Barry Tebb
LETTER TO MICHAEL HOROVITZ
It is time after thirty years We had our Poetry Renaissance Rise, Children of Albion, rise! It is time after nightmares of sleep When we walked the streets of inner cities Our poems among
CONSTRUCTIONS/RECONSTRUCTIONS
I Living in a land Where only the dying correspond I am borne on the wings of love II I cannot join in a poem The interstices of clouds I watched a lapwing Hover
LETTER FROM LEEDS
Would ‘any woman’ find me difficult to live with? My tastes are simple: space for several thousand books, The smoke from my pipe stuffed with aromatic Balkan Sobranie, A leftover from the Sixties, frequent
APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE
Sorry, Neil Oram (with an orange in my pocket) I can’t make, your loch-side commune by bonny Drummadrochit. Sorry Brenda Williams, I can’t share your park bench protest near the Royal Free At sixty
NEW YEAR POEM
For Jeremy Reed Rejection doesn’t lead me to dejection But to inspiration via irritation Or at least to a bit of naughty new year wit- Oh isn’t it a shame my poetry’s not tame
SUMMER WITH MARGARET
When my mam had to go Up north to look after gran, Margaret’s mam said I could Stop with them; while they were Sorting it out Margaret looked Away, pretending to go all shy
THE COLOSSUS
(Goya, an old man in exile, looks at his self-portrait) A bull’s neck, still much needed, Deserving exile or the guillotine, ‘Because you are an artist we forgave you’, Thus his royal highness gave
SMILE, YOU ARE ON CCTV
Even the charity shops boast of the surveillance Mr Average is caught on camera a hundred times a day To provide unending footage for reality TV But in a decade where will we all
LAMENT
How I loathe this land of my exile, Concrete upon concrete, Steel upon steel, Glass upon glass In massed battalions And no way back. My mind moves to a far-off place To a hill-top
LEFTOVERS
Empty chocolate boxes, a pillowcase with an orange at the bottom, Nuts and tinsel with its idiosyncratic rustle and brilliant sheen And the reflection in it of paper-chains hand-made and stuck with Flour-paste stretching
COMING TO TERMS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA
Why our son, why? Every morning the same dark chorus wakes me And I wonder how I am still alive. “Balance the forces of life and death” Is the Kleinian recipe for survival. “It
FOR JAMES SIMMONS
Sitting in outpatients With my own minor ills Dawn’s depression lifts To the lilt of amitryptilene, A double dose for a day’s journey To a distant ward. The word was out that Simmons Had
WELCOME HOME
‘Leeds welcomes you’ in flowers Garlanding the white stuccoed tower Of City Station: red on green As poetry’s demon seizes me, Upending all ordures of order. ‘Haworth Moor, Haworth Moor’ Echoes and re-echoes under
TO FOUR PSYCHOANALYSTS
Richard Chessick, John Gedo, James Grotstein and Vamik Voltan What darknesses have you lit up for me What depths of infinite space plumbed With your finely honed probes What days of unending distress lightened
TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
This is one spring you will not see. The fifty roses of your spray Smelt soft across that February day Where trees, heavy as only crematoria Can bear, sloped down the fallen banks To