Tina Hyett, Poems from In the Dirt

8/14/2019 Tina Hyett, Poems from In the Dirt

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POEMS FROM IN THE DIRT

Tina Hyett

PARNDON PRESS


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Published by The Parndon Pressc/o 17a Oakley Square EstateSomers Town, London NW1 3MK

Tina Hyett 2008


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I would have started on a longer poem

but this one will hold the words alright

put crosswise if I have to, uncounted but

vamped to fill & overflow, the lyric

spilt, split, spoiled sold off, no given away

worn out & worthless, friable

polished in places, others nubbly & piled

hoared, lined & sagging, dripping

slowly down the page, forms viscosity

insufficient against the pull of repeated attractors:

the vulnerability of language exposing us

parasitised & predated, or just random secular decay

a perpetual rot whose red spores

drift through like sand in a glass

or even a long empty room slowly filling.

It is impossible to live here, even to fit in

the dead crunchy detritus rising up

choking my throat.

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5/20

Id avoid the East End always:

The ghosts there are hungry like the river

will pull you down: It is a hard place

scoured by the shadows of wealth.

Anything surviving resists violently

sitting quiet & tooled up at the back of the room.

Nothing aggressive about it, the business of self defence.

People turned into sandbags.

This is where all the rivers & the sewers lead

the low point of this city

stolen liberties wasted in conflict & graft:

Dont drift this way, Simon.

Trapped now into art & fashion

take your clothes & leave you wounded in the street

laughing at you: all a game

and youre the loser. Their secret language

blames you & excludes you

builds up another world crazy & sentimental

the land of the self-justified sinner.

How much they love their family.

How much they will despise you.

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6/20

At the Book Launch I realised:

this lyric moment must last

all the detritus of the day shaken up

squeezed across the page

bits or lots

of white space

each word a miniature painting

of itself.

Just how much would they sell for?

seriously

Plus the grants & the residencies.

After this

only high art please.

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7/20

Slush. And high art.

Indistinguishable from an aspergerish processing of all junk.

Snow, you know, is never white

not in this city the colour still of soot.

One day it will be all washed out

to shine like bones in a museum display.

Under the cabinet a huge fluffbunny gathers.

It is a form of consciousness:

Unable to communicate properly

it gets disconnected in the slush.

Its ghost remains: querulous & shrill

troubled like coming off prozac.

In defence: make art.

Make it high.

Nothing on the ground now

but slush.

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8/20

What we praise so often is just folly

Our amazement at how shadows fall

The same projection the sun has always given.

How fascinated we are! What we ignore

Bubbles up behind us like in Benjamins Angel

Until she will deluge herself down upon

All the rubbish of history come back to eat us.

What we did we shall become:

The culmination of our species failure

Marking out the limits of conscious reason.

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9/20

Real solutions to imaginary problems

would you say that was advertising, literature

or just mostly sex?

I cant theorise flesh

not any more the plasticity has gone.

Reality, of course, becomes gritty, coarse-grained

and the colour suffers a lot: metallic or muddy

the available lighting deceives everyone:

this is the place, a pity it just

isnt here know what I mean?

Its as if the world tipped at 90down:

you scrabble to hold on at this gravity sink

but what? Well? nature is wonderful, always a solace.

Maybe then it was sex not literature or dreamwork

good honest body to body

the feel of his hair, I can like that

at the time I suppose: another

just as well, dear, theyre all like that underneath.

Not a happy image. Gravity benefits no one

no more than natural light.

Who decides this? Where

has the director gone to?

Suddenly we all drift away

or down.

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10/20

Pottering about on the old computer thinking of dragons

when the skies opened.

What a cock up!

Everything fell out, not just the water:

angels, coal, fish & clouds all fell down.

Think detritus with a vengeance

really it

was out for something, flopping aggressively.

The angels, see, were mostly damaged by their fall

denatured and subject to all sublunar ills at once.

Their flesh stank like the fish & frogs (also dead)

the coal was useful, but woefully damp

the clouds slowly sank in on themselves, like

remember balloons slowly wrinkling & shrinking on your birthday?

Like that.

A lot like that.

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11/20

Perhaps my ancestors come from Breslau though I doubt this. I have never satisfactorily

explained my name to myself is this why I feel abandoned? Like a slowly aging fluffbunny that as soon

as its found is doomed. If my ancestors actually came from Silesia, so much could be accounted for: my

tastes, my shape, my voice, my rapid decay, my sense of rugged independence. This does console me in

my worst fluffbunny days.

Where my descendants will live, though, I am sure, is Lisbon, where they will mingle with the

many children of Ferdinand Pessoa and his friends, and pass unnoticed in the street at last. I see them

sitting in caf terraces, watching the sun sink glowing over the Tagus, and its last light strike high & noble

buildings behind. In the narrow old streets, stumble lost poets, so unsure of their identity they will

welcome my children as their own.

In the meantime I hide in London stalk Somers Town streets where no one ever walks. It is grey

& slightly disgusting intoxicatingly so. I am almost home.

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12/20

The one occasion for the poem is always forgotten

the point where Id rage absolutely always passes

what I didnt write may be traced out in what I do write

like a scar or a buried watercourse: sandbags

needed against its psychic irruptions, the trail of polters

that are my own, rage turned in (where else?

like the line-endings in some prosy wide poem that

traces out a record of long buried processes within it

of course through the modulation of tone against vowel

the bright sword blades of consonantal play interrupted.

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13/20

Oh Boyd, you old misery

I fantasize about you yet again, your hair

your stubbly jowls & your ears:

were you not a Catholic prelate once

a proper little-boy cardinal?

Before that I see you profitlessly tending a shop

that sells dead animals.

Just why wont anyone buy them is all I want to know?

The shadows grow up around you

and you beat them down. I love you

for that and your inadequacy

as it matches my own but you refuse

even to acknowledge any weakness and so thrive

like a tree suddenly growing in the middle of the road

or like the great world serpent

strictly unviable but

not to be fished for ever.

So sit on my lap

like the little giant you are.

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14/20

Nothing much helps me here, like

being an early crocus in a patch of rubbished gardens

I know, outside a church

empty, angular & damp but

the dirt outside half sterile except where

some old woman once stuck a few bulbs

that push up wearily in all this mess

february throws at us and

little bright sparks of orange

bring some delight to someone passing

another old woman, one really hurt

or a child, a stupid girl with a toy pram.

Look, look, dolly, at the flowers, the

pretty flowers of spring.

Perhaps I am helped, have

like the little gallant corms

got through something again

no fear of learning but

the bright act of surviving enough.

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15/20

Time for certain foolish but sibylline utterances:

In the matter of who decides

cast lots but let him win

Which side of the bed is best?

Always both

There is only one way to raise children

at night in a warm place in silence

There is a secret of invisibility

that like the curse grows upon you

London is owned by the mad

It is never summer

in Somers Town

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16/20

The Sibylline Prophecy Explaind; or

The True Measure of the Poetic Art

Which lieth in a kind of subdued Phrenzy

In which the Soul speaketh in its own peculiar Tongue:

Their Jargons laid out & transcommunicated

With Curious Scripts & Hands with which

The Divine Furor is well known to write.

Newly translated into the English.

After the Lyre Falls silent

We must riddle its Ashes through.

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17/20

Todays word:

the black marks against the deep glowing sky

people walking in the streets

the stars above

what our feet bring into the Church of St Mary Magdalen

what the shops sell

how language always ends up

what poets feed on within the abysmal depths

scurf

moss

the newest street drug

a pile of stolen golf balls

the sludge at the bottom of a freezer

what were always left with

its relation with the rich is ambiguous, with the poor one of identity & mutual nourishment

did I comb it out?

tease or riddle it

tease or riddle it

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18/20

Formal invention gives out

here

inert

a giant fluffbunny

how I love that word

with all its loops

a copperplated pleasure.

The

weak & horrible line

endings

are also like loops

small & neat

like pubic hairs

little cursive signsvery introvert & quiet

somewhat

gritty to the mouth

otherwise

bland & bunnyish

oh yes

this does resolve itself

somehow

limp & halting

as it is

a huge fuzzy presence

a line of loopy language

here

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19/20

Dismal as a flat in Stamford Hill

Where a true religious life will bind and wound

Imagine the pleasures of being legless

My crutches & my crotch together

The little dogs go spoof spoof in the street

It so also the line, it is very hard here

More of a tribute to high art than any easy populist lilt

For this wound up disparateness my bosom the key

And you, reader mine, the fabled beholder

Enable me! Enable yourself! Live

To the full in your engagement with this text

Whose pleasures will remain forever recondite & crude

Imagine here a previously unknown bodily function

Follow these words, that care & cure for everything

Read art

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Tina Hyett, Poems from In the Dirt