[Digital Poetics 4.3] Three Poems by Tom Betteridge
Painting by Tom Betteridge
BULLFINCHES
another tight coil
pips
hangs
is caught moves and
as flutter
bends
raw branch overload pips
green fresh tone-split
foils circuit
birch knot-call fissures
overtone ghost-trip larks
trio chords
degrades in gain
ambivalent sounds parp-
split fundamental
frame-tones and
leaf-tips note-splayed doubled in seizure
wanting and hating to want
wanting to hate without loving
loving to knock the splay-wall strike
the daub-space
carried in mute logical bedrock
of emptied shape glitched backwards pipsway
roomed geometry bulwark
mere shapeliness wiring treelines
canopy unfurler
crashes green skin-spread fills out
airing space plosives out propelled in drawing I
thought I heard you
feathered peach just off-branch
where the open air
meets ribs cartilage brawn
another world opens its mouth for listening it’s
open enough
ether fair brightening audition cuts carries
room-plane leaf of
gelatine shard-wash
diagonal cut harmonic
gapeworm vomit total
at the tip of the branch just visible note-split
trilling I heard you
battered crack a note open into sheer faces
your face was noise and your lungs
and tongue
noise and clenched feet
and language
scrambled saw each other only
in interview
saw
in each other
on the porcelain slab
at the headstone
mute ingestion
grey wall of cut tongues
in reflex decay without instruction
signal smudged up the hertz
bending in toothed birch leaves
and the song is precise
sharpening
and cannot be left
even in the complete shade of estrangement
caught in spring brash sound
a split stream
bracing
WHAT WAS THAT PIECE AT THE OLD FRUITMARKET
curling fetal
original
time of arrival
in drum sound
to gain confidences
to chatter at the points where roughage shows
blooms in steel fences
but you can shift about if you want
in a dust of spurs
just beyond where rehearsal
meets sound cladding
we can link or
be knitted
play in split tones revolving listen out
cap each other’s effort
notes proceed sudden
dog roses there are these grief holes that suck
particulate scents
and expel them back as basic air
accruing clipped
residues that live
in the moving
parts of the body and cannot speak
or be called upon
but in mute transcription
of improper signals
mangled in static
condense in outline a social shape chem trail
line not reaching yous
stitching my courier bag with floss
the wind clamped again dead breath
thrift and vetch
in another life there’s still a chorus
of untrained voices
flinging utensils to the concrete
amassed sound
that brushes and strokes
cascades through the bulwarks
yous off in the clouds somewhere raining glossy
for a speakermouth that gapes
gives up in audition
all fluency
poetry is a death cult
held back by the grain-
sound of a slackened body speaking its minds
in occupation
the poem by the sea bindweed
throat pinned to a post
MARYHILL
under the little
footbridge that crosses the canal
a boy called Gavin
he was from the village
held me tightly
though I could still speak
by the throat
asked me to give him my phone
I don’t have a phone
called me dafty
then smiled a second as though to return love
Gavin punched me in the jaw
my leg shook
and his attention turned to someone else
and a larger boy
made as though to hit me again
when I retreated
he kicked me to the asphalt
and took my bag
but when he kicked me again
I withstood him
like we were friends
and the ludic scene died back
and someone called their cop-toys
on the boys from the village
and the cops entered the broad complex
and we rushed to beckon them
into the game nucleus
and the violent play
then could never have been a game
and Gavin could never have been
parental
and our intimacy
okay my body was afraid
and my leg shook hard by the traffic lights
I could barely stand
the cops found Gavin and knocked off his hat
but I had been solicitous
indiscriminate
and would be so again
when half Gavin’s age I made cop-toys
to run the green-
plastic dungeon zone
their smiles stretched
phonographic
and in their dungeon recess
in the pitted plastic mound
was placed ‘the average parent born in the late 40s’
ghastly smudged mauve and dirt
but the cop-toys didn’t know
how they got there in the lockup
nobody had called them
even cops say they exist to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence
deny it’s all in the family
the state the average violence
worse than a boy-stranger’s
light swing condensing
general astonishment to cold slow shock
more stressful to have been bludgeoned
than to be bludgeoned
or to bludgeon
stressful too to take advantage
of unprecedented investment in publicly held goods
while bludgeoning
having been bludgeoned or panned
confusing to have been met hard by
in cold daylight
love so-called
the name love
freezing stress-forms into mythic unhappening
that Gavin and I might love
one another
instead
another shard
and now I am an adult and father
shifting about
looking for Gavin
outpouring gaze-channelled
indiscriminate
affection towards anyone
in order
to be smashed round the head again
by the surplus non-historical pain of the ancients
the customary one-hand thought
massaging the dungeoned mass
to save all of our hardest work
back when we played
with the cylinder-headed cop-toys
the wardrobe mirror shunted
off its coasters and exploded
against our heads
and the green scene was ruined
by blunt impact
and the dungeon beneath became an oubliette
of obscure rubble
spread through the matter like dry rot
from basement to ceiling
the pliable walls in walls
the constant and the peaks
carrying the constant
dance of inner
children and real children
in splayed pirouettes
against the brick limiter
atop momentary
Gavin-underlay from which I
astonish
you offering love
back now
with nothing
*
Tom Betteridge is a poet living in London. His pamphlets include Mudchute (Veer2, 2021) and Dressings (MATERIALS, 2019). With Ellen Dillon he co-edited The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry’s special issue on Peter Manson’s poetry and translations. His new pamphlet Dog Shades is forthcoming from JUST NOT in Summer 2023.
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
