CHET - FROM A WINDOW

CHET - FROM A WINDOW

(in memory of Chet Baker, born December 23rd 1929, died May 13th 1988)

The constant onslaught of Amsterdam

surged through Zeedijk

on that hot night

when a full moon

dragged you

flying to your death.

In your room,

in the Prins Hendrik Hotel,

your clothes lay

neatly folded

in your suitcase,

with your body

a foetus on the street below.

Great white hope

fallen

offstage,

a love for heroin never shaken.

Sorrow was your stuff,

a plaintive,

lyrical anguish,

an excess of gloom

and charm.

This undernourished and parched body,

a singing corpse,

searching for an uncollapsed vein,

an expert driver hating the road

and the bleak hotel of his doom.

Such a foolish love.

Oklahoma farmboy on a golden trumpet,

his teeth knocked out in San Francisco,

become chained to an album a day

for a thousand dollars in cash.

And the Italian you learned in a Lucca jail,

your spirit surviving its deportation,

a lonely and melancholy master drifter

whose pianissimo

touched the soul.

Friday 13th May 1988,

Chet’s heart stopped

and his horn

lost its tongue.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

LOCKERBIE

‘Futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.’

(Patricia Coyle)

In Lockerbie,

the sky is red

and the clouds are banked like grieving hills.

In this curled up sleeping town,

humble in its sandstone walls,

you can hear

the hooves of history

clipping the soaking streets

and the high heeled girls

clattering on a Saturday night

with the cutting wind

ripping up their thin skirts

as they bleed into town,

past the sheep feeding on the ancient land

by Rosebank Crescent

where ‘The Maid of the Seas’,

Pan Am 103,

exploded on a sunk estate.

And life throws strangers together,

throws a suitcase of junk together.

And all our memories are ashes,

all our fantasies smoke.

And no one but the simple bending vicar knows

why The News dropped through our roof that night,

crashed onto our TVs that night.

Only the God in the angry sky has a glimmer,

only the groaning tombstones of Lockerbie have an idea,

the silent sandstone

and the biting rain;

only the old Scots lady knitting

for the refugees,

ducking her head under a leaden sky

for fear

the future lands on her.

And, in a field not far away,

someone’s diary lies rotting;

a love letter

scattered in the wind;

the wind

that won’t leave Lockerbie

alone:

the red dust on a broken past;

this town’s historic wound

aching on the map.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

as featured in scottish review: http://www.scottishreview.net/RussellGalbraith86.shtml

Your poem 'Lockerbie' was published by the Scottish Review and it impressed me so much (I was a journalist at the time of the Lockerbie incident) that I introduced my Higher English students to it. They too found it very powerful. I would now like to incorporate it into the course work material I am working on but need your permission to do that.

I look forward to hearing from you - and having looked at other work on your website, can I say how much I admire your style.

Best wishes

Marian

THOMAS SPENCE 1750-1814 - WATCH OUT FOR BICENTENARY BOOK AND EVENTS IN NEWCASTLE & LONDON IN THE NEW YEAR

THE HIVE OF LIBERTY

(AFTER THE NAME OF THOMAS SPENCE’S BOOKSHOP AT 8 LITTLE TURNSTILE, HOLBORN)

I am a small and humble man,

my body frail and broken.

I strive to do the best I can.

I spend my life on tokens.

I traipse through Holborn all alone,

hawking crazy notions.

I am the lonely people’s friend.

I live on schemes and potions.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

I am a teeming worker bee.

My dignity is working.

My restless thoughts swell like the sea.

My fantasies I’m stoking.

There is a rebel inside me,

a sting about to strike.

I hawk my works around the street.

I put the world to rights.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

FOLK SONG FOR THOMAS SPENCE

(1750-1814)

Down by the old Quayside,

I heard a young man cry,

among the nets and ships he made his way.

As the keelboats buzzed along,

he sang a seagull’s song;

he cried out for the Rights of you and me.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,

he gave up all his life

just to be free.

Up and down the cobbled Side,

struggling on through the Broad Chare,

he shouted out his wares

for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,

he was a man the likes you rarely see.

With a pamphlet in his hand,

and a poem at his command,

he haunts the Quayside still

and his words sing.

His folks they both were Scots,

sold socks and fishing nets,

through the Fog on the Tyne they plied their trade.

In this theatre of life,

the crying and the strife,

they tried to be decent and be strong.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,

he gave up all his life

just to be free.

Up and down the cobbled Side,

struggling on through the Broad Chare,

he shouted out his wares

for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,

he was a man the likes you rarely see.

With a pamphlet in his hand,

and a poem at his command,

he haunts the Quayside still

and his words sing.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

(from the music-theatre piece ‘Pigs' Meat’ written for Bruvvers Theatre Company)

MY POET FRIEND RENSE SINKGRAVEN

IN THE TOWN OF GORT WITH RENSE SINKGRAVEN, FROM NEWCASTLE'S TWIN CITY OF GRONINGEN, ON OUR IRISH TOUR

VISMARKT

(for Rense Sinkgraven)

The Mayor is bothered

about the litter in my brain;

the dross of poems

spilled out onto bar floors

and the fishy streets of Groningen.

He prowls the gutters

of my verse,

seeking to tidy up

the rhymes

and times I slopped

erotic images

between the lines

of council meetings.

The detritus

from lost poetry readings

gathers up

in windy corners

on this market day,

curled up

into sodden memories,

dark with crumbling print.

This city’s flags

continue

to flap proud,

defiant

in the rampant northern breeze,

fingers of lost empires

forlornly

waving

at laughing girls

and daring boys

dashing headlong

over stinking bones.

You will not make me clean,

I am a dirty poet

whose head aches

with dark subversive thoughts.

I am not tidy,

my very speech

remains unruly

as a mad professor in the Huis de Beurs.

I will mess up your streets

with a dynamic anarchy

until a true democracy

makes a clean breast of things

and the road sweepers

and dreamers

of the Vismarkt

share a green and wondrous world.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Groningen