Peppermint Aero Chutney

Peppermint Aero Chutney

It was a fortunate misreading
the kind that over-rides the first
dull meaning in a magazine:

four tigers in a frame.
I see them painted by Rousseau.
One gate at least hangs open:

There's a barrier, ten foot tall,
of dull wood painted green,
where the flowers and pathways were.

The overwriting hand is poised.
I think of William Blake,
his birthplace up the concrete steps.

There's an old VW convertible
that often parks round there,
yellow as a plastic bee.

No shop front that I pass
and pass again is ever the same:
blue as surreal ceramic.

Why does latte come out black?
With spikes up close, they look
bigger than church steeples.

A lemon nestles among the apples.
Being very sorry, or just being...
Acting up or just acting...

Soho Side

Soho Side

Walking the Soho side of Soho Square
I stop and stare: “Who locked the gate on us
in broad January day light?” I enquire
silently, where two girls chat and share. I suss
that they don’t care, don’t notice me; the gate
was never open for these sleek women,
whose English sounds quite confident and bright.
Staring on past them through the gate, it’s plain
to me: Summer has been padlocked away
by the cool giant who wants to ban our pleasure
of lying on worn grass in idle array
until there isn’t any grass – a measure
of potential, in one part of the melee,
for talking up a rapid urban culture.

Rangoon

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Rangoon

The Dignity: 11.0, Sunday night,
Rangoon in full tilt, speakers
on high stands. The amp is tube.

They play in front of the pub’s
oil painting, a woman’s face
in red, the height of a man.

A light is trained towards them,
and the drinkers are tuning in:
some begin to dance. There’s

nothing out there, some shops,
a road that needs maintaining,
electric rails the trains follow

out in the open this far North –
only this Rocking rhythm and words
that link us to the rights and wrongs
of men and women, Burmese monks
with cotton sails, riding against tanks.
Another pint: stand further back.

Curved planes continue through the amp and mike
across the road and into space.
Watch them playing: their eyes lock -

the music follows distant streets,
licks into shadows like a liquorice tongue,
goes blind down midnights steps.

The bassist has a 6.0 start;
A leaf curls round; a waist sways.
In the narrow space between the bar

and the stage, couples are making
each moment count. The bar’s
a rose open for last orders. Soon

last tubes will trundle back, and
in silence engulfed by black light
Rangoon’ll dissolve like sherbet dust.

+++

PoetryPivotal 3

Midnight Steps

Something is moving through a tunnel
a tunnel of silence and of brick,
and as it moves further and further away
the sense of the sound does not diminish.

It is born of a mechanism with many parts,
moves on the edge of what can't be heard;
perhaps it's below me or a few streets South
where the railway goes under the road.

The night is not entirely dark or silent:
the sudden creak of a footstep
in an upstairs flat. Three a.m: a cat sits
and looks out, as if seeing the shape

of something that's there, I can't see.
There's a bridge near Jeffreys Street,
where the nuclear waste in steel wagons
rattles on by, at least three a week

and a side alley leading West, down
seventy feet underneath the line. I sleep
with three storeys above me and three beneath;
the walls are thick, and the River, almost black,

flows under us through hidden arches
from Parliament Hill to Anglers Lane,
a sealed light that can't be seen
clusters on the surface, unexplained.

Some more of Eugene Atget's famous images

Some of Eugene Atget's famous images

Eugene

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/atget/index.html





EUGENE
(i)
My streets are empty
because I go out early
and take photographs.

My plates are too late,
mere things; what has happened
has left its mark.

Some mornings alone
I set up my camera
and just keep waiting

for the mist to rise,
for the vacancy to be
a few metres clear:

a cobbled concourse
leading to the Moulin Rouge
where dampness glistens.

Someone said I do
crime scenes, bleached and swept;
if so, the cops aren’t interested.

For artists - who else? -
these silver nitride traces,
instalment stories

where no shots ring out,
and there is no embrace, since
the world has ended.

These are documents
and nothing else. I know Man
Ray – he talks of a journal,

new existences.








EUGENE
(ii)

Sometimes, mornings I’m alone,
passing the Metro, and stop,
set up my camera in vain
for the faces emerging
and disappearing to greet
the soul that inhabits life:

the soul which was there
in the Luxembourg Gardens,
in the mist across water.

I record stone thoroughfares,
entrances machines will block,
the shops they’ll demolish.

My horizon is noisy,
limited by offices.

What can’t be repaired:
the stairs between walls,
full of entry points,

entrances for artists.


+++




Eugene (iii)

I took you still in your trades,
as you presented yourselves to me,
a set of prints from the streets
that you cross every day and re-cross,
imprinting yourselves at the heart
of the streets that you yourselves
create: baker, porter and tart,
peddler and hurdy gurdy man.
I made these pictures of you, and
with you, for you, as you were
each standing on your bit of street,
I with my tripod, as I presented
myself to you, fellow Parisian, graduate
of the School of Hard Knocks; we
were daybreakers on the gymnasium floor.