Four poems from Tenderloin, the debut pamphlet of poetry by Al Anderson, published by Blush in November 2021 and available in UK bookshops or direct from the publisher here.
Common tendencies
despair so cute
I resigned myself to writing YA fiction
would that my face were passed thru
a thicc pane of glass says he
feasibly excreted forever summer
beneath this shawl we are all plain
scratching thru gravel
smell of overheating modems &
wank around in your latex near cops
drunk & lonely the good stuff maybe
maybe dreaming about it
I don’t want luxury poetry
it’s a novel about a tomboy
with something to prove
named Gilles Deleuze
perfume smelling of faeces
the same price as a second hand car
Gay lit, or gay for pay? I
promise never to call you dude again
which now I couldn’t do anyway
elsewhere is bloomed into
obsession with self-worth
cherish that
the word droll used
more than is becoming
there’s a nicer way of saying it
written in a not unpleasant draft
as tide comes around
no one goes there anymore
clouds congealed
very little orgy here
just some gulls, ekphrasis
some other corny project
like intermittent fasting, spin class
karaoke by yourself
On the baroque
you don’t yet fully understand
you can measure it only against a vast syllabus of regret
frosted with grime in the window of a bedsit
San Sebastian, hands down his stained underwear
an incidental voyeurism, relegated to the bathroom mirror
head out, dear heart, a system of immovable phrases
a face as a body of raw material
wounds accentuated by not really being there
a shroud over something that was never a corpse
explaining this to myself as if I were explaining it to you
foot smell lingers after you leave the room & I
want to take each great man in my mouth
recreate the terms of his exile
be hopelessly in love with a body unlike anything dead do
violence only unto myself move to the Hebrides
flick cigarettes into the mossy ocean & re-rehearse
every time I tried to explain this current nausea & then die
rain is hammering on the window of course, rain hammering
on the window, rain hammering on the window like a drunk neighbour
trying not to think about when we knew each other better
you arrive a few minutes late understandably shaken
by last night’s horror show there are no friends to greet you
as you have no friends you order a vodka
some pastel nihilist gets behind the mic & the room shifts
to a mood of grim resolve
you drink more
space drops its sharper lines to the floor
someone asks what you made of the whole thing
you say it made you want to gouge your eyes out
but not in a good way
the lost Miró is called Reaper or Catalan Peasant in Revolt
a librarian says shhhhhh in the nicest way possible
you had met the signifying rupture
in an urban garden, a little wood
cloistered by victorian tenements
where the choices of wine were ‘um red, white’
dosed on codeine
trying to shrug off the weight of my lyrical antecedents
you’d a bottle to yourself
last night I dreamed of Reaper
a huge tapestry clumsily draped across a loft wall.
a sickle.
of spying on someone you knew at art school
who’s a curator of some merit now.
wake up ejaculating
you say, o wow, as if I was there
as if you were, as if it was you.
a hand floats above the room in a silk glove anchors itself
to the promenade via a golden rope tugs gently the red curtain
collapses, the rope, the glove, the entire room inhales as one
if you were here right now all I’d have to say was
God, people with nothing to do are the worst
My movie
Thinking of the movie a lot recently
it opens with Derson in bed facing
a large frame, a photograph of ruby light
cut to a tracking shot: kid in a library alone
night, vexed by strip lighting
you’re in someone else’s nightmare
he is called Alan Derson
the immediate temptation is to despise him
his favourite word is ‘now’ & we cut back
sunset drenched in monochrome
power is an ache, smells like BO but less determinate,
Alan is fourteen
February crumbling into March cornered in the changing room
boxer shorts pulled off, this is things going to plan
the most beautiful boy there turns devastating pink & spits on him
elsewhere, when now was better, when it was a plan
now we are watching Derson at twenty-three
in the library again at night
pouring over a book with blank pages
then another young man another library, ‘somewhere else’
a pseudogothic affair typical of a 90s bildungsroman
his dark room shown perilously unattended
a shaft of light makes a child of itself
falls backwards into a drain
I’ve named it August mon amore so as to turn you off immediately.
I’m telling you this in the hope it may suggest a plan
for my movie about August and September
Alan Derson all alone in a library at night
summer stretched to breaking point
He lives in a slow room
in the library late at night with much pressure behind the eyes
then sleep until two, the café for five hours
gets to the library for 8pm or 9 pm & stays there
In my movie, I don’t want characters, more
alienated obsessions, tedious nows
so tedious it makes me
think of slow afternoons, lawn chairs, throbbing heat
familial resentment, open flowers, smiling
say o! cut the melodramatics won’t you! I’ve a headache
if I was just some softcore straight boy how easy
it’d be to write about my dreams
my movie is so young, a broken divan
aching months collapsing into each other
I’ve forgotten the secondary protagonist
other kid, other library
named something delicate like Eli or Lyric
I just don’t know him at all
colour palette should be an
uncomfortable summer day
not at odds with the central theme
which looks like what? something distracting I
enjoy movies that do the whole surreal-lite take
on the horrors of life
The movie must not be a standard affair
soft lighting is a maybe
perhaps it could be set in a Swedish ashtray
Derson smokes a sexy cigarette
flecks of ash pirouette in 7pm sun
visual refrain is a blurred
shoulder in the corner of a shot
Alan, turning back
a bit more orphic pontificating
Alan, it’s a beautiful morning
Alan, don’t
My movie must have a lot of sky
Derson under a sky
the colour of red brick
of old wash cloth
silk pyjamas, smashed fruit
a filthy fish tank, cum stain
his big line is, fuck your lyric
the sky like vulgar wallpaper
he is too anxious to go to the party
lurks outside, hungry ghost
a sky the colour of sighs
stuttering about Genet & a flick knife
English suburban scene or as ram refers to it
an Erotics of Regret
you cannot remember if the old museum
was an old museum or just
stuffed penguins through peach stained glass
O, yes heap of battered bent cane chairs
ground floor gently sloping into a brackish pool
it isn’t to say anything to say the air smells of blood
the question is, where do oysters live?
& they live here, & still taste good
look the same in many ways but
a bit more wide a bit more tired
you miss the days when people worried about you
ram relegated to his coin operated light
O glaring at a pile of silver candlesticks
there was a photo of your grandmother
smiling with a group of other girls outside
local swimming baths which are a carpark now
the smile is the decades before she knew you
you once made her a gin & soda
watched her sip at it for forty minutes
she said, He never got out of bed.
Not for the whole time I knew him.
she meant her father
who would have been dead two years
by the time of that photo
outside the swimming baths
that are a carpark now
tears, on strictly ideological grounds
—
Oyster Catcher
electric pink against calluna
s’ not moving through
soft slumber of a dead town
felt like drowning, tasted like
a late-night petrol station
they used to pretend they were
looking out to sea despite this
town being the furthest one from sea
we’re a hyperabundance of gulls, said Oyster Catcher
pretend not to have heard
everyone asked him to talk louder
you were so small you two so essential
to this place it’s crude biology
ram in rain ramming down very hard
outside the cinema & you were the rain
crumbling some foam in your fingers
not wandering, no, more, baby just life
the only people there a tiny little thing
spasmodic neon of the food stand
silent pressure special screening
hundredth anniversary of someone’s death
vapours rising off the river music escaping
out of skylights on the walk home you said
life in this town is a fake yawn
it’s less scary to stay in bed
your horns showing
you were
never invited here
no time for thought
think sewage
not five or six pm
late summer
sweat maybe
Oyster Catcher in rain
you didn’t have time
for this, not tonight
joy of being needed
all the quiet things
between Ram & God
—
snake, sliding somewhere, slowly silent
your breath slips out of you
orange light across concrete
Oyster Catcher in rain
as if you’d just left
the knowing is all in the unknowing
the walls of a hot cave
thinking becomes what was thought
daringly poetic motif days at a time
without putting trousers on
it’s either lovers or somewhere nice to die
a hundredth time would dare to be caught dead
maybe think of something else in the meantime
you ran out of things to say
the day you left him there begging
Oyster Catcher in rain
O bright pink weeping
no decorum
it doesn’t have to be so painful, you said
sprightly despair
where could the word choke be applied
but everywhere
sometimes you watch him online
being alive
diffused like light
thru frosted glass
sharing a cup of coffee
skin crushed
into the carpet
nothing carnal to it
just minutes & minutes
you first & only lover
a rock spattered with
forgetting & birdshit
a snake coiled on it
like a heart
—
you………Implement
you………Fastidious Murk
you………O Stark Lightening
built out mud
the person parts of mud
Ram parts forming on
the balustrade
pulling hair breathing hotly
full gushing heat
his stammering grace
which if nothing else
felt far too much like sea
Wednesday night, November
you bought him a postcard
left it under a pile of dvds
met his mother just once
when she found you
both curled up
he said, don’t worry
rolled a cigarette
took it out to her
left the door ajar
dark gold light
on your chest
took your hand
you dreamed
of dignity
more than
posthumous
c’est ok.
———-
‘Common tendencies’ and ‘My movie’ were previously published in Modern Queer Poets and The Suburban Review respectively.
