John Whitworth: Five Poems

Going for a Burton

I hear you sighing through the curtain.

I see you singing on the stair.

I know most nights

I’m in your sights.

I feel it when I douse the lights.

I feel it everywhere.

Now here, now there, without a care,

Your silver skin, your golden hair,

So young, so yare, when I am old,

So winsome warm when I am cold.

Fountain of wisdom, son of Art,

Physician to the broken heart,

My brave beginning and my end,

My life, my lover and my friend,

Attar of roses in your breath,

Come gentle, unrelenting Death,

Come Death without a shirt on,

Most wished for and most certain.

John Whitworth

 

 

Hauntings

They said the house was haunted, but by whom?

They didn’t say. Perhaps they didn’t know.

The housemaid flitting through the sitting-room?

The stripper strangled in the studio?

The baby in the bloodstained babygro?

Alas poor ghosts! The worst of them are only

Tricks of the light to stop me being lonely.

 

The housemaid? She was poisoned by the stripper.

The stripper? You can blame it on the id.

It was his mother killed the little nipper.

She wished she hadn’t done it but she did.

And when next day they came for her she hid

Inside a wardrobe but of course they found her

And dragged her to the river where they drowned her.

 

A cardboard box went drifting down the river.

The child inside was bobbing in the stream.

He was the merest wisp of a cadaver,

A loss of breath so little it might seem

As insubstantial as a summer dream,

A bid for life choked off inside a minute,

Goodbye cruel world and everything that’s in it.

 

A scuttling in the shadows like a mouse made

My neck hairs crawl and set my teeth on edge

It was the soul of the poor murdered housemaid

Smelling of metal polish and boiled veg.

She had discovered God and signed the pledge.

Much good it did her, poor unhouseled thing,

Poor fledgling sparrow with a broken wing.

 

The stripper was a wrong ’un, ripe for sex.

I was an ardent boy seduced perforce.

We did it till I clouded up my specs,

All fifty-seven sorts of intercourse.

Death was our only possible divorce.

I said was strangled, should have said got shot.

That was another detail I forgot.

There are times I wonder if I’ve lost the plot.

 

They say I’m mad, you know. I know I’m not.

John Whitworth

 

My Blue Heaven

I’m sitting on a bench in Paradise,

Jet-lagged. I turn my head and sniff the air.

Broad oaks and rolling meadows – very nice.

Likewise the sheep, all safely grazing there.

Some lovely lines of Walter de la Mare

Unwind deliciously inside my head –

My first experience of being dead.

 

A shock-haired angel with a bag of cheese

And onion crisps comes shimmering through the grass,

A Botticelli child with winsome knees

And elbows and a sweet, seraphic arse.

Steel roses and chrysanthemums of brass

Bloom in my soul. My angel crunches crisps,

Then carols in the most divine of lisps,

 

With hymnal, halo, wings and angel’s nightie,

Our Holy, Holy, Holy, God Almighty.

John Whitworth

 

 

My Father’s Ghost

My father’s ghost was wont to walk

With Captain Ill and Marshal Stalk,

And oftentimes upon the Moor

I’d come upon a spectral spoor

That marked the stately rigadoon

They measured out beneath the moon.

Such phantoms, ghastly, gaunt and grim,

Could rend a peasant limb from limb

And crunch the bones of girls and boys

Who so had lost their equipoise

They stayed out playing after dark,

Till dawn discovered, stiff and stark,

The children who, in Mum’s despite,

Go gallivanting through the night.

It serves the little bastards right.

John Whitworth

 

 

Prophecies

The phantom in the attic,

The gnashing of the gums,

The howling of the static,

The bleeding of the thumbs,

The symbols in the letter,

The language of the curse,

The shunning of the better,

The choosing of the worse.

 

The parables of Jesus,

The warnings of the Djinn,

Spectacular diseases

Erupting on the skin,

The priming of the pistol,

The honing of the axe,

The shining of the crystal,

The boiling of the wax.

John Whitworth

 

The burning of the Bibles,

The casting of the runes,

The slitting of the eyeballs,

The orbits of the moons,

The parsons on the beaches,

The prayers on the sands,

The quivering, boneless creatures

With seven-fingered hands.

 

The changeling in the cradle,

The leper in the lake,

The devil with the ladle,

The madman with the rake.

The creaking in the boneyard,

The whispering in the wreck,

The tightening of the lanyard

About your reechy neck.

 

Twin Souls

 

My soul is pure, unspotted, edged with light,

A clear window, opening on the blue,

Still surface of a lake whose birds are white.

See how they glide and plane across the view

Of sky and water, circling endlessly,

And calling as my soul calls out to you.

 

And you are flying like a bird to me.

I hear the swish and shiver of your wings

Inside my head, inside my heart, for we

Were born to cleave together in all things.

And you are here, but oh, your wings are black,

Your eyes are flame and all your body sings.

 

Across the water like a razorback,

A song of darkness, violence and blood.

It breathes sweet perfumes aphrodisiac,

Not nurtured on anaemic angel food.

It sings that everything you say is right.

It sings that everything you do is good.

John Whitworth