A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,
He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally
As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane
Towards a new low and a legal high.
Why did he come here to pursue his goal?
These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,
Here to a town that nutted off John Clare
Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.
These are the yards where sonnets come to die
As with the local poet he’d been shown,
The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze
He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.
Rousing from reverie barely in time
Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays
Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,
To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end
Between the shabby flats where it cuts through
To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he
Must brave declining visibility
Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into
The shadowed valley of the psalm descend
Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,
The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.
He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom
Only to misstep in the gathering gloom
And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp
The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.
He calls himself by an unflattering name
Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,
Making for where the high-rise windows glow
From sombre violet altitudes and so
Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,
Scraping one foot behind him as though lame
And, too late, suffering anxiety
About his bald host, whom he barely knows,
Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound
Like the most selfless altruist around.
Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,
Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,
But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass
Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense
From brief illusion, a great cog of night
That smoulders and revolves then fades from sight.
He frowns and, finding the right residence,
Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass,
Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane,
His benefactor shimmers into form.
“Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died?
Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.”
While Den complies, allowed into the warm,
His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain
Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall
Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?”
Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee
Where books on psychopharmacology
Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point
On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball
Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red
Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds
In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug
Into an origami doodlebug
Then lights the stout white paper fuse which leads
To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head
That explodes into giggle, gab and cough.
Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood,
Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke
And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke,
If in return for lodgings, dope and food
Dennis might be prepared to suck him off.
“Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity.
I’m offering pizza and me special stash.
This hooker wanted some. Said I could do
Her up the arse, but no. I’d promised you.”
Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash
Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity,
All the hard bargains that it will entail
Keeping on the right side of a front door.
He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save
Time done while waiting for the microwave
To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor
Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail
And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead
On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest
Such poetry as might be had among
The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue,
Attempting to maintain an interest
In De Profundis while he’s giving head
But failing to recall a useful quote.
Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things
Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme
Save chance events acted at the same time:
Just as the heartless oven-timer pings
Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat.
They eat in silence. Den discovers he
Can still taste his aperitif and hence
Does not enjoy his entrée. When they’re done
The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one
Announces that it’s now time to commence
With their ethno-botanic odyssey
And shows Den the datura he has grown,
Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page,
With the Salvia Divinorum which
Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch
That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage