Stephen Jackson

OUT OF LATVIA

[Sunday Telegraph’s title]

Riga is the colour of the Eastern bloc, like nougat kicked around in a gutter. Beyond the river lies a scabby horizon of cranes and dockyard…

You asked me to write something today
And all I could sense was a blank.
Something on fiction and truth, was what you needed –
But my truth is a brick wall
And buildings that should be sha…

To carry the child into adult life
Is good? I say it is not,
To carry the child into adult life
Is to be handicapped.

- Stevie Smith

There are the scientists. They know how to p…

There you are, as I was at your age,
A solitary child in your teeming realm
Far from the shimmering torpor that I see – this
Province of flowers, in radiant mourning.
For you invisible ch…

Mr Duffy…lived at a little distance from his own body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his own mind from tim…

Life is so quiet, you see, on the abyssal plain.
There, in a drench of dark and suffocating cold,
With feelers like feeble spines – or wooded dendrites, like the
Spires of rotted ships,
A …

Out there, beyond the abyss of night
Beyond the lightlessness that lies behind my own
Eye – worse, my inner eye –
A dog is howling.
I know the black orb of its stare
A globe of satin, yo…

It is the big black before an execution,
Dark enough for him to feel the texture of a sound.
Fresh from an alcoholic stupor (giving a strange,
Recluse’s keenness to the senses): the tart ar…

Spare me the yellow loneliness
Of scorched afternoons, that gape like private deserts.
Spare me my skull, swathed in a sulphur dazzle
Of vindication (but not my vindication):
Where chokes …

How fast can living things revert to mud?
The beggar on a street is halfway there.
And, thanks to you, our mouths – yours and mine both –
Are gagging with the old sepulchral muck.
Because…

The coach before mine
Was headed for Bialystock.
Celestial on their concrete rafters, pigeons
Stolid as bolts, or gunmetal,
Nattered to themselves, or helped to
Transmute sunshine into di…

You didn’t have much to do with doctors.
Not since that last one called you a
Psychopath. I needed to make more of an
Impression, you told me: more of an effect.

Cover myself with chic…

Preen yourself, as you deserve
And your golden skin; stretch you long lush legs.
Exalt your lazy gaze, your eyes like jade
Your eyes that give me day: that cage the sun,
And let him blaze -…

THE INSPECTION

Peas in a pod
Laid out for God.
Like shrunken heads, or like autumnal
Conkers: once jostling, now quiescent in a line,
Each one of us awaits his weekly feather-dusti…

It was outside Battersea Power Station,
That great wen, that the train
Stopped dead.
It was November, and raining.
Your Dad didn’t bother to wipe clear
A patch of window with his cuff.
…

The Green Man was where we met.
You said, “I feel like getting drunk”.
The Green Man was where we split.
You said my kisses made you want to puke.
Alpha and omega, through a glass. Can tha…

He arrived, in a blue January twilight
At this great space: this measureless pavilion, epic
And austere. Within it (lost), the murmurings of
Still-beating hearts: microcosms, these, as i…

…“We shall make her one of us.
A loving cup: a loving cup!
Goober-gargle, goober-gargle:
We accept her – we accept her –
We accept her – one of us!”

Chant at the Wedding Feast: Tod Bro…

[still in progress]

‘I should have more faith,’ Holmes said. ‘I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed by a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capabl…

The interviewer asked if you had laughed.
You said that, once, you had.
How well I know that laugh.
A purged cry, sterile as fire,
A primordial bellow of the joyless Just:
Your bark makes …