Roddy Lumsden Poems

She lies in her well-kept apartment
above the spick and span cathedral
in the heart of the walled city
above Manila Bay and she dreams
...

Take this: for nothing here's chiming, vibrating
and all this vainglory and self-deprecating
just goads at the tender parts, gets irritating.

You'll make no advance advocating monopoly
on any vocabulary; even cacophony
needs the needle to make its point properly.

It's true that you find yourself fey and bewitching,
yet always you feel that the itch that you're scratching's
soothed better by far by bravadoes of bitching.

The off-pat flyting, back-biting and threnody
you render and throw up, at will, won't remedy
the rot of your serenading, lute-laden wannabe.

You can't see a barrier without pushing through it;
it's a poor pearl of pathos you don't disintuit
and you now give a doing when once you'd just do it.

You want my advice? Here it is: try removing
the self from your argument - gluts of self-loving
just pudding the gut of whatever you're proving.

That's it on the chin and I'm sure you can take it,
but that shadow you're boxing is me, so please break it
gently. Best wishes, I hope that you make it.Take this: for nothing here's chiming, vibrating
and all this vainglory and self-deprecating
just goads at the tender parts, gets irritating.

You'll make no advance advocating monopoly
on any vocabulary; even cacophony
needs the needle to make its point properly.

It's true that you find yourself fey and bewitching,
yet always you feel that the itch that you're scratching's
soothed better by far by bravadoes of bitching.

The off-pat flyting, back-biting and threnody
you render and throw up, at will, won't remedy
the rot of your serenading, lute-laden wannabe.

You can't see a barrier without pushing through it;
it's a poor pearl of pathos you don't disintuit
and you now give a doing when once you'd just do it.

You want my advice? Here it is: try removing
the self from your argument - gluts of self-loving
just pudding the gut of whatever you're proving.

That's it on the chin and I'm sure you can take it,
but that shadow you're boxing is me, so please break it
gently. Best wishes, I hope that you make it.
...

An inch from the curse and pearled
by the evening heat I shake
my polo neck and a cool draught
buffs my chest. What rises is
my animal aroma the scent
of blue-ribbon stock the sort
a starred chef would ladle from
a zinc-bottomed pan to soften
and savor the hock he has sawn
and roasted for the diners out front
who sip at shots of pastis and gnaw
around the pits of kalamata olives.
My head
sits in his fridge: stooping for herb
butter, our eyes meet and he touches
my cotton-cold face just as once
I stroked your cheek in a dream
you suffered in a room above the river.
...

The kilted porter shook my hand in welcome,
drained it of blood and gave me back my luggage.
I signed the register in my own name
for the first time in my life of low celebrity.
In the lounge bar, there were pictures by Margarita
but no sign of margaritas by the pitcher.
All night, the couple in the next-door room
failed noisily to make love even once.
The signature tune of the air conditioning
was a surface B-side for any one-hit-wonder.
Weary, I ordered up the late night menu
from room service, but sleep wasn't on it
so, after an hour of mentally undressing myself,
I donned the pyjamas with the killer bee motif
and there on the bed I wrote a dozen
identical postcards to friends I'd forgotten.
No doubt to keep the cold tap company,
the hot tap had opted to be a cold tap too.
Funnel-web spiders wove their lazy way
toward each other across the scarlet ceiling
and when I solved the riddle of the shower,
no blood came gushing, but no water either.
By the bed, a Gideon Bible in Esperanto
and a phone-book listing Lumsdens of the world;
in the mini-bar, flat Vimto and a half-pint
of someone else's mother's milk, turned to fur.
The TV had one channel, showing highlights
from my worst performances in every sphere.
At three, in the courtyard, a chambermaid choir
sang a barbershop version of ‘I Will Survive'.
The only time I dared to close my eyes,
dervishes under the bed began to talk dirty.
When I left at nine and settled my check,
they told me clearly Don't come back.
...

The man I could have been works for a vital institution, is a vital
institution.
Without him, walls will crumble, somewhere, paint will peel.
He takes a catch.
He is outdoorsy and says It was a nightmare and means the traffic.
He's happy to watch a film and stops short of living in one.

The man I could have been owns a Subaru pickup the colour of
cherry tomatoes.
He's in the black, not in the dark.
His mother is calm.
Women keep his baby picture in the windownooks of wallets.
No one dies on him.

The man I could have been owns bits of clothes not worn by
uncles first.
He has no need of medicine.
He walks from Powderhall to Newington in twenty minutes.
He plays the piano a little.
Without him, havens buckle, sickbeds bloom.

The man I could have been lives locally.
He is quietly algebraic.
Without him, granite will not glister.
And when he sees a crisis, he does not dive in feet first.
He votes, for he believes in their democracy.

The man I could have been has a sense of direction.
For him, it was never Miss Scarlet with the dagger in the kitchen.
He knows his tilth and sows his seed.
He'll make a father.
He is no maven nor a connoisseur.

The man I could have been has a season ticket at Tynecastle.
He comes in at night and puts on The Best of U2
He browses.
He puts fancy stuff in his bathwater.
He doesn't lace up his life with secrets.

The man I could have been was born on a high horse.
He knows the story of the Willow Pattern.
He had a dream last night you'd want to hear about
and remembers the words to songs.
His back is a saddle where lovers have ridden.

The man I could have been has a sovereign speech in him he's
yet to give.
He might well wrassle him a bear.
He is a man about town.
He has the exact fare on him.
Without him, motley trauma.

The man I could have been, he learns from my mistakes.
He never thought it would be you.
And no one says he's looking rather biblical.
He has no need of London
and walks the middle of the road for it is his.

The man I could have been is quick and clean.
He is no smalltown Jesus nor a sawdust Cesear.
Without him, salt water would enter your lungs.
He doesn't hear these endless xylophones.
That's not him lying over there.
...

...one begins, ungratefully, to long for the contrasting tone of some honest, unironic misery, confident that when it arrives Roddy Lumsden will have the technical resources to handle it.
Neil Powell, TLS
I'm trying to string together three words
which I hate more than I hate myself:
gobsmacked, hubby and...when I realise
that words no longer count for much at all.

And that's me back down, head on the floor.
It's like Cathal Coughlan goes in his song:

till I've seen how low I can go.

It's like what my ancestor told me in a dream:
You'll be a sponge for the pain of others.
It's like what I told the lassie from the local paper:
I do not suffer for my art, I just suffer.

And face it, while we're at it, it's like
what curly Shona said that night at Graffiti
when all the gang were gathered for the show:
how she reckoned I would be the first to die,

or the time I slipped back from the bogs in Bo's
to hear my best friend tell a stranger girl
who'd been sweet in my company, mind how you go
with Roddy, he's damaged goods, you know.
...

Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace
with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap

then back to the village with a lame cat
twisting and woeful in her cage.

Bread these days isn't baked to last:
how sad those posh loaves thudding off

in pine breadbins all around the Heath:
soulless latterday pets, frisky for a day

or two, then binned or thrown to foxes,
loaves just an inch of gloom below

the caged birds you notice in corners
of those same mansions when you seek

the past, dinking their mirrors, dipping
once in a while for a sip of milk.
...

With refreshments and some modesty and home-drawn maps,
the ladies of the parish are marshaling the plans in hand,
devising the occasions, in softest pencil: the Day of Hearsay,
Leeway Week, the Maybe Pageant, a hustings on the word
nearby. Half-promised rain roosts in some clouds a mile out,
gradual weather making gradual notes on the green, the well,
the monument, the mayor's yard where dogs purr on elastic.

Everything taken by the smooth handle then, or about to be,
hiatus sharp in humble fashion. A small boy spins one wheel
of an upturned bike, the pond rises, full of skimmed stones
on somehow days, not Spring, not Summer yet. Engagements
are announced in the Chronicle, a nine-yard putt falls short.
Dark cattle amble on the angles of Flat Field. The ladies close
their plotting books and fill pink teacups, there or thereabouts.
...

Skipping out from the major international cocktail party
with my becleavaged blight, a jeroboam in her tight fist,
I broke open my copy of Sarcasm for Beginners, i.e., men.

Never had I seen so many pairs of to-the-elbow gloves.
Never did I see a puttoed ceiling groan so with thin talk
as the great, the grim and the gone pressed terrible flesh,

so many penguins offering tastesome wisps and skimps
from doilied salvers: cherry-shaded caviar, cheese puffs,
dark sugared berries, dainty octopods, gently vinegared,

with not enough tentacles to count the capes and stoles,
fine bespoke pashminas, silk snoods, at least one vicuña
suit, tainted with gold thread. I'd seen down a Blenheim,

two Lime Rickeys and was eyeing a gamine mixologist
who was straining out Savoy Royales when my raddled
nemesis limped over to announce she had encountered

my latest screed, all four foot eleven of her tortoiseishly
quivering, a nubbin of cream cheese on her whiskery lip
and her good eye withering my borrowed companionette

as she leaned on air. I am not a man who has not known
the turmoil women offer, the gift you accept of their wit,
the way you'd slip a hand into a gloveful of cockroaches,

comply with a last-minute call to join a seal cull. Tanya,
I pouted, I am awed and honored you opened a window
in your schedule even to glance at my inconsequential

outpourings. At which point she clattered out a scoffing
gibe so sour you couldn't blend it with a chemistry set
from Hamley's and, seizing my escort by her neat wrist,

we tore out onto Jermyn Street, along which I performed
a sort of shuffle, one eye on the book and one on m'lady's
competition-standard backside as she led us to the Ritz.
...

For once, I felt wanted, dead or alive,
the day my fame outgrew the Famous Five.

There came a time I could give no more
to the other guys in the Gang of Four

and I felt the dead weight fall from me
when I unyoked the clowns of the Crucial Three.

I considered all this as I boarded the bus
to quit the town not big enough for both of us.

One eye didn't seem so much to leave behind
as I sped to my job in the kingdom of the blind.
...