Tina Hyett, Poems From In The Dirt

POEMS FROM IN THE DIRT Tina Hyett

PARNDON PRESS

Published by The Parndon Press c/o 17a Oakley Square Estate Somers Town, London NW1 3MK ©Tina Hyett 2008

I would have started on a longer poem but this one will hold the words alright put crosswise if I have to, uncounted but vamped to fill & overflow, the lyric spilt, split, spoiled – sold off, no given away worn out & worthless, friable polished in places, others nubbly & piled hoared, lined & sagging, dripping slowly down the page, form’s viscosity insufficient against the pull of repeated attractors: the vulnerability of language exposing us parasitised & predated, or just random secular decay a perpetual rot whose red spores drift through like sand in a glass or even a long empty room slowly filling. It is impossible to live here, even to fit in the dead crunchy detritus rising up choking my throat.

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Why do I still fantasise about Boyd? The sweep of his hair & the arrogant little strut. I’d welcome the big kid in a suit: Sit on my lap, Boydie, and suck on a swab. The grotesqueness of desire, the urge we’ve bought into a one-way valve into dissolution. That old joke about the skeleton at the centre: it is me, killed by Boyd’s ignorant anger like a fluffbunny. I admire his stubble his breath smelling of whisky & cigarettes, a little decay sweetening his imperfection. He’s always wrong doesn’t know it, poor chuck, & pushes on. A man not confined by clipped hedges he walks straight across the garden.

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I’d avoid the East End always: The ghosts there are hungry like the river will pull you down: It is a hard place scoured by the shadows of wealth. Anything surviving resists violently sitting quiet & tooled up at the back of the room. Nothing aggressive about it, the business of self defence. People turned into sandbags. This is where all the rivers & the sewers lead the low point of this city stolen liberties wasted in conflict & graft:

Don’t drift this way, Simon. Trapped now into art & fashion take your clothes & leave you wounded in the street laughing at you: all a game and you’re the loser. Their secret language blames you & excludes you builds up another world crazy & sentimental the land of the self-justified sinner. How much they love their family. How much they will despise you.

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At the Book Launch I realised: this lyric moment must last – all the detritus of the day shaken up squeezed across the page bits or lots of white space each word a miniature painting of itself. Just how much would they sell for? seriously Plus the grants & the residencies. After this only high art please.

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Slush. And high art. Indistinguishable from an aspergerish processing of all junk. Snow, you know, is never white not in this city the colour still of soot. One day it will be all washed out to shine like bones in a museum display. Under the cabinet a huge fluffbunny gathers. It is a form of consciousness: Unable to communicate properly it gets disconnected in the slush. Its ghost remains: querulous & shrill troubled like coming off prozac. In defence: make art. Make it high. Nothing on the ground now but slush.

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What we praise so often is just folly Our amazement at how shadows fall The same projection the sun has always given. How fascinated we are! What we ignore Bubbles up behind us like in Benjamin’s Angel Until she will deluge herself down upon All the rubbish of history come back to eat us. What we did we shall become: The culmination of our species failure Marking out the limits of conscious reason.

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Real solutions to imaginary problems – would you say that was advertising, literature or just mostly sex? I can’t theorise flesh not any more – the plasticity has gone. Reality, of course, becomes gritty, coarse-grained and the colour suffers a lot: metallic or muddy the available lighting deceives everyone: this is the place, a pity it just isn’t here – know what I mean? It’s as if the world tipped at 90° down: you scrabble to hold on at this gravity sink but what? Well? nature is wonderful, always a solace. Maybe then it was sex not literature or dreamwork good honest body to body the feel of his hair, I can like that at the time I suppose: another just as well, dear, they’re all like that underneath. Not a happy image. Gravity benefits no one no more than natural light. Who decides this? Where has the director gone to? Suddenly we all drift away or down.

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Pottering about on the old computer thinking of dragons when the skies opened. What a cock up! Everything fell out, not just the water: angels, coal, fish & clouds all fell down. Think detritus with a vengeance – really it was out for something, flopping aggressively. The angels, see, were mostly damaged by their fall denatured and subject to all sublunar ills at once. Their flesh stank like the fish & frogs (also dead) the coal was useful, but woefully damp the clouds slowly sank in on themselves, like remember balloons slowly wrinkling & shrinking on your birthday? Like that. A lot like that.

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Perhaps my ancestors come from Breslau – though I doubt this. I have never satisfactorily explained my name to myself – is this why I feel abandoned? Like a slowly aging fluffbunny that as soon as it’s found is doomed. If my ancestors actually came from Silesia, so much could be accounted for: my tastes, my shape, my voice, my rapid decay, my sense of rugged independence. This does console me in my worst fluffbunny days. Where my descendants will live, though, I am sure, is Lisbon, where they will mingle with the many children of Ferdinand Pessoa and his friends, and pass unnoticed in the street at last. I see them sitting in café terraces, watching the sun sink glowing over the Tagus, and its last light strike high & noble buildings behind. In the narrow old streets, stumble lost poets, so unsure of their identity they will welcome my children as their own. In the meantime I hide in London – stalk Somers Town streets where no one ever walks. It is grey & slightly disgusting –intoxicatingly so. I am almost home.

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The one occasion for the poem is always forgotten the point where I’d rage absolutely always passes what I didn’t write may be traced out in what I do write like a scar or a buried watercourse: sandbags needed against its psychic irruptions, the trail of polters that are my own, rage turned in (where else? like the line-endings in some prosy wide poem that traces out a record of long buried processes within it of course through the modulation of tone against vowel the bright sword blades of consonantal play interrupted.

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Oh Boyd, you old misery I fantasize about you yet again, your hair your stubbly jowls & your ears: were you not a Catholic prelate once a proper little-boy cardinal? Before that I see you profitlessly tending a shop that sells dead animals. Just why won’t anyone buy them is all I want to know? The shadows grow up around you and you beat them down. I love you for that and your inadequacy as it matches my own but you refuse even to acknowledge any weakness and so thrive like a tree suddenly growing in the middle of the road or like the great world serpent strictly unviable but not to be fished for ever. So sit on my lap like the little giant you are.

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Nothing much helps me here, like being an early crocus in a patch of rubbished gardens I know, outside a church empty, angular & damp but the dirt outside half sterile except where some old woman once stuck a few bulbs that push up wearily in all this mess february throws at us and little bright sparks of orange bring some delight to someone passing another old woman, one really hurt or a child, a stupid girl with a toy pram. “Look, look, dolly, at the flowers, the pretty flowers of spring.” Perhaps I am helped, have like the little gallant corms got through something again no fear of learning but the bright act of surviving enough.

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Time for certain foolish but sibylline utterances:

In the matter of who decides cast lots but let him win

Which side of the bed is best? Always both

There is only one way to raise children at night in a warm place in silence

There is a secret of invisibility that like the curse grows upon you

London is owned by the mad

It is never summer in Somers Town

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The Sibylline Prophecy Explain’d; or The True Measure of the Poetic Art Which lieth in a kind of subdued Phrenzy In which the Soul speaketh in its own peculiar Tongue: Their Jargons laid out & transcommunicate’d With Curious Scripts & Hands with which The Divine Furor is well known to write. Newly translated into the English. “After the Lyre Falls silent We must riddle its Ashes through.”

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Today’s word:

the black marks against the deep glowing sky people walking in the streets the stars above what our feet bring into the Church of St Mary Magdalen what the shops sell how language always ends up what poets feed on within the abysmal depths scurf moss the newest street drug a pile of stolen golf balls the sludge at the bottom of a freezer what we’re always left with its relation with the rich is ambiguous, with the poor one of identity & mutual nourishment did I comb it out? tease or riddle it tease or riddle it

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Formal invention gives out here inert a giant fluffbunny how I love that word with all its loops a copperplated pleasure. The weak & horrible line endings are also like loops small & neat like pubic hairs little cursive signs very introvert & quiet somewhat gritty to the mouth otherwise bland & bunnyish oh yes this does resolve itself somehow limp & halting as it is a huge fuzzy presence a line of loopy language here

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Dismal as a flat in Stamford Hill Where a true religious life will bind and wound Imagine the pleasures of being legless My crutches & my crotch together The little dogs go spoof spoof in the street It so also the line, it is very hard here More of a tribute to high art than any easy populist lilt For this wound up disparateness my bosom the key And you, reader mine, the fabled beholder Enable me! Enable yourself! Live To the full in your engagement with this text Whose pleasures will remain forever recondite & crude Imagine here a previously unknown bodily function Follow these words, that care & cure for everything Read art

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