Читать книгу Bloodshot Monochrome - Patience Agbabi - Страница 8

SHOTS

SEEING RED

1

Black mum parts my continent of head,

with glazed black cotton begins to wind

each division so fiercely my mind

bleeds black. I can’t close my eyes in bed.

White mum uses fading navy thread,

the tension less cruel, more kind

but the vision colour-blind

so I see red.

2

I read the instructions for shocking-red dye

(freedom has given me the green light)

yet bury the evidence under a head-tie

like the insight

that I see the world through a red eye

where blood and heart mean more than black and white.

POSTMOD:

a snapshot. Monochrome. A woman

in a ’60s rayon suit. A knee-length pencil

skirt and jacket with three-quarter sleeves.

Hot aqua and a mod original.

That shade translates to stylish grey. It’s me.

And on the back, someone’s scrawled in pencil

Brighton Beach, 1963

for fun because I wasn’t even thought of

in 1963. Imagine Rhyl,

’82, where the image was conceived

by someone with good taste, bad handwriting

and lack of a camera. Yet that negative,

in our heads only, was as sharp and real

as the suit so out of fashion it was in.

GREY AREA

We two sip wine outside a Jo’burg café.

Soweto’s bloody dangerous, don’t gotill it’s over she says. I don’t respond.

A white man swaggers by with a black

woman who’s not his wife, girlfriend or date.

A black man curses her in Xhosa.

Click.

The white man pulls out a gun and

I’m sitting so close I could lift my hand, touch metal.

Slow motion back

to our car. No split second.

The beer is ice-cold in Soweto, cold as lead.

Home is a grey area yet safe.

I don’t want to go.

SHOOTING ‘UFO WOMAN’

Action! Alien with Day-Glo afro

(wig) and eyes (lens) like stained-glass window,

mount silver stairs, float down to earth

(down-escalator Canary Wharf),

make earthling (hardcore dealer) pause en route

to admire strange skin (ogle PVC spacesuit).

Alien would conquer world

from business epicentre, with S-Curl

but the lens regressed to sand, attacked my eye

and blaxploitation sci-fi

turned film noir.

I left in dark glasses,

in a black cab like Metamorphosis,

each streetlight burning in my vision

how fact (I could be blind for life) shot fiction.

NOT A 9/11 POEM

No, postmen don’t get postman’s block.

They may deliver the wrong letters

but are never stuck for a line break

or line. If you think writers,

poets are lazy, give them enough real work

to sweat out their poems, a tragedy

like 9/11 and a week

to work on their wordplay

and watch them divide

into poets for spontaneous

overflow and poets for emotions made vivid

months later in the aftermath, the stillness

but since there’s still no peace there’s still no poem, no postmortem.

‘GANGSTERS’

shot straight into the Top 10 and school

uniform was dead. Ties tapered,

blazers trailed and we all murdered

to look as miserable as Terry Hall

or mad as Jerry Dammers whose smile

was a few keys short of a keyboard.

We didn’t get the 2-tone metaphor;

know the rankin’ rude bwoy model

was Peter Tosh; that the Wailers

preached ‘Simmer Down’ in ’63 to stop

rough an’ tough on the dancefloor,

but for ska to rule the airwaves

Sometime people got roughed up. We knew what it meant, ‘music to die for’.

THE LONDON EYE

Through my gold-tinted Gucci sunglasses,

the sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime

strikes the convoy of number 12 buses

that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.

Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting

to you, Hello! . . . on . . . bridge . . . ’minster! The aerial view postcard, the man writing squat words like black cabs in rush hour.

The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.

You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.

We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble

where I think, ‘Space age!’, you think, ‘She was late.’

Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .Beat™ blinks, replies

18·02. We’re moving anticlockwise.

ON TURNING ON THE TV TO CATCH,BY CHANCE, SOME QUAVERING BARSOF ‘SUMMERTIME’, THAT VOICE, PITCH,BLACK AS A SEMIBREVE, SCARSON THE FACE FILLING THE BLANK SCREEN,THE BLURRED BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGEOF JANIS JOPLIN’S SYNAESTHETIC SCREAM,ALL HIPPY HAIR AND CLASS A VINTAGE;MY REACTION MIRRORING MAMA CASSAT MONTEREY WATCHING ‘BALL AND CHAIN’CLIMB TO A CLIMAX; THE HEAVY BASS,THEN JANIS TAKING IT DEEP DOWN DOWN –TO THE BLUES, THE DEEP SOUTH, THE NEXT FIXOF ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND HEROIN AND SEX.

Wow!

COMEDOWN

The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. Milton, Paradise Lost

It wasn’t the rent boy we met in Heaven

who looked fifteen and called us dollies,

with his social worker as an accessory

I thought was his boyfriend, leading us up

to the party full of lacklustre women

in tight polyester, and upstairs, not

the Skin with the spider’s web tattoo

for a face, that bled red light in my skull;

nor the ugly man who said Full of fuckingspades and half-castes as soon as we entered whom I misheard, the social worker doing his damnedest to sugar the pill: it was taking a drug that made us innocent enough to leave Heaven and end up in Hell.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

In Hamburg, me and Anna, who is German,

and a man across the street attacks us, spitting

his violence; the air is cold, and bitter

faces gather like rainclouds, like an omen

and my gentle friend counter-attacks but later

refuses to translate and that’s the killer,

her silence, like a shroud; I feel the colour

rage in my cheeks for lack of that translation

reminding me of school, that French exchange,

a simple sentence, Parce qu’elle est noire, delivered at such speed and with such hatred it stung me: to encounter so much rage; more, for being judged solely by colour; but most, the fact it had to be translated.

NORTH(WEST)ERN

I was twelve, as in the twelve-bar blues, sick

for the Southeast, marooned on the North Wales coast.

A crotchet, my tongue craving the music

of Welsh, Scouse or Manc. Entering the outpost

of Colwyn Bay pier, midsummer, noon,

nightclub for those of us with the deep ache

of adolescence, when I heard that tune,

named it in one. Soul. My heart was break

dancing on the road to Wigan Casino,

Northern Soul Mecca where transatlantic bass

beat blacker than blue in glittering mono.

Then back, via Southport, Rhyl, to the time, place,

I bit the Big Apple. Black, impatient, young.

A string of pips exploding on my tongue.

SOL

After I huffed, puffed, pushed you into the pool

of light and blood on the crushed white sheet

you screamed like an abattoir, like shit,

breaking the day to smithereens until

they swaddled you, our son, our Sol:

you were light, light-skinned, skinny, sugar-sweet,

hair iridescent with blood, eyes bloodshot

but they said they would heal

and they did. Home, we keep you in the shade

in a basket bed where we watch you grow

golden, golden brown, your eyes indigo

to bronze, stare and stare at the ladybird

with a rattle for a heart. All you know