The Blazing Hat, Part Two
This is the morning that we burnt a cardboard hat
flames licking the inside of the brim
This is the morning that the thunder hung like great
black flags over the city
stirred by gusts of wind
This is the morning that they opened a new motorway
leading from my house to yours
This is the morning that I decided I wasn't getting enough
roughage
and went on a diet of broken milk bottles
This is the morning that Death left her cloak behind
after the party
This is the morning that a beautiful schoolgirl woke me
with a cup of coffee
in a vision
This is the morning that we saw
words written on water
This is the morning that beautiful girls with Renaissance
faces played Hindemith records
at dawn
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poem by Adrian Henri
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Adrian Henri's Last Will and Testament
`No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a Fryingpan owns death.'
William Burroughs
To whom it may concern:
As my imminent death is hourly expected these days/ carbrakes screaming on East Lancs tarmac/trapped in the blazing cinema/mutely screaming I TOLD YOU SO from melting eyeballs as the whitehot fireball dissolves the Cathedral/being the first human being to die of a hangover/ dying of overemotion after seeing 20 schoolgirls waiting at a zebracrossing.
I appoint Messrs Bakunin and Kropotkin my executors and make the following provisions:
1. I leave my priceless collections of Victorian Oil Lamps, photographs of Hayley Mills, brass fenders and Charlie Mingus records to all Liverpool poets under 2 3 who are also blues singers and failed sociology students.
2. I leave the entire East Lancs Road with all its landscapes to the British people.
3. I hereby appoint Wm. Burroughs my literary executor, instructing him to cut up my collected works and distribute them through the public lavatories of the world.
4. Proceeds from the sale of relics: locks of hair, pieces of floorboards I have stood on, fragments of bone flesh teeth bits of old underwear etc. to be given to my widow.
5. I leave my paintings to the Nation with the stipulation that they must be exhibited in Public Houses, Chip Shops, Coffee Bars and the Cellar Clubs throughout the country.
6. Proceeds from the sale of my other effects to be divided equally amongst the 20 most beautiful schoolgirls in England (these to be chosen after due deliberation and exhaustive tests by an informal committee of my friends).
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Pictures From an Exhibition
(Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54G4 Tate Gallery London AprilJune 1964) No. 54 Jean Dubuffet 'Déclinaison de la Barbe' 1. 1959
'astu cuilli les fleurs de la barbe?'
Jean Dubuffet I wander the dark pebbles of your mind
picking beardflowers.
No. 73 Joseph Cornell 'Hotel de l'Etoile'
cool pillars of the hotel/in the
night outside the stars are always
so white/the sky is always so
blue/silver moon waiting patiently.
No. 84 Mark Rothko 'Reds No. 229 x957
SCARLET
ORANGE
ORANGE
ORANGE
SCARLET
CRIMSON
SCARLET
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Any Prince To Any Princess
August is coming
and the goose, I'm afraid,
is getting fat.
There have been
no golden eggs for some months now.
Straw has fallen well below market price
despite my frantic spinning
and the sedge is,
as you rightly point out,
withered.
I can't imagine how the pea
got under your mattress. I apologize
humbly. The chambermaid has, of course,
been sacked. As has the frog footman.
I understand that, during my recent fact-finding tour of the
Golden River,
despite your nightly unavailing efforts,
he remained obstinately
froggish.
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Where'er You Walk
`Where'er you walk
Cool gales shall fan that glade'
The Pierhead where you walked will be made a park
restricted to lovers under 27
Peasants will be found merrymaking after the storm in
Canning St where you walked
The station where we first arrived at night
Will be preserved for the nation With the echo of your footsteps still sounding in the empty
roof
`Where'er you tread
The Blushing flower shall rise'
The alleyway where we read poems to dustbins after closing time
The kitchens where we quarrelled at parties
The kitchen where two strangers first kissed at a party full of strangers
The ticket barrier where we said goodnight so many times
The cobblestones in front of the station
The pub where the kindly old waiter
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Don't Worry/Everything's Going to be All Right
Don't worry
If your boyfriend doesn't treat you right
baby
Everything's going to be all right
come with me
And every poem I write will have your name in it
Don't worry
If the factories and villas cover the countryside
Everything's going to be all right
England will be given back to the animals
and we'll find a home under fern leaves known only to foxes
Don't worry
If I can't afford to buy you coffee after school
Everything's going to be all right
Soon the poem will replace the pound sterling as
international currency
and Britain Will get on the poem standard again
Don't worry
About those lunatics in the government
Everything's going to be all right
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Without You
Without you every morning would feel like going back to work after a holiday,
Without you I couldn't stand the smell of the East Lancs Road,
Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned by skeleton crews,
Without you I'd probably feel happy and have more money and time and nothing to do with it,
Without you I'd have to leave my stillborn poems on other people's doorsteps, wrapped in brown paper,
Without you there'd never be sauce to put on sausage butties,
Without you plastic flowers in shop windows would just be plastic flowers in shop windows,
Without you I'd spend my summers picking morosley over the remains of train crashes,
Without you white birds would wrench themselves free from my paintings and fly off dripping blood into the night,
Without you green apples wouldn't taste greener,
Without you Mothers wouldn't let their children play out after tea,
Without you every musician in the world would forget how to play the blues,
Without you Public Houses would be public again,
Without you the Sunday Times colour suppliment would come out in black-and-white,
Without you indifferent colonels would shrug their shoulders and press the button,
Without you they's stop changing the flowers in Piccadilly Gardens,
Without you Clark Kent would forget how to become Superman,
Without you Sunshine Breakfast would only consist of Cornflakes,
Without you there'd be no colour in Magic colouring books,
Without you Mahler's 8th would only be performed by street musicians in derelict houses,
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I Want To Paint
I
I want to paint
2000 dead birds crucified on a background of night
Thoughts that lie too deep for tears
Thoughts that lie too deep for queers
Thoughts that move at 186,000 miles/second
The Entry of Christ into Liverpool in 1966
The installation of Roger McGough in the Chair of Poetry at Oxford
Francis Bacon making the President's Speech at the Royal Academy dinner
I want to paint
50 life-sized nudes of Marianne Faithfull
(all of them painted from life)
Welsh Maids by Welsh Waterfalls
Heather Holden as Our Lady of Haslingden
A painting as big as Piccadilly full of neon signs and buses
Christmas decorations and beautiful girls with dark blonde hair shading their faces
I want to paint
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