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Virgin Brides of Hartlepool
Have your teeth knocked out by dockers
on your wedding night. Accept
these perfect china chompers as our gift
and form your former molars into quoits.
Or send them to the Glamis Pit at Kibblesworth
where the Queen Mother will attach them
personally to the pit ponies' hooves:
put your smile into the dirt.
These ponies had their lips cut off
to stockpile cheeriness in Hartlepool
after a bomb hit the greyhound track
and blew out the museum's panes.
Dog parts dropped from the trees for days,
but we could still grin like horses.
So pay the Queen Mum back
and bare your gums for Britain.
Waiting for the Pixels
to settle into letters
is like
reading the rain
is like
watching flecks from snowy clouds
turn into a newspaper.
You're weighing them like pulses,
that dark dhal, or black rice
from Thailand: these are
the staple crops of sky.
The waiting gets so bland
the mind must add its spices:
cumin for commencement,
saffron for suffering,
lemon-grass for longing,
peppers for perfection
(black to bead a duchess,
white to make a pig sneeze,
Szechuan and Jamaican
just thrown in for fusion).
Runes are for repentance,
ideograms for absence,
cyrillic for the bowels,
and the odd Mayan glyph
for recreational purposes.
And still the tusk
of part-thawed information
remains unquantified and raw.
Let the message received
be pottage, let it maize us.
Let it millet the imagination.
Let us be bulgared and
buckwheated stupid.
Let it couscous our consciousness
and quinoa our knowhow.
Let it arrive.
Little choruses heard in the coals
Bury the angel
drown the pope
string up the monkey
swallow the dope.
Insert the football
before you inflate
drink up the dog
piss on me Kate.
Sell the Juninho
be NFL
tell the P Minister
life is a smell.
Sink the shipyard
open the cast
banjax the Geordie
bury his past.
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