Oliver Lomax
Email: oliverlomax@hotmail.co.uk
Algiers for Maggie beef
Are you clued in prophetess, to the banner of revolt to the humour of
revolt to English humour itself? You deified Whitefield with your
merciless assaults, you spoke with all the fire and sword of Budica to the
vast nakedness, to the voids of skin and colour.
The gen dame, the dolls of sorrow forced your head to the café floor,
come though see the horror, peep through the birch window shutters see
the FLN, and the glorious pig torture of the Algerian night. Redemption.
No redemption you say, not for a martyred heart.
Now the obituary tide, the opal ring forefinger unfolded for England,
your angelic paper retreat.
Andre you came for Maggie beef, the new local resistance of the white
field, the sedated homes are yours, show them your photographs of
tattooed Russian prisoners, tell them about the real nightmares. Come
understand their peculiar adultery in the bone china collaborations of Tuesday
afternoons. Refuse to see any English doctor educated after nineteen
fifty four, did they make you feel like Harold Wilson on the Morecome
and Wise.
Forgive these placid estates they overlook the Tudor rose, are sad
about the bridge of wealth mainly because some men spend in one night in
London what another takes home to feed his family for a month.
In their mortal slip the tenants of industry dilute their glory tongues
and wear a shield of glass in the hollows of all defiant protests.
Sit with them now in favour and disgrace.
With frivolous hate she laid away her best years and visionary tears
and like the mahogany forest of the Volta keeps tender her whimsical
geometry and sustains her delicate head in the treetops to condemn the dark
waters and its practice.
The stag and vine chairs receive her anaemic body with reluctance and
guilt whilst the nystan pastilles and soft apples discompose their
delicate forms so that her palette can understand for a few moments of the
day. Now the ministers of care come to tend to her skin and hand down
their vague communion. They are creative with her poverty as I am not.
They are an immaculate god, a god that will sit with her in the daytime
watching with eagle stone glare the half and quarter moon decent of the
diazepam tablets, for I have known this pill box doctor clock since the
age of eight and it is no calendar for infancy.
Her home is all a ruin, an emphatic bungalow, a cell of ochre stained
walls that I have scrubbed back to white on occasion. The pile of
electrical keys abandoned like paraffin birds beside the meter at the front
door, the jars of copper coins waiting to be consolidated, lost from
currency and given to the children to build rooms with. Her undergarments
adorn the health service appliances like individual white shrouds and
kiss her home stead like the snow in Moscow.
She hates England's new trinity of love but cannot define it. The
radical jealous sons who count their tiffany bones whilst five miles north
of the Caspian Sea we leave women in the gallows. The schools to Walt
Whitman that England has closed in order to make claim for every
inconceivable accident. The legislative corridors that bruise my finger tips
and leave a red dawn Harlem in the fields of Peterloo. I remember her to
you in out patients when she whispered I shall soon be quite dead at
last in spite of it all.