly Gardens for us
| Marcel Duchamp has added your photograph to
the Green Box
| Dylan Thomas staggers into the Cromwell for one
last one
| and waves across to us
| Kurt Schwitters smiles as he picks up the two pink
bus tickets
| we have just thrown away
| Parker blows another chorus of Loverman for us
| Ensor smiles behind his mask
| Jarry cycles slowly behind us down Spring Gardens
| Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
| Bless the bed we lie upon
_Lakeland Poem_ | Daffodils grow in the shadows of your hair
| Waterfalls in the hollows of your throat
| Your body a bright lake seen between houses
catching the morning sun
| Pale lilies-of-the-valley in the darkness of your
thighs
|
_Boots_ | I've had 3 new prs. of boots since I met you
| And I keep thinking perhaps I should get a new
relationship as well
| But I don't need to:
| Perhaps it's the kind that doesn't wear out.
|
_Lawn_ | I think of you
| Even when walking with beautiful girls
| On the lawn of rich men's houses at night
| Where the sky is mowed every morning
| And the stars are switched on when the guests arrive
|
_Liverpool Poem_ | Wind blowing inland from the Pierhead
| I was glad to be seen with you in Liverpool
| Dead ferryboats in the shadows between your hair
and cheek.

## Wild West Poems

1. Noon:

2 tall gunmen walking slowly towards each other down Mathew St.

(for Leiber/Stoller
and the Coasters)

2. ' _And then he grabbed her_

_And then_

_He tied her up_

_And then_

_He lit the fuse to the dynamite_

_And then_

_And then_

AND THEN

ALONG CAME JONES...'

3. William H. Bonney alias Billy the Kid hitches his horse to a parkingmeter strides through the swing doors into Yates Wine Lodge. Barmaids slowly back away from the counter. Drunks rush out into Charlotte Street. He drinks a glass of Aussie White and strides out, silent as he came.

4. POEM FOR BLACK BART TO LEAVE BEHIND ON A STAGECOACH

I hope you ladies ain't afraid

Of the wicked man who made this raid

But I'm like nature quick and cruel

Believe me, gals, I need them jewels.

5. The Daltons riding down Church Street/Bullets

ricochet off streetsigns/windows full of cardboard

Walkers bottles shatter/Bob Grat Emmett

thunder across trafficlights at red/hoofbeats

die away clattering down Lord Street.

## Poem in Memoriam T. S. Eliot

I'd been out the night before & hadn't seen the papers or

the telly

&the next day in a café someone told me you were dead

And it was as if a favourite distant uncle had died

old hands in the bigstrange room/new shiny presents at

Christmas

and I didn't know what to feel.

For years I measured out my life with your coffeespoons

Your poems on the table in dusty bedsitters

Playing an L.P. of you reading on wet interrupted January

afternoons

_Meanwhile, back at the Wasteland:_

Maureen O'Hara in a lowcut dress staggers across Rhyl

sandhills

Lovers in Liverpool pubs eating passionfruit

Reading Alfred de Vigny in the lavatory

Opening an old grand piano and finding it smelling of curry

THE STAR OF INDIA FOUND IN A BUS STATION

Making love in a darkened room hearing an old woman

having a fit on the landing

The first snowflakes of winter falling on her Christmas poem

for me in Piccadilly Gardens

The first signs of spring in plastic daffodils

on city counters.

Lovers kissing

Rain falling

Dogs running

Night falling

And you 'familiar compound spirit' moving silently down

Canning St in a night of rain and fog.

## Where'er You Walk

'Where'er you walk

Cool gales shall fan that glade'

The Pierhead where you walked will be made a park

restricted to lovers under 21

Peasants will be found merrymaking after the storm in

Canning St

where you walked

The station where we first arrived at night

Will be preserved for the nation

With the echo of your footsteps still sounding in the empty

roof

'Where'er you tread

The Blushing flower shall rise'

The alleyway where we read poems to dustbins

after closing time

The kitchens where we quarrelled at parties

The kitchen where two strangers first kissed at a party

full of strangers

The ticketbarrier where we said goodnight so many times

The cobblestones in front of the station

The pub where the kindly old waiter

Always knows what we want to drink –

ALL SHALL BURST INTO BLOOM

SPROUTING FLOWERS BRIGHTER THAN PLASTIC ONES IN

WOOLWORTHS

Daffodils and chrysanthemums, rhododendrons and

snowdrops, tulips and roses

– cobblestones bursting with lilies-of-the-valley

'And all things flourish'

Whole streets where you walk are paved with soft grass

so the rain will never go through your shoes again

Zebracrossings made of lilies

Belishabeacons made of orangeblossom

Busstops huge irises

Trafficlights made of snapdragons

'Trees where you sit

Shall crowd into a shade'

even in Piccadilly

stations covered in flowers yellow like the paint you once got

in your hair

Oaktrees growing everywhere we've kissed

Will still be there when I've forgotten what you look like

And you don't remember me at all

Copies of your letters to me on blue paper

Written on the sky by an aeroplane over all the cities of

england

Copies of your poems stamped on eggs instead of lions

We will walk forever in the darkness under fernleaves

'Trees where you sit

shall crowd into a shade'

## The New 'Our Times'

(for Félix Fénéon)*

##### 1

At 3 p.m. yesterday, a Mr Adolphus Edwards, a Jamaican immigrant, was pecked to death by a large Bronze Eagle in Upper Parliament St. A U.S. State Dept. spokesman said later, 'We have no comment to make as of this time.'

##### 2

Police-Constable George Williams, who was partially blinded by a 15 lb jellybaby thrown at a passing pop singer, is to be retired on half-pension.

##### 3

Bearded Liverpool couple put out of misery in night by drip oil heater, court told.

##### 4

A certain Mrs Elspeth Clout, of Huyton, was killed by an unidentified falling object. It was thought to be a particularly hard stool evacuated from the toilet of a passing aeroplane.

##### 5

2 chip-shop proprietors were today accused of selling human ears fried in batter. One of them said 'We believe there is room for innovation in the trade.'

##### 6

Fatality in Kardomah bomb outrage: Waitress buried Alive under two thousand Danish pastries.

##### 7

At the inquest on Paul McCartney, aged 21, described as a popular singer and guitarist, P.C. Smith said, in evidence, that he saw one of the accused, Miss Jones, standing waving blood-stained hands shouting 'I got a bit of his liver.'

## In the Midnight Hour

When we meet

in the midnight hour

country girl

I will bring you nightflowers

coloured like your eyes

in the moonlight

in the midnight

hour

I remember

Your cold hand

held for a moment among strangers

held for a moment among dripping trees

in the midnight hour

I remember

Your eyes coloured like the autumn landscape

walking down muddy lanes

watching sheep eating yellow roses

walking in city squares in winter rain

kissing in darkened hallways

walking in empty suburban streets

saying goodnight in deserted alleyways

in the midnight hour

Andy Williams singing 'We'll keep a Welcome in the

Hillsides' for us

When I meet you at the station

The Beatles singing 'We Can Work it Out' with James Ensor

at the harmonium

Rita Hayworth in a nightclub singing 'Amade Mia'

I will send you armadas

of love vast argosies of flowers

in the midnight hour

country girl

when we meet

in the

moonlight

midnight

hour

country girl

I will bring you

yellow

white

eyes

bright

moon

light

mid

night

flowers

in the midnight hour.

## I Want To Paint

#### _Part One_

I want to paint

2000 dead birds crucified on a background of night

Thoughts that lie too deep for tears

Thoughts that lie too deep for queers

Thoughts that move at 186000 miles/second

The Entry of Christ into Liverpool in 1966

The Installation of Roger McGough to the Chair of Poetry at

Oxford

Francis Bacon making the President's Speech at the Royal

Academy Dinner

I want to paint

50 life-sized nudes of Marianne Faithfull

(all of them painted from life)

Welsh Maids by Welsh Waterfalls

Heather Holden as Our Lady of Haslingden

A painting as big as Piccadilly full of neon signs buses

Christmas decorations and beautiful girls with dark blonde

hair shading their faces

I want to paint

The assassination of the entire Royal Family

Enormous pictures of every pavingstone in Canning Street

The Beatles composing a new National Anthem

Brian Patten writing poems with a flamethrower on disused

ferryboats

A new cathedral 50 miles high made entirely of pram-wheels

An empty Woodbine packet covered in kisses

I want to paint

A picture made from the tears of dirty-faced children in

Chatham Street

I want to paint

I LOVE YOU across the steps of St George's Hall

I want to paint

pictures.

#### _Part Two_

I want to paint

The Simultaneous and Historical Faces of Death

10000 shocking pink hearts with your name on

The phantom negro postmen who bring me money in my

dreams

The first plastic daffodil of Spring pushing its way

through the omo packets in the Supermarket

The portrait of every 6th Form schoolgirl in the country

A full-scale map of the World with you at the centre

An enormous lily-of-the-valley with every flower on a

separate canvas

Lifesize jellybabies shaped like Hayley Mills

A black-and-red flag flying over Parliament

I want to paint

Every car crash on all the motorways of England

Père Ubu drunk at 11 o'clock at night in Lime Street

A SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT OF ALL THE SENSES

In black running letters 50 miles high over Liverpool

I want to paint

Pictures that children can play hopscotch on

Pictures that can be used as evidence at Murder trials

Pictures that can be used to advertise cornflakes

Pictures that can be used to frighten naughty children

Pictures worth their weight in money

Pictures that tramps can live in

Pictures that children would find in their stockings on

Christmas morning

Pictures that teenage lovers can send each other

I want to paint

pictures.

## Don't Worry/Everything's Going to be All Right

Don't worry

If your boyfriend doesn't treat you right

baby

Everything's going to be all right

come with me

And every poem I write will have your name in it

Don't worry

If the factories and villas cover the countryside

Everything's going to be all right

England will be given back to the animals

and we'll find a home under fernleaves known only to foxes

Don't worry

If I can't afford to buy you coffee after school

Everything's going to be all right

Soon the poem will replace the pound sterling as

international currency

and Britain will get on the poem standard again

Don't worry

About those lunatics in the government

Everything's going to be all right

The country will be governed by beautiful girls under 18

(and you will let me carry your portfolio home from the

House)

Don't worry

About what happened the other night

Everything's going to be all right

They'll give you contraceptive pills shaped like jellybabies

with your milk at playtime

Don't worry

about what your Dad says about the younger generation

Everything's going to be all right

There'll be involuntary euthanasia for everyone over 30

not a poet painter or musician

Don't worry

About the rain

Everything's going to be all right

The streets will be covered with tiny pink flowers

like the ones on your suspenderbelt

Bathingsuits will be banned from beaches

School uniforms will be the only kind allowed in public

Your end-of-term report will be marked out of 100 for sex

appeal

(and you will be Top of the Form)

Policemen will be beaten up by poets

Trade Unions will be taken over by workers

There'll be 24-hour licensing

And everything will be on the National Drink Service

your parents will wake us every morning with breakfast

Your teacher will smile at notes saying we stayed in bed late

Your face will be in every art gallery

Your name in every book of poetry

So

Don't worry

Everything's going to be all right.

## Mrs Albion You've Got a Lovely Daughter

(for Allen Ginsberg)

Albion's most lovely daughter sat on the banks of the

Mersey dangling her landing stage in the water.

The daughters of Albion

arriving by underground at Central Station

eating hot ecclescakes at the Pierhead

writing 'Billy Blake is fab' on a wall in Mathew St

taking off their navyblue schooldrawers and

putting on nylon panties ready for the night

The daughters of Albion

see the moonlight beating down on them in Bebington

throw away their chewinggum ready for the goodnight

kiss

sleep in the dinnertime sunlight with old men

looking up their skirts in St Johns Gardens

comb their darkblonde hair in suburban bedrooms

powder their delicate little nipples/wondering if tonight will

be the night

their bodies pressed into dresses or sweaters

lavender at The Cavern or pink at The Sink

The daughters of Albion

wondering how to explain why they didn't go home

The daughters of Albion

taking the dawn ferry to tomorrow

worrying about what happened

worrying about what hasn't happened

lacing up blue sneakers over brown ankles

fastening up brown stockings to blue suspenderbelts

_Beautiful boys with bright red guitars_

_in the spaces between the stars_

Reelin' an' a-rockin'

Wishin' an' a-hopin'

Kissin' an' a-prayin'

Lovin' an' a-layin'

Mrs Albion you've got a lovely daughter.

## ROGER MCGOUGH

* * *

## Comeclose and Sleepnow

it is afterwards

and you talk on tiptoe

happy to be part

of the darkness

lips becoming limp

a prelude to tiredness.

Comeclose and Sleepnow

for in the morning

when a policeman

disguised as the sun

creeps into the room

and your mother

disguised as birds

calls from the trees

you will put on a dress of guilt

and shoes with broken high ideals

and refusing coffee

run

alltheway

home.

## Aren't We All

Looks quite pretty lying there

Can't be asleep yet

Wonder what she's thinking about?

Penny for her thoughts Probably not worth it.

There's the moon trying to look romantic

Moon's too old that's her trouble

Aren't we all?

Lace curtains gently swaying

Like a woman walking

A woman in a negligee

Walking out through the window

Over the sleeping city up into the sky

To give the moon a rest

Moon's too tired that's her trouble

Aren't we all?

Wasn't a bad party really

Except for the people

People always spoil things

Room's in a mess

And this one's left her clothes allover the place

Scattered like seeds

In too much of a hurry that's her trouble

Aren't we all?

Think she's asleep now

It makes you sleep

Better than Horlicks

Not so pretty really when you get close-up

Wonder what her name is?

Now she's taken all the blankets

Too selfish that's her trouble

Aren't we all?

## A lot of Water has Flown under your Bridge

i remember your hands

white and strangely cold

asif exposed too often to the moon

i remember your eyes

brown and strangely old

asif exposed too often and too soon

i remember your body

young and strangely bold

asif exposed too often

i remember

i remember how

when you laughed

hotdogmen allover town

burst into song

i remember

i remember how

when you cried

the clouds cried too and the

streets became awash with tears

i remember

i remember how

when we lay together for the first time

the room smiled,

said: 'excuse me',

and tiptoed away.

but time has passed since then

and alotof people

have crossed over the bridge

(a faceless throng)

but time has passed since then

and alotof youngmen

have swum in the water

(naked and strong)

but time has passed since then

and alotof water

has flown

under

your

bridge.

## On Picnics

at the goingdown of the sun

and in the morning

i try to remember them

but their names are ordinary names

and their causes are thighbones

tugged excitedly from the soil

by frenchchildren

on picnics

## Café Portraits

A lonelylady with perfumed hair

is eating primly and with care

lest she should drop a bean

onto her clean suitable skirt

and ruin the illusion

of sophistication.

A pair of pensioners nibble

at their cups of tea

their mouths saying oldfashioned things

(for their minds are many miles ago)

one twirling the sugarbowl

with boney fingers

the other drawing daydreams

in the spilt milk.

A blueeyed girl

is sitting waiting

beautifully with

legs crossed easily

for her lightfingered leatherthighed lover

who will say things as sweet as icing

and carry her off between the cruets

to his castle on the hill.

And dreaming of the pleasures there

with littlefinger in the air

she ravishes her third eclair.

A thinman

with a pubic smile

eating herringroes

with neat copperplate movements

dreams of choristers – on toast.

Two portly menopausing women

with varicosemarbled legs and

Danish pastries

speak justso ideas agreeably

and longfor presanitary days

when they sucked pigs' eggs

and played ollies in the

knockeruppered barefooted tripe and fishcaked streets.

## The Fallen Birdman

The oldman in the cripplechair

Died in transit through the air

And slopped into the road.

The driver of the lethallorry

Trembled out and cried: 'I'm sorry,

But it was his own fault'.

Humans snuggled round the mess

In masochistic tenderness

As raindrops danced in his womb.

* * *

But something else obsessed my brain,

The canvas, twistedsteel and cane,

His chair, spreadeagled in the rain,

Like a fallen birdman.

## The Icingbus

the littleman

with the hunchbackedback

crept to his feet

to offer his seat

to the blindlady

people gettingoff

steered carefully around

the black mound

of his back

as they would a pregnantbelly

the littleman

completely unaware

of the embarrassment behind

watched as the blindlady

fingered out her fare

* * *

muchlove later he suggested that instead

ofa wedding-cake they should have a miniaturebus

made out of icing but she laughed

and said that buses were for travelling in

and not for eating and besides

you cant taste shapes.

## You and Your Strange Ways

increasingly oftennow

you reach into your handbag

(the one I bought some xmasses ago)

and bringing forth

a pair of dead cats

skinned and glistening

like the undersides of tongues

or old elastoplasts

sticky with earwigs

you hurl them at my eyes

and laugh cruellongly

why?

even though we have grown older together

and my kisses are little more than functional

i still love you

you and your strange ways

## At Lunchtime A Story of Love

When the bus stopped suddenly to avoid

damaging a mother and child in the road, the

younglady in the green hat sitting opposite

was thrown across me, and not being one to

miss an opportunity i started to makelove

with all my body.

At first she resisted saying that it

was tooearly in the morning and toosoon

after breakfast and that anyway she found

me repulsive. But when i explained that

this being a nuclearage, the world was going

to end at lunchtime, she tookoff her

greenhat, put her busticket in her pocket

and joined in the exercise.

The buspeople, and therewere many of

them, were shockedandsurprised and amused-

andannoyed, but when word got around

that the world was coming to an end at lunch

time, they put their pride in their pockets

with their bustickets and madelove one with

the other. And even the busconductor, being

over, climbed into the cab and struck up

some sort of relationship with the driver.

That night, on the bus coming home,

wewere all alittle embarrassed, especially me

and the younglady in the greenhat, and we

all started to say in different ways howhasty

and foolish we had been. Butthen, always

having been a bitofalad, i stood up and

said it was a pity that the world didn't nearly

end every lunchtime and that we could always

pretend. And then it happened...

Quick asa crash we all changed partners

and soon the bus was aquiver

with white mothballbodies

doing naughty things.

And the next day

And everyday

In everybus

In everystreet

In everytown

In everycountry

people pretended that the world was coming

to an end at lunchtime. It still hasn't.

Although in a way it has.

## Icarus Allsorts

> _'A meteorite is reported to have landed in New England. No damage is said...'_

A littlebit of heaven fell

From out the sky one day

It landed in the ocean

Not so very far away

The General at the radar screen

Rubbed his hands with glee

And grinning pressed the button

That started World War Three.

From every corner of the earth

Bombs began to fly

There were even missile jams

No traffic lights in the sky

In the times it takes to blow your nose

The people fell, the mushrooms rose

'House!' cried the fatlady

As the bingohall moved to various parts

of the town

'Raus!' cried the German butcher

as his shop came tumbling down

Philip was in the countinghouse

Counting out his money

The Queen was in the parlour

Eating bread and honey

When through the window

Flew a bomb

And made them go all funny

By the way if you're wondering

What happened to the maid

Well in this particular raid

She lost more than her nose

In fact she came to a close

Or so the story goes.

In the time it takes to draw a breath

Or eat a toadstool, instant death.

The rich

Huddled outside the doors of their fallout shelters

Like drunken carolsingers

The poor

Clutching shattered televisions

And last week's editions of T.V. Times

(but the very last)

Civil defence volunteers

With their tin hats in one hand

And their heads in the other

C.N.D. supporters

Their ban the bomb badges beginning to rust

Have scrawled 'I told you so' in the dust.

A littlebit of heaven fell

From out the sky one day

It landed in Vermont North-Eastern U.S.A.

The general at the radar screen

He should have got the sack

But that wouldn't bring

Three thousand million, seven hundred,

and sixty-eight people back,

Would it?

## Why Patriots are a Bit Nuts in the Head

Patriots are a bit nuts in the head

because they wear

red, white and blue-

tinted spectacles

(red for blood

white for glory

and blue...

for a boy)

and are in effervescent danger

of losing their lives

_lives are good for you_

when you are alive

you can eat and drink a lot

and go out with girls

(sometimes if you are lucky you can even go to bed with

them)

but you can't do this

if you have your belly shot away

and your seeds

spread over some corner of a foreign field

to facilitate

in later years

the growing of oats by some peasant yobbo

when you are posthumous it is cold and dark

and that is why patriots are a bit nuts in the head

## Sad Aunt Madge

As the cold winter evenings drew near

Aunt Madge used to put extra blankets

over the furniture, to keep it warm and cosy.

Mussolini was her lover, and life

was an outoffocus rosy-tinted spectacle.

but neurological experts

with kind blueeyes

and gentle voices

small white hands

and large Rolls Royces

said that electric shock treatment

should do the trick

it did...

today after 15 years of therapeutic tears

and an awful lot of ratepayers' shillings

down the hospital meter

sad Aunt Madge

no longer tucks up the furniture

before kissing it goodnight

and admits

that her affair with Mussolini

clearly was not right

particularly in the light

of her recently announced engagement

to the late pope.

## My Busconductor

My busconductor tells me

he only has one kidney

and that may soon go on strike

through overwork.

Each busticket

takes on now a different shape

and texture.

He holds a ninepenny single

as if it were a

rose and puts the shilling in his bag

as a child into a gasmeter.

His thin lips

have no quips

for fat factorygirls

and he ignores

the drunk who snores

and the oldman who talks to himself

and gets off at the wrong stop.

He goes gently to the bedroom

of the bus

to collect

and watch familiar shops and pubs passby

(perhaps for the last time?)

The sameold streets look different now

more distinct

as through new glasses.

And the sky

was it ever so blue?

And all the time

deepdown in the deserted busshelter of his mind

he thinks about his journey nearly done.

One day he'll clock on and never clock off

or clock off and never clock on.

## What the Littlegirl Did

The littlegirl

pulled up her bellyskin

like a vest

and examined her chest

spleen, kidneys and the rest

as a measled child a rash.

Sugar and spice

and everything nice

that's what littlegirls are made of

So she put in a hand

and pulled out a gland

and said: 'What a strange girl am I'

## Goodbat Nightman

God bless all policemen

and fighters of crime,

May thieves go to jail

for a very long time.

They've had a hard day

helping clean up the town,

Now they hang from the mantelpiece

both upside down.

A glass of warm blood

and then straight up the stairs,

Batman and Robin

are saying their prayers.

* * *

They've locked all the doors

and they've put out the bat,

Put on their batjamas

(They like doing that)

They've filled their batwater-bottles

made their batbeds,

With two springy battresses

for sleepy batheads.

They're closing red eyes

and they're counting black sheep,

Batman and Robin

are falling asleep.

## What You Are

you are the cat's paw

among the silence of midnight goldfish

you are the waves

which cover my feet like cold eiderdowns

you are the teddybear (as good as new)

found beside a road accident

you are the lost day

in the life of a child murderer

you are the underwatertree

around which fish swirl like leaves

you are the green

whose depths I cannot fathom

you are the clean sword

that slaughtered the first innocent

you are the blind mirror

before the curtains are drawn back

you are the drop of dew on a petal

before the clouds weep blood

you are the sweetfresh grass that goes sour

and rots beneath children's feet

you are the rubber glove

dreading the surgeon's brutal hand

you are the wind caught on barbedwire

and crying out against war

you are the moth

entangled in a crown of thorns

you are the apple for teacher

left in a damp cloakroom

you are the smallpox injection

glowing on the torchsinger's arm like a swastika

you are the litmus leaves

quivering on the suntan trees

you are the ivy

which muffles my walls

you are the first footprints in the sand

on bankholiday morning

you are the suitcase full of limbs

waiting in a leftluggage office

to be collected like an orphan

you are the musical queen

atattention

in a smokefilled deserted cinema

you are a derelict canal

where the tincans whistle no tunes

you are the virgin's bottom drawer

full of pillowslips and crisp loins

you are the bleakness of winter before the cuckoo

catching its feathers on a thornbush

heralded spring

you are the stillness of Van Gogh

before he painted the yellow vortex of his last sun

you are the still grandeur of the Lusitania

before she tripped over the torpedo

and laid a world war of american dead

at the foot of the blarneystone

you are the distance

between Hiroshima and Calvary

measured in mother's kisses

you are the distance

between the accident and the telephone box

measured in heartbeats

you are the distance

between power and politicians

measured in half-masts

you are the distance

between advertising and neuroses

measured in phallic symbols

you are the distance

between you and me

measured in tears

you are the moment

before the noose clenched its fist

and the innocent man cried: treason

you are the moment

before the warbooks in the public library

turned into frogs and croaked khaki obscenities

you are the moment

before the buildings turned into flesh

and windows closed their eyes

you are the moment

before the railwaystations burst into tears

and the bookstalls picked their noses

you are the moment

before the buspeople turned into teeth

and chewed the inspector

for no other reason than he was doing his duty

you are the moment

before the flowers turned into plastic and melted

in the heat of the burning cities

you are the moment

before the blindman puts on his dark glasses

you are the moment

before the subconscious begged to be left in peace

you are the moment

before the world was made flesh

you are the moment

before the clouds became locomotives

and hurtled headlong into the sun

you are the moment

before the television personality took off his trousers

and said: see I am just a man

you are the moment

before the spotlight moving across the darkened stage

like a crab finds the singer

you are the moment

before the seed nestles in the womb

you are the moment

before the clocks had nervous breakdowns

and refused to keep pace with man's madness

you are the moment

before the cattle were herded together like men

you are the moment

before God forgot His lines

you are the moment

before we learned that the maninthemoon was queer

and some of us ran into the forests

you are the moment of pride

before the fiftieth bead

you are the moment

before the poem passed peacefully away at dawn

like a monarch

## There's Something Sad

There's something sad

about the glass

with lipstick on its mouth

that's pointed at and given back

to the waitress in disgust

Like the girl with the hair-lip

whom

no one

wants

to

kiss.

## Vinegar

sometimes

i feel like a priest

in a fish & chip queue

quietly thinking

as the vinegar runs through

how nice it would be

to buy supper for two

## M. 66

The politicians,

(who are buying huge cars with hobnailed

wheels the size of merry-go-rounds)

have a new plan.

They are going to

put cobbles

in our eyesockets

and pebbles

in our navels

and fill us up

with asphalt

and lay us

side by side

so that we can take a more active part

in the road

to destruction.

## The Fish

you always were a strange girl now weren't you?

like the midsummernights party we went to

where towards witching

being tired and hot of dancing

we slipped thro' the frenchwindows

and arminarmed across the lawn

pausing at the artificial pond

lying liquidblack and limpid

in the stricttempo air we kissed

when suddenly you began to tremble

and removing one lavender satin glove knelt

and slipped your hand into the slimy mirror

your face was sad as you brought forth

a switching twitching silver fish

which you lay at my feet

and as the quick tick of the grass

gave way to the slow flop of death

stillkneeling you said softly: 'don't die little fish'

then you tookoff your other glove

and we lay sadly and we made love

as the dancers danced slowly

the fish stared coldly

and the moon admired its reflection

in the lilypetalled pond

## Dreampoem

in a corner of my bedroom

grew a tree

a happytree

my own tree

its leaves were soft

like flesh

and its birds sang poems for me

then

without warning

two men

with understanding smiles

and axes

made out of forged excuses

came and chopped it down

either yesterday

or the day before

i think it was the day before

## Mother the Wardrobe is Full of Infantrymen

mother the wardrobe is full of infantrymen

i did i asked them

but they snarled saying it was a mans life

mother there is a centurian tank in the parlour

i did i asked the officer

but he laughed saying 'Queens regulations'

(piano was out of tune anyway)

mother polish your identity bracelet

there is a mushroom cloud in the backgarden

i did it tried to bring in the cat

but it simply came to pieces in my hand

i did i tried to whitewash the windows

but there weren't any

i did i tried to hide under the stairs

but i couldn't get in for civil defence leaders

i did i tried ringing candid camera

but they crossed their hearts

i went for a policeman but they were looting the town

i went out for a fire engine but they were all upside down

i went for a priest but they were all on their knees

mother don't just lie there say something please

mother don't just lie there say something please

## A Square Dance

In Flanders fields in Northern France

They're all doing a brand new dance

It makes you happy and out of breath

And it's called the Dance of Death

Everybody stands in line

Everybody's feeling fine

We're all going to a hop

1 – 2 – 3 and over the top

It's the dance designed to thrill

It's the mustard gas quadrille

A dance for men – girls have no say in it

For your partner is a bayonet

See how the dancers sway and run

To the rhythm of the gun

Swing your partner dos-y-doed

All around the shells explode

Honour your partner form a square

Smell the burning in the air

Over the barbed wire kicking high

Men like shirts hung out to dry

Everybody claps his hand

To the swinging German Band

When you're tired hold your head

Stumble, fall, pretend you're dead

When you're ready for some fun

Up you get and kill a hun

In khaki evening dress you're grand

The Victor Sylvester of no men's land

In Flanders fields where mortars blaze

They're all doing the latest craze

Khaki dancers out of breath

Doing the glorious Dance of Death

Doing the glorious ( _clap. clap_ ) Dance of Death.

## Let Me Die a Youngman's Death

Let me die a youngman's death

not a clean & inbetween

the sheets holywater death

not a famous-last-words

peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73

& in constant good tumour

may I be mown down at dawn

by a bright red sports car

on my way home

from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91

with silver hair

& sitting in a barber's chair

may rival gangsters

with hamfisted tommyguns burst in

& give me a short back & insides

Or when I'm 104

& banned from the Cavern

may my mistress

catching me in bed with her daughter

& fearing for her son

cut me up into little pieces

& throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death

not a free from sin tiptoe in

candle wax & waning death

not a curtains drawn by angels borne

'what a nice way to go' death

## BRIAN PATTEN

* * *

## Party Piece

He said:

'Let's stay here

Now this place has emptied

& make gentle pornography with one another,

While the partygoers go out

& the dawn creeps in,

Like a stranger.

Let us not hesitate

Over what we know

Or over how cold this place has become,

But let's unclip our minds

And let tumble free

The mad, mangled crocodiles of love.'

So they did,

Right there among the woodbines and guinness stains,

And later he caught a bus and she a train

And all there was between them then

was rain.

## Little Johnny's Confession

This morning

being rather young and foolish

I borrowed a machinegun my father

had left hidden since the war, went out,

and eliminated a number of small enemies.

Since then I have not returned home.

This morning

swarms of police with trackerdogs

wander about the city

with my description printed

on their minds, asking:

'Have you seen him,

he is seven years old,

likes Pluto, Mighty Mouse

and Biffo The Bear,

have you seen him, anywhere?'

This morning

sitting alone in a strange playground,

muttering Youve blundered Youve blundered

over and over to myself

I work out my next move

but cannot move;

the trackerdogs will sniff me out,

they have my lollypops.

## Where Are You Now, Batman?

Where are you now, Batman? Now that Aunt Heriot has

reported Robin missing

And Superman's fallen asleep in the sixpenny childhood

seats?

Where are you now that Captain Marvel's SHAZAM!

echoes round the auditorium,

The magicians don't hear it,

Must all be deaf... or dead...

The Purple Monster who came down from the Purple Planet

disguised as a man

Is wandering aimlessly about the streets

With no way of getting back,

Sir Galahad's been strangled by the Incredible Living Trees,

Zorro killed by his own sword.

Blackhawk has buried the last of his companions

And has now gone off to commit suicide in the disused

Hangars of Innocence.

The Monster and the Ape still fight it out in a room

Where the walls are continually closing;

Rocketman's fuel tanks gave out over London.

Even Flash Gordon's lost, he wanders among the stars

Weeping over the woman he loved

7 Universes ago.
My celluloid companions, it's only a few years

Since first I knew you. Something in us has faded.
Has the Terrible Fiend, That Ghastly Adversary,

Mr Old Age, caught you in his deadly trap,

And come finally to polish you off,

His machinegun dripping with years...?

## A Green Sportscar

(for Mal Doft, racedriver)

... And later, to come across

those couples in gleaming green sportscars,

riveted with steel and sprinkled with dawn;

and, still shaking in tarpaulin hoods, the rain

spills onto their faces

as the daylight exposes their E-type deaths.

... And later still, to discover

inside him, something has been moved.

She stretched out across him, breasts

pointing towards dawn, who found her last kick

in the sound of the skid on tarmac

of the green-steel coffin in its quiet field.

... And finally, to understand them;

they who having been switched off permanently,

are so very still. You would think them asleep,

not dead, if not for the evidence, their expressions

caught at dawn; and held tight beneath

this accidental incident.

## After Breakfast

After breakfast,

Which is usually coffee and a view

Of teeming rain and the Cathedral old and grey but

Smelling good with grass and ferns

I go out thinking of all those people who've come into this

room

And have slept here

Sad and naked

Alone in pairs

Who came together and

Were they young and white with

Some hint of innocence?

Or did they come simply to come,

To fumble then finally tumble apart,

Or, were they older still, past sex,

Lost in mirrors, contemplating their decay and

What did the morning mean to them?

Perhaps once this room was the servants quarter.

Was she young with freckles, with apple breasts?

Did she ever laugh?

Tease the manservant with her 19th Century charms

And her skirts whirling?

Did she look out through the skylight

And wish she were free, and

What did she have for breakfast?

Waking this morning I think

How good it would be to have someone to share breakfast

with.

Whole families waking!

A thousand negligees, pyjamas, nightgowns

All wandering down to breakfast

How secure! and

Other coming out the far end of dawn

Having only pain and drizzle for breakfast,

Waking always to be greeted with the poor feast of daylight.

How many halflives

Sulking behind these windows

From basement to attic

Complaining and asking

Who will inherit me today?

Who will I share breakfast with?

And always the same answer coming back –

The rain will inherit you – lonely breakfaster!

## Sing Softly

Sing softly

now sadly

of rains he has known,

of dawns when

his visions

were of damp boys

slim and brown,

walking at the edge

of cold rivers.

O they were

the palest of children,

stripping.

Slim fish

darting through water,

laughing now and then.

## Seascape

gulls kiss the sun

and you walk on the beach

afraid of the tide

from the sea's warm belly

a lobster crawls to

see if we've gone

but mouths still talk

and finding out my lips

I say to you:

'lie silently

and stretch out your arms

like seaweed strangled by the wind'

out of a seashell

a sandcrab pokes his head

and sniffs the salt wind

now afraid we sit in silence

and watching the sun go down

I ask you your name

## Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworths, A Song

She keeps kingfishers in their cages

And goldfish in their bowls,

She is lovely and is afraid

Of such things as growing cold.

There were numerous men that loved her,

Though they were more cruel than kind

And their love an act in isolation,

A form of pantomime.

She says she has now forgotten

The feelings that she shared

At various all-night parties

Among the couples on the stairs,

For among the songs and dancing

She was once open wide,

A girl dressed in denim

With the boys dressed in lies.

She's eating roses on toast with tulip butter;

Praying for her mirror to stay young;

Though on its no longer gilted surface

This message she has scrawled:

'O somewhere between Heaven and Woolworths

I live I love I scold,

I keep kingfishers in their cages

And goldfish in their bowls.'

## I'm Dreaming of a White Smethwick

(An old, never-to-be-forgotten song)

I'm dreaming of a white Smethwick,

One I didn't want to know,

Where they'll have allwhite, allright children

And the White and White Minstrel Show.

I'm dreaming of a white Smethwick

Where they'll have a brandnew dance;

Teach their kids to close their eyes

And forget that once

Strange men came to Smethwick

With slogans whitewashed on their minds,

They campaigned about a while

And left their shit behind.

I saw black father christmasses

Burning in the snow,

Protesting to the Opposition

About what happened a while ago.

The last blackbird's been shot in Smethwick

And the council's doing allright,

The M.P.'s in the Commons

Making sure his words are white.

Chorus: May all your days be merry and bright

And may all your citizens be white.

NOTE: As in numerous folk songs, the words may be improvised on to suit the present.

## Sleep Now

(In Memory of Wilfred Owen)

Sleep now,

Your blood moving in the quiet wind;

No longer afraid of the rabbits

Hurrying through the tall grass

Or the faces laughing on the beach

And among the cold trees.

Sleep now,

Alone in the sleeves of grief,

Listening to clothes falling

And to your flesh touching God;

To the chatter and backslapping

Of Christ meeting heroes of war.

Sleep now,

Your words have passed

The lights shining from the East

And the sound of the flack

Raping graves and emptying seasons.

You do not hear the dry wind pray

Or the children play

A game called 'Soldiers' in the street.

## Song for Last Year's Wife

Alice, this is my first winter

of waking without you, of knowing

that you, dressed in familiar clothes

are elsewhere, perhaps not even

conscious of our anniversary. Have

you noticed? The earth's still as hard,

the same empty gardens exist; it is

as if nothing special had changed,

I wake with another mouth feeding

from me, yet still feel as if

Love had not the right

to walk out of me. A year now. So

what? you say. I send out my spies

to discover what you are doing. They smile,

return, tell me your body's as firm,

you are as alive, as warm and inviting

as when I knew you first... Perhaps it is

the winter, its isolation from other seasons,

that sends me your ghost to witness

when I wake. Somebody came here today, asked

how you were keeping, what

you were doing. I imagine you,

waking in another city, touched

by this same hour. So ordinary

a thing as loss comes now and touches me.

## Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers. On sighting mathematicians it should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra; it should fall in love with children and woo them with fairytales; it should wait on the landing for 2 years for its mates to come home then go outside and find them all dead.

When the electricity fails it should wear dark glasses and pretend to be blind. It should guide all those who are safe into the middle of busy roads and leave them there. It should scatter woodworm into the bedrooms of all peg-legged men not being afraid to hurt the innocent or make such differences. It should shout EVIL! EVIL! from the roofs of the world's stock exchanges. It should not pretend to be a clerk or a librarian. It should be kind, it is the eventual sameness of contradictions. It should never weep until it is alone and then only after it has covered the mirrors and sealed up the cracks.

Poetry should seek out pale and lyrical couples and wander with them into stables, neglected bedrooms and engineless cars for a final Good Time. It should enter burning factories too late to save anyone. It should pay no attention to its real name.

Poetry should be seen lying by the side of road accidents, hissing from unlit gasrings. It should scrawl the nymphomaniac's secret on her teacher's blackboard; offer her a worm saying: Inside this is a tiny apple. Poetry should play hopscotch in the 6pm streets and look for jinks in other people's dustbins. At dawn it should leave the bedroom and catch the first bus home to its wife. At dusk it should chatup a girl nobody wants. It should be seen standing on the ledge of a skyscraper, on a bridge with a brick tied around its heart. It is the monster hiding in a child's dark room, it is the scar on a beautiful man's face. It is the last blade of grass being picked from the city park.

## Maud, 1965

Maud, where are you Maud?

With your long dresses and peachcream complexion;

In what cage did you hang that black bat night?

What took place in the garden? Maud, it is over,

You can tell us now.

Still lyrical but much used, you wander about the suburbs

Watching the buses go past full of young happy people,

Wondering where the garden is, wherever can it be,

And how can it be lost. Maud, it's no use.

Can it be that you got yourself lost

And are living with an out of work musician,

You share a furnished room and have an old wireless

That tells you the latest bad news.

What's happening Maud?

Do you wear a Mary Quant dress

And eat fish and chips alone at night?

Wear make-up that tastes of forget-me-nots?

Where are you? and are you very lost,

Very much alone? Do you have stupendous dreams

And wake with one hand on your breast, and

The other on your cunt?

Do you cry for that garden, lost among pornographic

suggestions,

Where the concrete flowers neither open nor close;

Who poured weedkiller over your innocence?

We could not find that garden for you,

Even if we tried.

So, come into the city Maud,

Where the flowers are too quickly picked

And the days are butchered as if they were enemies.

Maud, is that you I see

Alone among the office blocks,

Head bowed, young tears singing pop-sorrow

On your cheeks?

## The River Arse

The rain is teeming

across the

river falling on the arse of

a nude girl swimming

without even a splash

& O it's such a pretty little arse.

see how it rises now and then

like an island

a pink island moving through the water

something young and good

in the river that flows out of Lyons

a nude arse and a special one at that

belonging to a swimmer floating

in the opposite direction

to the shore.

## Room

Room you're toneless now.

Room you don't belong to me

I want another room I want one

without your tattymemories

I want to brush you out into the streets where

you'll become a debris full of children's laughter

Room you're murderous

You're a crooked woman with armpits full of lice

You're no good to me

You make me feel like an accident

Make me blush with your crude jokes

and your old iron bedsteads

Room you've made me weep too many times

I'm sick of you and all your faces

I go into houses and find its still you only this time

you're wearing a different disguise

I send out my spies to find who you're living with

but they don't return

I send myself out and find you eating my spies.

Its impossible. You stand there dusty and naked

Your records spinning mutely

Your bed throwing gleeming girlbodies at the armies

of wage clerks who prance in you

Your books all empty

Your gasstoves hissing

Wallpaper crying sighing it doesn't matter

for your windows have become taperecordings of the night

and only death will shove you to sleep.

I'm going to leave you

Going to spend all my dreams

Once in you I could lie and hear the spyingmoon apologize

as it tiptoed through the clouds

and left you in your special darkness

But its different now, now

only the rain splatters through

and the one other sound is you whispering

'I'm not around you I'm in you all my walls are in you'

Room you're full of my own graves!

## A Creature to Tell the Time By

I created for myself

a creature to tell the time by

– & on the lawns of her tongue

flowers grew,

sweet scented words fell

out her mouth,

her eyes and paws as well were comforting –

& woken with her

at dawn, with living birds

humming, alien

inside my head,

I noticed inside us both

the green love that grew there yesterday

was dead.

## Schoolboy

Before playtime let us consider the possibilities

of getting stoned on milk.

In his dreams,

scribbling overcharged on woodbines,

mumbling obscure sentences into his desk

'No way of getting out,

no way out...'

Poet dying of

too much education, school bullies, examinations,

canes that walk the nurseries of his wet dreams;

satchels full of chewing gum, bad jokes, pencils;

crude drawings performed in the name of art. Soon will

come the Joyful Realization in Mary's back kitchen

while mother's out.

All this during chemistry.

(The headmaster's crying in his study.

His old pinstriped pants rolled up to his knees

in a vain attempt to recapture youth; emotions

skid along his slippery age; Love, smeared across his face,

like a road accident.)

The schoolyard's full of people to hate.

Full of tick and prefects and a fat schoolmaster

and whistles and older and younger boys, but

he's growing

sadly

growing

up.

Girls,

becoming mysterious, are now more important

than arriving at school late or receiving trival awards.

Photographs of those huge women

seem a little more believable now.

(Secretly, the pale, unmarried headmaster telling him

Death is the only grammatically correct full-

stop.)

Girls,

still mysterious;

arithmetic thighed, breasts measured in thumbprints,

not inches.

Literature's just another way out.

History's full of absurd mistakes.

King Arthur if he ever existed

would only have farted and excused himself

from the Round Table in a hurry.

(The headmaster, staring through the study window

into the playground, composes evil poems about

the lyrical boy in class four)

'He invited us up sir,

but not for the cane,

said the algebra of life

was too difficult to explain

and that all equations

mounted to nothing...'

Growing up's wonderful if

you keep your eyes

closed tightly, and

if you manage to grow

take your soul with you,

nobody wants it.

So,

playtime's finished with;

it's time to pull the last sad chain

on his last

sadschoolgirlcrush.

It's time to fathom out too many things.

To learn he's no longer got somebody watching over him;

he's going to know strange things, learn

how to lie correctly, how to lay correctly,

how to cheat and steal in the nicest possible manner.

He will learn, amongst other things, how to enjoy

his enemies, how to avoid friendships. If he's unlucky

he will learn how to love and give everything away,

and how eventually, he'll end up with nothing.

He won't understand many things.

He'll just accept them. He'll experiment with hardboiled

eggs all his life

and die a stranger in a race attempting Humanity.

And finally,

the playground full of dust,

crates of sour milk lining the corridors;

the headmaster, weeping quietly among the saws and

chisels

in the damp woodwork room;

The ghosts of Tim and Maureen and Pat

and Nancy and so many others,

all holding sexless hands,

doomed to living, and

one pale boy

in a steamy room

looking outside across the roofs and chimneys

where it seems, the clouds are crying,

the daylight's gone blind

and his teachers, all dead.

## Delicate John

Delicate John has moved away.

Listen to what the children said:

He couldn't make love

And he couldn't make money,

He had a gammy leg

(which they thought was funny).

Now John, tender and quiet as a habit,

Is leading half a life among his books.

He cannot return from where he came

Because the children learnt

Of what they thought a lack of love,

Of his lack of money,

Of something unfamiliar in his brain

(which they thought was funny)

He sits at a window and sometimes they pass,

The children who gave him a monkey for his back,

They pass in twos they pass in threes,

They look contented and they look pleased.

John sits, he rots away,

Behind a lace curtain where he quietly cries

Tears as big as a choir boy's eyes.

What have they done to John,

What have they done to him?

The children who grow old,

Who squabble and grow thin,

Who lick their lips at disaster

And quietly whisper of sin.

## On a Horse Called Autumn

(for Maureen)

On a horse called autumn

among certain decaying things

she rides inside me, for

no matter where I move

this puzzled woman sings

of nude horsemen, breeched

in leather,

of stables decaying near

where once

riders came,

and where now along

her heart journeys, among

lies I made real.

Now riding in truth

what alterations can I make

knowing nothing will change?

Things stay the same:

such journeys as hers

are the ones I care for.

## A Talk with a Wood

Moving through you one evening

when you offered shelter to

quiet things soaked in rain

I saw through your thinning branches

the beginnings of suburbs, and

frightened by the rain,

grey hares running upright in

distant fields; and quite alone there

I thought of nothing but my footprints

being filled, and love, distilled

of people, drifted free, then

the woods spoke with me.

## Travelling Between Places

Leaving nothing and nothing ahead;

when you stop for the evening

the sky will be in ruins,

when you hear late birds

with tired throats singing

think how good it is that they,

knowing you were coming,

stayed up late to greet you

who travels between places

when the late afternoon

drifts into the woods, when

nothing matters specially.

## The Fruitful Lady of Dawn

She walks across the room and opens the skylight

thinking, perhaps a bird will drop in

and teach me how to sing.

She attempts to understand why a sentence made of kisses

is followed by the image

of somebody wandering alone through semi-colons

but cannot fathom out

whose dawn she belongs in,

so among them is silent

and under the skylight

puts on a red dress calling it a blue one;

she approaches breakfast as she would a lover,

she is alive!

and one of her body's commonest needs

I have made holy

For she will feed my pink bird

She will make love in technicolour

She will be the fruitful lady of dawn.

## In a New Kind of Dawn

In a new kind of dawn

readjusting your conscience

you wake, and

woken you dream

or so it seems

of the forests you've come across

& lives you'd have swum in

had you been strong enough.

## On the Dawn Boat

on the dawn boat,

coming awake,

the land empty, I thought

about it, about

the many warnings,

the many signs, but

none to lead me

away from here, none

to lead me there.

## Looking Back at It

At nineteen I was a Brave Old Hunchback

Climbing to 'tremendous heights'

Preparing to swing down on my golden rope

And rescue the Accused Innocence.

But on my swooping, downwards path one day

Innocence ducked

And I amazed at such an act crashed into

A wall she had been building,

How silly now to think myself able to rescue anything!

## The Beast

Something that was not there before

has come through the mirror

into my room.

It is not such a simple creature

as at first I thought –

from somewhere it has brought a mischief

that troubles both silence and objects

and now left alone here

I weave intricate reasons for its arrival.

They disintegrate. Today in January, with

the light frozen on my window, I hear outside

a million panicking birds, and know even out there

comfort is done with; it has shattered

even the stars, this creature

at last come home to me.

## Acknowledgements

The poem 'Me' by Adrian Henri is taken from the following book, to whose publisher acknowledgement is due: _The Best of Henri_ , 1975, Jonathan Cape Ltd. For the rest of the poems acknowledgement is due to the author.

The poems by Roger McGough are taken from the following books, to whose publishers acknowledgement is due: 'Sad Aunt Madge', 'At Lunchtime A Story of Love', from _The Liverpool Scene_ , 1967, Donald Carroll; 'Goodbat Nightman' from _In the Glassroom_ , 1976, Jonathan Cape Ltd. The rest of the poems were first published by Penguin Books in an earlier edition.

The poems by Brian Patten are taken from the following books, to whose publisher acknowledgement is due: 'Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworths, A Song', 'Little Johnny's Confession', 'Party Piece', 'A Creature to Tell the Time By', 'Where Are You Now, Batman?', 'A Green Sportscar', 'After Breakfast', 'Song for Last Year's Wife', 'Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself', 'In a New Kind of Dawn', 'On the Dawn Boat', 'Sleep Now', 'Seascape', 'The River Arse', 'Room', 'Maud, 1965', 'Schoolboy', 'On a Horse Called Autumn', 'The Fruitful Lady of Dawn', 'A Talk with a Wood', 'Travelling Between Places', 'Looking Back at It' from _Little Johnny's Confession_ , 1967, George Allen & Unwin Ltd; The rest of the poems were first published by Penguin Books in an earlier edition.

## THE BEGINNING

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##### PENGUIN CLASSICS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

This selection first published 1967

Revised and enlarged edition published 1974

Revised edition published 1983

Published in Penguin Classics with revisions 2007

This restored edition published 2017

Copyright © Penguin Books Ltd, 1967, 1974, 1983, 2007, 2017

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Cover: detail of Fairground Image N°2, 1962, mixed media on board by Adrian Henri

Private collection © Adrian Henri Estate

ISBN: 978-0-141-19085-3
* The title for this poem is taken from an LP by Charles Mingus, 'Tonight at Noon', Atlantic 1416.
* (A free 1960s Liverpool version of Fénéon's great 'Our Times'.)

# Contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. About the Author
  4. ADRIAN HENRI
    1. Tonight at Noon
    2. Adrian Henri's Last Will and Testament
    3. Liverpool Poems
    4. Without You
    5. Love Is...
    6. Morning Poem
    7. Drinking Song
    8. Song for a Beautiful Girl Petrol-pump Attendant on the Motorway
    9. Poem for Roger McGough
    10. Song of Affluence or I Wouldn't Leave My 8-Roomed House for You
    11. Love Poem/Colour Supplement
    12. On the Late Late Massachers Stillbirths and Deformed Children a Smoother Lovelier Skin Job
    13. Great War Poems
    14. Country Song
    15. Holcombe Poem/Poem For a Girl I Didn't Meet
    16. Me
    17. Hello Adrian
    18. Adrian Henri's Talking After Christmas Blues
    19. The Blazing Hat, Part Two
    20. Pictures From an Exhibition
    21. Love Poem
    22. Wild West Poems
    23. Poem in Memoriam T. S. Eliot
    24. Where'er You Walk
    25. The New 'Our Times'
    26. In the Midnight Hour
    27. I Want To Paint
    28. Don't Worry/Everything's Going to be All Right
    29. Mrs Albion You've Got a Lovely Daughter
  5. ROGER MCGOUGH
    1. Comeclose and Sleepnow
    2. Aren't We All
    3. A lot of Water has Flown under your Bridge
    4. On Picnics
    5. Café Portraits
    6. The Fallen Birdman
    7. The Icingbus
    8. You and Your Strange Ways
    9. At Lunchtime A Story of Love
    10. Icarus Allsorts
    11. Why Patriots are a Bit Nuts in the Head
    12. Sad Aunt Madge
    13. My Busconductor
    14. What the Littlegirl Did
    15. Goodbat Nightman
    16. What You Are
    17. There's Something Sad
    18. Vinegar
    19. M. 66
    20. The Fish
    21. Dreampoem
    22. Mother the Wardrobe is Full of Infantrymen
    23. A Square Dance
    24. Let Me Die a Youngman's Death
  6. BRIAN PATTEN
    1. Party Piece
    2. Little Johnny's Confession
    3. Where Are You Now, Batman?
    4. A Green Sportscar
    5. After Breakfast
    6. Sing Softly
    7. Seascape
    8. Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworths, A Song
    9. I'm Dreaming of a White Smethwick
    10. Sleep Now
    11. Song for Last Year's Wife
    12. Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself
    13. Maud, 1965
    14. The River Arse
    15. Room
    16. A Creature to Tell the Time By
    17. Schoolboy
    18. Delicate John
    19. On a Horse Called Autumn
    20. A Talk with a Wood
    21. Travelling Between Places
    22. The Fruitful Lady of Dawn
    23. In a New Kind of Dawn
    24. On the Dawn Boat
    25. Looking Back at It
    26. The Beast
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. Follow Penguin
  9. Copyright Page

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  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Begin Reading

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