Poems

Michael Pedersen

June 16^th 1984 – Birthday

The same morning I discovered Plath

And Hughes wed on my birthday, my sister’s

Too, I started reading Birthday Letters, trudged

In record snows with slight fever, missed the train, lost

You and wrote a poem beginning ‘I am broken

Like glass bottles’- which talks of red eyes

Pointless ripostes, wrong turnings and black holes;

The (poker-hot) cinders of troubled minds.

On my 22^nd I flew to Delhi, bussed it to Vashist

Chasing you that cut me loose, from where I hung

Content as plant in basket. Could have been

Jerusalem, Jaffna, Jupiter, I’d still have gone

Still have packed my things inside the bag I borrowed

With adrenalins and stomach sirens blaring:

To red dust tika sunrise, through brimming bead market

Where henna printed hands contort for rupees

Amongst new shades of Himalayan

Light and dark.

Within 6 short months of this rescue mission

I’d coined a whole new fleet of commotions

And there, subverted, you found yourself

In the driver’s seat of a crashing plane

Or thrashing bull (on a good day).

No panic button, no safety harness

So I understand, the ‘gone for good’

At Christmas, then once more the year following

When the torment came flooding back

Like the panic of blindness under water

Like the fear of drowning.

You were all directions, plugged

Into my live currents, panacea for poorest

Attributes. Perhaps that’s not the gospel truth

But it roughly fits and I am left shattered:

Where should I varsity, now my poetry

Can’t take your charity hand-in-hand?

Skip together, to where they’re housed together

To where they bleed and cry, unjudged

Like things newborn, battling enormity

From their opposite corners.

I remember my 16^th, unwrapping Ulysses

To discover Bloomsday too, on June 16^th

Clapped eyes on a brochure boasting

‘Dublin’s literary zenith’: join penchants

Of language for Irish lore, dancing

Twirling jig, slip, single-treble-step

To a 6/8 metre, eat sausage pudding

Single-treble measure, roost

And read in races, voice blasting

Open-air, Celtic singsonging.

How I yearn to be clean, unharmed

Harmless; before the heart’s chambers

Were loaded, dangerous like drunks with pistols.

Fully promise, I never knew what was coming

At 18, iron willed, I thought I had it made

This terse diction and I had found a nest, above

The tower blocks and tombstones and dark trees

Bearing fruit. These sparkling totems fixed

All towns’ broken yolks. And then, I saw it

Crow-black, gaping shadow…

…..In my sun.

G-20

In casual clothes

I walk to work

Expecting Revolution

Past tweeting birds

Twittering paper-sellers

And free samples of new sandwiches.

At the convulsing morning

Travellers, shoot glares of rancour

Seek out the tight-necks

And full-blue steamy auras

Of the square-mile scoundrels; 

But these needy eyes find only smiles

Squints and light spring nods;

One such gesture sent whistling

A whole four-storeys down

By a friendly Farringdon resident;

Clasping filtered coffee

He’s contemplating egg-based

Bread-based breakfasts

Oral love on sun spattered sheets

And slurping cocktails through warm July

Evenings of trombone jazz.

This is some way off from revolution.

Outside my building, yellow vested

Lachlya greets me in handshake-

He mans the doors here

Takes business classes at night, sends letters

Newspaper clippings and ‘London Wealth’

Home to his family in village-part Nepal.

There’s talk of charities

Before further hand clasping and enthusiastic

Goodbye waves. It’s like this

Every time we meet.

Lunchtime gamboling

Is me tailing protest chants

Until they become booms and barks

Some men shouting carbon, some munitions, some lobby

For the market villains to be strung up

With arms out like Christ on souvenir toys.

Scattered causes every bit beleaguered

By the cyclones of constabulary

Their stranglehold.

I stop to clap a policehorse but am told off:

‘Sorry’ I say. ‘Would you rather I smashed a window

Or two?’ I would but he doesn’t reply.

After being ushered up and down; marshalled

Left and right I get back to the office ten minutes tardy.

It turned out I didn’t need the Emergency Line

Or last cigarette, which like the whole thing

Politely fizzled out.

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