Four poems for Bat Bean Beam

A wet afternoon brings with it sufficient headspace to honour my poetic commitments to Bat, Bean, Beam where, as a laureate, I am regrettably asynchronous.

Shadow Children

What to do about that girl-of-twelve
who, though bright enough
cries a lot,

doesn’t want to mix with others,
gave up swimming and
can’t take a joke.

Academics and such are all very well
but if she won’t fit in soon
she never will;

She needs to jog or jolly along
ask fewer questions and
get on with it.

“The Dream is Over”

North Beach was for when you had nothing
save the dunes that protected the houses from the worst of the wind.
The women were breadwinners, by and large;
they did knitting, or mending, or took in boarders.
What the boarders did
came out in memoirs much later;
suffice to say
it was neither Christian nor kind.

The men stayed and worked, or came and went,
the children knew a little of what they didn’t have.
There was a density of churches
and prayer, no doubt, too;
polite conversation, in lieu of gossip
effaced the density of suffering.

Some of the children grew up to the middle class,
a different kind of walking wounded
from their peers, the war veterans.
It wasn’t just the men who had things
not to talk about.
Their hurt stayed silent for years
then broke out in retirement:
depression, confession, the ranks of the evangelicals
brought back bad angels for good people
who’d assumed, somewhere, the fault was their own.

Marked

We will die here,
or at least our labour will
or at least the printed pages’
simulacra of our thought.

Inside the emptied tower block
the new rewriting, ex cathedra,
invisibly reaches to occupy space
to harry or hurry the slow and the old.

Time Travel (1)

The intersection where you died
gets a lot of traffic
and why not?  It’s central to the
city, as well you know.
You died at rush hour
doing something stupid.  My good
fortune is that my stupidity
has yet to kill me.

What a mess a white wooden cross
would make of that good clean intersection,
or rather, what a mess the
buses that turn across it would
make of the white wooden cross.
You know what I mean.  I don’t
miss you like I used to, and neither
I suppose do your mates; it’s good,
I guess, that the violence of your
going doesn’t keep us awake like
it used to.

Still, I wish sometimes for some
sort of memorial, just like I wished
the day after you died for a report
other than in the freebie evening paper
which I doubt you ever read.  I grumble
at the fact of that celebrity kid
who died just after you (though
technically the day before).  We’ll
never joke about your last minutes
the way people joke about his.

Indeed, you wrecked the Manchester precinct
for me for years, boy.  Those shops
and nightclubs were like mausoleums to me;
cavernous mouths pouring kids like you
on to the streets, still, still, still.