DIET
This is where I am right now, feeling like
I’m in some loose-limbed American poem
by one of those hard-living American poets.
Mentioning no names, but … those poets,
who casually toss their cookies
in the car park of a roadhouse then go back inside.
Who work their way through brands of mouthwash
like fresh-breath sommeliers, coming down
off the Scotch. Who write about drink, destitution
and divorce and still serenade the bottle
as a siren for whom they’d drown.
But with me it’s food. The thought of it.
Its ubiquity. The gauntlet of cafes
discharging aromas of baked, fried or lightly sauté’d goods,
making agony of the five minute walk
from depot to car park after the morning shift.
Who needs the crushed depravity of an empty beer can,
the gleaming accusatory empty bottles
with their Jack-Jim-Glen labels and 40 percent proofs,
the coffee table ring stains and slops of spillage?
This isn’t American Hangover with a plink-fizz
of Bukowski cool. This is Hunger in the UK
and the urge to enjoy eating again
never mind the steady pound a week loss,
never mind the millimetric effect on the waistline.
This is where I am right now, and motherfucker
I would straight up end you for a Greggs sausage roll.
I would do the bitterest of business
for an all-butter croissant. Stamp out entire ecosystems
for a full English and a mug of tea with two sugars.
THE NEXT POEM
I’m making a list of things to include
in the next poem. Pine needles
on loamy ground, the smell of rain
in the air before the downfall, the sound
of a curlew or maybe a peewit. Whichever
fits the scansion or alliterates. This list
proceeds from the things I need to stop
writing about, stop falling back on:
work, pub, traffic, heavy industry,
the whole back-in-my-day yawp
of how shit things are now
when they were just as shit back then
but at least the trains ran on time.
I should probably leave trains out of it
as well. Sunsets, lakes, trees tall as the sky –
that’s more like it. Something about
a summer job at a sawmill in Oregon.
The heavy resiny scent of cut wood.
The beers after work – no, wait; shit:
done that to death. Small town,
picket fences, delicate hints of cliché
on the summer breeze. Jasmine! Jasmine,
not cliché. The drugstore soda fountain,
the diner, endlessly refilled cups of coffee
and a sustained rant at the lying son of a bitch
politician on the TV above the counter.
No, not that. Christ, I’ve done a whole book
of variations on the theme of fuck
the government. This is supposed to be
pastoral and wistful, this next poem –
soporific, almost. I just need the right
set of images. Punch in “midwestern nostalgia”
as if the muse were a vending machine.
Light on the water tower at sun-up,
a fallen tree by the creek, cicadas
kicking up the racket of a thousand concrete mixers,
a freight train rumbling through the industrial belt.
Neil Fulwood
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