Bloodshot Monochrome
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