Contains Mild Peril E-Book

Fran Lock

• Herausgeber: Out-Spoken Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 144

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Contains Mild Peril is a book permeated by anxiety, not fatal threat, but the ambient manic hum of daily life. Precarity does something to us at the level of language; it shapes the ways we see and say. Our current climate – political, environmental, economic – engenders its own nervy music. These poems channel this collective apprehension in ways both deeply personal and instantly familiar. It is a collection that abounds in loss, in a sense of being lost, and in the gnawing fear of losing, yet its speakers address us with urgency. This is language in the throes of fighting back.

Leseprobe

Published by Out-Spoken Press,

Future Studio,

237 Hackney Road,

London, E2 8NA

All rights reserved

© Fran Lock

The rights of Fran Lock to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Out-Spoken Press.

First edition published 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9160468-5-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-9160468-8-7

Artwork:

Ben Lee

Printed & Bound by:

Print Resource

Typeset in: Baskerville

Out-Spoken Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Fran Lock

Acknowledgements

Thanks is due to Bad Betty Press, Black Light Engine Room Press, Blue of Noon, The Chicago Review, Culture Matters, The Curly Mind, Disclaimer Magazine, The Lampeter Review, Mechanics Institute Review, The Morning Star, One Hand Clapping, POETRY, Poetry Bus, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, Proletarian Poetry, and The Rialto where some of these poems first appeared.

Contents

Last exit to Luton

A rough guide to modern witchcraft

Precarity

The Rites of Spring

Devil

On weekends

Dazzler

Some small beseeching

On insomnia

Giallo

Gentleman Caller

And I will consider the yellow dog

A ghost in our house

‘Daddy’, indeed

Dear Comrade

True Confessions of a Catholic Schoolgirl

The Miracle of the Rose

Epistle from inside the Sharknado

Happiness

‘Drinks with friends’

On trauma

Come home

Rock bottom

On guillotines

Children of the Night

Contains mild peril

A tiny band of glittering stones

Valery in Zombieland

Gentry

Loneliness of the long distance runner

Hippy crack

Sisters under the sun

My dear Maurice

Sister Cathy

Francis

Poem in which I attempt to explain my process

Saint Hellier

On incantation

Citizen Pit Bull

Jonah

Sailing from Jökulmær

Matthew in Heaven

The accidental death of a plagiarist

Remedial dog

A backward dark

‘What it is’

The difference between

Centennial

Visiting Prometheus

The seven habits of highly affective people

Special needs

The very last poem in the Book of Last Things

Us too

X (mouth)

*

dead / sea

Introduction

The title of this collection is taken from a ‘consumer advice line’, one of those descriptions supplied by the BBFC and slapped on the back of your DVDs in order to clarify the classification of a particular film. Some of these are gloriously silly. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for example, features ‘mild language and fantasy spiders’. Another favourite of mine is ‘moderate torture’. In what sense can torture be said to be moderate? I did consider this last as an alternative title, but there’s having a sense of humour about yourself, and then there’s issuing a gilt-edged invitation to ridicule.

The title poem was originally named something else altogether, I forget what. But after sharing the poem one Wednesday night at Poetry School, and explaining the line ‘my face is a fifteen certificate’ in terms of the BBFC’s ‘mild peril’ descriptor, I was advised by Roddy Lumsden to change it. Roddy was right. Naturally. Other ‘mild peril’ poems came out of that class of his, of which Alex Bell’s was / is the best. I often found this to be the case.

But I take credit — if such is due — for the notion of ‘mild peril’. I like it and I think it stuck with people because it seems to say something about our collective precarity; the apprehen-sion, threat, and unspecified dread with which all of us live. Some more than others, obviously.

Last exit to Luton

He’s a real man, you can tell, all plushy skunk and a dog you’d do well

to avoid. Aaron’s twenty-three; says he could wear my moony face

as a pendant, calls me tweety-bird. I hang around his neck and Aaron drives.

He’s taking me out to get buzzed at a club. I’m wearing white denim, spotless

as a chorister, and we are sculling the druggy gale between the tyre shop

and the roundabout; we’re leaving these scutty streets, with their pawned gold

and thawed meat, far behind us. We’re away up the town, gone for the gavelled

abandon of smashed out me ‘ead, for fighting squib with binge, and living

for the weekend.

Aaron is not like the boys at home, dimbulb chinless wonders who only

want to trap you in the maundering bondage of marriage like their mothers.

Aaron’s got other ideas, got big ideas, and vodka, and jellies, and he understands.

I’m mature; need more than pliant writhing in a narrow bed that howls

like a chimney. He says you’re better than them, and he’s right. I refuse to end up

like that, like the girls at the camp, lank slags currying love and desperate quaking

from spousal apathy; to be one of life’s pale remainders, scrubbing my sink and trudging

to church, burnt out on a soused downer again. I don’t want to be tied to the site,

to the tribe, to the old men, their tournaments and sorceries; to a fist in the face. I am

special. I am rare. I want gilt and spree and perfect hair and endless fucking diamonds.

He will take me away, I know it. In the club we are spinning until my vision

breaks into dizzy splinters; his kisses determine directionality. I’m lipping

limoncello, lisping citronella, reeling round my handbag like a wasp around

a bin. I see myself in the mirrored ceiling, well impressed with the brittle shimmy

of me. Aaron is grinning, and I am watching the weaponised swag of my nails, rinsed

in warm red light and raving in front of my face, my own face, big as a billboard. All is

love, and there is God, shining like a migraine!

He will take me away, he says, but not today. Tonight it is back to his flat

by flickering inches, and then to bed, this mad cabbagey firmament, where I

am rummaged and squirreled by turns. Aaron is smoking, the smoke hangs

in the air like a spookhouse special effect. His back is baroque with spots,

a constellated mire. He does not tell me that he loves me, he tells me I am old

for my age, and I smile. I smile at his Jesus tattoo, pink and coy as a bearded

lady. Jesus is smiling too. I have no plans. I don’t want to go home. I have

school in the morning. You know what they say about gypsy girls: our life

is either a circus or a zoo.

A rough guide to modern witchcraft

For Roddy

To begin with, an incision in the blanched cerebellum of a cauliflower,

a pale obol of hot fat. Open up the pomegranate’s ripe encrusted lung;

wrap your amulets of garlic in the white chantilly crepe of tripe. Take

any human heart, and pierce with dark projectiles of asparagus. Forge

bright ingots of chilli on anvils of meat. Bake strands of your own coarse

hair into this bullion-darkest rye to give it better strength.

To begin with, hunger is a wrinkle in the breath. Fortune is the black

plough that turns up tea. Everything has meaning: the bones you soak

for soup, the slippery white ganglion of a soft-boiled egg; thin fuses

of vanilla. Condense a broth of cloves and shoots; of arrowheads

and thunderstones. A hole in a steak like a jewellers’ loupe. Through

it you can see your future drip and spread.

To begin with, seasoning and yeast. To begin with, spinning in

your kitchen, barefoot after midnight, measuring your cannibal

proclivities against the reddest bite of bitter fruit. This is the spell:

your hands in iridescent gloves of borrowed scales; a yellow lace

of pasta, sighing in an eyelet. This is the spell: the grapes we tread

to lustre. The charm by which we’re well.

Precarity

For Jack

The parcels I send simply do not arrive. It is winter.

The house has been pregnable, cold. I leave the city in order

to speak of a rare, inevitable light; to tell you of contorted

skies above grim silos. Silence. Love is sufficient but brittle,

it always was. Most utter mercy, Grace of God, aimlessness.

These things I wish for you. Luck isn’t wine, it won’t improve

with age, but still. You and I keep the same feasts, my friend:

obscure saints with improbable powers. Our desires are likely

too simple. The rabbit’s foot dangles, intent upon chance.

We should have asked for the moon. Hold up your hand.

The needy span of claret in a flashlight, an aggravated purity,

something sore and hurt. How do I love you? Like Christ, his

upturned dumpling face afloat in the golden miso of his own

holiness. Young and born, sunblessed and remedial-exquisite.

My love is harrowed treasuring, devoted and fanatical. That is

to say that we’ll have no half measures here. That is to say,

and how much water can a lung hold? That I would drink

the mid-Atlantic all unsteady, ride the rooftops bareback into

sleeplessness. That is to say, I am here, present but meagre,

with nothing else to send but love. Condition the day to walk

at heel, and think about you, often, as brave as the climate,

facing things. What fills me now is admiration. Hardy, still,

you are, and singing.

The Rites of Spring

Long day awash with wheezing breath, sadsoft

mood of lesser nettles, heading home at five a.m.

Our mutant cohort treading weather, unkempt

earliness we walk, in transports, tribal blankets,

pixie-hooded, resolute. Come again to London:

affrighted sky, beleaguered wage, the rage we

bargain into grief. Count the ribs of half-starved

dogs while city women shriek like zips. This is

spring, the whole world running with green

scissors, a cockadoodle spite beneath their skin.

Back again, pacing the sprained light of squats,

reeling a love we want to dig the loamy breadth

of. Back, to days spent lying better-dead against

the corkscrew guts of mattresses. This is spring,

Neanderthal with suffering, and twitching

its teased prick. And we will seek dark spaces,

fold our arms like pharaohs, close our eyes until

fury’s gold implosion finds us, sunshine after

cinema. Then we will rise, practise our pagan

ablutions: boys in stonewashed mood swings,

grinning a dissolute wonder, girls atilt with

a sauntering kilter, singing to cheap speed,

adrenal distress; old men leading their

horses to water, and all the lust they’re lame

and fumbled with. We will honour you, ghost,

with vodka bottles smashed for making rainbow

mincemeat out of daylight. We will honour you,

with three part harmonies, chemical dread.

Because this is spring, the whole world under

a tourmaline sway, and the gates of the Cross

Bones cemetery, wanton with ribbons. We

will honour you, in that famished hour when

sorrow files its weasel teeth, and under

the wan spin of stars, in the unquiet sci-fi

of a mind that makes a drowned world

of this dockland. Hush now, hush. The night

is the ambient temperature of a carsick sob,

and in the scrubby parkland the litter bins

are trying their very best to grow.

Devil

It was you all along: you dressed the dogs in restlessness,

and wheresoever your kisses land, the acne gathers. The TV

is thick with Americans, talking their awkward astronaut’s

English. Donald is busy: stunned pussy, Home Alone cameo.

Bathrooms are cold spider-bounty. Fat white tonsils of mistletoe,

a sudden rash on the back of my hand. The sauce thickens,

opinions skew, fire begins to climb the curtain. I recognise your

detrimental handiwork: Miranda Hart and Kirstie Allsopp, a lispy

carol sung at half the speed of blowing glass. You wait for

the cover of darkness, then slide the stones back into their fruits.

Trust nothing. The limp handshakes of overcooked veg, and every

third thin Eat Me date is a catshit in disguise. I am not fooled.

Yours is the Kingdom of the ice-cream headache, the acid

heartburn, the hat that didn’t suit. A whole family drowned in

their car in County Kerry. The big unlucks and small. Nothing is

too much trouble for you: stag dissolved in headlights, the mirage

before impact, the smug brat in the iPad ad, a round uncharted

apple, suddenly bad in the bowl.

On weekends

I might not wash today. I might

let the weekend slide into gratifying

anarchy. I am supposed to be thankful,

this town is not among the true nightmare

portions of the world. A roof over my head

and quite sufficient shine on the silver,

thanks. I might, though. Haven’t you seen it?

Your city pokes a crafty fang at a flight path.

It’s my city too, I suppose. You think you

are in control. Idiot! To name is to own, not

to know. And now we are so used to blood we

miss the silly crimson pity of it. I dream of

hardmen, the torturer’s tweezers; of scholars

supplanting their teeth in basement gardens.

It’s there, but you miss it. I don’t miss

a thing. It’s always there, the aura before

a seizure, inside my expendable circuitry,

deeper than dog years down, always, even

always. I dream of the made face coming

apart in my hands like wet bread. I might not

dress today. I might suck sauce from the bottle.

Here’s mud in your gloria mundi, and a blue

blowtorch to your extremities, dear. How do

you feel about that? Or the massive enigma

of love? Does anything shock you? I

am supposed to be grateful, the shirt on

my back and quite enough coal in the cellar,

thanks. But the grand mal growls at the back

of the mind, and the back of the mind is

a bottle bank, love. We come and go, stooped

in their palisades. The rich are always with us,

their hexentanz and agonies. Here’s Kate, we all

love Kate, oblivious, bombshell, and didn’t

she used to be us? Not me. Your city, its nicotine

fingers, windows lit, yellow and sickly. Here we

crouch with our snouts to the damp plaster. I might

not leave the house today. Haven’t you seen what’s

out there? Their vaunting faith; the awful punitive

spring. I dream of muti and suitcases; grown men

stabbed in their Camden hamlets, eyes without

faces, world without end. It’s there, still there,

but you do not see it. I see everything. I see it all.

And the Billy-born-drunks in the house next

door are shouting again. Inadmissible figments

slurred through the wall.

Dazzler

‘Like diamonds we are cut by our own dust.’ — The Duchess of Malfi

No, not a duchess, whose nature is a dance of iridescing,

but a pallid aspie with a smoker’s cough. I sit in the kitchen

for hours at a time, compete with the fruit in the fruit bowl

at withering, or lean into my mirror, unable to decide

between ravaged or effaced. My lips are so red and so sharp

they could kiss the skin off a cold peach. But whores pout,

ladies frown. I pixelate myself with pearl dust, coax my skin

to a flat gleam. Nighttime is a paregoric lozenge. I am stately.

I am waiting for all the tricks you’ll try to send me mad.

Where is my child? I held him as he slept, pink in twitching

time-lapse like footage of a flower. A moment only. To fill

the days I learn the words to Lili Marlène and sing it out of

the side of my mouth. I refuse to eat, and my Karen Millen

maxi dress enfolds me like a fumigation tent. Where is my son?

And where is his father? In the bathroom my scalloped nudity

takes an age to upload. I am tired. I must move slowly, stand

with my heels together, corrode and fold into souk blue shadow.

My legs don’t work, won’t run. Prognosis: mermaid.

Turn the radio on, heel and toe and howling. But no, I am

Nobody’s loony, not yet. Open the window, let London’s

smoky starfield strain its light through my upturned face.

Breathe out my Benzos and Bensons. I am nodding the sky

inside of me. I will make my world in the air. My world,

not this dingy Margaritaville of bland godliness. My world

is danced not lived, head thrown back and vaulting a roar.

My world is where my fingers merried up and down his tattooed

back, false nails walking a roseate rain.

Not a duchess, but a scheme of gowns and tapers.

A lady is something planned like a heist. A lady

is a conspiracy, whispered up by brothers. I must

parcel my hands, demure at fist and flute. I have gone

inside. I tell myself I am still myself, that I will kick

more than I scream, and rather my scissors pretend

to some indiscriminate vein than this. But I wasn’t born

for sweeping gestures. I shall buff my face to solid shine

and cut the hands I pass through.

Some small beseeching

Come darkness, my meticulous apothecary, and make

more liquid. Do not restage some swaggering hurt, but