NOTHING HAPPENING IN COVENTRY
(excerpts from Little ... Glitter)
for Tony Frazer
At his city’s edge
where the good citizens’ excreta
sludged into the River Sowe
they dodged sewage
in the pipe where a kid’d just drowned,
and pushed against that ledge of fear.
He and Warwick, of the perfect name,
in the steel culvert that could as well’ve been
Krakow, Warsaw, Budapest.
~
At the Forum on the Walsgrave Road
with his mum and Warwick:
when MGM’s lion roared
Warwick got up to leave,
“I’ve already seen this one”,
but he was stayed by more popcorn.
The ghost of a Roman spectacle
flickered on the screen
where anti-heroic antics were yet to rule.
Someone’s Civil War with love interest
played out considerably larger than life –
much larger for sure than on their ten-inch telly.
~
If Warwick’s an unlikely first name
what price Dipple for a last?
Englished to sanitize a brutal past:
if cleansing up all those excess
consonants, flensing names to an English palate,
could rewrite the history
ah, with tongue untied, his dad would’ve stepped
into the grey drizzle of the Midlands
unbunkered, his ghetto-self never borne.
~
Which Summer was it he learned
that a thousand-and-one stories
won’t even cover it?
That you can’t judge a cover
by its book and a book can still
read you better than any undercover cop?
That inside its leather hide
strange animals make ready
to baptize you in scorched breath?
That the dark Satanic predates
the spiring chimneys of his Boom-Town
home: that the Phoenix nests in prosperity’s arse?
~
Longfellow Road, Lord Lytton Avenue,
Keats Road – weren’t ours just the best-versed
Romantic feet in the city?
We never found Gitchy-Goomy
so gloomy Binley Copse had to sub –
whose corpses were often rumoured
though the place wasn’t really that
boring. It was on posh Kenilworth Road
that young Larkin’s myopic boredom grew.
Had Philip lived over near Hipswell Highway
he’d have surely ended up favouring
the MacSweeney side of Roy Fisher’s looks.
~
At F.W Woolworth & Co (Coventry) Ltd.,
wearing the brown coat of a stockboy
hired to keep toy counters stacked
on busy Saturdays, once, in the stock-room
with the elevator lost between floors,
he learned one of the meanings of stuck
when the maintenance boss
successfully pried open, “And there you have it!”,
the doors revealing the two missing
supervisors, presumed no more than
late back from lunch
again in flagrante delicto,
or, at the very least, in a grand non-sequitur,
her skirt hoisted over stunning black suspenders,
his fly entertaining her frozen hand.
~
The London Road and Canley
Crematoria were two ways
of escape:
a third, the Central Library,
held more appeal.
He succumbed and haunted
the Poetry Section for its occult song:
the New Americans with their tough hides
and gap-toothed anti-Puritan chansons;
the jazz pianist block-chording his way
through the ship’s arteries;
and, in another cast of density,
the late-Elizabethan South African
finding air stirred and luminate with mortals
who drift in and out doors of stone.
(excerpts from Little ... Glitter)
for Tony Frazer
At his city’s edge
where the good citizens’ excreta
sludged into the River Sowe
they dodged sewage
in the pipe where a kid’d just drowned,
and pushed against that ledge of fear.
He and Warwick, of the perfect name,
in the steel culvert that could as well’ve been
Krakow, Warsaw, Budapest.
~
At the Forum on the Walsgrave Road
with his mum and Warwick:
when MGM’s lion roared
Warwick got up to leave,
“I’ve already seen this one”,
but he was stayed by more popcorn.
The ghost of a Roman spectacle
flickered on the screen
where anti-heroic antics were yet to rule.
Someone’s Civil War with love interest
played out considerably larger than life –
much larger for sure than on their ten-inch telly.
~
If Warwick’s an unlikely first name
what price Dipple for a last?
Englished to sanitize a brutal past:
if cleansing up all those excess
consonants, flensing names to an English palate,
could rewrite the history
ah, with tongue untied, his dad would’ve stepped
into the grey drizzle of the Midlands
unbunkered, his ghetto-self never borne.
~
Which Summer was it he learned
that a thousand-and-one stories
won’t even cover it?
That you can’t judge a cover
by its book and a book can still
read you better than any undercover cop?
That inside its leather hide
strange animals make ready
to baptize you in scorched breath?
That the dark Satanic predates
the spiring chimneys of his Boom-Town
home: that the Phoenix nests in prosperity’s arse?
~
Longfellow Road, Lord Lytton Avenue,
Keats Road – weren’t ours just the best-versed
Romantic feet in the city?
We never found Gitchy-Goomy
so gloomy Binley Copse had to sub –
whose corpses were often rumoured
though the place wasn’t really that
boring. It was on posh Kenilworth Road
that young Larkin’s myopic boredom grew.
Had Philip lived over near Hipswell Highway
he’d have surely ended up favouring
the MacSweeney side of Roy Fisher’s looks.
~
At F.W Woolworth & Co (Coventry) Ltd.,
wearing the brown coat of a stockboy
hired to keep toy counters stacked
on busy Saturdays, once, in the stock-room
with the elevator lost between floors,
he learned one of the meanings of stuck
when the maintenance boss
successfully pried open, “And there you have it!”,
the doors revealing the two missing
supervisors, presumed no more than
late back from lunch
again in flagrante delicto,
or, at the very least, in a grand non-sequitur,
her skirt hoisted over stunning black suspenders,
his fly entertaining her frozen hand.
~
The London Road and Canley
Crematoria were two ways
of escape:
a third, the Central Library,
held more appeal.
He succumbed and haunted
the Poetry Section for its occult song:
the New Americans with their tough hides
and gap-toothed anti-Puritan chansons;
the jazz pianist block-chording his way
through the ship’s arteries;
and, in another cast of density,
the late-Elizabethan South African
finding air stirred and luminate with mortals
who drift in and out doors of stone.