Jackself Read online

  of the sky, small

  panes of it where the

  tarmac gives out

  he returns

  nowhere to somewhere by

  standing there

  in sunlight, its flicking

  over him like

  likelike

  he’s been this way

  before he couldn’t

  remember any way but

  onwards and upwind

  along a fence-line

  to see what’s hanging, down

  in a ditch where the still

  dark stands

  Peewit

  a little one

  drab

  barely skyborne, with nothing

  of the gut-unravelling acumen

  of the scavenger

  this is Jackself

  limping across marshland, making a decoy

  of himself, piping up when the day goes dim

  so close to the ground he’s almost it

  small wonder Peewit

  is the name the other boys have given him

  not Jackdaw, not Rook

  the gods of bracken and fly-tipped

  black plastic sacks will expose themselves to the pilgrim

  who has faith in the star

  at the centre of the crab apple, in the ditchful

  of frogspawn and the shed door

  hinged with spiders’ webs

  so it comes to pass

  for Peewit, whippy stick in his right hand

  as he tramps the far-out lanes with those

  who had diminished him,

  a breeze

  starts to ratch in the dust

  the foxglove

  jangles

  his legs

  break and he goes down, his eyes a white

  flutter in his head

  the boys circle him

  where he fits,

  grinding his teeth so hard they sing

  and when they heft him,

  heavier than he should be,

  his bird-soul batters

  into him

  they process so slowly the light’s

  all gone by halfway home

  when

  Peewit’s no longer between them

  has flown

  and blank with terror

  the boys go round and round

  in the dark and cold and are not ever found

  The Goose Shed

  Jackself finds Jeremy Wren

  in the goose shed

  who the fuck

  has a goose shed, Wren says

  people with geese,

  Jackself says

  he’s standing in the bright

  door square, his shadow-self

  monstered against the dim back wall

  where Wren crouches, stringy knees

  drawn up to his chin

  where are they then, Wren says

  Jackself looks at his shoes

  they prefer not to use

  the goose shed, he says

  it’s true the goose and gander hiss

  and thrash with blazing wings

  anyone who dares set foot

  on Lamanby’s yard,

  but they nest in among

  the elder brush behind the barn

  while the ghost shed

  is where Jackself comes to hunker down

  in the gold straw

  and watch Lamanby’s sandstone doorstep

  and red front door,

  as if from outside his own life and not

  minding as it goes on without him

  you mean

  the goose shed, Wren says

  everybody’s got

  a ghost shed

  have they, Jackself says, taken aback

  yeah,

  course, Wren says

  somewhere

  to take yourself off to, just close enough

  to hear your mum,

  dad, brother and sister

  laughing

  but not to make out

  what they’re laughing at

  it wouldn’t be right,

  he says, to overhear

  no, Jackself says,

  but what are you doing in my shed

  I’m looking for ghost eggs, Wren says,

  and you’re standing in my light

  Nightlines

  Jackself and Jeremy Wren are setting

  nightlines in the kidney-coloured pool

  all the streams of England run into

  Jackself’s fretting

  all night the guiled

  will hang, their hooked lips

  mouthing into the waterworks and bloodstreams

  of all England

  all night, gaffed,

  their bullion flexing

  until Jeremy Wren

  bashes them at dawn with his hardwood priest

  Wren,

  who says his granddad built the southern domes

  Jesus needed to stable His beasts,

  thinks Jackself’s a soft-lad, a quick-

  tear, a worry-wit,

  and ties off another triple-barbed spinner

  so Jackself rolls up his jeans,

  takes one end of the nylon line looped to a tent peg and

  wades into the chuckling shallows

  slippery-stoned ice-cool

  fishpath where no one has stood

  for a thousand years

  when Wren’s not looking

  Jackself stamps his foot

  and all the carp and sticklebacks, the perch and pike and bream

  are shaken out

  of their gullible, muddy-minded dream

  Cheapjack

  as an elephant has memory

  so Jeremy Wren has merchandise

  in his pocket, an order book,

  a Biro behind his ear, and in his palm

  a matchbox from which he offers

  Jackself the patter, eight-legged

  and shrivelled like a dead

  star

  wrap your tongue round this,

  he says, and sell a man

  a second shadow

  isn’t it an old spider,

  Jackself says

  you have to learn to overlook

  your own eyes,

  Wren says, otherwise

  you’ll never live the life you might

  he slides shut the little drawer

  and stows the matchbox back in his jacket

  that night

  Jackself lies awake,

  his commercial inhibitions coming undone

  in the dark and hiss of the rain

  and next day at school he’s barking the corridor

  in a sandwich board that proclaims

  a belt of Eden serpent’s skin

  a fairy’s skull, a stone age stone

  a map of sleep, a stick of rock

  from Pompeii’s only sweetie shop

  a pick n mix of famous stains

  a hanged man’s jerk, a traffic cone

  a bedbug from the riverbed

  an ominous pencil, a furry mint

  the last gold hair from Satan’s head

  The Whispering Garden

  listen to those hollyhocks

  those lupins,

  Wren says

  I’ve watched the bees

  stealing in and out

  with their furry microphones

  to record the voices inside

  I’ve put my ear to the box

  where they take the noise

  only to be warned

  that an eye

  was on me

  all the time

  look!

  he says, scrambling to his feet

  in the crook

  of Jackself’s elbow

  a Wall Brown butterfly

  blinking its wings

  It

  tell us what’s wrong, Jeremy Wren,

  crouched in the corner, spitting no blood,

  robust in bladder and bowel, your toes

&nbs
p; untouched by fire or flood

  no cold wind blows

  there’s hair on your feet and mint

  in your groin and tonight

  is milk, tomorrow cream

  and the day after that

  a herd that lows

  from your very own

  meadowland of light

  your head doesn’t hurt

  though it’s bigger inside

  than out

  Jeremy Wren,

  whole of heart,

  tell us what pains you

  my hole is bigger inside than out

  and the heart of my pain

  is a black bull’s heart

  and the tongue of my pain

  a black bull’s tongue that every day

  licks off the cream

  of the light

  there’s hair in my bowel and doubt

  in my groin and my head’s full of

  animal glue

  I’m spending my face

  on people of fire

  who visit at night

  to stare at my emptiest place

  while I crouch in the corner

  and read my own spit

  with a torch for a clue

  that’s it

  Les Symbolistes

  way out among the hedgerows, Jackself

  and Jeremy Wren, drunk

  on white cider and Malibu,

  are kicking up dust, the froth

  of the cow-parsley spunk

  or cuffs of sweat-yellowed cambric,

  the seamy side ablaze in the moonlight

  and fancy words on Jackself’s tongue

  now the locks of his head are picked

  and the distance he’s kept from his different selves

  is all undone

  how good it feels to be French

  and deranged, swinging the empty crock

  of his desire

  what the fuck,

  Wren says

  my dad sniffed fag-

  smoke on my breath and made me eat

  a twenty pack, then welted me

  buckle-first

  when I asked what was for sweet

  fie, foh and fum

  I smell your backwash in the coconut rum

  Jackself giggles and tilts the bottle nightwards

  starburst

  and the spinning moon’s bone china rim

  my dad sniffed himself

  on me, Jackself says, and made me eat him

  carved so thin

  I could read a rose-tinted poem through each slice

  A POEM! Wren roars

  you’re creepy as a two-headed calf

  and I’ve always thought so

  but Jackself’s bent double

  in the dark, clutching his thighs,

  a silver thread unspooling from his chin

  around him maze the midnight lonnings

  of reasonable England

  see, Wren says, clapping Jackself on the back

  as he retches

  that’s a proper poem for you

  agony to bring up,

  with real carrots in it

  An Age

  Jackself is staying in

  today, like a tool in a toolbox,

  to try to just be

  high in the lovely lofts

  of Lamanby

  he stands at a cracked

  window watching the gulls

  flash and snap, like washing on a line

  in the pale heat

  the wormy heartwood floorboards

  swell and creak

  he stands for an age

  not for a dark age,

  not for an ice age or an iron age, but for a

  pollen age, when bees

  browsed the workshops

  of wildflowers for powder

  of light, and the cables

  of a spider’s web were dusted with gold

  by the unreceptacled breeze

  Jack Frost

  Jackself is tapping

  fractals of ice, ice

  ferns and berries of ice,

  onto windowpanes and door handles, doorsteps,

  grass blades and the postbox as he walks

  the November village after midnight

  he’s wearing his homemade thousand-milk-bottle-top

  winter suit,

  complete with epaulettes

  of copper wire, and the lametta wig

  he’s kept all year in the Auto-Arctic Unit

  that hums in the cellar beneath Lamanby

  but it’s hard going, all this tapping every boot-scraper

  and hubcap, and 3 a.m. finds Jackself

  with his silvery head

  in his hands, slumped on the unspun roundabout

  among the gallows-poles of the moonlit playground,

  the stars grinding on above him

  his suit tinkles as he shivers

  would it really all go to shit

  if he went home before sunrise, leaving untouched a gutter-trickle

  here or a windscreen there

  fuck it

  Jackself wants a hot chocolate and a digestive biscuit

  he wants his bed

  and doesn’t need to be doing this

  cold scrollwork,

  this archiving

  of air bubbles

  and tatty leaves

  he hauls himself to his feet, gives

  the roundabout a heave

  and crunches across the grass

  but who’s this weaving down the empty road

  wearing snow-globe deely boppers, a mantle of tinsel and gauntlets and greaves

  of kitchen foil

  it’s Jeremy Wren,

  waving a glitter-sprinkled wooden spoon

  at the wing-mirrors of parked cars and the street lamp’s

  long case, baking them in frost

  you look a proper sight, Jackself says

  Wren’s weeping the lucid mask that’s welding to his cheekbones

  help me, he says, keep everything just as it is

  Plantation

  Jackself’s chinning

  into the near-dark north wind

  and feels it drawing silver thorns

  from the corners of his eyes

  he hunches

  deeper into his parka,

  deeper into his lion’s mane

  hood

  I’m in the wilderness

  no, he says,

  I am the wilderness, where stray

  greyhounds, scrawny prophets

  and secret-keepers walk cold acres

  hunting shelter under a welder’s

  mask moon, motherless

  and fatherless, with no cupboard of sweetcorn

  and baked-bean tins, no airtight

  canisters of shortbread

  no baubles, no toilet paper, no featherbed

  what would a turned-out

  greyhound want with baubles and toilet paper

  concave and zithery, they’re the hounds

  Jackself knows from the kennels down the lane

  and, knowing no prophets,

  he imagines a greyhound-ish

  greybeard up on his withered hind legs

  and leaning on a chewed dog-stick

  to howl like the wind that’s threshing these

  trees, grown too fearsome to be Christmas trees

  Blackjack

  it’s rained for days and Jackself

  is standing under Lamanby’s dripping eaves

  to ask all

  his dark questions in one go

  where does the toilet water take

  his tapped-out gold, how many eggs

  are laid by spiders at night in his nose

  and did the bathwater once carry

  his mucky portrait

  (a skin on the water’s surface, like engine oil)

  down

  down into galleries

  of fungal brick, where a frog-faced haaf-

  netter stood, mi
dstream, to haul

  the likeness of Jackself’s naked body

  from the current on an old bedsheet

  and pin it up with the thousand others,

  contorted on the sewer walls

  Jackself shudders

  to be known secretly,

  intimately

  to be chronicled

  get a grip

  who’d be interested in where I stand or what

  I eat

  or if my bathwater tastes, as it does, of lime cordial