Alan Morrison is author of twelve poetry collections,
most recently Anxious Corporals (Smokestack, 2021), Green Hauntings (Caparison, 2022), Wolves Come
Grovelling (Culture Matters, 2023). A winner of the Bread & Roses
Poetry Award 2018, and highly commended in the Shelley Memorial Poetry Prize
2022. Journal appearances include The Fortnightly Review, The London
Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, Vsesvit. Editor of international webzine The
Recusant.
The Fasters
Is this
always to be the sound of home:
the
interminable rumbling drone
of empty
stomachs—a parent’s nightmare:
growing
boys’ bellies but a larder bare.
The
stopped clock governs a timeless room
where ghouls
digest morsels in gloom—
Vincent’s Potato Eaters recaptured
a century later, on an uncarpeted
hearth, framed in the glow of a cathode ray—
a mute television views our chamber play;
Tausk’s Influencing Machine manifest
as a box of frights, a magic-charged cabinet
transmitting images, strange, transgressive,
advertisements of plenty, tempting, intrusive—
a trauma screen like the two-way mirror in
the special clinic mutely reflecting
the absentee son as he sits confessing
horrific thoughts that afflict his schooling—
Hardy’s Little Father Time pre-empted
by clinical intervention, suspended
in psychical aspic & left to ruminate
on the knotty nature of his obscure state,
like his parents’ lack, though a boilerplate
label abounds: the poor are profligate.
Blow the
cobwebs from the crib for Chrimbo,
Christ in a stable, a bloom of fake snow.
As Easter draws near, time to be abstinent:
our
fasting at last given symbol by Lent.
Caught
Alight!
Skidders’
sons brought up to aspirations
of thwarted
parental stations, surrounded
by numinous
mystique of musty tomes,
leather-bound
grimoires of forgotten
knowledge,
& an unpresuming heap
of chipped
heirlooms taking up the cramped
spare room
in our unremarkable
orange-bricked
mid-terrace—lapsed
&
cash-strapped lower middle class;
our ears
attuned to Gustav Holst & Ralph
Vaughan
Williams coming from father’s
scratchy
record player, or the brass
&
cymbals of the Royal Marine band—
orchestral,
classical, call it what you will,
sonically distancing
as our better-heeled
ancestors
he traced at ashtrayed weekends.
One Sunday
our ears caught alight from
a cassette
tape: a crash of Rickenbacker
struck by a
scowling working-class boy
from
Woking, yobbish bolshie voice,
Cockneyish
inflections infused with lyrical
invective:
our lightning introduction
to The Jam
(in their twilight) courtesy
of boy-Mod
Brendan, second eldest of five
impoverished
brothers, an undernourished
brood who’d
grown from glooms of a cold
roomy
council house, a pale tribe
who smelt
of damp & talcum powder,
ghettoised
on the dog-end fringes
of
gentrified Worthing where they’d play
out
Saturdays clambering about abandoned
building
sites, brownfields & wastelands—
we
gravitated to their unvarnished vim,
a vitality
that overrode any lack of vitamin,
felt some
unspoken bond with them,
almost like
being related, distant
cousins in
unconscious Catholicism.
Brendan,
the most highly-strung & sullen
of them all,
a brooder, temperamental,
evinced the
vocals in devout tones:
Weller’s
bark & woof, Foxton’s flustered howl,
call &
response between blasting guitar
&
thundering bass, & the clipped drum-tap
of
unflappable Buckler; sharp-suited magpies
pinched in
Sta Press, white socks, skinny ties
&
black/white bowling shoes pointed sharp
as
winklepickers, urchins in funeral suits,
pasty
scallywags, hair fringed at the front
unflatteringly,
puritanically cropped
from
shoulder-length tatterdemalion styles
of the late
Seventies—unreconstructed
Mods, the new retro Roundhead breed,
Secondary Modern Diggers, & we dug them!
This was
working-class music, common music,
it packed
gunpowder punch like saltpetre,
tapped
something in us though we felt impostors,
not quite
as poverty-carved as pale sculpted
faces on
our posters, sons on the shivering
verge,
something shivered our spines, shivered
our nerves,
something almost regimented
in that
aggressive reverb, primitive but tamed,
wild yet
disciplined & drilled to rattling drum,
thumping
bass & quick-cutting Rickenbacker—
&
Weller spat expletives into the spittoon
of his
gritted poetry & pockets of pastoral
wistfulness
among the glum urban slang
of his
language with scapegrace throat-scrapes
of
embarrassed sentiment cigarette-singed,
brush of
bashful masculinity, boy soldier
brash,
fuelled on adrenalin, guttersnipe-
golden of
tongue, honeyed hoodlum,
a slug of something
strong, nothing on
Aunt Hazel,
just silver papers dipped in
flat pints
to speed things along, furious
of soul,
furious song, & so soul-nourishing.
Something
in us changed that Sunday once
those
sounds sparked us awake, charged us
up with
jabbing vibes so we were buzzing
for hours
afterwards, our former tastes for
anesthetising
synthesisers & synthetic
chic of New
Romantics now dismantled by
authentic
music of reduced circumstances,
the
un-suppressible pulse of up-against-it
optimism,
thumping tempo of proletarian
hope—an
unreconstructed sound we’d not
forget,
which would influence us towards
new types
of tunes & attitudes, socialism
of soul,
communism of minds, & help us
face up to
tougher feelings when in our
future of
domestic scarcity we’d too be
sculpted by
poverty, sleep on empty stomachs,
endure
sporadic indignities of dole,
forced to
sign on & promise to sacrifice
our
educations if the job centre found us
work
unsuited to our skills & talents—
O we’d soon
become bitterly accustomed
to the
soul-scouring source of common music.
from The
Four Spoons of Phineus
Spoon Two:
Phineus Suspected of Parasitism
The appeal
panel was meant to be independent,
yet the
scent of preconceived opinion
as to
Phineus's suspected parasitism
overwhelmed
the impersonal chamber, a courtroom
facilitated
to scrutinise the incapacitated
(presumed
guilty of malingering until proven
otherwise),
impeach the poor, unemployed,
unemployable
(though it had nothing on
the
courtroom of his own accusatory thoughts
that never
show him mercy & always arrive
at the most
vindictive verdicts), consciously
misconstruing
honest accounts & taking
offence at
courtesy, as if attempted flattery,
choosing to
perceive evasive evil in the most
ingenuous
of gestures, an impertinence
imperceptible
because it simply isn't there at all,
imagined
sleights—as if being observed by
Victor
Hugo's pathologically conformist
Inspector
Javert whose morally forensic eye
sees evil
everywhere, who abhors rebelliousness
& the
bohemianism from which he himself
sprang (son
of a gypsy fortune-teller), scourge
of escaped
convict Valjean*Les Mis├йrables (1862),
or Herman
Melville's faintly satanic Master-at-
Arms
Claggart, arch-antagonist to Billy Budd,
the young
Adonic sailor & foretopman whose
innocence
& uncorrupted beauty he simply
cannot
countenance**Billy Budd (1891/1924);
a courtroom
for scouring out the sick & unlucky
with
pedantic pumice stones of 'I put it to you'-s,
rough
pebbles of scruples*** cross-questioning
the unfit
as if criminal suspects simply for
making
claims of the State that makes examples
of them in
pop-up judgement theatres,
treats them
as if their afflictions are their fault,
behavioural
foibles, ‘lifestyle choices’...
& so
the appeal was refused, as Phineus felt
in his
bones it would be—in spite of all the facts—
as he rose
from the chair (without using its arms
for support
as it was
noted), staggering towards
the savage
daylight of Havant gazing in against
the glass
from outside the suitably Brutalist
tribunal
building like an outraged vigilante
raging at a
convicted child molester being
bundled
into a van with a blanket over his face
that might
as well be an inverted spit hood
(the kind
of graphic imagery suggested in his
agitated
head)—then there was a hailstorm,
traumatic,
that clattered at the windows &
drummed on
the grass verges as the darkening
sky bruised
Navy blue & thundered, then halted
abruptly as
it had started, like a panic attack,
sun blazed
back, his mind pounded, thoughts
left
tattered, melted for scrap (is this lapsing
into rap?) as he
wound his way back across
the rough
concrete rail bridge that combed the shabby
precinct
with half its shops shuttered & graffitied...
They'd
evidently decided he was a wolf-
crying
chronic hypochondriac (metaphorically
lycanthropic
perhaps?), a
maladaptive
specimen of
Munchausen's syndrome by proxy,
or some
such psychosomatic ailment,
what used
to be more evocatively termed
valetudinarian (back at
school he'd always
haunted the
sickbay), anything but actually
what he
was: one of countless psychical casualties
of
elliptical descriptors, psychological
refugees
snagged on Kafkaesque paper
spikes,
cast on a scrapheap, cash-strapped,
ripe
pickings for Harpies as he had been
as a boy
absentee (please excuse the ellipses)…
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