Security
(after Allen Ginsberg's America)
Newcastle, I have given you everything, and now I am
nothing.
I can't stand my own mind.
Newcastle, when will you stop looking?
Go look at yourself with your security cameras,
I don't feel so good. Don't bother me.
Newcastle, when will you be a true angel?
When will you take off your football strip?
When will you look at yourself from the Gateshead bank?
Will you ever be worthy of your million fans?
Newcastle, why are your night streets full of bruises?
When will you send your coal to Africa?
And why are you so damned white?
Newcastle, you and I love each other.
But your machinery is too much for me.
You make me want to be a Quaker.
There must be some way to settle this argument.
Earl Grey stands on his monument.
Basil Bunting sings in his grave.
They won't come back. Today it's just you and I.
Outside the cherry trees are pink, and daffodils line
motorways
Down at the law court they are trying murderers.
Newcastle, I feel sentimental about The Great North Run.
I lie in bed and write poems and don't do the washing.
When I go down to the Quayside I never get laid.
I never drink. I don't swear in company.
I am a woman who likes to fit in.
Because of you
for years I saw a Jungian analyst.
It's you who needs therapy.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life
be run by the Evening Chronicle?
I admit I am obsessed with the Herald and Post.
I read the small columns, the non-news.
It falls onto the doormat. I never see it coming.
I read it in bed, which is where I live.
It is always telling me about double glazing, about
fireplaces
and scout camps.
It tries to sell me second hand furniture.
Everyone is buying second hand furniture but me.
Newcastle, how can we be together if I never get up?
How can I make my life more beautiful?
Why is it that cameras watch me whenever I step outside.
Is there a camera in my bedroom?
Where are all the other women?
Newcastle, I will forgive you everything.
It's just that I wonder if you ever see me,
even with your cameras, with your small democracies.
Do you know who I am, that I breed?
That I delight in your small ads, your large
Art galleries, your intelligent bridges?
Will you ever be really proud of me?
Newcastle, I am putting my Southern face
into your black and white history.
I have booked a plot at the cemetery.
Newcastle, you may say you don't need a woman
who won't get out of bed,
but your weakness
is love.
Face it, I am too good for you, and
you are too good for England.
And, (take it on the chin)
we shall be sisters.
Her Zoo
(13th Century: from The City Archive)
Finding a flat square place a little way back
from the river, she made a zoo. Close to the
monastery, to the smell of mead. You can see
it on those early maps, a paw print,
just within the city walls.
Each morning she swept the square
with a birch broom, a rasping sound that
woke the birds, the monkeys and the bears.
Sometimes a monkey ran away,
being adept at understanding fastenings
and locks, with a memory as long as a ship's voyage.
There is an account of a boy,
wandering by Leazes Pond, startled by
a shivering monkey, falling to his
knees with fear, but the monkey fell with him,
a leathery face right next to his,
he watched it die of cold,
its' clenched fists loosening,
hot eyes freezing over.
And then a lioness was found sleeping
in the friar's bed. He wanted compensation.
A horse with a harness of silver bells.
An elephant came, and she dressed
in red silk with a golden trim and led
the timid beast down a gangway
watched by a porridge of children,
a silvery wash of Quayside dwellers.
The elephant screamed and blinked its miserable seasick
eyes,
but she spoke to it, lifting its ear, like a curtain
to whisper into the crevices of its heart.
And the friar wrote that the devil was
riding on her tongue.
One time she rode a zebra, followed by a pack
of Northumbrian dogs, down Dog Leap steps.
That's when the friar said she was the devil,
and that she slept with snakes, and took instructions
from the grey wolves that snarled outside the walls.
She was unaware. In love with the smell of hide
and hay. She ate with beasts, a gritty stew
of barley and turnip. She lost a finger to a tiger.
And it's true, she slept with snakes.
Then the zoo disappears from the archive,
like ink fading on paper. The friar must have died.
There's a story of her walking the monkeys
one harmless day in June, and being seized
by Quayside dwellers who hung her from a tree,
with the monkeys screaming and chattering
trying to cut her down.
Another: the zoo was infected with rabies, and closed its
doors,
and that the sound of dementia drove some to
jump into the river, and that no one dared to go near
until the place had rotted down into the earth.
Or that she walked out of the city, followed by
her entourage of beasts, all dressed in hand made suits
of sheep's fleece, and disappeared into the smoke
and religion of Northumberland.
Or that there never was a zoo,
just a collective memory of an elephant;
a woman dressed in a red shirt;
a deluded friar, who saw lionesses in bed;
too many wolves at the walls;
And the long soft memory of a monkey
touching your hand .
(Her Zoo is part of a sequence of poems
about Charlotte Square in Newcastle, written with Sean
O'Brien. They hope to publish it at some point in 'found
book' form.)
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