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Poetry

Four poems

Al Anderson

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

what it is you’re looking at

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. 

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