Scupham - Borrowed Landscapes

How busy, busy, busy these ghosts are, who pack away their bones and wrinkles, roll ashen sleeves up for the duration. She ties time back to its apron strings, puts up her hair in a nest of curlers. They cling tight for a safe rough-ride when she pummels and scrubs life stupid, sets the Vactric moaning like a siren, pegs out her tempers to the washing-line.

He buffs up his blue, chalk-striped trousers, snaps the jaws of his briefcase shut on dull certificates of proficiency, sets out in khaki on a croaking push-bike for sticky-bombs, firecrackers, clay grenades, the Captains chalk-and-talk in the Village Hall. Their childrens job is just to shrink a little, cut rinds of mud from square-toed shoes, trundle dolly about in a deadbeat pram while the wireless wraps house and garden in creamy sheets of taratantara. Housewives without choice, workers without playtime work themselves back again to skim and bone. The dustmen make schrge musik with the bins, swinging us all to the grave on stooped shoulders.

Big flowers lean to the sun, blonde village simpletons, dirt faces picked to moons like the one I watch climb, pause out on a limb of a tree I cant name in a place I called home. Each dissolving room rubs to the same patch of distempered wall made gestural by Van Goghs chorale: sunflowers with yellow heads A Zouaves brilliant red, a blue cart in a field their licks of paint all primary, primal.

The world before this fall into unlit green and brown where the big flowers lean and bombers groan.

In a flat-faced semi on the road out shaky taps have left their misery running. Garden-skins souse in slurps of cess or loll and sunburn to a sour frizz. Is it Charlie Holmes, digging in his patch, in battledress, in summer, in silence? At the window I watch our neighbours child go riding down the gravel in his coffin, watch Charlie, Father: patched and taciturn as guys or scarecrows, whose hands cradle potatoes like misshapen eggs wring chickens necks, drown kittens. Houses brim with slow, hoarded anger; spill to outbursts of wild sobbing. War, cat-like, hoards nine lives in dust-scribbles, boxes of dull silence. War, cat-like, hoards nine lives in dust-scribbles, boxes of dull silence.

Here the boy cupboards his ruinous loves bomb-fins, tracer-shells and shrapnel hunkers them down with the cold pond-life of eggs in isinglass, window-panes furred white with webbing, trunks of trunks stretched out headless on a cage of rafters. My rod propped against the garage door, I turn, paw the shelf to find my gentles: glistening maggots packed like shelter-sleepers. Fingers tingle on a fizzing tin of flesh-flies greedy for the hidden light. Wings and legs tangle into vortex unscrew away from their dispersal point, sing a dark song back into its ghost.

Pain is so far away it has become lyrical, its edge keening in a dramatic present where the world dances to sweet, high music: plucked wire, hen squawks, a child screaming, the grasshopper tick of a bike wheel spun free between its tuning forks. Down the school road small village sirens and their bully boys sing their piss into buckets of warm straw.

Bass-notes: the labouring gear-change of a truck, slap of wet sheets in a drying wind, silver bombers wrapped in quiet thunder floating east over westering buzz-bombs: feral waifs combing the low highways. She stands alert, carved out of stony time in a cold kitchen, in a cold house, a silence neither of us has the heart to break.

Criss-cross, mud-shod, he scrambles the ditch-lines, notches pithed elder to whistle up a wind to blow them all away: con-trails, cobwebs, sobbing, anger, the blue smoke-tang hovering a penny perched on the line: a kings face blurred by the hammering wheels. Down wind, wires thrum; a poles china insulator falls to his catapults four-square elastic. Never such innocence on his round cat-face, purring up the drive, a bomb in his basket, Like other boys who go out, early, come back, late, do nothing, much, but race down paths where mothers beckon and men in braces turn things over. Beggar my neighbour and take the rap.

From Mondscheinsonate to Thunderclap, Coventry, Freiburg sear the map. Do the little dogs laugh to see such fun? How can the dish run away with the spoon when moon refuses to rhyme with June, and anything, everything, anything goes, the umbrellas to mend, the holes in their clothes, the rings on their fingers, the bells on their toes, the jug with no handle, the half-burnt candle, Mondays washing done up in a bundle, the Bible, Shakespeare, Brahms and Handel. Lie in the dark and listen. I do, and hear the shake of them passing through as each earnest, chaffering, murderous crew of the Sorcerers clever apprentices blows by sky-high to turn is to was and only a pen to turn was to is. No Odes to Nightingales, or Joy, but built from the plainest light of day, houses: a man, a mother, a boy who dance in the dark with clapped-out eyes through blood and treasure, is, will be, was, through dampening dust and a cloud of flies.

Only known like the back of a hand running fissure, old scar tissue dull as milkskin where finger-posts lie down in shadow and from miles on miles of sad fantastic voices pencil in each indirection to soft as cat fur, hard as pack drill, blue as distance.

There crooked men run crooked miles over crunched and stumbled hills. Proud flesh festers. Never known like the front of a hand, plump with furious, destined roads, cross and crescent, where the pack of pretty straight guys limp in shoes packed stone-tight to the deadest ends, bend the right map to the wrong crease, rim a hills white knucklebone on the one contour, plagued by backhand sounds of children filling alley, track and backstreet with laughter, sobbing