‘If there is a troubadour washing, it is he

If there is a man about town., it is he …’

 

It’s the liminal hour, neither night nor day,

2am is when troubadours come out to play

Urban street savages roam around the pitch black

Most people fast asleep but not in next door’s flat

where two male cubs through the walls, I hear growling

It’s not just the foxes outside that are howling

 

Bodies howl in my thoughts

First told me ‘Lee, walls have ears’

Bet he heard my walls talking

because I’ve not seen him in years

I sleep alone on the right side

Last night, how I wept

for the troubadour absent

from the left where his body once slept

And lastly, the body of a fine troubadour’s

Can you guess whose it is?  Well, that body is yours

 

‘Que cette fête célébrée

Soit à jamais un jour l’année,

Le premier du mois de Janvier

Et que joyeux fous sans dangier,

De l’habit de notre chapelle,

Fassent la fête bonne et belle,

Sans outrage ni derision’

 

My wordplay puns and funny rhymes,

are my glue guns, hammers and screwdrivers

to deconstruct and build carnivalesque

upside down inverted counter-worlds

Embodying the legacy of the medieval Feast of Fools

Countering hegemony and hierarchy with comedy

Turning everything on its head, topsy turvy

At Saint-Omer, the clergy turned their clothes inside-out

And the Franciscan monks at Antibes

held their books upside down

Long live the Feast of Fools!

Vive la Fête des Fous!

 

Cheerleader of Jacques Derrida’s

theory of language slippage

I’m a linguistic slapstick post-structuralist

Slipping and slapsticking poet

Carnivalesque subversive

Master of inversion

Bottom is back of face

Face turned inside out

Supporter of Mikhail Bakhtin’s

World Turned Upside Down

Corporeal outrageousness

Anti-grammaticality

Unbuttoning, undoing, unravelling

Embracing what the French thinker François Rabelais

called gramatica jocosa (a laughing grammar)

Everything in its opposite

Alternative logics of permanent contradiction

 

I weave open ended webs with words,

constantly moving and shifting in meaning

Dualistic, transformable, malleable

Provoking unforeseen linguistic panic

into the signification of anything

prick, cut, slash, rip, tackle, prick, nosh, naff

 

Tell me what’s the first thing you see in this bistable illusion?

 

 

Whether you see a hare, or a duck

or the behind legs of a donkey,

us carnivalesque troubadours,

we too adopt liminoid positions

Yet our contradiction remains

We are also bistable illusions

Whilst journeying through life

in forever poetic unrest

at the same time, we desire fixture

There is a need in all of us to be anchored

in love by a fellow troubadour

                                              

I’d slip on your words anytime,

you sexy troubadour,

And when your bananas are cheeky

I like it because I slip a bit more

 

I am for a poetry of speaking bodies

caught between memory and everyday life,

between private, public and pop-cultural history

Cassettes, rewinding them by hand

with pencils through their eyes

Music mixtapes and football matches on cassette

recorded off the radio

Drawings of bodies, of Rupert Everett’s

I made by hand as a teenager

Reanimate the archive

Conduits to otherworldly

out of sight people and things

Memory objects,

never nauseatingly nostalgic,

but calls for action in the present

 

We came out did me and Vespertine

almost on the same day

Bought it on cassette all those years ago in Bethnal Green,

got it home and pressed play

Still play that same cassette,

think of you when Harm of Will begins,

because you’re even more beautiful than the first line

that Bjork, the chanteuse sings

‘If there is a troubadour washing, it is ... STOP

 

I write you a poem give your soft left cheek a peck,

A scarf made of words to wrap around your cold neck

But I must remember all that I’ve said above

A knuckle punch in your face might be how you interpret my love.