Oliver Lomax


Email: oliverlomax@hotmail.co.uk

 

The Reveres Jukebox

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.

England's new trinity of love.


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.