In the early 1980s I was out of my knowledge in Cambridge
In a Trojan-Israelitic civitatem desolatus missed by Bede
who copied the words he heard Prynne pricked and
Sinclair mulched the rotted place without my knowing
while local wankers savants like me invented the sun in boyhood
reanimated past places
and what it is
anyway necessity and other weird contemporaries
singular conceits like drawing breath
mugged me
the best were otherwise
I came and sat down selling books
Trumpington Street 60’ from the top from below
smelling my drunken yellow fingers
key-of-sleep two-bob prole antiquarian
retail-servicing valedictorians
with Priam already dead in the tradition not yet mine
standing apart uncaring in my unknowing
saying goodbye on red and brown hair looking out
perhaps think of me sometimes when you hear music
that takes you from where you are
for a hand’s turn
biking ditch-bound night five miles
fen edge enclosures
silence scrapyard style no hands home
working reckoning on backtime wold
locked on sleeping on
through brief lines a mote in the eye of literature
amusing boy fairing light
unzipped fly
in magic Christmas game
hot sorrow
accord the sequence
in a translated version
the reek of semen
coliform banding
round my guts
foretaste of the cunts returning
knowing my versions
living in middle-class scrying
incompetence daily thriving
despite complaining
causing abjection all day on St Andrew’s St
worn down by the primacy of everything else
spider-climbing out the bath of class culture
subject aware
building numinous power
guiding rare tracks
over sensible outlines
no capacity
of what I can do
except it’s a guitar
evening quit my taking in the news
past times almost over travelled lone and long
provision in the village unilateral
making lines gaining tunes
cunning wording of a singing single man
proses weak and strong in me tightened right
at moments cropped from work
friends back lanes as allowed
where ever dreaming had it
thinking how to do it
what it was there order
words for thoughts
would it all be right
extra time there taken
purlieu flourish
poking innards through elastic navel
hinting at gone immanent terror
het up listen
pray ing creeping past
is added at the end
clicker-counting osteomnemonic
answering flickering gain
coarse radiance for the time being
loading light into the past
olden sullied wishes internal rhyming
triremes terror hands of time
cold war cider 13th Chime
epic films wanking and Céline
Cockney Rejects custard creams
old jet aircraft Uncle Buck
do you like punk rock
can I have a fuck
there was nothing going on in my mind
when all over town
increasingly panic for perpetuity of price
settlement calm all over for the time being
leafy locales made and sold
paint jobs, handmade paper
equity in lock-tight hidden histories
facilitated without question
past affording
archived
labelled local
all-seeing ripening tourist carol
outwith elder seasons
enclosing all that’s known
beyond the work that made it
looting shrunken fields and yards that dreamed it so
men and women singing reckoning
kind hard faces
respectful gone away
old necessity tallied as a stilling
slowing crashing present
rating custom as tradition in a file
promoting diverse communities
abolishing working class individuals
knowing necessity as history
the time taken in their practice
theirs no others made by them
nice measure of hardness
I come back to full consciousness
on re-reading what I wrote just then
I’ve nearly reached the end of my ability to say
knowing I need not have despaired although
it is no surprise I faltered for everything must be done
before work tomorrow knowing it’s a version
Neil Palmer, 2004
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