Bloodshot Monochrome Read online

  Patience Agbabi was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford and Sussex Universities. Renowned for her live performances, her poems have been broadcast on television and radio all over the world. Her work has also appeared on the London Underground and human skin. She has lectured in Creative Writing at several UK universities including Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent. In 2004 she was nominated one of the UK’s Next Generation Poets. Bloodshot Monochrome is her third poetry collection. She lives in Kent with her partner and two children.

  Also by Patience Agbabi

  R.A.W.

  Transformatrix

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Patience Agbabi, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The TS Eliot quote on p. 37 is from ‘Philip Massinger’, Selected Prose of TS Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Faber and Faber Ltd). Reproduced with permission.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material.

  The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 153 0

  eISBN 978 1 78211 488 8

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

  www.canongate.tv

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the following journals, in which poems for this collection have appeared in some form: Atlas, BBC Poetry Proms Pamphlet, www.blinking-eye.co.uk, www.madhattersreview.com/issue8/england_index.shtml, Poetry Review, Pratik, The Red Wheelbarrow, Trespass, Vogue.

  Some poems have also appeared in the following anthologies: Here to Eternity (Faber & Faber), New Writing 12 (Picador), Poems on the Underground (Cassell), POP Anthology (New Departures), Velocity (Apples & Snakes).

  ‘The London Eye’ was a Poem on the Underground. It was originally commissioned for Earth Has Not Any Thing To Shew More Fair, ed. Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald and Robert Woof (Shakespeare’s Globe & The Wordsworth Trust). The book was a bicentenary celebration of Wordsworth’s ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802’. ‘Man and Boy’ and ‘The Siamese Twins’ were originally commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for Poetry Proms. ‘North(west)ern’ was originally commissioned in 2000 by Radio 4 for The Windrose, and was made into a short film for BBC Knowledge. ‘Osmosis’ was commissioned for a Southern Arts postcard celebrating a Year of the Artist Residency at the Schools of Humanities and Healthcare at Oxford Brookes University in 2001. ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’ was commissioned as part of the Faltered States performance project (2003) by Apples & Snakes and the Science Museum.

  Several of these poems appear on the iPoems system hosted on www.57productions.com.

  I would also like to thank Jamie Byng, Francis Bickmore and everyone at Canongate for their enthusiasm and commitment to the book; Jeremy Clarke, Kwame Dawes, Matthew Hollis, Steve Tasane, Geoff Allnutt and Patricia Debney for their insightful feedback on the manuscript; Kate Clanchy for reminding me there is creative life after motherhood and Louisa Stevens for keeping me focused; Jennifer Russell, Sue Booth-Forbes and Susan DeBow for helping me kickstart the ‘Shots’ section at Anam Cara; to Gary Bagot for giving me the plot for ‘Yore Just My Type’ and Adeola Agbebiyi for the song title ‘Slow-Burning Fuse’ in ‘Josephine Baker Finds Herself’; Thabitha Khumalo for alerting me to the issues of women in Zimbabwe for ‘What’s Black and White and Red All Over?’; Peter Abbs, Ros Barber and all those on the MA at Sussex for their invaluable feedback on ‘Vicious Circle’ and the late Carl St Hill for believing in it.

  The poet would like to thank the Authors’ Foundation and the AHRB for grants enabling me to write and develop as a writer and lecturer.

  Finally, special thanks to all the contributors to Problem Pages, for their sonnets and their prose. Without their presiding spirits this book would never have been written.

  CONTENTS

  SHOTS

  Seeing Red

  Postmod:

  Grey Area

  Shooting ‘Ufo Woman’

  Not a 9/11 Poem

  ‘Gangsters’

  The London Eye

  On Turning on the TV . . .

  Comedown

  Foreign Exchange

  North(west)ern

  Sol

  MONOLOGUES

  The Siamese Twins

  Eat Me

  Skins

  Yore Just my Type

  Josephine Baker Finds Herself

  Heads

  Man and Boy

  PROBLEM PAGES

  Contributors

  In Joy and Woe

  Two Loves I Have

  A Crowne of Sonnets

  My Light Is Spent

  Queen of Shadows

  Scorn Not the Sonnet

  O for Ten Years . . .

  Not Death, but Love

  Send My Roots Rain

  Not Love but Money

  On ‘The White House’

  Babes in the Basement

  Knew White Speech

  From Africa Singing

  BLOOD LETTERS

  ‘Ruby, the Hypodermic DJ’

  R.A.P.

  Osmosis

  There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

  Step

  In Invisible Ink

  What’s Black and White and Red All Over?

  Not the One They Read To Tell My Fortune

  Lines

  The Exchange

  VICIOUS CIRCLE

  Vicious Circle

  Notes

  SHOTS

  SEEING RED

  1

  Black mum parts my continent of head,

  with glazed black cotton begins to wind

  each division so fiercely my mind

  bleeds black. I can’t close my eyes in bed.

  White mum uses fading navy thread,

  the tension less cruel, more kind

  but the vision colour-blind

  so I see red.

  2

  I read the instructions for shocking-red dye

  (freedom has given me the green light)

  yet bury the evidence under a head-tie

  like the insight

  that I see the world through a red eye

  where blood and heart mean more than black and white.

  POSTMOD:

  a snapshot. Monochrome. A woman

  in a ’60s rayon suit. A knee-length pencil

  skirt and jacket with three-quarter sleeves.

  Hot aqua and a mod original.

  That shade translates to stylish grey. It’s me.

  And on the back, someone’s scrawled in pencil

  Brighton Beach, 1963

  for fun because I wasn’t even thought of

  in 1963. Imagine Rhyl,

  ’82, where the image was conceived

  by someone with good taste, bad handwriting

  and lack of a camera. Yet that negative,

  in our heads only, was as sharp and real

  as the suit so out of fashion it was in.

  GREY AREA

  We two sip wine outside a Jo’burg café.

  Soweto’s bloody dangerous, don’t go

  till it’s over she says. I don’t respond.

  A white man swaggers by with a black


  woman who’s not his wife, girlfriend or date.

  A black man curses her in Xhosa.

  Click.

  The white man pulls out a gun and

  I’m sitting so close I could lift my hand, touch metal.

  Slow motion back

  to our car. No split second.

  The beer is ice-cold in Soweto, cold as lead.

  Home is a grey area yet safe.

  I don’t want to go.

  SHOOTING ‘UFO WOMAN’

  Action! Alien with Day-Glo afro

  (wig) and eyes (lens) like stained-glass window,

  mount silver stairs, float down to earth

  (down-escalator Canary Wharf),

  make earthling (hardcore dealer) pause en route

  to admire strange skin (ogle PVC spacesuit).

  Alien would conquer world

  from business epicentre, with S-Curl

  but the lens regressed to sand, attacked my eye

  and blaxploitation sci-fi

  turned film noir.

  I left in dark glasses,

  in a black cab like Metamorphosis,

  each streetlight burning in my vision

  how fact (I could be blind for life) shot fiction.

  NOT A 9/11 POEM

  No, postmen don’t get postman’s block.

  They may deliver the wrong letters

  but are never stuck for a line break

  or line. If you think writers,

  poets are lazy, give them enough real work

  to sweat out their poems, a tragedy

  like 9/11 and a week

  to work on their wordplay

  and watch them divide

  into poets for spontaneous

  overflow and poets for emotions made vivid

  months later in the aftermath, the stillness

  but since there’s still no peace there’s still no poem, no postmortem.

  ‘GANGSTERS’

  shot straight into the Top 10 and school

  uniform was dead. Ties tapered,

  blazers trailed and we all murdered

  to look as miserable as Terry Hall

  or mad as Jerry Dammers whose smile

  was a few keys short of a keyboard.

  We didn’t get the 2-tone metaphor;

  know the rankin’ rude bwoy model

  was Peter Tosh; that the Wailers

  preached ‘Simmer Down’ in ’63 to stop

  rough an’ tough on the dancefloor,

  but for ska to rule the airwaves

  Sometime people got roughed up.

  We knew what it meant, ‘music to die for’.

  THE LONDON EYE

  Through my gold-tinted Gucci sunglasses,

  the sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime

  strikes the convoy of number 12 buses

  that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.

  Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting

  to you, Hello! . . . on . . . bridge . . . ’minster!

  The aerial view postcard, the man writing

  squat words like black cabs in rush hour.

  The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.

  You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.

  We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble

  where I think, ‘Space age!’, you think, ‘She was late.’

  Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .Beat™ blinks, replies

  18·02. We’re moving anticlockwise.

  ON TURNING ON THE TV TO CATCH,

  BY CHANCE, SOME QUAVERING BARS

  OF ‘SUMMERTIME’, THAT VOICE, PITCH,

  BLACK AS A SEMIBREVE, SCARS

  ON THE FACE FILLING THE BLANK SCREEN,

  THE BLURRED BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGE

  OF JANIS JOPLIN’S SYNAESTHETIC SCREAM,

  ALL HIPPY HAIR AND CLASS A VINTAGE;

  MY REACTION MIRRORING MAMA CASS

  AT MONTEREY WATCHING ‘BALL AND CHAIN’

  CLIMB TO A CLIMAX; THE HEAVY BASS,

  THEN JANIS TAKING IT DEEP DOWN DOWN –

  TO THE BLUES, THE DEEP SOUTH, THE NEXT FIX

  OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND HEROIN AND SEX.

  Wow!

  COMEDOWN

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

  Milton, Paradise Lost

  It wasn’t the rent boy we met in Heaven

  who looked fifteen and called us dollies,

  with his social worker as an accessory

  I thought was his boyfriend, leading us up

  to the party full of lacklustre women

  in tight polyester, and upstairs, not

  the Skin with the spider’s web tattoo

  for a face, that bled red light in my skull;

  nor the ugly man who said Full of fucking

  spades and half-castes as soon as we entered

  whom I misheard, the social worker

  doing his damnedest to sugar the pill:

  it was taking a drug that made us innocent

  enough to leave Heaven and end up in Hell.

  FOREIGN EXCHANGE

  In Hamburg, me and Anna, who is German,

  and a man across the street attacks us, spitting

  his violence; the air is cold, and bitter

  faces gather like rainclouds, like an omen

  and my gentle friend counter-attacks but later

  refuses to translate and that’s the killer,

  her silence, like a shroud; I feel the colour

  rage in my cheeks for lack of that translation

  reminding me of school, that French exchange,

  a simple sentence, Parce qu’elle est noire,

  delivered at such speed and with such hatred

  it stung me: to encounter so much rage;

  more, for being judged solely by colour;

  but most, the fact it had to be translated.

  NORTH(WEST)ERN

  I was twelve, as in the twelve-bar blues, sick

  for the Southeast, marooned on the North Wales coast.

  A crotchet, my tongue craving the music

  of Welsh, Scouse or Manc. Entering the outpost

  of Colwyn Bay pier, midsummer, noon,

  nightclub for those of us with the deep ache

  of adolescence, when I heard that tune,

  named it in one. Soul. My heart was break

  dancing on the road to Wigan Casino,

  Northern Soul Mecca where transatlantic bass

  beat blacker than blue in glittering mono.

  Then back, via Southport, Rhyl, to the time, place,

  I bit the Big Apple. Black, impatient, young.

  A string of pips exploding on my tongue.

  SOL

  After I huffed, puffed, pushed you into the pool

  of light and blood on the crushed white sheet

  you screamed like an abattoir, like shit,

  breaking the day to smithereens until

  they swaddled you, our son, our Sol:

  you were light, light-skinned, skinny, sugar-sweet,

  hair iridescent with blood, eyes bloodshot

  but they said they would heal

  and they did. Home, we keep you in the shade

  in a basket bed where we watch you grow

  golden, golden brown, your eyes indigo

  to bronze, stare and stare at the ladybird

  with a rattle for a heart. All you know

  is mum and dad, is black and white, and red.

  MONOLOGUES

  THE SIAMESE TWINS

  And she arose at midnight and took my [child] from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom.

  1 Kings 3:20

  Excuse me. Janie isn’t it? I’m Rhea.

  I’m deeply sorry. Yes, I knew your mother.

  You won’t remember me, you were a baby

  when we last met. Your mother might have mentioned . . . ?

&n
bsp; She didn’t? No, ‘The Times’ obituary.

  I thought I should attend, pay my respects,

  she was an inspiration to us all.

  A tricky act to follow, I imagine.

  The service was sublime, so many flowers.

  A gin and tonic, thank you. Mother’s ruin.

  Do you have any children? Yes and no.

  I met your mother forty years ago

  in hospital. Both of us were expecting,

  had both had false alarms. They kept us in.

  Her bed was next to mine and soon we gelled

  so well they nicknamed us The Siamese Twins.

  Your mother smuggled in forbidden foods –

  hospitals were like prisons in those days –

  and every night we’d have a midnight feast.

  She kept me sane. When the pains started

  she held my hand until the nurses came.

  We both had baby girls on the same day.

  The 21st of May, 1960.

  Your birthday, dear. I called my baby Sophie.

  Your mother couldn’t decide between Amanda

  and Jane. I said, She looks like a Jane.

  I felt so thrilled, so overjoyed, I cried.

  Twenty-four hours later, Sophie died.

  I laid on her, they said. I started rocking.

  It took three doctors and a sedative

  to separate me from her. Yes, I’m fine,

  thank you. I can’t remember much about

  the funeral. Except I couldn’t cry.

  So many flowers. All I can remember

  is being back in hospital, visiting

  your mother there and finding her asleep.

  I picked you up, Janie, started walking

  down corridors and stairs and corridors.

  Nobody stopped me. No one ever does.

  You didn’t stir until we reached the car

  and when you cried, I held you to my breast

  and fed you. Janie, don’t you understand?

  My husband and the doctors and now you.

  I should have been your mother, it was fate

  that Sophie died. You were identical,

  one egg split into two. They locked me up

  until I was too old to bear more children.

  They wouldn’t let you visit me. Each week

  I read about your mother in the papers