The monotony of always being on a side!

By the picture-house he blacked my eye

and in The Golden Bowl I split his lip.

And if I took some pleasure in it then

I don’t remember. I’d note I had been met

and left with an excess of aggression.

I had been held against a wall and spat on,

torn my skin and clothing on barbed

wire as I fled. I had been scared.

(Giant Grim)

And it was real disaster (astra, stars)

that Fergus stood on the cutting floor

of the meatplant where I spent my summers

moping on the packing line, lugging plastic

crates of feathercut and paddywhack

and prime off the belt and onto the palettes,

and then wrapping each stacked tower with

the massive roll of clingfilm Americans

call cellophane. Brian wasn’t listening;

having spent the morning absorbed

in constructing a skull-sized silver orb

by sticking gaffer tape around itself,

he was playing keepy-up and keeping

count when I got the word to head down

to see the foreman Mighty Quinn . . .

(Mr Hold-the-World)

I would like to see Mozart in the Sistine,

watching the darkness arrange itself

as the candles are damped one by one,

chewing a hangnail, half-thrilled and half-bored

to be taking the music apart in his head.

His quill scratching it out on the starched

parchment later and his fingers stained black

with the cuttlefish ink, not with ash,

but black anyway as the hand of Prometheus.

(By-Path Meadow)

If it is a number, it’s irrational.

Like the square root of two. Or pi.

It doesn’t die. It’s memory, a memory

feat. It is discrete and doesn’t stop.

It doesn’t stop, that is, until it does:

it dies. A man, the son of Someone,

is killed in his own town by anagrams

of nativist and visitant. Amen.

And the Baron of D etc.

Any number, even Constant, has its patterns.

Keep an eye skinned for something to sharpen

as you mooch along the tarmac, something

to lob or to burn, for some fact to report

apart from the porn left in the hedge,

the own-brand bottles of vodka smashed against

the stop sign or the same unfamiliar

green Sierra parked up by the piggeries

for the fourth or fifth evening in a row.

You stand on the verge for the tractor to pass

and trail a long stick to poke roadkill with

or the dozen fertilizer bags of stiff

gawpy chickens your sister saw young Morgan –

the one not right in the head, not the one

in prison – chucking off the Red Bridge.

(Valley of Humiliation)

In his medieval chainmail apron

Fergus was again waiting, with Beetle

O’Donnell and Mungo, and an arsenal

of animals dismantled, unhitched

from tendon and skin, the glistening

testicles, kidneys, livers, the slick

rippling hearts – I heard the door bolt

behind, and began to run before

I’d even reached the cutting floor.

All trajectories are parabolic,

and Galileo demonstrated how

metal spheres fired from a falconet