Four poems

1

The poet's not talking bout
something that needs explanation
The poem is the explanation
It's the best they could do

I haven't got thoughts of a poet my thoughts
are entangled with the weeds trapped
clutched in the undergrowth where
metaphors come handy

The poet has higher thoughts
a mystery even to themselves

2

And now it's like
the lights have
lowered
and we're all
cowering before

the smack
and yet this was
always my anxiety
now written upon

the world
and so I'll send my time
ensconsed
wrapped in headphones
cloaked in Sarah
Davachi and German
abstract techno

and see people sitting in cafes
like the lady in Hitchhiker's
Guide who suddenly
realised the meaning

of life
Are we nearly there yet?

3

The world is Weimar
slipping
unease turns to tension
and anxiety and all of that
Caffeine's not helping
But still things are
Better than ever
Can still enjoy the sun
and the thrown off
froth as we suck on
our blood
and choose from 15
types of coffee filters
and eat peasant food
on reclaimed wood tables
and listen to poor people
singing about hardship and want

4.

Poets grab stardust and elemental gas and froth
and throw it together by means of their pen
great gas clouds are trapped
vapour is trailed

from out of the clear
undifferentiated sky
a bright spray of water
lands fresh on your face

Me, I lurk in the earth
my fingers are black with scientific concerns
ethereal coalescence is not my agenda
The dirt in my nails makes my metaphors stand

The sky and the air escape me
I grab only the solid
gruff material of the
earth

Bring down ink like rocks
from Mount Sinai
Stuffed in my pockets
Bring it down to my level

Where great poets will
write with ink
sourced in the skies
I'll plod on

perpetually on the verge of disappoinment
forever failing to understand
even the basics of
what I am trying to do

May's poem

Your face to the mace
You may grimace

You’ll be a-maced
following when

Thou mayst read
Of Mace and Men

Shogun assassin – a poem

When I was little,
my father was famous
He was the greatest samurai
in the Empire
He was the Shogun's decapitator.
He cut out the head of 131
lords for the Shogun
It was a bad time
for the Empire
The Shogun just stayed inside this
castle, and he never came out
People said his brain
was infected by devils
And that he was rotting with evil

The Shogun said his
people were not loyal
He said he had a lot of enemies,
but he killed more people than that
It was a bad time
Everybody living in fear
But still we were happy
My father would come home to mother,
and when he had seen her,
he would forget about the killings
He wasn't scared of the Shogun,
but the Shogun was scared of him

Husband ...
Maybe that was the problem
Azami
I had a bad dream
Don't be afraid
Bad dreams are only dreams
What a time you chose to be born,
Daigoro !

At night, mother
would sing for us
My father would go into the temple
and pray for peace
He prayed for things to get better
Then one night
The Shogun sent his
ninja spies to our house
They were supposed to kill my father
But they didn't
That was the night everything changed
For ever

Azami
Azami, your dream has come true!
Dai ... Daigoro
You must protect our son
They will pay
In rivers of blood

That was when my father
left his samurai life
and became a demon
He became an assassin
who walks on the road of vengeance
And he took me with him

I don't remember most of it myself
I only remember the Shogun's ninjas
hunting us wherever we go
And the bodies falling
And the blood

You are marching toward death
wherever you go,
you cannot escape the Shogun

My father hardly ever talks anymore
We just go a little farther everyday
At night, we make a fire,
have our tea
and we listen for the ninjas

We never make a sound

Sometimes he tells me about the past
and about mother
I try not to think about it
but my father can't
help it

Sometimes he gets lost
in the past

John Cooper Clarke, Barfly Camden

John Cooper Clarke, variously called the Bard of Salford, the Salford Poet Laureate, the Salford Bob Dylan, well you get the idea, he's a poet from Salford. The rhyming ranter, who seems to have had more comebacks than a gay porno star who won't do facials, hasn't exactly been fastidious in mopping up the residue of his unlikely punk-era success - a long heroin addiction, followed by domestic bliss in Colchester, seems to have kept him absorbed. Chickentown appearing at the end of an episode of the Sopranos hasn't hurt though, and despite not having released an album since 1982, he's kept up performing sporadically, enough to stay honed and keep him writing new poems.

Late on stage ('old punks never die, they just keep you waiting until you wish they had'), looking much the same as ever, with a few extra wrinkles, he soon settled into an act that was as heavy on the raconteur as on the poetry. I tell you what, you couldn't think of a better man to do a best man speech, he spins more yarns than a medieval dressmaker, and crams a heap of jokes in as well. It seems like his greatest feat wasn't getting poetry into punk gigs as much as sneaking a whole working men's club cabaret act in. Working men's clubs was where he was started out, when punk was still a globule of spit in Malcolm McLaren's eye. He mentioned the downbeat introductions he used to get: "Here he is all the way from Salford, he's not my cup of tea but you might like him, John Cooper Clarke." There are an awful lot of gags packed into his show. And an awful lot of them, it should be said, are not strictly speaking his. When I mentioned this afterwards a friend told me I was a joke nerd, which is true. It also didn't help that I'd listened to a fair few of his recordings and read some recent interviews, so I'd heard or read too many of his own jokes for my own good. So maybe it's more my problem than his.

The poems remain the blistering tour de forces/tours de force they ever were. He ran through some of the old favourites at a pelt, as if he was trying to finish them before a train pulled out the station. Seems like he's always done this - compare these two versions of Twat. He also blitzed classics like I Don't Ever Want To Go To Burnley (with possibly the greatest opening line in the history of poetry), Chickentown and Hanging Gardens of Basildon. Maybe he's read them too often, maybe he was trying to make up time; I don't know, personally I could have handled him taking a bit longer. He was more stately when he read the newer ones, including the heartfelt I've Fallen In Love With My Wife and an unfinished one about the b-movie Attack of the 50ft Women. This led him into a digression about Helvetica Light - he turns out to be a typography nerd, another feature we share, along with old jokes and world-class poetry - and how he always reads it as Attack of the Soft Woman. He mentioned his Jewish-Irish background and how common it is in Salford - "Everyone goes to confession but we take a lawyer with us."

When I watched a few youtube videoes the other day it was like he'd set about me - I went for a walk and found that I was thinking entirely in Mancunian-accented rhymes - and it was easy to see how he'd fitted in so well with the punk movement. He reminded me of when I first read The Boy Looked At Johnny, sharp, direct, aggressive brilliance, and made me want to take a razor to my writing, cut out the pretensions, and speak with a clear, unsullied voice. Nowadays I'd say he's a bit more comfortable and relaxed, maybe he lacks a bit of the acrid, angry stringency that electrifies the old recordings, but what the hell, he's a 62-year-old legend, with great comic timing, and great comic rhyming. On the other hand, I'm not called criticalbill for nothing.

As for my ongoing plan to record all spoken word gigs I go to, I took both my flaky voice recorder and my ipod; the voice recorder worked perfectly, for the first time in donkey's years, but I took it out of my pocket to check it 10 mins in, and knocked it onto pause. They can’t find a good word for you, but I can... TWAT. The ipod also worked perfectly, but the 70-minute file it created seems to have driven it into a black hole of technological incorrigability. The upshot being I don't have a recording. The 10 minutes I do have is just enough to make me really wish I'd not fucked it up. Maybe next time I'll learn shorthand.

Bonus youtube feature: Ten Years In An Open-Necked Shirt

PPS: Incidentally, with his intricate, fiery rhymes, there is a case, if it wasn't for the geographical incongruity, for JCC to be considered a major forerunner of rap. Twat, for example, with its succession of cold-ass one liners, is one of the greatest diss records ever recorded. And Beasley Street gives you ghetto rhymes, albeit of Salford slums, but he's keeping it real alright.