Land Lords

by Bryan Murphy

Property as virtue: an international lie
receding with history, tail ablaze with stingers,
preparing fire next time.
Its toady minions,
puffed with sense of entitlement,
better watch out: tenants can be pricks.

My first taste as a teenager:
the Lawrence lady from London
lets herself in to the South Coast cottage
while we still sleep,
decorates the death-wired lounge
just before demolition
to swell her Council compensation claims.

Fortune keeps me free
of Brighton’s gangster landlords,
its flat-torching insurance-scammers –
were there a Hell to burn them!

Life propels me to Oporto,
where the regime protects its pillars with weapons
and landlords lack no licence to use theirs.

Italy’s counterparts
could teach them a thing or two
about the pretence of power
from paper deeds.

In Rome, Cadolini: “You don’t know who I am!”
Right. “I’m sailing solo round the world!”
So proud of an ill-fitting factory-outlet suit,
of flats in his dead mother’s name.

Ditto Carraglio, Sicilian good manners,
antique dealer convinced of his right
to flout the law, generous to others
of his ilk: “Thieves won’t be back.
What have you got left worth stealing –
your moustache?”

In Turin, a dysfunctional family,
parents striving to be nice
yet ready to squeeze as though by right;
a whippersnapper son, who failed as an architect
before graduating,
choking with anger on his silver spoon
that bends against the bars over my bank account.

Even in Eastern Europe,
once the red-fascist State has gone walkabout,
a Colonel can accrue capital
through contacts and trickery,
install a foreign tenant in a former Army high-rise.
“Have some more rakia. I’m doubling the rent.
You need a Bulgarian wife. Why are you really here?”

States do no better on the landlord’s podium,
spy on you to boot, and let you know:
the cough of the scribe when you talk on the phone,
handprints on clothes in well-rummaged wardrobes.
“Shut up,” is the message, “we own your tongue.

Don’t even think about it.”

Hong Kong is different,
for time is money,
words are bonds,
and face looks also inwards:
all too precious
to waste extorting nickels from strangers.

I still rent freedom.
Half deaf, I hear the siren call
of brick and mortar:
“Buy me! Let me! Join the caste!”
I’d be no better than the rest.

Day Trip

by Bryan Murphy

Two thousand black beers
in that tiny station bar,
barman rolling eyes
when I order it warm,
cup my hands round the bottle,
let the bitter-sweet malt
ease my vocal cords
after long lessons
then late-night winter chill.

They've spruced it into glass and light,
overlaid pisshouse stench with bleach
and estuary ozone.
Rolling stock's the same,
still leaves on time,
rocks you from river to sea
past names that send synapses
pulsing deep into the senses.

This river line from Lisbon
leads always to Cascais,
a last sweet home in Portugal,
jettisoned to touch the world.

The station there feels smaller.
Outside, a spasm of disorientation,
autopilot frozen by decades of disuse.
In this land of cartographers,
they now have public maps:
check, then plunge towards the sea.

Joy: the posh-shop street's hubris
has been punished: turned to tack,
an Indo-Italian takeaway its feeble heart today.
Still it disgorges day-trippers
into the square above the bay,
on whose tiny beach only foreigners
venture from sand to water.

We spin off into cobbled lanes
whose tiled names
infuse the ordinary with artistry.
Bougainvillea masks the enigma
of partial demolitions.
I know those names,
no longer where they lead.

Autopilot stirs, wakes, fires itself,
pulls me through tunnels of time,
sets us outside an unimposing cottage
a corner of which once served as home.

It stands silent, shut up.
No neighbours chatter.
The garage opposite, now a gallery
enjoys an extended siesta.

We head on to the big one:
a shiny modernist temple
to Paula Rego's twisted magnificent dreams.
Culture as commerce.
I leave with a hallucinatory bookmark:
"Não incomodar" - do not disturb.

The park opposite, where I laughed myself sick
on LSD, my unique trip,
when dappled sunlight filtered through,
swirling in dizzy patterns among the leaves.
The leaves are still there;
the sunlight still does.

Carpet

by Bryan Murphy

I’m on my knees,
fingers flicking through Indian pile,
grass-green in imagination,
smooth as Wembley turf.
My centre-forward nail
shoots,
my left-hand goalie
tips the marble away for a corner
to the sound of one hand clapping
at relegation averted
on the sole luxury item
in that returned-colonial Kentish cottage.

This one, too, is older than me.
I notice it more
now home is my default venue.
Its football-pitch shape sparks only
meditation on colours faded yet effective,
on provenance, history,
on artistry that launches illusions
of depth and movement
radiating from a lotus centre,
its very survival an augury.

The Hell! It’s just a breeding ground
of allergenic mites that I’ll not have
sear my sinuses, rash my skin, widow my lady.
Roll up those half-bare threads,
no more dreams for that theatre.
Away to the cellar!
Let twilight gleam on bare boards.

Campo de’ Fiori

by Bryan Murphy

Filippo was in pretty good shape, until they burnt him.

Of course, seven years of imprisonment had taken a toll – his leg muscles had atrophied and his eyes would water in sunlight – but for a man past fifty, well, he looked as though he’d be around for years to come. And that voice: loud and level, a debater’s voice. Not to mention the man’s mind, sharp and lucid as his tongue. Ah, his tongue.  The weakest part of his whole body, the only part he couldn’t control.  Even that was healthy enough when I examined it. They brought the friar to us, to our hospital on the island in the river. Wanted to be sure he’d survive until the end of his holy inquisition. Some of his holy inquisitors looked more likely to snuff it than he did. Tortured consciences. Brought him here regularly over the years. Always me who examined him, until – Holy Father!

Yes, we talked. Mostly he talked and I listened. No, I didn’t absorb any of his heretical ideas, all that rubbish about life on other worlds. He did teach me some of his memory tricks. No, it’s not witchcraft. Believe me, I’ve seen a few witches in my time. Tell you one thing, I’ll never be able to forget him. Never forget a word he said. And he says plenty. Dominican, he is. Was. Intellectuals. Not like us plain John-of-God people. We just tend to the sick. It’s true we learn anatomy and cures, but mostly we just talk and listen to our charges. And pray for them.

So, memory and anatomy and obedience. I’ll get by with them in the secular world. Saecula saeculorum. What a world. Sixteen hundred years after Our Lord came to it. And left it. Poor, forsaken Filippo Bruno:  our Brother Giordano.

PARTY PIECE

by Bryan Murphy

The morning light forces its way through threadbare curtains. It startles me awake. Where am I? Roll over. No, the bed is too damned narrow, the narrowest bed I can remember. Not a hotel, then. A prison? No, the room itself is too large, too home-like. Got it! It’s the flat I’ve just rented. Home from home for the next three months. A two-room apartment in a run-down leafy suburb in a major East European city. Why? What on earth am I doing here? I don’t know anyone. I don’t speak the language. I’m not even running away from anything. Not really. Just a sore coccyx that forced me to change jobs, get out of that anti-ergonomic study and back to something I could do standing up, namely teaching. Or, in this case, consultancy, for a small dollar salary they say will go far here, and a fat euro-cheque that will fly me to Asia at the end of it. It certainly won’t kill me. OK, let’s have some action: leap out of bed, see how that coffee machine works, have a bash at the neighbourhood market, try and make a phone call. After all, this is my party piece: starting from zero.

Biting The Worm

by Bryan Murphy

The ebb tide breaks;
life flows in his favour:
unbidden, unforeseen, relentless,
it replenishes a micro-universe
with love, ecstasy, contentment.
Wise-monkey eyes flick open
to macro-horrors
in a shrinking world;
one existence blooms,
a universe rots.

Venice Biennale

by Bryan Murphy

Saturday at the Arsenal, art not soccer.
The new explodes on every visual front:
minimalist videos sputter under walls
coated with jokes against cyber-pretension.
Rain has drenched our poems into silence,
whereas sculpture is renewed in the perfect
mis-shapen toes of Ron Mueck’s “Boy”.

The evening’s train draws us homeward
from the palaces of the powerful
toward parking fines, headaches,
bulletins of war and terror
striking ever closer.

Going Postal

by Bryan Murphy

Was it that John Lee Hooker concert?
Guitar busting drums. I bragged
how close I’d been to the speaker,
inviting it all in.

        I stare at mouths like a dentist,
        though it’s the lips I’m after,
        leaning in at them then twitching
        to favour the right ear: trying to get
        on someone’s good side now purely physical.

Or the volleys of semi-automatic weapons
from the balconies below,
celebrating another year of life
in war-desecrated Angola?

        “Being dead has its advantages”,
        my line as The Ghost. Being deaf?
        Not promising for a would-be actor
        vulnerable to pavement cyclists, anything behind.

Or the unrelenting barrage of meaning-light words
from governments, churches, companies bloated
with Humpty Dumpty’s linguistic awareness
forced into the cavity
at every zap, dial or click?

        Though teacher-trained to listen carefully,
        misunderstandings multiply,
        yet even the undeaf
        ask constantly for repeats.

Or the inevitable undermining of ear-brain connections,
biased toward the left, but now muted,
getting no better no worse, nor debilitating enough
to enslave me to electronic enhancement?

       Denied the comfort of silence
       by a supermarket soundtrack of tinnitis,
       I burrow into my own world, to seek
       new ways to learn my lover’s language.

DOLORES

by Bryan Murphy

He knows she is there.

The air is heavy with the aroma of coastal flowers and the Pacific humidity he associates with Dolores. The guitar awakes to Hamish's touch as he tunes it. The audience looks bigger than those he is used to.

Hamish felt very lucky when the leader told the band they would be playing the Jazz Festival at Zuntema, just along the coast from Playa Chisme, where he had met Dolores. He was sure she would come, for the rare treat of live jazz, if not for him. She had captivated Hamish by her easy sociability, by her height, which matched his, by her being at home in her own skin even amongst the lost souls of Playa Chisme.

Hamish, though, failed to prise Dolores away from the surfer. Four long months have passed since then: plenty of time for Dolores to have grown out of him, or tired of him.

The act before the Oaxaca Jazz Ensemble is playing. Its music barely creeps into Hamish’s awareness. He thinks of the music the Ensemble is to play, and suffuses it into his mind with the essence and the allure of Dolores.

Now it is they who are playing. Hamish produces his allotted notes. He would love to follow the tenor sax beside him into the heights and beyond them, but his instructions are to stick to the score and not try to show off his technical skills. Those skills had brought him invitations first to jam with the Ensemble and then to join them, an honour for a musician barely out of his teens that recognised his Oaxaqueno status despite frozen-north birth and features. Hamish is happy to do what they tell him.

At the end of their second number, he catches sight of Dolores. Has she changed? Her hair has bleached to a lighter brown. She is as self-composed as ever, at ease in town clothes. She slips out of his vision amongst the families replenishing plates and glasses.

Into their third number; his playing takes on an urgency. He is playing for Dolores, of course, calling to her, urging her into his orbit. By the fourth number, he is not showcasing his technique, he is his technique. Dolores is forgotten. The drummer starts to play off him, echoing Hamish’s chords in new riffs. Expectant looks are exchanged amongst the band, though Hamish is oblivious to them. They urge each other on with flickers of improvisation. The tenor sax dives deeper into the music and leads it in a new direction. Hamish follows him and then is following no-one, rearranging the tropes of the genre to outline new possibilities and then explore them. This is no longer technique but raw feeling.

The music stops rather than ends. Applause takes its place. The band stare at each other, exhausted, elated, astonished.

Hamish is back in his own head. He remembers Dolores. Now is the time to find her. He sets his instrument down at the edge of the stage and takes the steps that lead off it. High-fives and back-slaps mark his passage through the crowd. He has never experienced a reception like it. But where is Dolores?

The next band is tuning up when he spots her. She is not alone. Hamish recognises four of the group from the Playa Chisme summer. The surfer is not amongst them. Tomas waves him over. Greetings are effusive, congratulations sincere. But it is an age before he can get Dolores to one side, out of earshot of the others. He asks her to come to Playa Chisme with him, alone, now. She can’t. He insists. She won’t. He cannot believe her reluctance. He entreats her.

“Look, Hamish, you’re a nice guy but you’re just not my type.”

Hamish’s world stops turning. His blood has frozen in his veins. His liver has turned to lead. His head hurts.

The figure of Julio comes into Hamish’s peripheral vision. Now he is going to get hell for his disobedience. Julio nods at Dolores.

“Hamish,” he says, “we have to talk”.

But the band leader is beaming.

“Let’s get some beer and fix you some solo time for the gig in Puerto Desaparecido.”

Hamish is back in a turning world. He is starting to feel good.

Set in Stone

by Bryan Murphy

The King
 The fortress refracts the silent scorch of noon;
here below, warriors scream and kill.
The King cannot endure this fate for his men,
torn at the roots by a maelstrom of greed,
short lives halved in his service.
Yet fate wills the fortress be his.

It is done. He staggers among those excised
from self-awareness. Is he the only soul alive?
His eyes burn with sweat and blood, his own,
sinuses aflame with the stench of others.
He tastes vomit, spills it, drops to his knees.
The fortress is his. This cannot go on.

He prays. There is no answer. Duty
lifts him to his feet, forces them forward,
up the grassy knoll toward stone walls
untouched by mayhem, aloof
yet vanquished, one strong link
in the chain he would see set
around his neck before it is severed.

The sun slithers toward the mountain backdrop,
mutates into two cold orbs in a female face
that pierce him, halt his steps, tell him
all he wishes to hear: peace in his time,
abundance, fertility, his name blessed.
He knows her provenance; the price
seems trivial.


The Actor

Midsummer sun lays siege; inside the fortress walls,
damp chill inhabits every patch of shade.
Costumed bodies move between two seasons,
today’s future and tomorrow’s past: self and role.

Seeing is believing: the dungeon walls ooze,
set-lights dazzle. I cover my grief,
but let it show, at my adviser’s grisly death.
We are all entombed below the Alpine stone.

From indestructible ramparts, my brother
heralds my kingship over all I survey.
For this, I have traded my children’s souls
with the Underworld queen.

I wonder about driving conditions
back to the city as I renege on that deal.
Mayhem will follow.
(They should be okay.)

Sun sets into stone; we shoot and shoot.
Every man-jack of cast and crew gives all:
it’s only a B-movie, but it’s our B-movie.

Freeze Frame

by Bryan Murphy

Joshua is late for the longest night of his life.

The party has long since started by the time he reaches the detached house set back from main road and surrounded by stone walls. Despite their thickness, the walls are crumbling in places. The grounds of the house are darkened by thick trees. They seem to extend a long way behind it. The house itself is a concrete-and-glass construction with no distinguishing features. A heavy iron gate swings open as Joshua presses the bell. He walks up an unlit path toward the well-lit house, from which little noise emerges. The front door is ajar. Joshua goes in. No-one greets him; no-one challenges him.

By the time he reaches the most crowded room, Joshua has summed up the event as staid. The music is muzak; the guests might have been commissioned from a bourgeois Rent-a-Crowd. Joshua finds he can freeze the scene in front of him, to survey its individuals members faster and more closely. As he looks over their still figures, the little finger of his left hand instinctively traces the pattern of a recent scar on his cheek. His practised eye fails to pick out any potential informant, partner or supplier. Then he feels the pressure of a palm on the small of his back, and time restarts.

“So there you are.”

The words resonate first in his brain, then in his ears. The speaker moves round to face him. She is a woman near Joshua’s own age but small, slim, her hair short and black, her eyes dark and evasive, her features indistinct. Joshua knows he has never seen her before. Nevertheless, she takes his hand, her slender fingers enfolding his stubby ones, leads him across the main room and out of it, down a long, wide corridor, through a set of open French windows, across an unkempt lawn, into an orchard heavy with an aroma of persimmon and apples, at the heart of which stands a green-painted wooden gazebo. She pushes open the unlocked door and steers Joshua inside. Oriental rugs cover most of its floor. The air is cool and expectant.

Time clicks forward. Joshua lies on a rug, bare; the woman, the same woman, sits beside him, discarding her own clothing with flowing, languid movements. She turns to him.

“You can call me Ayeesha. I want to tell you about war.”

“I know about war.” Joshua pulls her down to him. “I’ve been telling the world about war for seven years. That’s how I earn my living.”

“It’s time for you to listen.”

He feels the satin texture of her flesh on his, and begins to listen.

She tells him about the long occupation of her distant homeland by people from far-flung islands; the oppression which everyone in the archipelago suffers for long years under a fascist regime only collapses on its own rotten core when its puppet masters discover that democracy is not incompatible with kleptocracy; the oppression and abuse she suffers personally and at length from her own fundamentalist society; her fight to be an individual, to be treated as a person not a chattel; about the tsunami; the slow reconstruction; the fragile peace that emerges and survives after the waves have washed away so much hatred with the bodies; the chance that peace brings for her to flee, to rebuild her life using reason, not handed-down prescriptions; the loneliness, tempered by hope, of her enduring exile. Joshua listens. As their minds and bodies came together, separate and return to each other, searching for ever deeper points of contact and understanding, Joshua drifts in and out of consciousness. The hours multiply.

Dawn comes. The tale of war and its aftermath continues, turning back on itself to garner fuller insight. The woman telling it fingers her long blonde hair as she expounds the details in the same intense, breathy voice that has instilled itself into Joshua’s brain, and made a home there during the night. Joshua is now watching her through the open door of the gazebo. She is squatting on the porch, hugging her knees through a thin sarong, addressing her words to an older couple seated a few feet beyond her, her green eyes fixed on them. The middle-aged man she is speaking to looks familiar to Joshua, although he cannot make him out clearly, the older woman barely at all, for she is partly hidden by the man. Joshua cannot bring her into focus, yet the silhouette of her head, like a child’s sketch, sets his mind trawling for memories he cannot quite bring to the surface. Her companion, his brow knitted in concentration, leans forward, as though to hear better, simultaneously running a finger along a faded scar on his left cheek.

Time fails to stop.

Joshua switches his attention to the story, listening with his mind and his ears, letting the words in the unknown woman’s clear, familiar voice flow into him.

A Whole Year Without Drowning

by Bryan Murphy

Houlihan discards his guilt at the water’s edge.
Chill Pacific tentacles tow his ankles in.
He dives below the surf, casts free his past,
takes the salty secretions of Yemenjà into his lungs,
lets her cross-currents tug their war
over the sponge-like carcass he has sloughed.

A pelican swoops at two bodies, veers off.
One moves, rises on unsteady limbs,
drags its fellow beyond the water’s reach,
with hand and mouth, human skill and flattery,
redeems its life from the sea-goddess,
then offers it back to fate
with kicks and blows and unkind blasphemies.

The pelican intuits carrion, yet Houlihan twitches.
The lifeguard has saved the year, Playa Chisme’s first
with no drowning. He has gone to its fiesta.
Houlihan is reborn, into a world of pain.
He cries from every orifice, convulses with cold
and possibilities, crawls among worlds in grains of sand
back to our own.

Edge of Africa

by Bryan Murphy

Like a mesmerised fly, a small white car
teases a path along a chameleon
tongue of land, eager to be swallowed
into its city.

The sky blackens like a power cut;
Luanda lagoon seethes like a forgotten kettle.
As the Atlantic approaches the far verge
and the car aquaplanes on the asphalt,

its driver peers toward the city,
his foreign home, distant as the future,
his breathing strained by fear, elated
at this flirt with death by nature

in a land bled dry by civil war.
The tempest loses interest, slams away;
the car staggers along the causeway
to chance its luck in the human storm.

Kanzamba

by Bryan Murphy

The envelope disgorges a faded photo:
my erstwhile drinking buddy’s younger bro’,
aiming a pre-draft grin into the future
as though he had one.

Whatever did you do
to those choiceless defenders of our freedom,
chosen to manoeuvre apartheid’s army
into check?

Were your jeans a shade too western?
Did you hand them to the sergeant too slowly?
Was your accent not quite right, an exile twang?
Did they just loathe your love of life?

Or was it your large, city-boy’s body, so easy
to pierce with pen-knife, machete, bayonet,
so light to lay out, silent, torn,
unable to accuse, or dance?

They all had a share in your murder,
the other new recruits. Your blood
bound them deeper than any enemy.
Those who lived “won” that war.

Do they still stab conscripts to death
now that peace and playstations rule?