THE JOLLY SMOKERS

Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone

On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet

Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent,

Ground to which he feels no entitlement

Nor any purchase on the sullen street;

Unpeels his chill gray cheek from chill gray stone

Then orients himself in time and space.

The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor

With on one wall some obsolete decree

Meant for the Cypriot community

And at the near end an iron-studded door,

A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face,

Or that of some more academic tome.

He struggles up onto one threadbare knee.

Moved on by night, he’s slept instead by day

Beneath Saint Peter’s covered entranceway

Thanks to the shame of university

And a conviction that he can’t go home,

Can’t face his parents, ask yet more reprieves

Of those who’ve done so much, left in the lurch

Through furthering Den’s literary bent.

He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent

To shelter in this all but disused church,

A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves,

This sentry-box in lieu of an address.

Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men

With targets, goals to which they must adhere,

Themselves regretting the proffered career

That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den

Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness

In this, his latest of unfixed abodes.

Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing,

Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out,

A student loan he dare not think about

Here in his hutch, its corners harboring

Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes

When all he’s ever craved is poetry,

The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had.

To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear

Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair

Nor the reproof of hard-up Mom and Dad

Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee.

Thus one door closes, while another shuts

Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup.

To doss in Saxon palaces and forts

Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts

So with a sigh he stands and gathers up

His bag as though it were his spilling guts,

Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night

With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:

Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,

Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.

An unaccustomed surge of urgency

Propels Den out into a tired rose light

From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,

Across worn flags that vandal time deletes

Where names and mortal numbers disappear,

Erasing status, sentiment, and year.

Dead information sulks beneath these streets

And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld

Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,

The war memorial’s black memo-spike,

Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls

When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,

Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like

Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate

Then over Marefair, observed with disdain

By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;

White hair and beard, officious little sod.

A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,

He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally

As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane

Towards a new low and a legal high.

Why did he come here to pursue his goal?

These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,

Here to a town that nutted off John Clare

Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.

These are the yards where sonnets come to die

As with the local poet he’d been shown,

The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze

He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.

Rousing from reverie barely in time

Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays

Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,

To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end

Between the shabby flats where it cuts through

To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he

Must brave declining visibility

Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into

The shadowed valley of the psalm descend

Through a despond of debt and canceled dole,

The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.

He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom

Only to misstep in the gathering gloom

And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp

The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.

He calls himself by an unflattering name

Then slogs on among peeling Bauhaus slums,

Making for where the high-rise windows glow

From somber violet altitudes and so

Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,

Scraping one foot behind him as though lame

And, too late, suffering anxiety

About his bald host, whom he barely knows,

Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound

Like the most selfless altruist around.

Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,

Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,

But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass

Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense

From brief illusion, a great cog of night

That smolders and revolves then fades from sight.

He frowns and, finding the right residence,

Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass,

Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane,

His benefactor shimmers into form.

“Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died?

Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.”

While Den complies, allowed into the warm,

His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain

Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall

Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?”

Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee

Where books on psychopharmacology

Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point

On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball

Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red

Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds

In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug

Into an origami doodlebug

Then lights the stout white paper fuze which leads

To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head

That explodes into giggle, gab and cough.

Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood,

Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke

And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke,

If in return for lodgings, dope and food

Dennis might be prepared to suck him off.

“Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity.

I’m offering pizza and me special stash.

This hooker wanted some. Said I could do

Her up the ass, but no. I’d promised you.”

Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash

Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity,

All the hard bargains that it will entail

Keeping on the right side of a front door.

He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save

Time done while waiting for the microwave

To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor

Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail

And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead

On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest

Such poetry as might be had among

The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue,

Attempting to maintain an interest

In De Profundis while he’s giving head

But failing to recall a useful quote.

Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things

Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme

Save chance events acted at the same time:

Just as the heartless oven-timer pings

Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat.

They eat in silence. Den discovers he

Can still taste his aperitif and hence

Does not enjoy his entrée. When they’re done

The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one

Announces that it’s now time to commence

With their ethno-botanic odyssey

And shows Den the datura he has grown,

Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page,

With the Salvia Divinorum which

Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch

That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage

The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone.

“I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see.

I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke

The other later.” They both masticate

The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.”

So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak,

Den gulps and swallows apprehensively.

He pales, as if at the approach of some

Fierce, underlying pandemonium.

Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall

So that how long he’s sat he does not know.

The dismal room has undergone no change

Save that its cluttered details now seem strange

To him, and meanwhile simmering below

His tongue the bitter vegetable ball

Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run

Into his belly, past the teeth and gums

To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone.

Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan

As he by subtle increment becomes

Uncomfortable in his own skeleton

And catapults up from his seat to pace

The room, thus to assuage his restlessness

While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk

Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk

At the delay, this possible to guess

Through study of his well-upholstered face

Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue.

“Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz

I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares,

Circling an endless rug between the chairs

As, barely knowing where or who he is

He wades in a dissociative fog

Alone, the lights on but nobody home,

Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid

The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat

Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that,

Some little tramp on crackling celluloid

Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome,

All color fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den

In antique garb now waddles through the gloom

Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk,

Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk

While in the upper corners of the room

Are gruff, gesticulating little men

In similar attire, homunculi

Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace

The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call

Their taunts, where dirty gray light seems to fall

As from some higher mathematic space

Or proletarian eternity

Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow

Seizes them both. Perspective is askew,

The jeering imps made large as, by degree,

Den and his colleague rise towards them. He

Has the sensation as he passes through

Of fusing with the drab planks from below,

Emerging on their far side in insane

Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor

To nightmare. He discovers that his skin,

Now naked, is that on a manikin

Grown from this attic of the charnel poor

With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain,

Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum

Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled,

As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he

In floor, is seized by the fraternity

Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled

Up to inebriate Elysium:

“The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch

Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut,

Enjoy that good night out without the wife

Pursue an after-hours afterlife

And want for nothing save a head to butt

Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.”

Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell

Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy

The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate,

Its touted goodness decades out of date,

Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye

Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele

Of smoldering reprobates who swirl and curse

About him as he struggles there beneath

Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat

Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat

While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth,

Though some of his confederates are worse.

There’s one whose features crawl about his face,

Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be.

Another, a raw-knuckled harridan

With smile as threatening as any man

Sways to an air that falls conspicuously

Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space,

Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives

To find its source, soon managing to spot

The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums,

Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs

Disconsolately, yet perk up as what

Appears to be their ringleader arrives

To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who

With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes

Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view

Him, if but briefly, noticing that two

Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs,

One memorably fair though lacking hue

And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out

But draws the mob’s attention with his cry

That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown,

Jesting as they attempt to tread him down,

His careful lyric ear affronted by

Their hateful voices everywhere about.

“He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg,

Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.”

Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit,

Is held down by the leering female brute

Who’s carving her initials on his arm

Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg

Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet,

Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout

As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire,

Resurfacing to hear the bard inquire

If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about,

Told in reply that he’s just down the street,

At which the children leave. The cackling throng

Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways.

They kick Den harder as the band begin,

They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin

And as the joyous, tumbling music plays

These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song:

“Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we,

Up here near fifty year now, man and boy!

Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale,

So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail!

Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy

Our pie-eyed paralyzed posterity!”

And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some

Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes,

Target for every last ethereal thug.

Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug.

Not even memory of his name remains

Nor life prior to this warped delirium

Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal

Competes now with the music’s weave and wail

As the two writhe in what appears to be

A pissed-up paradise or purgatory

Where bygone barbarisms still prevail

And the perpetually present poor are real,

Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass

Before distraction having the semblance

Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums,

Frog-marching there before him as he comes

A mangled man whose babyish countenance

Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass;

Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime

And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?”

The vagrant phantom loudly now decries

His captive’s deeds and whimpered alibis

Though Den, just then pressed down beneath the floor,

Cannot discern the nature of the crime

Yet sees its punishment. For his offense

The prisoner, stripped of his torn attire,

Is made to kneel, unsure what to expect,

While Kenny, wooden phallus teased erect,

Learns that the roughneck revelers now require

An act unnatural in every sense.

As both performers start to moan and bleat

In their abrasive coitus they enthrall

The spiteful, spectral spectators, who sing

“We’re jolly and we smoke, but here’s the thing.

There’s some stuff that we care for not at all

And serve rough justice here above the street

Where all the assholes of the ages meet,

Thereby democratizing Milton’s fall

With Satan overthrown and mob made king!”

Den feels as if he may be settling

Back to a real world almost past recall

Through spit and sawdust at the phantoms’ feet

Into an intermediary zone.

As from some party in an upstairs flat

He hears the rosy-cheeked man’s howl of pain,

Forced to do that which goes against the grain,

Then sinks back to Fat Kenny’s habitat,

In darkness with the lamp-bulb clearly blown

And finds, now the experience is done,

His host slumped on the couch; him in his chair.

The jumping up and pacing, it would seem,

Were merely part of his unearthly dream.

Exhausted, leaving questions in the air,

He slides into a kind oblivion,

Knowing, as all thoughts into shadow pass,

The dead to be a literal underclass.

Out of gray nullity to consciousness

He comes, reluctant, one fact at a time,

Aware of self, of where he is and when,

His body in the chair. Eyes slitted, Den

Notes, after the stark, solarized sublime,

That there is color, though not in excess

Nor well-distributed. The sun, discreet,

Leans through the curtains to bestow a kiss

On Kenny’s slumbering paunch. Beneath Den’s tongue

He finds and spits out the exhausted bung

Of salvia then, needful of a piss,

Rises unsteadily to his bare feet

To navigate that unfamiliar place,

The hallway with his bag, Fat Kenny’s coat,

Then up loud, bare-board stairs to find the loo.

Fully awake now he peers down into

Stained porcelain, the filthy toilet’s throat,

Its exhalations lifting in his face

As memories rise too, sharp as a knife:

The porch of Peter’s Church, his student loan

And, oh God, did he suck Fat Kenny’s prick?

He’s overwhelmed. It’s all too much, too quick.

Den retches and with a despairing moan,

In its entirety, throws up his life

For some few minutes, doubled in a crouch,

Then flushes. In the rattling pipes, trapped air

Bellows in anguish like a minotaur.

Mouth wiped, Den clumps back down to the ground floor

And the mauve gloom of a hushed front room where

Fat Kenny still sleeps, supine, on the couch,

Extinguished pipe clasped in one pudgy hand.

Though keen to leave, Den feels it only right

To say goodbye. “I’m off, then.” No reply.

He notices a flat, green-bellied fly

Orbit the still, shaved skull and then alight

But though he sees he does not understand

Why his host shows no sign of coming round.

“I said I’m going.” Den begins to feel

Uneasy and as he steps closer spies

The motionless breast and unblinking eyes.

With realization comes a shattering peal

Of sudden dreadful and incessant sound,

A circling and swooping banshee roar

That shivers glass and sets dogs barking but

Appears to have no source save him. Den screams,

An improvised Kurt Schwitters piece that seems

Expressive although inarticulate

And backs in the direction of the door

Which, unlocked, yields at once and opens wide

Whence dazzling rays pour through the gaping hatch

To blind him. Crumpled sleeping-bag forgot

And slammed door ringing like a rifle shot,

Den takes off without bothering to snatch

His shit-smeared sneakers from the step outside

Or to look back. In truth, he doesn’t dare.

The grass is cold and wet – Den has no socks –

As he sprints past the tower blocks – nor a plan –

But then in Crispin Street he spots a man

Whose pale blue eyes and thinning flaxen locks

Are oddly reminiscent, but from where?

Upon Den’s lips unspoken epics burn

And seek release, drugged visions that might be

As those of Coleridge, Cocteau, Baudelaire.

By now he’s reached the guy with sparse blond hair

Who eyes the gasping boy uncertainly

And asks “Are you alright, mate?” with concern

Made clear. Is Den alright? Aye, there’s the rub,

He thinks, one with De Quincy and Rimbaud,

Preparing for an image-jeweled account

To spill forth as though from some Bardic fount

But all he can come out with is “Yes. No.

Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub.

That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub.”

His mouth won’t stop. “They wouldn’t let us go.”

Won’t pause. “Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out.

It was a pub”, as if that were in doubt,

Language bereft of any metered flow

With words recurring, echoing like Dub

Through burned-out ganglia. The stranger’s stare

Is quizzical. “Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate.

Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept

You at all night?” Although Den’s barely slept

He knows the man is trying to judge his state

Of mind. “Which was it, anyway? Up where?”

“Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub.”

Den babbles, but the blond man nods his head.

“Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that”, and then

He mentions, in the corners, little men.

Den strains to comprehend what’s just been said,

Brain washed, or at least given a good scrub.

“Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”

Seeming to understand the man takes out

Some cigarettes and offers one to Den

With calm acceptance bordering on Zen

Then lights both. Den squints. What is it about

This quarter of the unforgiving town

That brings such things? His savior tells him how

He isn’t mad but will take time to mend;

Provides more cigarettes; offers a tip

On where to rest, suggesting a small strip

Of grass with trees at Scarletwell Street’s end,

Adding “They’ll be in blossom around now.”

With syllables become a syllabub

Den calls his benefactor a good bloke

And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill

But looking back to find the stranger still

Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke,

Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”,

Then carries on down the long slope again,

Barefoot, skirting jeweled spreads of powdered glass,

To the T-junction at the bottom where

A single house stands near the corner there

Amid a great amnesia of grass,

Its presence making a stark absence plain

Yet with no clue as to whose residence

It is, its windows with closed curtains hung.

Beneath trees further on he takes a seat,

With freight-yards making the dressed set complete,

Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among

The lyric rubble of experience

In search of rhymes. The solitary abode

Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,

Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.

Lighting his cigarettes each from the last

Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend

The dead man in his house just up the road,

That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains

At the idea of it; cannot begin

To analyze nor even quite define

How jarringly abrupt that end-stopped line.

Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within

The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain

But finds instead its own signature tread

And sensibility. Den’s narrative

Thus far, he sees now, lacks maturity,

A consequence of inability

To put forced stanzas by and only live

His language, though it goes unread

And unrewarded. No more self-deceit.

He’ll go home, face his folks, work in a shop,

Pay off his debt and wait for the day when

He’s had a life to write about. Just then

A scuffed blue Volkswagen grinds to a stop

At the round-shouldered curbside up the street.

A dreadlocked woman climbs out to assist

Her passenger, a thin girl of mixed race,

The younger of the two and yet more frail

With bandages in lieu of bridal veil

Surmounting her exquisite, battered face

And wedding flowers clutched in one trembling fist

To emphasize the matrimonial air.

Their car left at the corner of the block

One helps the other slowly up the hill

Out of Den’s line of sight, though he can still

Hear their muffled exchange before they knock

The door of the lone house that’s standing there,

This summons answered after a long pause.

There’s conversation too hushed to make out

Before the women, minus one bouquet,

Return to their parked car and drive away,

A striking vignette which leaves Den in doubt

Regarding its effect, still more its cause,

But then, the world won’t scan as poetry.

Ass chill with dew he reconstructs his night,

The things he’s done, the dreadful place he’s been,

Crowned with the first dead man he’s ever seen:

A stripped-down attic statement, still and white,

Without a trace of ambiguity

Or adjectival frills, that can’t allude

To anything. Den needs a modern voice

As had Blake, Joyce, John Bunyan or John Clare,

Words adequate to these new ruins where

We may describe the wastelands of our choice

In language that’s been shattered and re-glued

To suit these lives, these streets. He thinks he’ll sit

For one last cigarette then phone his mom.

Somewhere uphill behind him sirens wail

Diapasons of disaster and yet fail

To mar his sudden equilibrium,

The snow-globe moment’s placement exquisite

In time’s jeweled action, where future and past

Shall stand inseparable at the last.