take me out to the ball game

glass: no
worms: no
maggots: no
a rat leg: no
ejaculate: no
a BAND AID: no
hard plastic: no
bone fragments: no
a piece of an eyeball: no
sodium erythorbate: yes
skeletal muscle: yes
pig snouts: yes
intestines: yes

Jerry, we need you to come to the office.
We need everyone to come to the office.
Are you behind on your child support?

bugs on the body: get them off me

if you want to be happy,
forget the past,
someone said.
and I was like,
not gonna happen, but
do you ever do that thing
where you're sitting in your car
and you think about something that you did,
something that you screwed up in life,
and you go NNNNYYAAAGGGHHHHNN,
and you, like, slam the steering wheel
and shake your head really hard
to, like, shake that thought,
to, like, get rid of it?

I do, I do. and it's really small things,
like this one time I wrote something stupid
and embarrassing on someone else's computer.
this was in, like, nineteen ninety-four,
so it's not like the machine was connected to the world
and it's not like there's a trace preserved of those dumb words,
except in my head. and maybe his?
anyway, somehow it got left on there so he could see it
and he made just the most slight and veiled reference to it the next day,
and I knew that he knew that I know
that I'm a pretty weird dude.

I want to forget it.
but I can't.
and now I'm reconnected with the guy,
well, virtually anyway,
so though there's no digital footprint,
I live under a cloud of terror
all out of proportion to the actual incident,
being all like, does he remember it too,
and would he ever bring it up.
he wouldn't, right? 
I mean I don't see him.
but then.
his tone IS a little mocking (isn't it??)
each rare time there's keyboarded interaction
between he and me.

this,
this,
THIS is why
we drink.
and things.

NAN

a sometime barmaid,
a sometime payroll clerk,
a sometime supermarket cashier,
and once something of a hard-faced and cold-eyed beauty,
my grandmother stuffed the unlovely rooms of her underheated boarding house
with friendless flotsam,
with horrible knick-knacks:

a stuffed, glass-eyed crocodile forever frozen in a hostile pose;
a crude wooden rendering of some cannibal's shrunken head;
a  cigarette lighter contained within a china ornament:
a drunk tramp leaning against a lamppost.

"How Dry I Am"
tinkled metallically into the strained silence of the living room
when the thing was lifted,
the cogs and tines of the mechanism inside plinking
and plonking
the notes
of the dipsomaniac's refrain.

she was a working class Tory,
and she was flattered to be spoken to by the local M.P.,
a louche, saturnine rogue.
"he's so polite," she said,
"so charming,"
"so well spoken,"
"such nice teeth."
I didn't say anything
but I must have looked at her the wrong way
because she glared icily through the tobacco smoke seething
from between
her tightly pursed lips.
"ooh, go away you make me sick," she said.

(I've written this before, haven't I?)

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS

we were in the car
and my wife said
everyone on Facebook is complaining
about Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip.

so I was like:
who is complaining? what are they saying?
mums, she said. they are all in the cinema, with kids.
enduring Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip,
and, like, it's really terrible, the
worst thing ever.

it's the voices, I imagine, I said.
those fucking voices...

look, I continued,
I'd take a kid to see that movie
so long as I got to take something that took me out of myself.
like I'd go if I could take valium.
or heroin, maybe.
or, like, OxyContin.

MY DESCENT INTO DRUGS HELL
the headline would shout, leading to...
"it all started when I needed something
to take the edge off Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip" 

IMPERATIVES

take advice,
take heart,
take heroin.

do yoga.
do charity work.
do crystal methamphetamine.

do it in the bushes.
do it in the morning.
do it at some guy's house.
do it do it do it.

do it on that patch of land behind the drive-thru McDonalds.

watch your weight,
watch your mouth,
watch porn.

pass the peas,
pass water,
pass away.

but
don't
tell

me
about it.

the changing of the seasons

caramel coloured feet
and pale blue toenails,
out,
even as the sky sets into its blank whiteness
for the long sunless autumn
and the winter beyond it,
on this windy rock
in a chilly sea.

up and down all morning

years and years ago,
when we were all  big bullshitters,
I had this mate and
my god
he could spin a yarn.
like he told me
that this one sunday morning
he'd been out all night
somewhere in town

and that
he'd got on the northern line,
heading home to wimbledon,
still off his head,
(pills,
puff,
lager),
sweating,
smelled bad,
white jeans all stained
and cigarette burns
on his shirt
and
normal people staring at him,

and that
his eyes had closed

and that
when they opened again,
he was dazzled in the hot glare of daylight

and that he was passing through east finchley,
heading north,

as in he had supposedly been passed out all the way south to morden
and then all the way north on the way back up to high barnet.

well, I didn't believe him
but it was one of those clubland boasts,
one of those ecstasy war stories.
so I was probably all like "what are you like, you nutter."

and the

the snake bites the deer
as it grazes in the shade.
and the sweating mothers labour us,
wailing,
into the world.
and the bag of blind kittens is tossed into the sea
where the fish dies in terror
in the entrails of the whale,
and the whale dies in terror,
barnacled,
beaching,
in the holiday sun.
and the light fades in the eyes of the impotent tiger,
and the beauty of the flowers is a ruse,
and the butterfly's joy doesn't last,
and the lovers' embrace is uneven,
and the teeth rot in the mouth while the dentist plays golf.
and the lepers know horror,
and the sperm stains your underpants,
and the metamorphosis of the breasts
marks the time








this is pretty derivative, drawing heavily on a few lines of prose from the short story Simon Magus by Danilo Kiš 

it's not too late

I open up the emails and the first one,
from a mobile phone company,
says it's not too late
to get to glastonbury.

and I look at decades of photos on the wall,
and at the mess of the thing I've been trying to do all these weeks.

and I think of when I started feeling older than everyone around,
more than 15 years ago now,
and I think
you people don't know me.

BABY ON BOARD

those BABY ON BOARD badges
worn by pregnant women
when swaying around
on London's buses and Underground trains:
it feels like they're a good idea, conceived (pun intended)
with noble intentions
and high hopes
about the decency
of the travelling public.

but see what so often happens
and think again.
see the able-bodied
suits and brogues and cufflinks
acquire, suddenly,
a selective myopia.
and see them stare,
more intently than before,
at the bright little screens
in their laps and palms, never connecting
the dots between the unborn child slung
uncomfortably out in front of the living person stood inches away
(from the spreadsheet, the Twitter feed, or the game
of solitaire)
and the children spawned
from the loins
inside their own trousers. 

maybe it's more understandable
in someone who's not (yet) had kids
of their own.
think of that scene
in The Office
when that (admittedly creepily irritating) woman objects
to the plumes of cigarette smoke emanating from the nasty mouth
of that horrible sod from the warehouse... and he says
she's not special just because she let
some useless tosser blow his beans up her muff.
but look, even if you haven't had children and
even if you're one of those people who goes on about
how you're never going to have children, and
even if you're one of those people who goes on about
how it's other people's choice to have children and
how you don't see why you should have to listen
to someone else's fucking brats making noise
in a restaurant,
or how you don't see why you should stand up for some bird
just because SHE'S DECIDED to have a baby:
well,
let me put it this way:
one day you're going to be old,
infirm,
incontinent,
and confused.
and
when that time comes
and you've had no children,
or the children you've had think you're a mean-spirited arse...
then you'd better hope that enough fucking brats have been born
in the time it's taken you to become
a desiccated husk.
because if new humans
are in short supply
then who's going to wipe your backside
and listen to your peevish bullshit?

veteran broadcaster

a national treasure,
he sounds, now,
like someone doing
a very good impression of himself: 
spiralling comfortably
up his own arsehole,
happy to be lucratively bored,
auto-sodomised by the horns
of complex intertextuality across
multiple media platforms (on radio,
on mobile, online)
and sucked
into an endless lilting vortex
of parodies,
committed, folks,
by his own fair hand.

oh joyous day, halloo kalay

stitched together a messy little bit of poesy ruddy ages ago - made up of bits 'n' pieces from there and there. there's a britney lyric, of all things, and all sorts of other detritus. some time after making it and putting it up here - sent it off to the good people of HAGGARD & HALLOO, an online and print publication based in Austin. Texas. these guys are PROLIFIC curators of stuff they deem to be creative and contemporary, publishing something new every day since 1999. 

anyhoo, the piece shuffled, finally, to the front of the queue and earlier this month it made it onto the Texans' site, albeit with the line breaks shot to hell, but that's really a minor thing. nice to see it there anyway and you may wanna look at the other stuff there.

THE GLORIOUS DEAD

my son was born on the 13th of november,

which falls on a tuesday this year.

you're not going to have a kids' party on a tuesday, right?

not in term time, right?

so we do it on the sunday, remembrance sunday of course and,

as ever, the role of jolly fellow is outsourced

to some grinning goon half my age

who gets on great with kids and whose

smile says you're a miserable prick.

this is at one of those bloody places:

you know, a unit on an small industrial estate:

soft indoor play equipment,

germs,

shrieks,

plenty of parking and

a coffee shop where the mums and dads

read their papers and

deal with

their email,

their hangovers,

the dullness of a cocaine comedown,

their caffè macchiato and

those hard, expensive little biscuits.

other people's children

and our child

do

what they do

at these places:

they slide down things,

they pretend to be zombies or

super mario or

sonic the hedgehog or

whatever and

as some young voice

shouts out this is my gun and

i'm going to shoot you,

old soldiers

and new soldiers

parade in braid

and bandages 

and pomp

and prosthetic limbs

to the sound of LADY GAGA

along whitehall

to the cenotaph,

with the commentators' words

mangled by the BBC's closed captioning

that can't keep up, so,

really i'm not making it up,

somewhere in the serious crowd

are some

SCARY TREES OF STATE.

and at the eleventh hour,

the music stops and

one of the FUNZONE goons

invites us

to join the two minutes' silence but

there's no such thing as silence in there,

and as I watch

men laying wreaths

(men who have ordered the bombing

of cities and villages

in full knowledge

of the infants

[collateral damage]

who will breathe their last

in the rubble

of their nursery schools and paediatric wards),

I fancy somewhere I can hear

my own son's voice,

SCREAMING:

i'm not your friend anymore!!!! and,

unbidden,

my great grandfather marches back

from the trenches of the GREAT WAR,

shelled into heavy-handedness,

knocking his children about (my grandmother,

my great aunt), slapping them

into pieces of vindictive shit

that take it out

on my dad,

who doesn't take it out

on me.

but when those devils from the playing fields of eton

sent market porters and stevedores

towards the mortars,

a pebble dropped

into the lives of every poor bugger's family

up and down the land and

the ripples

keep rippling,

ever fainter of course,

even now.

happy birthday to you,

squashed tomatoes and stew,

you look like a monkey,

and you live in the zoo.

SATAN

so I'm walking down to the station
on a nice bright morning and
god's in his heaven and
all's well with the world and
then this bloke appears from a side turning,
riding his bike on the pavement
on the other side of the street:
a man of thirty-five or forty,
his front wheel wobbles as one hand
comes off the handlebar and slides
into his pocket
for a cigarette.
he spits a piece of chewing gum
onto the paving slabs outside the nursery school and
weaves his tyre tracks 
into the little lawn
at the front of those new apartments.
cigarette lit,
he zips downhill,
then diagonally across the road
just ahead of the junction and
straight through the red lights,
mounting the pavement
on the other side.
and I think
SATAN.

and on the train
this tool
in an M&S suit
and a Thomas Pink shirt
gets on halfway through my journey,
sits next to me and steadily widens
the gap between his thighs.
he is trying to push his way from his seat onto mine and wipe ME
against the wipe-CLEAN plastic-coated
carriage wall,
and his elbow
is working into the tender space
above my hip. jabbing, jabbing.
and he's tutting 
as I push back a bit
and I'm going to say
"are you trying to sit on my lap, you cunt?
are you fucking winding me up?"
but I don't.

that's really funny

the first year I lived in Poland
I lived alone,
something like six storeys up
a building that swayed in a wind which whipped in
from east to west, starting out beyond the steppes
of central Asia
and gathering speed across the low
green Świętokrzyskie Mountains.
and on the evenings when the power went out,
I'd sit on the floor, reading Bukowski by candlelight and
eating meatballs or bigos heated on the little gas stove, and
I never complained
about the lack of furniture
or about sleeping on a very thin foam-rubber mattress
or about the graffiti
and the shaven-headed teenage smokers
on the stairwell
of the block.

I liked the solitude,
I liked it better than coming home
to the sound of someone else's voice
and the tutting and the post-it notes
about not rinsing out the bathtub
about not double-locking the door
about all that stuff
you have to worry about
when you share a place
because working your drop-out job
pays far too little
to buy you
even the smallest space
in which to be
alone.

but ten months in Kielce was enough.
it was unlovely,
with its little bits of life and light
all seemingly straggled
along one long central street,
ulica Henryka Sienkiewicza.
and all that was
was a couple of places
to eat bad pizza
or drink a beer in a cellar,
worrying that some arsehole
in a bad tonic suit
might shoot some other arsehole
in a bad tonic suit, and
all the time
not knowing enough of the language
to know how dangerous
those fuckers really were.

don't get me wrong,
there were some good people there,
hardened into humour, ready to share
their homes, their food
and their stories
with this young Englishman
who was crazy enough
to spend time
scratching out a living
in their out-of-the way town.
yeah, don't get me wrong,
before and after the snow came
I liked to walk arm in arm with this one young girl,
this smart little Anna,
through the untidy parks and
across the cobbled marketplace
where peasant women
in tight headscarves
sold their potatoes, their plums,
their jars of fat.

so I took the offer
of a bigger city, taking my few things
to Kraków,
not suspecting,
of course,
that I'd be there,
in love with the place,
in love with everything going on there and
in love with one maddening girl there
and in lust
with a few more there
for a few more years
after that.

for the first few months
the only bad part about having moved there
was needing to live in the same apartment
as a pretty curious fellow who worked
in the same place as me.

this was Chuck, an American,
a graduate
of a state university in New England,
and a native of the Connecticut suburbs
to the north
of NYC.
curious? yes, yes, curious.
a real weirdo, in fact,
but harmless.

he had a small number of ageing checked shirts
which he buttoned right to the throat, and
a small number of pairs of fading jeans
that he tucked tightly
into these stupid looking
pale brown waterproof duck boots
just as soon as a few drops of rain were heard falling
past the windows
of the flat.

he was a man of strange habits.
for instance, he was particular about the way he ate his cornflakes.
he would pour a layer of the cornflakes
from the packet
to the bowl, then
he'd splash on a little milk and then he'd pat down the cornflakes,
using the back of his spoon.
pat pat pat. like he wanted the cornflakes to lie perfectly flat.
then he would pour on more flakes
then more milk and then go
pat pat pat
again, with the spoon,
pat pat pat.
over and over this went,
four or five layers of cornflakes
applied in this way.
oh, and the whole time
he did this
he was standing up,
with his spoon held right out at arm's length.
it was one of the damnedest things I've ever seen
and he did it like that every morning
for all the mornings I lived there.

and he was obsessively tight with money.
I mean, we all earned nothing in real money,
our wage in złoty,
well it would make you wince
to convert it to dollars or pounds.
but everything was still cheap there then.
I never worried about what I spent.
there was no point saving,
'cos as soon as you went home for Christmas or whatever,
the cash was really worthless.
so you'd eat in restaurants,
take pretty girls to the cinema,
spend all night in bars,
get haircuts,
go to the football matches
and always have a little left over
when payday came around again.
but not Chuck. he watched everything he spent,
and he took to schlepping right across the city
just to get to a supermarket
where things were a fraction cheaper.
he used to head off with this little shopping trolley,
one of those two-wheelers that old ladies use,
and he'd load the thing with cartons and cartons
of fruit juice
that cost a little less
than the same thing
from the all-night convenience store
forty paces
from our front door.
we were on the third floor and I'd hear him
and his trolley
coming up the stairs
with all those cartons.
slap, slap, slap,
as he dragged it
up from the street.

Chuck was also a very strange guy to talk to.
he didn't really get jokes,
he listened in complete silence
when someone else spoke,
not giving back any signals.
then sometimes,
at the end of somebody telling him a story
about something they'd done
or something they'd seen,
he would say,
without smiling,
and with no laughter in his voice,
"that's really funny".

he was strange about women.
I know he really lusted after this one red-haired girl
from Manchester
who was also working in the city
and who wandered into our workplace one day,
looking for other English-speaking people she could hang out with.
but he never made any move on her
and he seemed more painfully silent
and shy than ever
when she was around.
and then one night
he saw me walking somewhere with her,
from one bar to another, I guess,
we were drunk
and holding onto each other for support,
tottering about
in the dark.
and that's all it was. I wasn't into her.
but he kind of confronted me.
a day later.
asking why I'd been with this girl,
what I'd been doing and
didn't I know
that he liked her.
there was a flash of violence
in the usually unperturbed eye
of this bloody American fruitcake.
I was, seriously, like
what the fuck are you on, Chuck?
cool it, brother. really.
for fuck's sake.
anyway, this didn't go on forever.
pretty soon I was living in a big house full of boisterous Poles,
wild parties
and the sweet smoke of cannabis.

anyway, that was all years and years ago.
it sometimes shocks me to realise that it's fifteen years now
since I finally came back from Poland for good.
yes, I have seen him since. he stayed in touch by email,
back when people were starting to get into email.
he used to send these very very long messages,
describing everything he'd done for months and months,
where he was working, how much money he was making,
how he was back at his parents' place, how he started to make money
selling stuff on eBay,
back when people were starting to get into eBay.
and he'd tell me
about trips back to Poland, where he'd always meet a new girl,
a girl with whom he had exchanged emails or whatnot
prior to getting on the plane from New York.
and these trips of his, well it broke your heart to hear about them.
he'd fly three or four thousand miles or whatever it is,
with the idea that the Polish chick waiting for him
was actually waiting for him,
when in fact all she'd done
was say "yeah OK"
when he suggested meeting up.
in a couple of these stories he told,
the girl wasn't even in her home town when he arrived from the USA.
generally he managed to embarrass them into showing up at some stage,
but he seemed impervious to the rejection
and kept doing it every summer.
different girls. same results.
in one message back
I asked him why he didn't just get together with someone in the States,
meaning a woman living close by.
he never answered.

then I was getting married
and he sort of invited himself to the wedding.
it was hard to say no.
I'm glad he wasn't in time for my stag weekend.
the frenzied screaming at the football,
the jibes of my old mates,
the blizzard of cocaine.
well, it wouldn't have been his scene,
and the boys would have been all like
who the fuck is this bloke?
but there he was
at the wedding with,
guess what?
a confused-looking Polish girl in tow,
a girl who visibly didn't feel attracted to him.
and then,
a few months after that,
my wife and I were in America, and we wanted to spend
new year's eve in Manhattan,
getting wasted,
eating,
shopping.
all that.
so of course I mentioned it in an email,
and of course he showed up one December afternoon.
and guess what?
he had those fucking duck boots on.
actually the same pair, I think,
something like eleven years
after I'd first seen them
in the hallway of the flat in Kraków
and wondered what they were.
he also had these fuzzy earmuffs on.
it looked ridiculous
and my wife felt awkward, shuffling around an art gallery in New York,
me, her
and this funny dude.
and he suggested a place to eat, and it was decent enough,
which surprised me, because I remembered him only eating in the cheapest places you could find.
and, at his suggestion, we had wine. and the wine was kind of expensive,
but what the hell. we were on holiday. and we were doing OK moneywise.
and we'd be splitting the bill, right?

no, he got up and walked out to the toilet when the waiter brought the bill,
and he was out there long enough for me to realise
that me meant for us to pay.
I didn't get angry. I guess he was broke,
having lost another job to which he wasn't suited,
having spent years, by then, living with mom and pop.
again, sort of heartbreaking really.
so we paid. and he dashed off to catch his bus back to Connecticut.

the last time we saw him
I decided enough was enough. this time he was really a pest.

our kid was just a few months old,
I had a lot on at work,
and it wasn't an especially convenient time.
but Chuck wrote to say that this time he was going to look around England
rather than Poland and I said OK when he asked could he come stay with us for a short time.

he drove my wife crazy.
how can you talk to this fucking guy? she asked.
all he does is just list how much he's paid for really banal things
and tell me he got a good deal on this or that.
it's maddening. he doesn't listen to what the other person's saying.
get him out of here, she said. find a way of not being a shit about it.
but get him out of here.
so I did.
well, I just said it was a little bit more of a strain than we'd expected,
that my missus wasn't really feeling up to having house guests,
what with the boy being so young and waking us up
a zillion times a night.
so he was off.
but not before telling me about his trip to Newcastle, a couple of weeks before he'd come to stay with us.
he'd emailed some girl he'd met online on some chat site or something.
she'd said sure look me up.
so he went to bloody Newcastle of all places,
only to find she wasn't there.
terrible.
poor bastard.

I guess he's somewhere on the autistic spectrum
and I guess that shit with the cornflakes and the saving money
is some kind of OCD.
you want to dislike him. because that would be easier.
but I guess I'm not quite as hard-hearted as I tell myself I am.

I wonder when he'll turn up next.