Writing for voice
What Remains Now
October, Belfast, 1990. I’m at home doing schoolwork with the radio for company.
A sharp squall of feedback. Bared-teeth guitar. A voice. Yearning and torn. Nirvana.
By the chorus, I’m woozy. My blood is warm honey. I would spend the rest of my life chasing that feeling.
‘The sun shines in the bedroom, When we play, The raining always starts, When you go away’
What’s grief? Wrestling with reason. Reverie in the space between. You stare at things. Lampshades, dewdrops, the shadows of leaves.
I was hollowed out when he died. Colossal, luminous beauty, snuffed out.
If he were still around, what would he make of the mess we’re in? The right wing resurgence, the Fascist platforming. Incels, transphobes, toxic misogyny. Kurt was vulnerable, but righteously angry. I hear his voice, cracked and laconic, eviscerating these modern mutations of masculinity.
And I hear myself, questioning.
Did I stay true to what we believed in?
The further I get from his death, the deeper it sits in me. I get older. Kurt is eternal. A mythic, phantom thing.
It calls to me. Or maybe I call to him. I need this reckoning.
In a dream, I travelled to his cabin in the afterlife.
He dressed the same: t-shirt, ripped jeans. But the face had changed. Parts were missing. The chin, mouth and nose were formed of a shifting mist, threaded with fragments of dead leaves.
His eyes remained; watery blue and weary.
We sat in silence. He handed me coffee. I took a sip, and set it on the table.
He lost his shit.
“What the fuck are you doing!” he screamed. “That’s antique furniture! You’re going to ruin it with the hot coffee! Use a fucking coaster, man!”
A fucking coaster?
I moved to the bathroom. It was cramped and filthy. A MAGA cap, stained and sagging, hung above the mirror. There was a bone stuck in the u-bend of the toilet.
Outside the window, an olive-green sedan sat on bricks. Flying around and around the back of the car, between the tyre and the mudflap, was a tiny plane. About the size of my finger. A ragged banner trailed from the tail. On it were written the words:
Clear light. Clear bowl. Clear day.
Kurt is gone.
Everything beautiful about him was set free.
What remains now is rotten and blocked.
Like a bone stuck in the u-bend of the toilet.
I look at the palm of my left hand. There is a plughole in my palm. I hold my palm directly over the plughole of the sink. Smoke rises from the sink, slowly entering the plughole in my palm. I feel myself travelling.
I reach out.
And whisper the words…
Jammin’ a raid on the sun
Have you ever worked a job
Where you felt lost and lonely?
Have you ever written
In pencil on a page
When your palms are sweaty?
And the heel of your palm
Dampens the page
And the paper doesn’t take
You’ve got to write through it
Write through your natural excretion
Write from the plughole in your palm
Plughole to plughole dreaming
I met a French baker
Buncrana, ’93
He held my face
We danced, pinky in pinky
He had an Airfix plane in his palm
He made that plane
Passing overhead sound
He passed the plane
Into my mouth
I felt my palate
Detach
I swallowed something
Warm and syrupy
It was lovely
I lay my head
On his chest
Fell asleep to his breathing
I saw the future
As bioluminescent architecture
Psychedelic skeletons of grief
Every cell of every cell
Was sizzling
Visions of love
Passing through me
Here
Look where I’m pointing
To my forehead
To the coin inside the wounded skin
Jammin’ a raid on the sun
I broke a thorny branch from the hedgerow
Jammed it under my arm
Jammed it under my pale green vest
I’m on the studio floor
Spooning a burnt car door
Tapping my toes on a galvanised bucket
Filled with empty sandwich packets
Babs came by
To change my bandages
‘Baba-Roy, why you gotta’
Drill a hole
In your ankle?’
I suck her toes
She calls me boldy
Jammin’ a raid on the sun
After you died
A world opened up inside me
I touched things
Conditionally
Old lovers
Hand-painted quilt covers
Touching
With metal fingers
I put my hand
Into a bowl of water
I add three petals
Three petals
Rotate above my palm
Jammin’ a raid on the sun
Animal father
Caramel tweed
Bones on your sleeves
Sand in the gaps between the car seats
Your name over the water
A coin under the sofa
Jammin’ a raid on the sun
Listen
To the painter
In the space next door
Shuffling
Back and forth
He senses the divide
Smiling
In the corridor
I used to make
Poetic, abstract painting
I really believed in love
I really believed
I was part
Of the cool club
I used to make
Containers of difficulty
Containers of freedom
All in all
They were forgeries of peace
I have been released
Now I’m just livin’
Jammin’ a raid on the sun
Brón Michael
Brón, Brón Michael
Talking to pigeons on the pigeon stump
Your hair made me nervous
Selling Peter your Kleenex
It’s summertime Brón, what’s wrong?
I put two copper coins inside your arm
And off you run
Waving metal pipes above your head
Waving at your best friend
Talk to me again about your shoes
That’s why I took a shine to you
On the bus home
Singing about pale, green ceramic tiles
And the dirt under your fingernails
You know you’re the only one
Who can read my father’s writing
I get pictures when you read
Of what his life must have been like
I can see his life through your eyes
I know he spent a long time alone
With hands that were burning
And Brón
It took him years to settle
Emotional reactions to metal
Dreaming of paintings
He never got to make
King of the cheap shot
A painter's ghost
Kind and broke
A graveyard in my paint set
You know Brón
We did have fun
Pissing like dogs
In our backyard
Tinkling keys
On cheap pound shop synths
Preset beats
Shuffling feet
Pis splash
On paving stones
On jelly shoes
On frogs
I say
Is any time spent wasted?
Who knows?
I am ok today
I don’t burn toast
I keep kindness close
I sit in my garden
Naming flowers
Giving wasps my ice pops
I sip cheap wine
From my plastic cups
I listen to Spanish horse racing
Repair deck chairs
With hands that are burning and Brón
Dreaming of paintings
He never got to make
King of the cheap shot
A painter’s ghost
Kind and broke
A graveyard in my paint set
The Sphinx
While consoling The Sphinx
He gives me
An extraordinary meditation
On grief and mortality
With magical correspondences
Maps, and frogs, and graveyards
Some kind of necropolis
Was growing ever larger in his bones
From the debilitating sickness
Of having to ingest
All this violence
In the end
The Sphinx says
‘Medicate me’
So I do
While caressing his palm
I slip into a dream
In the hangar of a spacecraft
I see a blood red robot
Floating inside
A huge, translucent globe
I think of the book I was given
Taking hallucinogens with the evil police chief
The Sphinx gurns
Baring its gums for the orchestra
But no
There is no sun
Only the afterlife of love
The Sphinx dies
Its bowels run out
Like oil over dry leaves
Bloody prints on piano keys
Everything is playing on me
As always
The real story is elsewhere
Rising from his wheelchair
The Pale-Faced Clown
Removes all his jewellery
He takes the urn under his arm
We follow him to the hillside
The coast falls away to the sea
Below there is a flotilla
Of wrecked cargo ships
From 1863
Chris
Chris
Standing in the doorway
Of parties
Chris
Looking healthy
Looking saintly
Wearing
Homemade
Chrome green bracelets
Wearing
A blue paper tulip
Hand-painted towelling
Chalk tablets
And a necklace of toothbrushes
A locust tattoo
On your knuckle
The musical notation
Of whale song
On your buttons
You brought me
A bucket
Of frogspawn
‘When you comin’ home?’
Drawing
A pale-faced figure
Rising from a river
A pale-faced figure
With a plant for a hand
A pale-faced figure
Watching the water
And the changing behaviour
All eyes are on
The river bed
All eyes are on
The stone head
Of a tiger
Blinking slowly
Bubbles are blown
Off your wrist
Turning slowly
Smoke rings
Hang in the air
Between us
I’ve never felt
This kind of
Freedom
The door shuts
Plant pots
And
Coal dust
A car skidding
Fabric ripping
The washing machine
Spinning
The smell of cat piss
Feet shift
And
Locust tattoo hands
Punches
The air between us
Chris
Secretly they were afraid
Afraid of our voices at the door
Flute
She lifted her wrist, and showed me where it was broken. ‘They put the pins in there', she said, pointing to a hole.
‘I fell out my back door, right onto a bed of nails I was making'.
I lean across the passenger seat, taking her wrist to my lips. I blow on it, faking the sound of a flute.
The car pulls into the drive.
'The toasters broken, you need to dress accordingly, there's the phone'
The Bucket
I went down to the riverbank, and collected some frogspawn in a galvanised bucket.
I got back to the house, and half-expected to find you there, cooking.
I put the bucket on the table, and washed my hands.
I turned and saw a bird, small, blue, and featherless, rising from the bucket.
The bird fell onto the kitchen floor.
Little bits of frogspawn dribbled off the bird, and seeped through the crack in the floorboards.
I got down on my hands and knees, and started singing into the floorboards.
It was some song that came to me, looking into the little bird's eyes.
You! Know! What! That! Song! They! Sing!
Yoda Hardcore
Yoda Hardcore
Armed to the teeth
With magic
And bad dreams
Dreams of cheap
Pound-shop shower curtain rings
Dreams of wet grass, cold glance, bleached-by-the-sun catalogue dreams
What did you find in the hedgerow?
What did you find that you want me to know?
Let's break it down
Let's break it to them gently
Varnished, varnished on a twig
A car reverses slowly from the driveway
Of a suburban family home
5 a.m
January 1980.
Frost has formed around the teat of a pale green soother
Cheap Mirrored sunglasses
Buried next to the rosebush
And the breath on a twig
Slow breaths, cold breaths
A slow descent from the bedroom window
Walking to school ashamed
You're watching your classmate
Too shy to start a conversation
Pressing your palm against the freezing cold metal of the basketball post.
She tells you John Lennon is dead.
You ask, who's John Lennon?
In Hollywood
George Lucas and Irving Kershner
Are putting the final touches
To The Empire Strikes Back.
No one really knows yet who Yoda is
Your world is yet to fall apart.
Straw breaks in your hand.
Sickness is forty years in the future.
Screams and shouts and an empty bean can.
Star Wars figures are buried in the back garden.
A police walkie-talkie is buried in the back garden.
But something is warming up in the soil.
Something will coalesce.
Small Town Vampire
She wears a wide-brimmed hat
With netting that covers her face and neck
The doctor has given her medication to protect her from the light
They welcomed her because she was vulnerable and kind
They secretly serve her blood in the pubs at night
No one bats an eyelid
It’s become de rigueur
A small-town vampire
Cast adrift from her clan
They took her in
She grew from a bloody stone
A murder weapon left on the beach
First it sprouted flowers
Then hands and feet
They call her McDaniel, Charlotte
They would know her more now
For her red trousers
And green-rimmed glasses
She stands at over two meters tall
And works in the bakery on the main street
Preparing bread and buns on the night shift
Her gift to them, is stories
Stories of the dead
From her hair
Most Sunday nights
She invites the wounded and grieving
The love-hungry
They settle down in the kitchen
She hands them a yellow comb
One by one
They run the comb through her hair
They hear the voices of their loved ones long gone
The voice is only audible to the comb-holder
They call this The Brenning Twentice
The act of necromancing the voice of loved ones
Through the hair of a vampire
A welcome, friendly, vulnerable small-town vampire