POETRY BY

Iain Britton
© Iain Britton 2005



Days

I call them as they are
live them as they come. I call this caravan
home.

Sunshine measures its stroll to the fence and back
neighbours laugh and bicker and sing. Music
rocks down to the river. A hawk
splits the air waves. Polly
leans into my eyes and kisses me
asleep
awake.

I wander about on my own
and like a lifer I
spend most of it in solitary.

The streets get in my way
they’re full of shoppers office workers weirdos old people doddering
doing their thing every day of the week. I’ve built

tunnels entirely for myself to walk in. I see no one and then
I do. I do my thing.

I live closed off from the the drawn knives of others’ eyes
from the couple who live in the house which I’m attached to by a
cord. I watch them washing regularly - taking it in turns.

I’ve mapped out my life in following familiar paths
calling in at shops
watching rugby at the park
trains rattling the rails and Bonifaces
trucks loaded with quotas of hot daily bread.

Polly who drinks with me who nicotines my walls
who does more than sit on my knee
lives with me by day

closes me in each night and
locks the moon in the keyhole and then there’s
the question of whose eye is looking in.

The Seamless Hours

Day begins in darkness before the
seepage of light before
the first yellowy fingers
grip the jagged line of mountains and heave.

I lift my body briefly above sleep. A
night bird clicks its beak
chuckles crazily to a phantom’s dance and
the wind shuffles in.

I roll over and talk to a dream-eaten face and she
talks back
then we sleep my arms
wrapped around where she should be

holding smooth curves the smooth skin the
rise and fall of a striated illusion.
Ears burn. I hear the
clatter of footsteps

voices in polyphonic discord vehicles
heating up the winter the rustle of a woman in my bedroom
dressing
washing

brushing her hair talking to herself or
is it to the man who sits on the bed watching? She
kisses me and I bruise easily from each touch of her lips.
I hesitate as if

juggling thoughts. I take her on a tour
amongst walls the bricks and mortar
of my home down long passageways through
rooms furnished unfurnished. We go

between ceilings then follow the shapes
of storeys of floors and descend steps into
the warm dark
the narrow dark

the long dark
our eyes clutching at objects
the infinite going down
and then we stop

to ascend the staircase of the tower -
a half hour’s climb and I don’t know
if I’ll be at the top to
greet her or if she’ll reach the 600th step alone

where God’s open mouth
salivates
in the sepulchre
of his cloud. We

enter a farmer’s kitchen and the sky
thunders and releases a few reminders that outside there are
no certainties of immortality no guaranteed places on tall
sculptured columns. The kitchen

smells of flour and dough hot scones and bread.
There’s a fire an oven the smell of wheatfields
of crops and harvests and ploughs haybales
and cut summer grasses. There’s

beer and wine and the hot stink of youthful mayhem and walls
waxed with age
cooked and blackened and hard like granite.
Further in I

show her the Chapel of the Paraparaumu virgin
Mary the Mother Mary of the Roses Mary of the Purple Pussy Cat
down the road. She stands where she’s stood for years
painted like a Barbie glossy unchipped and glowing. We

can’t help but walk (as softly as) over the packed-in relics
under our feet - the Rons and Williams Nancys and Jacks. I
know them intimately - they continue to follow me all the days
of my life - being screwed in isn’t permanent enough.

In my bedroom she watches the man
taking off his clothes
washing
brushing his teeth. She

feels my hands dip into her body
as if into a river and she grips me tightly. With
this discovery
she assures me I’ve gone too far.

Stripped of Old Divinities

A blackness windows my eyes as I walk into the cold

cavity of The Rialto - a tap on the shoulder a voice

wanting a ticket which of course I don’t have

can’t buy the last cashier is dust

spooling on the floor. Stripped of old divinities

this tomb to cinematography reeks of

abandoned breaths the human life cycle that has been

foreplayed repeatedly in the back seats where the heat of

hands still lingers where Jaffas

passed from mouth to mouth in torrid bouts of

oral contact can still be tasted. Matinee idols

gelled for the part have drawled their last lines and

gone out like imploding stars. The curtain has dropped and

rolled itself up ready for the disappearing act to come.

And something will come - for certain - to knock at

the hauntings of this immense space to take down the

plastered handprints on the walls to tear up the stained

carpets of lovers their sins sliced into smiles

with every new opening night with each full house the

national anthem the foyer alive with queues of

patrons desperate to unsheathe themselves desperate

to slip into roles more comfortable more fitting their

sexuality wanting wanting to be someone other than

the pricks they knew they would wake up to

not fully comprehending the transference of appeal

because what else tell me who else was there

which shred of unexpurgated imagery

was responsible for that deviation into consciousness

that knowingness of self that terrible dance to the death

of losing oneself amongst those glittery made-up fantasies.

And something did come to every single one who

passed through these glass doors who swung them open

let them close who escaped each week to

at least one showing of a feature saw themselves

on the big screen their names in print in neon tubing.

As actors. As pin-ups. Saw newsreels of Solzhenitsyn

escaping - last seen tango-ing with Simone de Beauvoir

along Quay Street - seen arguing on the waterfront with a

Hockney original all puffing Capstans

through nostrils in Vulcan Lane all spitting gum through chinks

in facial hair practising sulky looks

posing for whoever happened to cross their paths eating Tip

Top ice creams and Santa Bars. Generations

had sunk their minds into this bug house and I’m

just starting to get used to the dark my eyes picking up

packs of roaming laughing weeping ghosts a mad mad

madness of the clown clone type. The

last rites of the last night’s artificial flowers lie

dried up in an alcove and tell me please

will it be revealed they are long-stemmed roses possibly

plastic made in China not of the expensive variety but good

enough to be put on display without anybody

paying too much attention and will they survive to prove

these fantastic moviegoers spent their oily fleshy lives continuously

stuffing marshmallows popcorn

images without a cause

down voraciously-shaped throats.

If only to stand in their shoes for a while

live the hypothesis

as if it were my night out on the town my chance to

take down the make-up from the shelf and alter the look of the

mirror and sign my name as if I were another person.

“At a Private Viewing ... ”

The sliding glass doors announce our arrival and heads on warm-collared necks

turn dilated brown eyes at our interruption of a woman’s speech and they pin us

to the floor firing tacks. We don’t move. Bright fluorescent tubes

x-ray us through and through. We’re not family. Our features are too sharp too

Caucasian our profiles distinctly white and pointed with freckles moles

body hair vowels rounded. The family are dark

getting darker the darkest standing in corners. The woman’s chanting

as if to a river as if to clouds passing over its surface to trees growing

from the pictures of water. Wrong place. Wrong time. We stand inconguously

intruders in glass - obtrusive spectators amongst a family celebrating its mother - and

her gift for oratory for making bits and pieces live within them for creating histories. She’s

surrounded admired. She has written her name in earth

glazed it with muddy fingers - and like some obese fertility incarnation

she comes over and puts her hands around mine

holds them and her warm fatness unfolds then folds over me

sucking in my air and something is lost is taken from me is stolen irretrievably

manipulated into one of her creases. Above us through glass

lightning speaks in many languages.

Iain Britton
© Iain Britton 2005

Poetry is widely published in NZ and internationally eg Jacket, Masthead, Salt-Lick Poetry, The New Reporter, New England Review, Stylus, Malleable Jangle (Aust) Free Verse, Tinfish, Slope (USA) Magma, The New Writer, Poetry Scotland, Aesthetica, Orbis, Coffee House Poetry, Poetry Nottingham and The Reader (UK). Poems forthcoming in Overland (Aust), Tears in the Fence, Neon Highway, Wasafiri, Nthposition and Agenda (UK) Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria).

Interview and a selection of poems can now be read on The Poetry Kit (UK) – Magazine 5, plus new work can be accessed on drunkenboat.com

This material is copyright © Retort Magazine/Individual Artists/Authors 2005 - no reproduction of this material is permitted with express written permission from Retort Magazine and/or the Author/Artist.