Did Charles B smell of inky sweat
& stale booze – of rolled odours?
That oil from his skin? It could’ve
greased a ship’s slipway [or fried
a sly heart attack brunch for us] –
& his scarred cheeks spat poems
between his knocking-back shots
& did he ever wash? Did he loose
his cock out on a street to shock?
Do I know you? – a paying heckler
was dispatched – again & again &
words were left again [beer helps]
as Hank [to his friends] swigged a
fat-neck Michelob & oozed grins/
This is what killed Dylan Thomas –
his column’s by-line spoke – oily
fish spit out their oily prey [he was
born to this] Castro’s twin in verse
Tag: alcohol
They’ll always revert to size-of-cock
They’ll always revert to size-of-cock
[& what-they-would-do-if-this-that]
as alcohol’s numbing repeats such –
this week’s cache of ex-wife cracks
& tall stories – from short-changed
men – they don’t hear anything – in
pubs they bawl out said-soliloquies
on deaf ears [‘cause no one listens]
except for offers of one more? [But
even then they are still dismissing]
They’ll wake to habitual headaches
British Summertime
Left off-shore by previous tides
& adrift behind a mask of cliffs –
redoubtable & other labels – as
if different [as if our differences
are good]/ Scuzzy pissed tribes
trip over bitter-sweet cocktails –
a mix – cruel shyness & loathly
arrogance gather outside pubs –
knocked back three – then off to
our match – foul origins boil &
spill across crowded pavements
as fists find their answers with a
night’s sweated dizziness & piss
dries quick on wooden benches/
By daybreak there is no hope or
glory on our lorded landing strip
[we were all sold short by Brexit]
I drop my ball sack
I drop my ball sack
into the bowl’s gap
& exhale out of my
arse – a sour split &
burn of [foul] gases
followed by spits &
grunts of red wine’s
overnight damages
inside [we will not
discuss what I said
eight hours before]
Booze talks & won’t
shut up/ Midnight’s
Scrabble is a forfeit
come morning’s hit
on glossy porcelain
of triple scores – so
shower with soaps
& don’t breathe in –
or see my posture –
here – no one prays
for foul drownings –
now flushed & dead
Stone-circled
Six men sit – perching –
on suffering bar stools
Six etched chunks – an
almost-even arc offset
[nearly of Stonehenge]
A curve with no motive
apart from supping ale
& muttering objections
& unruly explanations /
They grumble together
to a misogynist ‘banter’
There’s no women ‘ere /
Their justifications pool
as pints are dispensed
[equally tipped out & in]
If standing stones ever
fall then fools fill gaps –
to stone imposed rules
[of concentric intervals]
Also on Medium
A Poem t’ Newcastle Brown
Here – floatin’ – ish-whiffs
of desiccated weed on a
glass neck – of iffy-sniffs
of dope & somethin’s – of
beer’s belly-round settles
I prefer a bottle of Newci
because our local pumps
are n’ swilld thrugh – see –
look at my remains there
[shy b’low] an obtuse polo
mint seat – relief is clipp’d
& wiped – flushin’ m’ recall
w/out looking down again!
I yearn for a retreat
I yearn for a retreat
from my devices &
my vice of red-eyed
hours – do not wake
me – space spills in
as funnelling sand &
bottles of spilt wine
knocked back in my
bowl-sized cut glass
Instead – pull emptied
tumblers & tall flutes
from breakable lips –
do not kiss thin rims
& try to get shut-eye –
Michael – try to sleep
You almost kiss me
You almost kiss me with that dry smile
made by my your mouth
and your half look
You listen to me – and like me –
you hear near scatterings
of circled cross-table talk
I feel those ricochets of consonants
in split lines
as they pass across your eyes
Then one shuts to wink?
Those slices of others
have fixed on your slide
You capture just enough
to turn from me and find a twist to focus
to a floated idea
A reflection off your plate provides backlight
for you to use your microscope
and its monocular view
Gift of the Gab
Walk on air against your better judgement – Seamus Heaney, The Gravel Walks
I am getting drunk
with Seamus
He still rolls
his soot vowels out
from his distiller’s
mouth
We are considering
fallacies
from our buttressed
high attics
[Aloft in our crosstrees
he wrote]
My English accent flattens –
avoids rolled port-barrels
I will not sweat his peat
or grain
I once got pissed
on my brother-in-law’s poitín
I then sweated poetry
for days
Riddled
Half a waking aspirin
now taken down
and half a headache –
again – left to take
but screw her –
with regret –
more than tight enough
to avoid any off-licence visits –
or as an underlining
of twisted sorts
before not enough of her
causes concern?
A woman in a dress –
high chested –
so highly-grippable
and sweet-kissed in red –
her designer label states –
Mis en bouteille en France
Golden
I lift up Leonard’s
microphone
He had kissed
this windscreen’s
black-eyed foam
His spittle curdles
from his song
I can tell he had sipped
on bourbon’s whore
Tell me Leonard
what
was that
golden chord?
Uckfield Carnival
This floor is piss-sweated
as are those swilled bowls
at Cinque Ports in Uckfield –
more beer-strewn puddles
of splattered cock misses
across slipped wet tiles
Old men flatter too-tight birds
by sleight of words of fucking –
we old fuckers are cursed
Piano Men
The unannounced pianist
was a pummeler –
less Jools Holland
more jewel robber
We politely relocated
from The Griffin’s bar roar
and found ourselves in
a Rocketman party
at another restaurant
five minutes south
where women wore glitter
and sang loud homage
to Elton John’s flickers
of flares of greatness
Rotarians
I am not that someone
who revels in hate
Her look at the bar
left me cold-eye weighed
Poor Phil-the-farmer
could not match my smile
as Val took her drink
leaving her stare to scythe
Those Witches of Newick
have stirred their dark brew –
they sweat its rank scent –
a mephitic perfume
I settled with my pint
in the turned barrel seat –
my lonely remove
was my greet in defeat
Beer Mat
What you readin?
A repine novel
This is my bar work
as larynx~stretched
guffaws
& shrieked screams
tie up eye~readied lines
Dont mix booze
& dry books
Youll re~read
one typeset line
far too many times
tween knocks of beer
& lifted rounds
of re~filled tumblers
& mispronounced
bloody foreign wines
Shot~sworn drunks
& their pissed~up lovers
make stabs for clarity
Itll never be possible
to take hold of
any one paragraph
for long enough
without that jolt
off slammed drinks
& loud slaps
of theatrical hands
on bared thighs
Put yer book down ~ Mike
it’s time for a pint
Blonde-fucking-words
A too-bloody-loud blonde
stood gin-fucked at the bar –
stretching and over-pitching
her filthy lung-and-gut cackle
It was high-and-wide enough
to threaten every nervy glass
as she – blindly drunk – upset
those low murmurs of diners
who slyly turned to witness
her public orgasmic judders
She split atoms and chatter
and spilt wine across matting
as punters’ mouths dropped
with her heavy-footed acts
and re-enactments of others’
disgraced and shamed ways
Hampstead Heath
We scurried across NW3
but not the low-laid Heath
of bricked-ish village-ness
of idealised introversion –
with loquacious City views
No – We took the buff support
of metre-high teak bars
before the flow of beer taps –
erect like those glass towers
stood in that visible rotten mile
We ripped at the greenery
of London’s low-rooted life
Scarred and weeping skin
from middle-class weekends of
pottering was not ours to wash off
This city is a rubbed scab
which if picked will bleed
from its red core and then fester
until a dry canker kills it off –
Once for all – as the Bible says
We slept with different women
of various sizes and weights
and woke to awkward breaths
and memory loss – some things
are best left on Hampstead Heath
Dry
Bugger off to those soda syphons
claiming in January sainthood –
un-settlers of our sense of right
with their smug month-long cast
of sober teases off whipped rods –
with their dry false flies as bait –
those anglers now spreading
their dull-witted winter diseases
of no more indulgences –
drowning by their dry resolution –
But we have our thirst-fix gulps
from all-answering tankards
as they stare out at tame still water
The Lash
We will – now – we will be read like tea leaves
swilled in a bone china cup and saucer
We – the forcing twins will find a paradox –
the mirrored – the paired inept
Us – the repeated – the sighted mis-readers
of too many – many shames – our mistakes –
under a cooling off – of weightlessness
of false sways – of our un-weighings –
here the sickly heavens will heave –
taking us – bowed into a curved white bowl
of moaned throat prayers –
cold mantras between each lost mouthful
against our friends – Falsified? –
Of exultations –
upon that hard – that bare hardness –
so we spew kisses –
there on the glossiness – the unclean porcelain –
as our bloodless faces pair
to the low level of beer-darkened water –
There – one more soundless drowning –
bereft of any of the bubbled screams –
into the suck-suck
of breath-dead air –
our lungs will now surrender as lost
and we shall pull our heads
from this bent reverence – then –
then –
we will find succour in tap water
#Guinness is God For Yer
I am – now – that Old Boy in the bar –
he who nurses an anchored pint –
who has time itself as a luxury
of sips every fifteen minutes –
those slow draws of his lifted Guinness –
that drinking match of dark mass
and white-topped hair-on-head –
‘Youngsters take this tipple ironically’
Then the in-house mumbling alcoholic
stirs me from my reveries by my name
to ask about my illness – and Christmas –
both are twisting inside me – like candida
The quickened swill in my gut then blooms
to a weighty obligee to her seasonal beliefs –
and those of my degenerative stuff –
each then rinsed down by my cold stout
Students Don’t
They don’t throw parties
like we did –
no sleepovers in puddles
of puke and-or-piss –
or found shagging bareback
their best mate’s lover
They don’t sink pure vodkas
for breakfast –
no acid – nothing dropped
without a full appraisal –
googling its providence
Unlike their bad parents –
who took to partying too hard
with only the letter E to look up –
They don’t throw up like we did
Royalty
He is there – again – the ageless barfly
sat like a sore king at the wet-ringed table
where he fondles his tide-marked pint of beer
in the rooted grip of his right hand and
with each sup he plans to swallow time –
kept to Greenwich by his amber hour-glass –
well drunk – but he is still able to command
the Queen’s English – words not troops that is!
He is the cliché – the grounded boozer who wills
his wide-smiled laughter and loud intrusions
upon more innocent patrons – virgins in his game –
those who do not know how he plays the room
.. Don’t take the adjacent seat – don’t be fooled
by his schemes – of words and winks ..
For them he prepares to over-deliver
.. it is so well-known that he never listens
by dint of his loudness and eyebrow animations ..
And a woman – and a man – scrape chairs out
to sit across from him at his stained table –
and he now turns – with his sips of time to take –
and soon she is giggling at his crude stories
whilst her silent man stares at his glass
After half an hour they stand to leave the scene –
the man with a shoved handshake for the barfly –
to quietly let the pub’s royal drunkard know
that he is not wanting to fight – not tonight –
and the well-pissed king is left
to drink
on his own
Units of Measure
It is this moment – a problem of
mine – in my stumbled-to-stand –
when I rise to a lowered sobriety –
to another false swing of swagger
into the blind tight turn to corners
of sharp right-rights and then-thens –
I am stuck still – counter-stopped
at the gloss-bald white worktop –
to find-and-twist – to dead-head –
another French label – volute –
from contorts in cellars – such snobs –
at eighteen quid-ish of so much –
So very much more – bottled up –
Another grip on her narrow neck –
she opens up to a wine bled red –
a gutting-burn of drunk guilt
as I surrender to my mild hangover
which is my waking anal fist
Beer in Alfriston
A pint of IPA
almost Fenian
but still welcomed
by this Englishman
A beer will loosen
so many things
like tied up tongues
and wedding rings
Within view
of the lifted church
I pray to a God
that this ale will work
Late
I cannot suppress the yawns
of this drawn-down evening;
earlier she re-scaled a recipe
into four guest-sized dishes,
adding a handful of dark olives:
We were sat, blindfold-drunk,
in alcohol’s sway of puked lies,
arguing against the concrete
piles of objectionable opinions –
truth still born by boozed cecity.
The Free Ride
Here, for a second time
in our relationship
(should that be ‘only’?)
I wait in a rain-spat car,
now on the wrong side
of a hand-braked midnight,
expecting you, please soon,
to re-surface from a night
of red wine, gin and fags,
in this town of staggerers,
shed-sheltered faggers,
last-bus-to-Ringmer-takers,
on this dark street of
shouts-from-around-about,
but you do not answer me,
my repeated calls and texts,
and it will be, later, much later
a simple miscommunication
writ by your right to escape.
Tab
Now, what we wake to,
we cannot undo,
that accident of drink,
words lost to you:
No soften of pain,
nor popped-codeine,
to fix risen days,
redux, lie ins:
Foul-breathed wine,
paused, re-aligned,
from few hours straight,
to another lost time:
That reminder, rattled,
loose-change gathers,
buying bar laughter,
soured breath,
days after.
Michael, Not Me
– Looking nice Michael,
been somewhere special?
– Funeral. In the bloody rain.
Two pints of bitter, froth flat,
stand alongside the boozers,
as they then chat about showers
just passed and bloody penguins.
One of them, not Michael,
has the look of Rupert Murdoch.
Pints are refilled, the urinal next –
it takes more visits these days.
– Michael, you dressed this well
last time you was wed.. hahaha.
Ceiling beams, once chiselled
by equally beery men,
prop the roof of the bar
and threaten the non-stooped:
the timbers are black-slapped in gloss,
they ooze a shine like a ship’s tar.
Old age brings advantages,
and shrinkages and breakages.
A handshake, another drinker,
greeting Michael, not Mike (too old,
not Mick, too straight)
all to the hubbub, ice-chink,
bandit-complaint and clink
of glass and bar. Michael smiles.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 