Barry Tebb

I struggled through streets of
Bricked-up, boarded-up houses,
Mostly burned-out, keeping
...

Your voice on the telephone
Hushes the storm in my heart
Lightning strikes twice
...

Dawn's my Mr Right, already
Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,
The neon lights of Leeds last night still
...

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
...

In sleep I dream the gratitude I know I cannot say

Now you are in a latitude where palm trees hold the sway

There are always things between us that keep getting in the way
...

At ten she came to me, three years ago,

There was ‘something between us' even then;

Watching her write like Eliot every day,
...

Sorry, Neil Oram (with an orange in my pocket)

I can't make ,your loch-side commune by bonny Drummadrochit.
...

Two nights I have dreamed of you

Once as an adolescent, evanescent

Yet tangible still to the spirit's touch,
...

We were three weeks

Into term, Sheila,

When you came
...

L'orage qui s'attarde, le lit dйfait

Yves Bonnefoy

Here am I, lying lacklustre in an unmade bed

A Sunday in December while all Leeds lies in around me

In the silent streets, frost on roof slates, gas fires

And kettles whistle as I read Bonnefoy on the eternal.

Too tired to fantasize, unsummoned images float by,

Feebly I snatch at them to comply with the muse's dictum: write.

The streets of fifties summers, kali from the corner shop,

Sherbet lemons and ice pops, the voice of Margaret at ten,

What times will have done to you, what men

Used and abused you?

Solitary but not alone I read Lacan on desire

It is not a day I can visit the ward

Overcome by delusion's shadow.
...

To Thushari Williams

Dear Thushie, the six months you spent with us

Will never be forgotten, the long days you laboured

In the care home, your care-worn comings home

To sit with Brenda Williams, poиte maudit sang pur,

Labouring together to bring to light poems buried alive

And turn them into a book, the living text

Proof enough of your divine gift as muse

And enchantress of both word and screen.

Now in far Indonesia you strive to strike a bargain

With an uncaring world, webmaster with magic fingertips

You engrave the words of us, careworn poets of our age,

In blue and scarlet on a canvas alabaster page.

Simulacrum more real than reality itself,

Should reality exist in cyberspace.

My Prйvert, my Nerval, I never thought to see

So handsomely orthographed, like Li Po scrolled

In Chinese water by a blue pagoda.

Indeed if anyone could write in troubled water

It would be you, my dearest daughter.

Whether this world will grant you a living

Only time's indifference and your subtle craft will tell,

Artists like poets live on other's bounty, as you know so well.
...

When I come from the Smoke to visit my son on the ward

I see you everywhere: by the station, by the neon sign of ‘Squares'

By every shopping mall. Leeds seems to have more of you than anywhere:

How do you stand there for so many hours in freezing winds

When most you solicit hurry by, saying to themselves, as do I,

‘Charity begins at home' when you so often have no home?

I tend to give my change to the desperate, silent huddled in blankets

When all the warnings say I shouldn't but who's to judge

The deserving from the addicted?

Who but God can justly judge

My feeling is we all must learn to give.
...

Quarter to three: I wake again at the hour of his birth

Thirty years ago and now he paces corridors of dark

In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts

Besiege his fevered imagination â€" England's

Imminent destruction, his own, the world's…

Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections,

Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol

Hold no sway on ward one, nor even being

‘A six language master,' on PICU madness is the only qualification.

There was the ‘shaving incident' at school, which

Made him ready to walk out at fifteen, the alcohol

Defences at Oxford which shut us out then petered out

During the six years in India, studying Bengali at Shantiniketan.

He tottered from the plane, penniless and unshaven,

To hide away in the seediest bedsit Beeston could boast

Where night turned to day and vaguely he applied

For jobs as clerk and court usher and drank in pubs with yobs.

When the crisis came â€" 'I feel my head coming off my body' â€"

I was ready and unready, making the necessary calls

To get a bed, to keep him on the ward, to visit and reassure

Us both that some way out could be found.

The ‘Care Home' was the next disaster, trying to cure

Schizophrenia with sticking plaster: 'We don't want

Carers' input, we call patients ‘residents' and insist on chores

Not medication', then the letters of terrible abuse, the finding of a flat,

‘The discharge into the community.'

His ‘keyworker' was the keyworker from hell: the more

Isaiah's care fell apart the more she encouraged

Him to blame us and ‘Make his life his own', vital signs

Of decline ignored or consigned to files, ‘confidentiality' reigned supreme.

Insidiously the way back to the ward unveiled

Over painful months, the self-neglect, the inappropriate remarks

In pubs, the neglected perforated eardrum, keeping

Company with his feckless cousins between their bouts in prison.

The pointless team meetings he was patted through,

My abrupt dismissal as carer at the keyworker's instigation,

The admission we knew nothing of, the abscondings we were told of

And had to sort out, then the phone call from the ASW.

'We are about to section your son for six months, have you

Any comment?' Then the final absconding to London

From a fifteen minute break on PICU, to face his brother's

Drunken abuse, the police were kindness itself as they drove him to the secure unit.



Two nurses came by taxi from Leeds the next day to collect him

The Newsam Centre's like a hotel â€" Informality and first class treatment

Behind the locked doors he freezes before and whispers

'Daddy, I was damned in hell but now I am God's friend.'

Note: PICU- Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit

Beeston- An inner city area of Leeds

ASW- Approved Social Worker
...

Pulled from a life some leaves in evergreen

Or dressed like fragrant crinoline draped

Over shadows by di Chirico, stolen

From a station where trains never run

And set up in a tableau in the parsonage at Haworth

The three sisters with Chekovian overtones

Stood round the table where their mirrored forms

Await the blast of the last judgement's call to make them

Take that final walk across the heather mantled moor.

Down vain corridors I searched for some leaf token

Of a life unlived, a faded mignonette or four leaved clover

Down a pathway closed forever by the twists of fate:

The shadows of you gone still took the night

And I was left alone to face the painful light.
...

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 is God's will, life is meant to test us'

My Christian heritage tells me.

'Life is a vale of soul making'

Keats reminds us.

Insistently the morning traffic hums

As I sip my tea, list calls to make,

Sigh in frustration at unread books.

For solace I look at cards of Haworth

Moorland vistas of unending paths

Cloudscapes only a Constable could paint

High Withens in a gale, the sloping village street.

How? When? Why?

‘The truth' - if such an entity exists -

Is that I want to run away.
...

Two nights I have dreamed of you

Once as an adolescent, evanescent

Yet tangible still to the spirit's touch,

Then as a ten year old in the shared

Secret garden of our imagination.
...

Too much gone wrong â€"

No Muse, no song.
...

for Daniel Weissbort

Some poems meant only for my eyes

About a grief I can't let go

But I want to, want to throw

It away like an old worn-out cloak

Or screw up like a ball of over-written

Trash and toss into the corner bin.

I said it must come up or out

I don't know which but either way

Will do, I know I can't write in the vein

Of ‘Bridge' this time, it takes an optimistic view,

Bright day stuff, sunlight on

Roundhay Park's Childrens' Day

Or just wandering round the streets

With Margaret, occasionally stopping

To whisper or to kiss.

Now over sixty I wonder

How and where to go from here

Daniel your rolled out verse

Unending Kaddish gave me hints

But what can you or anyone say

About our son, the other one, who from

Such a bright childhood came to such

A death-in-life?

Dreamless sleep is better than the consciousness

Of bitter days; I sit in silent prayer and read

Of Job, the Prodigal, the Sermon on the Mount.

I read and think and sigh aloud to my silent,

Silent self. I write him letters long or short

About the weather or a book I've read and hope

His studies are kept up. I can't say ‘How much

Do you drink? Is it more or less or just the same?'

Its your own life

But then its partly one we shared for years

From birth along a road I thought we went

Along as one. Some years ago I sensed a change,

An invisible glass wall between us, between

It seemed you and everyone, the way friends

Hurried past, patting your shoulder in passing,

A joke in the pub, the Leeds boy who'd made good

Then threw it all away for drink.

Your boxed-up books, texts in five languages

Or six, the well-thumbed classics worn cassettes

Of Bach, Tippett's ‘Knot Garden', invitation

Cards, the total waste, my own and your's and her's.

Love does not seem an answer

That you want to know,

The hours, the years of waiting

Gather loss on loss until

My hopes are brief as days

That rush and go like speeding trains

That never stop. You drink, I pay,

You ramble through an odd text-book

And go and eat and drink and talk

And lose your way, then phone

‘To set things straight' but nothing's

Ever straight with you, the binges

Start and stop, a local train that

Locals know will never go beyond

The halt where only you get off.
...

Poems do not always satisfy the soul,

The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more

Than all of Shakespeare's sonnets, the unending vistas

Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarmй.

I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea

With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped

Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland'

Disturbs my reverie and I notice the Big Issue seller

Can find no takers among the ernest camera-ready Japanese

And mid-life couple shuffling into tea rooms.

'We are here to please'

I long for the enduring love of a woman

Here is God's glory-hole,

O, women, why are you all so angry?
...

I have no camera but imagination's tinted glass

I cannot pass this crumbling dry stone wall

Without a break to catch the vistas of the chain of Pennine hills

That splash their shades of colour like mercury in the rising glass.



The June sun focuses upon the vivid grass,

The elder's pale amber, the Victoria Tower's finger

On the pulse of past shared walks, Emley's mast

And the girl from there whose early death

We somehow took the blame for: her reach from the beyond.

Still troubles us, the only ones to mourn you, Chris,

Your corn-gold hair splayed like a longship's mast

You sailed to Valhalla through a sea of passing loves,

The deceits of married men who took your beauty

For a moment's gift then cast you with your seven year old son adrift.

The sun has gone but birdsong blunders on

As I take courage from the gone, the waving grass,

The sculptured pylons of my shadowed past.
...