The purpose of poetry, like any hunter-gatherer society before it, is
To fund a currency of truth &
Beauty.
In this vein sandwich is a conduit, a prism of
Idealism, one investibule
Lubricant to corsair,
Except inside a manor mia kirshner.
Resonant ants on a buyers road flip,
Just as global relevance during a changing
Primate scenario is a lower back to reach but
Must be done like
Many of the off
Spring of two.
If there are strings attached of coarse
Imaginings,
Not strings but little rings or
Bubbles, but let’s call them strings,
Then flags will flap to unisex;
Else go to stand/buy bigger branes.
What does the author say? What does
The author mean? And is
It true & beautiful?
Gluons are true,
Drugspills in loo queues beautiful,
In purple flesh tenements fazed snarls of a fake leather jacket faint;
Yet experimental verification lies beyond
Sour beans of
Intellectual tears & mythical
liverless comprehension. Poems are to produce
Meaning meaning with a capital ing.
Once we pound two poems
Smack dab in the idyll
Like matthew to
Dark
One query quits:
Does the poem make the most efficient and profitable use of available Resources?
This leaves us with, does this leave us with,
Where to smear the glycerine,
if not inside a manor mia kirshner.

They say
That for the maximum effect
To avoid direct reference
How Auden in Musee des Beaux Arts
Talks about Icarus
In Brueghel’s painting and
How the rest of the world
Seems
To turn away as he falls to his death and
How the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
I recall another painting
As beautiful as Brueghel’s Icarus
A corn field
A pale blue sky
And a not so modern abstract
Like the eyes that looked up at Guernica
As the sky fell
Where the dogs go on their doggy life
And the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree
And I heard a splash
As Icarus fell.

(In 1995 7,000 Muslim men were executed at Srebrenica. The UN Dutch force who were supposed to be protecting these men ignored orders and handed them over to the Serbs.)

Your tits are rubbish, your trough of wealth
makes me want to drag you
by the ponytail
through acervated cave guano.

Your threatening/sexy strut
implies self-sodomy with one
of your pistols, which you wear
on your hips like zirconia
stud earrings, and your accent is meh.

But your deaths, Lara, are what make you hot.
What other girl can swallow dive,
legs a barbed tailfeather, onto a carpet
of unforgiving rock?

What girl can crumple
with all the clatter of a lifesize model skeleton,
its wire snipped?

What girl can take a javelin
right up the vagina, out through the left eye,
then sigh and tumble sideways like you do?

Does anyone ignite so easily?
Would anyone else, richly aflame,
wander sure-footed, sans primal howl,
before expiring in the sponge of moss?

I don’t think so.

And what kind of landed lady
writhes and bucks with such orgasmic energy
when she drowns in a deep sea cavern?

Or swaps elocution
for electrocution
in the kitchen of a capsizing icebreaker?

Or remains unbloody, intact,
death-gripping her pistolbrace,
after getting her spine massaged
by a tumbling boulder?

What girl could meet all these ends
and still come back for another run
at a ledge they can never reach?

What other girl, Lara,
would die for me,
not for my love, or to save my neck,
but just to stir, to rub, to make
me damn her wretched luck?

You’ve not changed!!!
I mean what are folk like?
Don’t start me.
Obviously not everybody is, but…
It takes all kinds, it does, you don’t…
Well, you do, but you shouldn’t.
You try to tell yourself most folk’s attitude is it takes all kinds, live and let live, no skin off my nose, nine times out of ten course they’re curious, but, you’re right, they’re not actually…
One way or the other.

Course some are.
So cruel. Can be.
Straight out and bought this packet of fags. Came in here to the Ladies and first time in donkeys here’s me ripping off the cellophane… Says No Smoking right left and centre but I think we can take the so called ‘smoke detectors are fitted’ notice with a pinch of salt.
Not going to smoke it but. I’m not.
Who needs them?
Ach, you know you really don’t want it, so don’t, OK?

Michele Quigley!
I mean one minute I’m quite the thing swanning around Markses thinking I’ll treat myself to a new forty two B because they’ve got some really pretty stuff in since they’ve bounced back, even in the bigger sizes. Next thing I’m in the middle of Per Una in floods.
Because I coped at the time. Acquitted myself. You generally do, don’t you, but how I got myself down that escalator to ground God knows.
What the hell Michele Quigley had to be doing on the till at the lingerie…
Of all the gin thingwies…
As well it was empty! Not a soul but a wee wummin way over miles away rummaging about among the Secret Supports so she’ll have heard nothing.
Does Michele not just have to go and go: Michael! Michael Manson! My God, I’d have known you anywhere. You’ve not changed.
Felt like saying couldn’t say the same for you darling. Fifteen stone if she was an ounce. Twice the size. All that blubber and in there, underneath…the old Michele. I’d have known her anywhere anall.
Turns out she’s been here best part of twenty years. Came down with the ex when the weans were wee, not been back much and nothing to take her now her auld mother and faither are away. Goes: not lost the accent but! You can take the girl out of Glasgow but you can’t take the Glasgow out of the girl.

This bloody fag. Och I shouldn’t. I mustn’t. I’m not going to.

Michele goes: Oh Michael.
I says it’s Michele Michele
She says No Michael I’m Michele.
I says: I’m Michele.
She goes no I’m Spartacus and starts laughing. She says no, no I’m sorry, it’s just what is it with yous..? You know, how come you don’t change your name totally, how come all the Johns become Jo-annes and the Matts Matilda and the Phils Phyllis? Why go to all that bother just for a little feminine appendage? How do you not go from like Boab Smith to… like… Lolita Angelica Lopez or something? How is it just goodbye Sam hello Samantha and the same old surname?
I says: I’M STILL THE SAME PERSON.
She says unless you called yourself after me?
Sorry. I’m like: Nope, it’s just my old name. In a feminine form. Simple as that.
She said: You’re not though.
I says: I’m not what?
She says: The same person.

And thing is that was where she was wrong. See, I could go out that door right now and look at myself in that mirror and know exactly who I see. Not everybody can do that. Can you?
Total self acceptance. I told her that was the reason I had to go to all this length to change everything.

I said do you know what I really miss? The fags. Because conditional on me getting the op, obviously, is going one full year fag-free. Surgeons insist on it. Anaesthetists.
That and living and dressing as a woman full time.

She says: and passing?

I says well Michele I can’t say I’ve never clocked the odd funny look in a too slow moving queue in the ladies (and aren’t they all, that has been a revelation) but, you know, short of me getting desperate hiking up ma skirt to ma neck and pishing in the sink people basically tend to be pretty polite and just zip their lips.

Because I do realise I’ll never be a pretty woman. I mean I look at someone like Michele and she’s been both. She’s been one of the young and very visible ones – a stoater – and now she’s one of the invisible ones and she sees me stepping — voluntarily — on to the moving wheel at this stage of the game, the downer, post-menopausal (not that that exactly applies to me, but…) and she just doesn’t get it. At all.

She said – bitterly – sounded so bitter so she did. Goes: You couldn’t get enough of my tits.
I said no Michele I couldn’t.

Telling you she was gorgeous. And now oh my god the arse on her. How are the mighty fallen…

Bitter but. That’s the bit I don’t get. When my wife can – twenty four year in! — find it in her heart to uproot, relocate down here, live with me as my sister and… ach… come out Mother of the Bride outfit shopping with me last week for something for me to put on at our son’s wedding — and Michele Quigley I went out with for about six weeks max in nineteen seventy nine couldn’t look at me? Couldn’t give me her blessing by getting her mouth around my name.
Not going to smoke it but. Yes, right in this bin, now, the whole packet. Great!
Who needs them?

Liz Lochhead, 2006

Not Changed began life as a dramatic monologue performed in a cubicle in the Ladies Toilets of the Arches Theatre as one of eight pieces commissioned by artistic director Andy Arnold for his one-to-one audience-and-actor project Spend A Penny in October 2006. It was performed by Grant Smeaton.

All that effort
on a effortlessly, carelessly clashing
set of hunted down like your
aunties did in the co-op clothes they probably wore
too; but now to a club and found
two pills in some guy’s tight
jeans pocket or mouth and the projected
circling shape-lights are falling
like neon, dripping and
calcifying, high-watt cream creating a fragmented
shell of sparking sunspots on a strobe flash-frozen statuesque
flesh, staring to the gods, wanting all the time for those tubes of
perfect colour to fall and swallow us.

Swallow all those leather encased, cotton-encased,
polyester limited edition
Ts-encased everyones, into our darkness
gulp down feet in 3 for 5 pound retro H&M socks,
and too tight 10 quid boxers chafing cocks.

Swallow our mam’s belt, a father’s now fashionably
unfashionably William Morris-esque
wallpaper ties on all those in tune with it guys, their hands
under the table and now even further
in between your thighs.
The girl with the half shaved beautiful bony
head is swimming in the dance floor’s static.
Some boy is dripping saliva down her chin,
watching each pixellated strobe flicker with his eyes wide open,
illuminating on the girls in stained soaked tights
as sores grow on rubbing thigh-tops,
heels trickle blood and tendons ache. You glance
up and smile into under her heap of sodden mascara
watch lipstickless lips, terrified perhaps or not really there,
ready to unload stomach through smiling teeth at that camera,
and the floor is slippy, the table is sticky,
and your hair is sweaty and you bet me,
watching eyes mostly closed
as he wanders the floor making
no hints again, bet me that
the glass-collector is up for some.

Sit on his knee and powder
your nose so it doesn’t matter that
you think you’re fat,
go to the toilet and nose your powder,
until you wake up cold and damp on the couch.
Were you there all night. It was class
but.

[This piece has been adapted through performance.]

I work in the office canteen
Where the walls are blue & the borders green
And there’s so many suits without heads
And the air is obscene.

They surge through dim-lit tunnels from above.
A school of sorts at frenzied feeding time
Mechanical and mute, a carnal mime.
Gargoyle-like glares more sad than fierce look
Upon their bait: the vats of mince. The hook:
I catch their eye, they hunger for the stove.

And then the few that do not gorge on chips
Will swarm about the iron salad bar
(That formulaic sustenance bazaar)
Saliva wet for tuna-sweetcorn rolls.
I hand them fish and smile at watery holes
That quiver back, devouring their lips.

I work in the office canteen
Where the walls are blue & the borders green
And there’s so many suits without heads
And the air is obscene.

Decanting food from tin to box to bowl
Observing chewing - tuna, cod or cow
I dream of far-off fishermen and how
Their blue expanse is greater than the sky
That’s shuttered out of each unblinking eye
In this deep torture chamber of the soul.

Their bones and flesh submerged, they can’t be heard
But for in this canteen cannot be seen
(Consumers of cadaverous cuisine)
These suffocated humdrum headless hordes
All daily falling on their forks and swords
I make my humble theatre absurd.

I work in the office canteen
Where the walls are blue & the borders green
And there’s so many suits without heads
And the air is obscene.

The glorious body she inhabited
looks lonely without her.
Such stillness is not reminiscent.
Flies feel they have the right to feed
now she cannot fight back.
They gather outside waiting,
reveling in desert heat,
aching for her moist eyes;
still open reflectors
of a ceiling fan above,
chop chopping unbreathable air;
blades that drum drum a dire obbligato,
a helicopter at war,
a metronome tick ticking time
even though she has left,
left strands of copper hair
splayed or stuck to pallid cheeks,
the last bubbles of her smiles.

Meet me under the viaduct;
Force a path through choking weeds,
And find the hole we made in the rusty fence.
But don’t fall into the river;
Don’t get lost in the dark.

Meet me at the place your parents met,
Before that pyramid of glass rose over the city
Like a hypodermic needle.
The place where your father and mother would steal for a kiss,
And maybe an untutored fumble.

What makes you think of the past
Makes you fear for the future.
That now, gaudy hands,
Radioactive in the neon night-light,
Tense as they press against tattooed arches;

Finger secret buttons: T-shirts, jeans;
Close around goose-pimpled flesh,
And pull ever closer till fevered gasps collide
With pieces of crumbled brick; broken fence; surrendered,
Poisonous washing machines and, fittingly, dead romance.