for you all
Little noisy children, then, aren’t
you nice?
– just as you should be, yes
everywhere that we can think of
funny little creatures uncommitted yet
to all that crap we must believe & follow
adult masculine English, say
uncertain class & age
what commonplace delusions that you don’t
yet share
of course now lots
totally fucked up & maybe even lost
but most alive & hopeful still
the future such a grasp of faith
actually here embodied
open & illuminating
So what do we need?
for more
little children to pass through
full
sometimes of life, sometimes of quiet
none of this easy & none of it a recipe
but what we’d need then is something like
an openness to your growing lives
& a way of adjusting all that is around
into your flourishing transformations
some sorts of food as varied & as comforting
as all that can be managed
& like too
spaces open and enclosed, full up & empty
you know, just every possibility
– someone1 needs to have produced these
& someone needs to carry this all on
somewhere to run & someone to turn to
softness & feeling totally assured
others just like when you’re bibbling & bobbling
& others totally unlike so you can learn good things
– whatever you need
time as well, to be on your own
staying engaged
& time to be caught up with others
a mad laughing mob
rolling down hills
little hills
giggling together
& words
good words attuned to you
& about you
engaging you in colloquy
engaging you in nonsense
a constant gentle rain
language softened into mud
squidged up & scooped
all over you
& things for your bodies & things
for your eyes & things for
your ears & nose & your hands again
water & sand & mud & stone & wood & paper
plastic & metal & everything natural
& lots that is unnatural
stories & love
music & encouragement
peacefulness & challenge
& always
to listen
& to respond
Chinese feasts & barbecues
picnics & Christmas
– all with as many others
as you can gather
breakfast at Broadstairs or teatime in Coffee Corner
sitting on a sofa w/ everyone around or
just as many as fit
on a mat out the back
or even a large cardboard box
– this isn’t telling anyone
anything we don‘t know
but
just praising what is good
fall quiet now
Hullo?
– are you alright?
this place needs noise now
needs everything said again
& done
whatever ceremonies are proper
that appear out of nothing
(like this whole ridiculous universe
yes?
& like us)
doing what you do to help the child
be what you are
& will be
a person
true person
playing yourself
as your self
just as you are
can be
This is
a revolutionary demand I’d say
to do this truly & fully
rushing in as absolute & unforgiving
like a sundog over Harlow2
like the digging up of relics
of who we could have been
like a poem by Sean Bonney
like an urgent summons
on someone else’s phone
– oh my god it’s you
that’s who they want
you’re wanted now
to help us all
make this much better
if too late for us
for all our children
& yours for ever3
Thank you – this is
a start again to say
the same words really
(oh thank you constraints of form that chose me!
but I don’t care
– for what is good
we can say again & again
with no loss of balance, only
just to do better is a gain
our eyes will burn
unless we open them to this light
of the new world continually around us
utopian hope lurking even in unrented shops
& we risk losing it
letting the old drop onto it
suppressing it into what we are
actually bound here as we are
we think ourselves free still
we carers & we parents
we know that you must be
not as we are4
but as we could be
should be
in a world that is as it should be
as nothing else will preserve our lives
& yours
[So much I must say, so much I must finish with, ending what isn’t a recipe, except as I say it is, disordered as late summer sun collapsing into autumn. We must dig out what we need from it, if we’re to get through the coming winter & you, our children, flourish – rooty-tooting like glad tapirs in an uncomplicated alchemy, changing everything we live within into what will sustain us, especially our children for ever. “Always a good time to rebuild, now,” we say, as we serve you this dish to enjoy & nourish
1 that is us, dear reader or dear audience
2 or Mortimer’s Cross or the someone else’s Bridge: cold & luminous anyway
3 The political is children; the psychological is children. Socialism is children. Everything else is profitable infanticide.
4 insipid ghosts