Bridge Passages: Bill Herbert
My apologies to the hopeful who came
here from the Wiary and thought they might get
some decent music on these pages -- copyright and
royalties dictates only the texts can appear at present.
Here are the poems from my bit of the Book of the
North/Drowned Book performance at Biggfest, Live
Theatre Newcastle, 9th July, 1999.
These poems became part of the sequence
'East Shields', which will appear in my next collection,
The Big Bumper Book of Troy sometime in 2002.
Aspects of this sequence gave rise to the webcast Radio
Free East Shields, and some music can be
found here.
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Toon
The real one, the black and white cells,
the edges of its frames quite visible
as Steamboat Geordie chugs on by
and Kappa the Kat cakewalks down
an endless loop of Gray Street to the Quayside.
The secret one, willies out like jemmies
amid the Bigg Market's flying asterisks,
and the hilarious squirts: black for blood
and white for ultimate surrender,
the rainbow's shout as grey as deluge.
Who do you remember to love
in the jingling and the rant of daywhite,
each little waster of a night?
Who do you remember to draw
up from the well of graphite into thought?
Black as milk, as stars, as rivets,
white as coal, as hope, as fillets;
black as hard-boiled fog,
white as the economy of slag:
who do you remember to love?
Beautiful dreamer
Beautiful dreamer
heed full of mince
when will you wake up
and chuck oot the chintz?
The Socialist Pairty
got gatecrashed by doot
while the lungs o wor fathers
aal filled up wi soot.
The lugs o wor mithers
aal filled up wi tears
while they lay oan their backs
and coonted the years.
The coal that was dug up
is filled wi the sighs
of workers and lovers
and dinosaur lies.
The fire it sits on
is burnin wor schemes
so get your big boots oan
and stomp oot your dreams.
Little choruses heard in the coals
Bury the angel
drown the pope
string up the monkey
swallow the dope.
Insert the football
before you inflate
drink up the dog
piss on me Kate.
Sell the Juninho
be NFL
tell the P Minister
life is a smell.
Sink the shipyard
open the cast
banjax the Geordie
bury his past.
Then, Voyager
The good old ship Millennium has
the sun on her starboard bow,
the port side's all in shadow where
we malinger now
with a heidrumho and a yohoho
and a tug on the noose of tow .
There's a thousand starboard cabins, all
as empty as that glare:
at each bolted door beats a thousand bores
determined not to share
with a skinkling star and a hailwellmet
and the salt in your long blonde hair .
Myself, I'd rather wander back
along her darkened flank
to where the yawn of timber starts
to drown out iron's clank,
and coffin-cabins shrink, and stinks
grow large as lateen sails,
and Dante and Bette Davis lean
and look down from the rails
to where an even older craft
burns beneath the waves,
a quinqueremish, Ark-like raft
that holds two thousand graves.
Might a mountain or a berg,
we argue, be our goal?
And is this fluent medium time
or a breathless holy soul?
Then from the aft our sailors drag
up, keelhauled by the years,
a gouged-out, cod-fleshed mariner
whose gasps confirm our fears:
this grand old girl Millennium steams
ahead but never moves:
its seabed is a whirling mind
scored with anchor grooves
with a heynonnyno and a fire below
and a kick from the white horse hooves .
And time is not progression
nor the years velocity,
and lost and altered human thoughts
sing below that sea
with a pale clear sky and a cuttlefish eye
and you'll never come home to me,
with a pale clear sky and a cuttlefish eye
and you'll never come home to me.
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