SIMON SMITH
E N G L A N D
‘to tingle/carry on/england/ “you walked into my nightmare”’ - Tom Raworth
'but it's wonderful to wake up & know that / despite everything / France is still there' - John James
dirt from under the nails
on Dover Beach
a shrieking gull
sounds like a firework
between depression
& high blood pressure
the x & y axes
big big moon
above the Channel
filling my dad’s shoes
listen to Debussy all day
& the grey afternoon
when the older you are
the higher the risk
& where noise is voice
& the wheezing dull chest
meaning a heavy heart twice Shelley’s age
lost my mojo lost my thread
ATTENTION!
ATTENTION!
ATTENTION!
the gunner propped
upright in the turret
now a body
fading afternoon above
the purple-headed fury
of their troops the casement
the barbed wire a station pie
from the Pumpkin Café
all the delights of early morning
light & the ‘Today’ programme
a stray moth floats alone
green parrots bombed out
of their roost by native gulls
the People get their money’s worth
england dead space
policing refuse
& waste the courtyard
no sun verdigris
the light quite depleted
the day already lost
to markets & account
town centre gutted
by Westwood Cross
the venal in the vernal
you can see them
laughing in their heads
the site secured
spoken clearly
into the microphone
the red light switched on
most of these people
are just not nice people
“I don’t want to hear your news”
& that’s a warning to you
how did the penny drop
on Evan Davis’ head how?
take the bus to Palm Bay
Dasein caught on a double yellow
& the invasive smell of dog shit in Ramsgate
the UKKK bringing law to town
& clubs & chains & the noose
in broad daylight their fear of invasion
while an Evan Parker solo chases
round the horizon above Viking Bay Pegwell
the water supply protected
by electric chain fence
twenty-first century carpetbaggers
cheek by jowl with the Klan
pure & common
reach Ashford International & its all over
Baudelaire stepping off the 11.07
& a carriage full back from Disneyland
the end-of-the-line all points lead to
all the blue plaques a France defeated
Tissot Marx van Gogh
gulls serried like Guston’s KKK
like drones ranged above the precinct
shoppers pass unconcerned
to the next world past the Pound Shop
& simple values
the movement of air
& eyes prickle with tears
a Polish vendor selling The Big Issue
& the one sat outside
The Red Lion deck shoes
Gadd’s 80/- & slip ons
on another Farage’s brow
moons like one of Guston’s
furrowed football heads
the Beatnik clichés
bussed in afford
no more comfort
the return to my asylum
here it is the southeast coast
the gulls are crying like babies
listening to Winterreise
in 30° of August heat
whilst reading Berrigan
off of my iPhone
some feat
these are the shadows
I’ve walked into
before the rolling hills of Kent
roll out across the horizon
grey sea blue sky elegy
orange cobalt
Glowacki ‘One Day Ace’
the first climbing
above Ramsgate
his lucky Hurricane
three 109s two Ju88s
rubbed out
in one go
& the prediction
on another day
below fair skies
I’ll die of a broken heart
its in the doctor’s notes
its in the stars
its left on a postcard
its toasted tasted
a little of scotch & water
the colour of stone-cold tea
its this room a dream of itself
& an ordinary shoe
& all the poetries of the World
won’t change the World
the sloganised rant
or the poets of academe
marketing Marx
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
its not the paranoid
its not the hysterical pitch
its not the bourgeois attitudinising
its a boot’s resoled thick tread
its eating eggs off a sky-blue plate
its in the ‘on we go’
Caesar (& later) Claudius
would you send St. Augustine
the Anglo-Saxons packing
the late-in-the-day Vikings
the hoverport returned
to nature history & myth
Napoleon the bombings
this godforsaken place The Great War
& Dunkirk V-1 V-2
Stukas & Flying Pencils
the tattooed clichés
of anchor & heart
they all stack up
a couple of drunks scrap
in the street an altercation
of heron gulls over takeaway
Farage’s clan has come to town
& other crimes in plain sight
‘RACIST’ aerosoled on a garage
door KKK stenciled in red beside
the white sand of Botany Bay
the white cliffs of Dover
the white faces of smack boys
& girls cut the rose
deep red blooms
the bluey-striped
cooling tower vase
the hooded men
in the pointy hats
a split-second glimpse
they drive around
in open-topped cars
C-series Mercs
black electric drop-top
top most definitely down
clockwork stop-
frame politics
from the cartoon gestures
keeping the intellectuals
busy on the impact
squaring impossibly
elegant circles within circles
Ray-Bans for distance
‘what do the people
of Kent actually want?’
would it be quite wrong
to write a beautiful book
in these ugliest of ugly times?
or best wait settle up
the lunchtime trade
blood howling through my ears
set off between the abstractions
of weather
& rubbish
plastic pellets
nuggets of crude
the shoreline
stinking wrack
where narrative begins
where history begins
so the World chugs along
for another ten minutes
all showing signs of wear
a father dies
& the girl
across the aisle
told she looks like Scarlett Johansson
by the strap-hanging creep
on The Hi-Speed home
a pigeon like folded
paper out of a tree
one for the record
& Guston’s brutal funnies
there are jokes
& there is slapstick
& there are bloody stumps
& there are no jokes
but a few pounds
off the social
red baseball cap
pulled down
over the eyes chin
jutting ahead
prediction emerging
as certainty
certainty as increasing
disappointment
the corruptible Labour Party
& useless Miliband
thick as the flat mud at Pegwell
the politics of the handshake
the politics of the milkshake
trains run slow
to the long gaze
Calais luminous
most clear days
from above the harbour
(now marina)
the desperate ferry-port
its barely legal cargo
hush-hush
damaged in transit
& transmission
every message
comes with an attachment
tired & stupid
Mister Blister shadows
Schubert’s Mister Hurdy-Gurdy Man
within walking distance
the labour of attention
attention attention
the first definition
of poetry where
to raise the barricades
fire the first shot
the words between us
maybe nothing else
white white white
black & white
4.i.15
Copyright © Simon Smith 2015
Simon Smith is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Kent. Part of his entry in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-Tod reads, ‘Reverdy Road and Mercury are book-length sequences of short, epigrammatic lyrics which pick up and redistribute the language and life-world of modern London with a Raworthian lightness.' The Fortnightly Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books have carried essays on his work. Shearsman Books will publish More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry: Selected Poems 1989-2012, and Salon Noir, a new book of poems will appear from Equipage, both in 2016. Simon's work has twice previously been in Molly Bloom, latterly in issue 6.