10.Theatre Piece by DuncanMcGibbon (world of reading TXT) 📖

presumed by no thinking mind
to set out for town again.

With the moonlight aping the lamps
by tenements and the golden age of well-placed villas.
Empty coaches will follow at regular intervals,
Journeys will lead to furious places of non-existent war.


Priapal 2

I don’t need you to guard
my wine that’s stiff
and the trellis that’s so hard,
or we’ll have a tiff.
It’s my zest,
you little pup,
that you watch best.
so keep it up,

You maybe
the hard-on God
but that odd
bit of tree

your idol’s carved from
might end up in the fire,
if I can’t come
and you feel my ire.

Soliloquy 9

Larbaud’s train de luxe is sliding through Europe.
Everyone has been edited elegantly
in the Gallimard Halogen glare.
Like an footnote to a bland obituary, immortal hope
races us through pages of indexed towns.

The narrative finds us in our train-voiture
I shield my sleeping, swaying son
on the top couchette, while below
a mother and daughter still unsure
whisper the percussions of their journey.
with a family of circus clowns.

A dusty town, narrowed by a river,
It is Tournon and, Mallarmé,
you slip through the door,

“My wife, expecting our first, slept in that way.
I was an underpaid provincial teacher.
She wondered at my dreaming,
yet it was I who gave her God no say.”

The train lurches on past monuments to German wars,
while he looks at me in deadnight freedom.
and burns the pages of his missal at a secret altar
to a dead sister in a pre-industrial Edom.
I tremble at his self-centredeness of sight
to turn the Catholic singularity at its breaking point
into a boudoir frozen in a dread pogrom of the soul,
more sinister to the curse of his secular Bossuet.

“My wife put out the lights on surpliced ecstasy
and shut the door on similes of voids
leaving me, the schoolmaster, writing late
by the brimming lamp, in mimicry
of locked existence, a heap of cold monstrances,
thuribles, relics: each with a faded price tag.
First communion veils tossed without clemency
onto piles of supernaturals, emptied and frozen
with no holy pictures reattached.”

He leaves me, smiles at his reflected fame,
quotes from Hamlet, to joke about his state.

My children begin to wake, and to acclaim
the bewildered landscape, huge chateaux,
rear up like redundant systems of a theory:
there a high garden and a lake in its frame.

As morning comes. The “I” lies back
trying to picture Languedoc,
made into a Parc Nationale de Dieu
by the Rhône mist. The land’s slack
is a Catholic ode in the grand old style.
The “me” resists the praise of a thuggish God
and his shyster word in funerary black,

the inverted faith of my own dismay.
A torrent of rite has been turned over.
while Avignon lies under a seven o’clock sun.
A long, red wall hides it from display.

Love Mimes 4

So, this was the climax.
You, reluctant, in my arms:
me, exultant, free of the tax
on guiltiness that harms.
You in ecstasy, your coldness, lax,
while we warm in foreign climes
expatriate to Puritan crimes.


Soliloquy 10

After those shadows of orthodox fear,
I leave the reservations of the ghost.
The long low platform,silver and white
in the early sunlight. People and quite clear,
the young, in luminous reds and blues,
lean or sit against walls.The town is bright
with rooftops strewn like a pack of card,s
edging the brimming sea and the sky so near.
A girl with a typique shrug of a delicate shoulder
reajusts the halter of her top without a touch,
like a white moth on a brown bere.
She waves goodbye to the boyfriend
who maybe regrets the parting with that skin
and hair and makes his smile sincere.
While Valery refuels the demi-urge
and fills the spaces of an empty God.
The conscience that will not interfere
with anti-consciousness.
The places and these people, exist
as alien materials to re-invent the drear,
last identity:all pure metaphysics,
not word need be real, except what we twist
and hammer from this given-ness to steer
our senses. The spring’s head is dry,
despite the sense you try to make,
A river is a road of pebbles.Its bank is sheer,
the trees parted ironically,
each on either side of emptiness.

Chorus 3,of Blakean Currency Speculators

Then came the clerks of treachery,
the solicitors of betrayal
with slobbering jaws
and grey, restless eyes
to sell the British graveyards
to the Erms of time.
Heseltine in fetters grown
from his own heart,
knows they will reverse
the judgement on the dead.
Thatcher, daughter of the light,
would not attend him.
She had sensed his dark spirit
and weak resolve.
Enraged, he had sought her in the
places of illumination
which cast his vile shadow
on the ground of purity.
Thatcher sat, her face to the sun.
Her body glowed white
with a fierce flare, which
Heseltine could not reach,
nor could he see her beauty
lest his eyes burned to the core.
He wass delayed in his workshop
and would not sign over the Westland
dead to the managers of the aeons.
He had a final grave dug deep
by Thatcher’s curbed
and broken brothers.
Open, dark and still, it would
support the endless sleep,
of the Sons of Disraeli away from
the Erms’ mandibles of greed
and the armour of their avarice.
Yet he hungers to kill her light
by which the raiders navigate.
Heseltine waits by the places
of desolation, the theatres
of death and captivity.
Now, Major, with a radiant
smile and happiness in his eyes
announces the mercy of the elders
at the exchange rate of being.
The Erms have a right
to ravage time, as it was they
invested in the cosmological
ravines where time’s flow reversed.

Enraged, Heseltine, speeds in flames
to the final horizon and meets
with the elders, as evil has a say
in universal destiny.
The evil-one takes out the Book
of Neo Liberal Conscience
to show how all will stand
condemned among its pages. Only the
extinction of the poor will cancel it.
The entity of guilt itself
will destroy the frame of vision.
All elementals face the void.
His massive brow is wrinkled.
His hair, dire and furrowed.
Thatcher must die for impiety and justly,
or Heseltine will expose the illusion
of being and bring down the universe.
Both protagonists are confined in the
temple vaults that darken being.
The elders know that even the raiders
are illumined in Thatcher constant light.
Is Major a traitor with the clerks?
The elders debate with lesser entities,
While in the hangar of darkness
lewd shapes celebrate their malice,
And Heseltine observes them, debased
with dread, having seen the last grave filled
with ash and clinker and having heard
the howls of steel feet moving in
to claim the victory in a harsh new wilderness.
Yet as the last vile demon sleeps
the fire of right has not gone out.
Major, taking Thatcher’s ashes, shoots away
with a new and powerful aura,
which Heseltine sees and curses
his gentle light by which the Erms
already ravage the sleep of human dead.

Soliloquy 11

The town takes us in to listen to English exiles
now the driving rain engorges the gutters.
The little grey lizards skulk under old lead pipes.
Rain is the grief of the South, unexcluded by open space.
that throbs with falling water like a field of glass corn.

To beg the culture from such a town is like
prising a wounded bird from a dog’s mouth.
Its English voices talk of dead writers
visit its shelved conflicts or creep
from its houses framed for spies.
The sight of hundred year plane trees
as dense as roofless pillars
left standing by untranslatable cultures
tells me their massive avenues
have refuted time, but not the rain
that shelters neither history nor families.
With sodden leaves high and twisted
they are remote, not even living,
but sound stoneware drums,
pumelled by the rattle of shower drops.
until a concierge, her lunch disturbed,
opened her doors to surprise our shelter.


Chorus 4,of Cataloguing Librarians

The ‘A’ bombs mushroomed at his birth.
B sixty twos brought him down to earth.
CS gas brought friends suffocation.
but Wilson’s ‘D’ notice barred publication.
News of the ‘E’wings caused him no concern,
The Ascent of F6 another text to learn,
pin-up girls in G-strings his only newsread.
To injustice in ‘H’ blocks he paid no heed
His IQ by teachers was judged fit to serve.
He invented the J cloth, despite his reserve.
He read only Kafka and saw himself as K.
and the L shaped room taught him to lay
He took the M4 daily in a Fiat saloon
with an N registration not a day too soon,
while his O level children swatted Auden by pat,
then a P 60 thudded dull down on the mat.
Belief in hope was blocked by Bultmann’s Q
Dad’s photo of R101, summated his view.
The ‘S’ bend flushed away life’s joy.
At the ‘T’ junction he injured a boy
and made a ‘U’ turn hit and run.
The trauma of Mum’s V bomb left him undone.
as did the ‘W’ formation of fighters in Burma,
An X- ray showed up a hostile murmur.
His Y fronts hid the scar, or so he said,
for later he died on his own Z bed.


Soliloquy 12

We must have looked like tourists to the girl
relaxed in cut down shorts.,who kept the gate.
She misunderstood our reluctance. Too late
to hide our awkwardness. She didn’t see
our wary, footsore need to stimulate
the children and our quitting of the sea.
to make an exploration of the town.
She shrugged as if we didn’t care for poetry,
tossed back her hair to read her book again.
We left, with happier kids, Vauban’s crown
Your face, my lover comes to me, when
you opened a window to let in Collioure.
I saw your puzzlement that out of men
I knew this one, yet was unsure
to see him pinned down. What did we look for?

No poet should be on show. I feel again the allure
of the sea-glossed sand, your legs upon the shore
and your brow, sun-tawny as the earth.
Such vision is the show. Life can draw
in sand the outline of a man whose worth
is washed away by waves that wash away ourselves
Let the fortress be his place of birth
and the girl his iron angel who delves
deep that we should hear our bad egos rasp
in chained emotion and see the helves
of faithless feelings in our coward grasp.
and sends us off, for none should penetrate
another’s depths except to liberate.

Again the place could hide a shuttered spring
a cloister by the sea where your walled garden
is hovered over by some naked loving
that’s always blind, vanished in a stone margin.
Nearby a seat of stone marble
stands moistened, overgrown with cyclamen.
On the white walls lizards gambol
with the young autumn sun and stirring wind.
Maybe she says , a rustling, surpliced angel,
“Why not see your souls?”We’d follow gladdened
where the moon has just appeared on waves.
Yet we will not go there, to be maddened
by another life that makes us slaves.