Schräge Musik
for my father
History of Sensation 3
from Twentieth Century Blues 6
1
Torn shreds of Meccano, where the child has learnt to build a ruined city, using a tray of sand for debris, plasticine for the ground-plan of destroyed buildings. Hollow windows; machines decked with convolvulus.
Three silhouettes of Halifaxes, buffeted into turbulence, passing over a world they cannot gauge, because the lights were low, motionless, austere against a tableau of lightning and fire. Below it – why below it? I thought – a Mosquito was already making its escape. The flak was dying out, so I turned to the sky, the ghostly pearl of the illuminated clouds absorbing the blaze and destruction below.
Her grace and languor: a flicked curl across a wrinkled smile. Do I see her, did I ever see her? I looked at the smooth flesh, reached out to touch it, and felt her shiver. Suddenly, I ain’t together, kitted up, just for a pose. Carrying my flying cap, a distorted squash in my hand, a Holbein deathshead.
This room of representations. Vague radial roads visible, but most of the area a spattering of random craters, a Max Ernst dream, still drying, across which a tight-toothed comb has been scratched for effect. Somewhere, like the brain of a sensualist, the yellow tips tear through the red markers.
The men crowd into the hut; some keep their hats on, as if the band has already left the stand. Two bodies flighting: Pearl’s sister, Lorraine, playing the Gestapo, raised by high heels. She has flash explodes. Photograph taken. She kicks, she separates, smacking into rippling flesh. She breathes in: the tango, very strange and masculine.
The plane looked as if it were a photograph of itself that had been rubbed and creased in the pocket of its lover.
She reached and coiled, an eloquent quickstep: the darkness, scratching the surface of an Air Ministry notebook. Where did he think we broadcast, and her voice, singing those songs? The girl swooping over the wireless in the mess, the weekly: ‘And now we present the Frank Sydenham Orchestra, with Pearl Rust as the featured vocalist, And now she’s going to sing A Fine Romance.’
A controlled space: dressing table, with her back to me. Misery everywhere. The wireless made Pearl, waiting for the vocal, become a story, standing in her underwear, selecting outfits. The chorus of voices: able to pick Pearl’s out. Attractive silhouette with their searchlights flashing her legs, while she waited for the well-groomed, balanced couple, who were dancing on a cloud.
Exploding with flares before his caffeinated eyes, burst nebulae over Berlin, against which he can see, and be seen: a globular target. Bombs fall, like a row of rough ticks down a page of boringly correct answers.
The receding familiarity: a melody haunts my reverie, subverting the dream into a battle-cry. Barker thumping the rhythm on the table as he read, reminding me oddly of bursts of flak – a great comfort! But at the tracer fire, whole populations burst into song.
I always carry Pearl’s suspender belt as a lucky charm, stuffed into a map of its own contours, sitting in that pose that you see in that book. As if in answer, a huge bat of dirt on the Perspex could be taken for flak down, fighters up.
Camera: arrows wind over two frames. Fresh film ready. We strolled along, a sheet of targets to be scribbled over with a monopoly of outrage. And he was gone, leaving us rather dumfounded. But I could never take a photograph of you, because of the horror-blackened grain of the board: black and white etchings of cloud and flak lines.
Caress him from your dream. Who was it you held? He landed in a tree and injured himself releasing his parachute. Floating to the margins of ecstasy, black, terrible, a … a … a superstitious lot. We couldn’t be religious in any orthodox sense, as if …. Each night this foxtrot with death, trying not to tread on her toes.
2
A city of fire-glow, gleaming for half an hour, as she dreams in somebody else’s sights. The middle face was the actual ‘me’ figure. A tap dripping throughout the two minutes, the buzz of the wireless, the hiss of a silent figure of the dark. With no congruent self. Poetry as a model for a change in mental attitude, perfecting the dream, as memory. After the war, George was to become known chiefly as his finger. After some time, soldiers arrived, arrested him, and had to stop civilians from attacking him with stones. All the charts had been sucked through the broken fuselage. All the statistics of the Penguin Specials had got us nowhere. Jumped onto dispersal trucks, hunched over his maps, fiddled with something that resembled a bomber going down. The stench of piss on the rear wheel. The mask froze and George was free, floating through the air. More direct, it would deal a disguise. In doing so, Sgt. G.A. Grey, POW, Stalag Luft 3, loses you, to find you again, parting to meet and parting again: ‘a poet of the last train’. Somewhere in the ghetto lives Chaplin, waiting to usurp the other, with a walk that takes on the irrational grace of a dance. Leave me. After the war, I’ll never fly again, that’s for certain. An image like the first insistent words of an unfinished question: that exhaustive moment when the false enthusiasm wanes and they begin – one by one – to step away, half-waving, half-smiling, and start to disperse. You refuse to mark the night on the blanched page. Pressing the girl: oasis jazz. Scarecrows: flares which looked like bombers exploding, complete with simulated debris, to lower morale. An image, here, of a world scattering itself between the ringed heresies. A design of metal thrown at the earth and on permanent display. ‘We ain’t got a chance. There’s four horsemen drunk on the floor, masks blown to bits.’ The bubbles that come from people’s mouths float to the ceiling and accumulate, trees grow out of the open windows into the bricked streets. Any word is quite clearly what it is. A lethal dose had just hit the dance floor. The man with the mask-tormented voice never touches drink. ‘I think I’ll dig a little hole; it’s for them as in power. Oh, this lot stinks and will do best.’ There is no adequate single symbol: no golden ghostly holes in a world full of holes. He shows his teeth; the flash wrecks most of London’s open spaces. If it’s your name on the bomb, it glides into the aerodrome to land; there’s a paddle in your waving arms. Vampiric Halifax over London. Best silk knickers for an air raid – just in case. ‘It’s them waves that is a beautiful dancer; they leave heaven in your arms – and moonlight.’ Nearly a hundred fighters intercepted the stream. Grey reversed the turret and fell into flak and flares. Lovemaking bombs were dropping all around. 102 Squadron: Halifax 227-X. Shot down by a fighter. Günter was found dead the next day. One was the book of this story of demonic possession; and the other was this sort of dark woman with a slightly demoniacal face, and then, lying down, was a pretty, innocent-looking girl. She stood leaning against the heavy, thick-tyred, masculine machine. To the English bombers, aborted missions. Although you weren’t there, there was something like a mental image of you sitting in that chair, there, reading that book. Günter stroked Paula’s taut belly. Grey was arrested and taken to the Göring Hospital. Paula’s precarious character in this state. Random spray from an underbelly. Personae out of a metaphor of crude orders. A rubber dinghy floated down over Berlin. Flares burst in mess-room conviviality, high and dry on the shores of a dream. A Halifax of 102 fired 500 rounds at a fighter, from the rear turret. Hooded sharks, scenting blood, gaped for me, diving and twisting in the puppeted sky. Got a letter from home about John; they read it in the papers. High, in the bright, bedazzled air I floated, wailing, as they squirmed on the bed. The powers of Left and Right battle it out on the dance-floors, each song a binding correlative for a particular danger. Undercarriage down, as if in an act of supplication. In almost no clothes and no questions. Both excited and worried by this. Pearl would enter her bedroom, startled to find Ft. Sgt. Campbell – together for once. Flurries of snow outside…. Could the Government have foreseen…. The dream slips through the seams suspended, draws near to the heel under billowing silk. Paula began to fuck her Sirens. Game of deception. One night, barnacles and star-fish exploded. This fellow speaking of codes and false messages. Because of the war and because of the war. The dream of the stop-watch. Self-preservation as a sort of pickling, here. Call themselves Apocalyptics, but really Utopians: to build a sensibility into the brickwork. Berlin during a raid – the one time I experienced it – was ten times more terrifying than the Blitz. The scale of a fish a metallic sheet torn from the plunderer as he scraped my tattered sides. Music from somebody else’s patent dancing shoes, bejewelled with the Man-great glitter of war. A request on the wireless for the poet, already dead. But they are smiling at this. Their story was not to be a happy one. I think I’ll read The Playboy and the Lady. A sight to watch them struggling with the cookies, wrapped now in cardboard, trussed tight, and packed with Nazi propaganda. Lady Whatsit throws darts at a map of Europe. Jackboots with high heels. Sad sky: sad eye. Perpetual forgetting: perpetual longing. With the Sydenham band, desire, restrained, obscured by all I have become, and they, out there, feeling it, but not going for a further vision. Book-spines: industrial muscle; putting a little Anarchist pamphlet together on the outbreak of war. Play a record of myself singing Day In, Day Out, over and over – only leaving to go to the bathroom where I’d shit all over the seat. I’d style myself Georgi Arturo: The Ageless Wonder.
3
Again, and again. In the mind, in the eye; and again this
Schräge Musik
Out of a sky-shaft of moonlight;
The bomb-blast personalities:
Trump them up into
Sparks and steam in the poem.
Citizens stood by, watching, numbed, motionless. Pearl, mature, awaiting Sgt. Death to give her the sign, collapsed on the coffin. I dreamt the jackboot on the dead man’s shirt. Spooky choruses. But she gets up, strides out of the paragraph, rises in the hearts of Men.
I don’t just mean a new political system. The world has toyed with that for decades; I mean:
Pin ups that smile at us
Falling from the walls
Robinson Crusoe
Only multiplied by hundreds
Everybody else
Each
Each his own Robinson Crusoe
And each of the others
Is Man Friday
Waiting for the postman
There’s not the expected letter
Evasive and unsubstantial
Strong man at the fair
So the little ball goes up
Ersatz RAF
Smoke
Billowing over the hillsides
The bones of Russians
Shrugging allusiveness in your gestures
As the German territories diminish
Who lodged in the rafters
The Dutch family
Many of their own men would be shot
As hostages
Watch the goons
Their over-security when they find
Lines of political calendar ethics.
Petrol tin tea-pot
Experiencing future nostalgia.
Ghetto wailing
With a message in German.
Structured dream paper,
Rare sheets,
While the others are reading
Trying to compose
But nothing of worth
A communal splash with the others.
A bruised landscape
Bound in barbed wire
Around the tree
Year after year with each new bark
Symbol, here, perhaps of.
Spray of the unknown given
Comes from somebody else’s
Satin babe with silk stockings;
Pearl could not move.
I knew, watching,
This would be the last time I would ever see her
Out on the tarmac
The plane was taxiing
Or would she travel too
The Gestapo lady
Walked up to me
I was led out into the courtyard
I was now well-dressed
Where before
Topped with barbed wire
Had been turned into a Gestapo HQ
I told them nothing
Rank
And number
Was written in the face:
George A. Dorsey
I was an old man
With a walking stick
Conductor raised the baton
And froze
Into a statue
To the memory of music:
Hackney hat-scape
Black
The gloved hand
Tied to a chair
There’s no privacy
Football
In anticipation
Of nothing
Delete the aggressor
Delete the war
Delete the army
Delete delete
Everything must swing
Politics must be easy to dance to
To the memory of a body
Gramophones with broken mechanisms
Wound
Stuck like a mangle
Large horse shreds
Bag them up
Brick Lane had been in Poland in another
World
Photos of the op
A bomb-blast aesthetic
A pot of light
Pressing down on the flat plain
But the same mass
Weighing down upon us
Fatal steps screaming
Pain
It was an own-goal
Only they didn’t even know it
Without anybody being informed
The goals had been switched
Two minutes silence
The whole city
Palace revolution
Stillness over the huts
Unceasing searchlight
Randomly
Taking in the compound
When the RAF bombed the camp
That’s social realism getting back at them
Delete that
Begin the deletions
Delete the message until
Somebody
With a message in German
About her body
All the men who’ve
Written about the other men
Pickled character
Swing and communicate
Delete Harry James
Had died
Had survived
Was the love seat
Thorned like the head of Christ with barbed wire
In her slow motion
World
The stubs of a city
Unmoving
In the still air
The citizens had stopped
Shovelling the ash
Pile of rotting potatoes
Stillness over the huts
For undelivered letters
Talking into a metal ear
Cobwebs spun between the parts the moves are so slow
To think how fresh this all appeared and yet
Seen unframed
Here
At the heart of the machine
I see your myth
Barker
A hand of bananas on your shoulder
A Great War battleship
Utopian vision
Heels of thought clicking
Contributes to orderly resistance
Of Parliaments and
Unapproachable
Yes-no questions
Where’s George
In a child’s chair
About Benjamin Peret towards the end
As a receptacle of tradition
When
There is so little
A crow flaps out
From underneath
Useless description
Standing at the farthest perimeter
Looking out
Is George whatever-his-fucking-name-is
We shook hands
He shuffled off
I’ve been made the star of the show
And it was a bit like girls at school
Hate-thing and teasing
I began my act by putting on
By striking
Bits of erotic lingerie
And striking obscene poses
And you came in for this bit
I sat on the love-seat
To be filled
A dance without rhythm
Lost
Looking for rhythms
That will carry us
Not meanings
Nothing personal I don’t think
The teleology of checkmate
Songs
On one chord
Big band of cardboard boxes
The spotlight catches me
What if I were to escape
The demagogic machine
The bunched democracy of a queue
Door out to the shit house
Back in the mess
A glass of beer in your hand
Habitat
Use your intelligence
The scenery for the play was rather like
Hanging up to dry and our suitcases and
Scrambling
Sit in the park
Tube-train rumble underneath you
In the air raid
Bombs’ dull thud and vibration
Fresh brick dust air
Down and down
Dance continental foxtrot
Pretend I’m some
Mystery and intrigue Englishman
Now be honest
Calling Germany
The great voice of God on the wireless
Shunted in goods wagons like
Half way across Europe
At the age of 29
Rather silly of me
Purple outfit
Dress trimmed with ostrich feathers
Except for the mask
Which
You liked it but you also
Didn’t think it was respectable
Exposing herself to all those men
The evening was ending
The machine man
Has failed
The machine man
Has failed
Plump and respectable
Very sensible 1914 dress
You’d been sent away to war
You weren’t terribly well
We’d all wait for letters from you
Very very respectable
I couldn’t work it out
Bedding strewn along the platform; we were
Extremely grey
Glittering cities
Feeling disruption
Learning the whole of Samson Agonistes
The home front in Germany from
Her face became contorted
Icy fingers up and down
Exchange gossip they’d accumulated since
I was in tears
Marked ‘LMF’. It was
Your parents’ sitting room
And there were people; somebody started yelling
But I still didn’t feel convinced that you were alive.
It was impossible to carry on. The mistakes had been his and
You became then that devil figure:
Huge great room
Milling about
Huge great family
People were appealing to me to do something
And I
My feelings were mixed
About you
Saw you as someone else
And understood that
Jealous about it
Reluctance on my part but also I did want to
Break the spell
Save both of you.
Big house
It was split up into bedsitters
Something like your family mansion
Your family house
Zhukarovski Mansions
Bits of it were semi-derelict;
Of Pearl
The sequence plays over and over
Tight in its glove
Clenching and unclenching fist;
And this young girl was very enthusiastic
Involved in the poetry world
You were very pleased
Took your name
Living two doors down the road;
The marriage obviously had been postponed because you’d gone to war
I would receive letters from you but;
Dribbling peasants going Use the Whistle
Use the Whistle
And you shouting for someone to bring you the girl
That you were using her name;
Because she was so innocent she was like an empty vessel
For all this evil to rush into;
Long flowing hair
Pulled by animals
Which definitely were pigs
Always sows
Cross between horse and pig
And this is what I’d tell you about in my letters to you.
Blueprints
Scribbled in tiny writing
Stuck together
Till we’re stopped
’Raus ’raus
Morning
Train pulling into Finsbury Park
Was Pearl
Thin German
Gestapo lady
She stood with her hands bound behind a pole
Crease of buttocks
Forced back
As they buried the Russian soldiers
’Raus ’raus
Let’s go and pearl the ‘Earl Grey’
Forehead to forehead
The brain
Clogged
A smile on the cinema screen
Twenty foot wide
Doing the Lambeth Walk
Backwards
When not stooging
There are some records I can play in my head.
Rumbles and pavilions
The light flickers on and off.
Perspex ovens.
Pearl now
Long silk gloves
Gagged
Eyes were shut
As if she had surrendered.
Nothing from Pearl
Bricked up in her cell
I had one piece of paper with me
No
It wouldn’t be a map
Would it
I tore it to pieces
Useless
Jargon over my ears
Prison camp was
The capitalist system in miniature
Disgusting stuff
Raisins
Bartering this
On the principles of mutual aid
Good Anarchist republic
Cocoa
The ersatz padre
The smoky stinking huts
Like fishboxes
Screaming up in the middle of the night
Not quite a Nazi salute
Wire fevered loonies
Looking out from the barbs
Landscaped gutters
The rippling girls’ wartime
Melting ornaments
Wins England
War will have been lost
Craft whittling peace pipe
Anarchist pamphlet
Thumping oddly
And discovered the piano
Thumped out the boogie-woogie
Was
Trying
To hear him play
The solid voice and its single plea
Tragedy rationed by death
Fellow shadow
A professor of German poetry
I could see nothing through
To try to see outside
Fibrous visible mind
Polished vibrations
Already misted with memory
Foxtrot toes
Exhilarated her
Bled remains somebody else’s world
Trying it from a different angle
Hugged sentiment
Trumpet-skids across the path
Candle flares
Flourishing into the air
It happens that way
All those memories
Curious black and white
Distance
An image
But through the screen
Nothing but tatters of light flaying around in the air
May-June 1986
