1st March

20 pp

Graham Clifford was born in Portsmouth, grew up in Wiltshire and

lives in London with his partner and two daughters. His
pamphlet, Welcome Back to the Country, and full collection, The
Hitting Game are published by Seren. Well, is published by Against
the Grain. His pamphlet collection, Computer Generated Crash
Test Dummies is published by The Black Light Engine Room, as is
his most recent collection, In Charge of the Gun. He has a MA in
creative writing from UEA and is a Head teacher.

www.grahamcliffordpoet.com
e: rhubarb100@hotmail.com
T: 07718557921
tweet: @GrahamClifford1
Insta: @grahamclifford
21 Winns Terrace, Walthamstow, London E175EJ

1
Wishful Thinking

Graham Clifford

2
Contents

1. The Judge’s House

2. Sex
3. There is No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in Red-Footed
Tortoises
4. Uri Geller’s Fork
4. Application Denied
5. Proof
6. Complications
7. Les Enfants du Paradis
22. The Waters of the Zambezi
29. Now Their Robots Can Cover Rough Ground
36. Conjoined
47. Revivifying Bees in the PRU
48. Slow
52. Seasons Of
55. No
56. ‘…a knight sticking his sword into a snail.’
56. Tonight
57. Gift Tokens
57. Sitting Down
58. Unknown Unknowns
58. x
60. Overhanging Grief Makes Short Work of Indulgence
59. Acknowledgments

3
The Judge’s House

In the judge’s house is a wall of photographs: a mountain; him

with an elephant; him not at a family gathering.

On the bedside table are magazines which he uses to lie to me about

his interests, and a container of expensive condoms.
I’m aware of the game.

Later, I read the decrepit streets and a song from my past is freed
and the whole world deflates a little,
as if squeezed by a windy god.

4
Sex

We were having sex at a peculiar time. We had been focusing for a

good while but weren’t able to conclude as expected. We could hear
our neighbours through the wall, also hunting down that bright
moment but not being able to trap it, then we became aware of our
other neighbours on their lawn having sex, in their particular style,
which also wasn’t working; they talked of how recalculating
flightpaths or percussing to a more exotic meter could help.

Their grown up children must have gone to have sex in their

partners’ parents’ houses, or in one of the derelict Ministry of
Defence outhouses full of out-of-date visionary, purple graffiti.
Perhaps they were having sex in a car. I became aware of cars
passing and rationalised about masturbation.

Then we were given to understand our neighbours’ neighbours were

all having fruitless sex, too. And their neighbours: everyone was; the
whole postcode, the ward, probably everyone in the country, all at
the same time.

I wish I had tried harder at school, you said as we continued our

twin efforts like shipbuilders with Zen focus on every rivet. I
thought about drone ants under the paving and a whole city of
couples urgently, intermittently poised, inhabiting expectation like
the audience at a world-record-challenging domino attempt before
the first bone is tipped.

Now it’s dark. I stayed awake to write this as if the last line out of
me will explain what was holding us back but I’m a born again
realist and know this is nothing if not common-or-garden, wishful
thinking.

5
There is no Evidence of Contagious Yawning in Red-
Footed Tortoises

Following extensive study

something you didn’t know you didn’t know
isn’t happening.

Uri Geller’s Fork

Was there anyone who didn’t believe,

or didn’t want to,
when he told us
to press our palms to the screen
and not just think, but
really think?

Static prickled.
A dainty fern came to life.
It hailed then stopped with a rainbow at the end.

Still they will not admit to

any frantic weakening out of shot.

6
Application Denied

We are sorry
to inform you in front of
gathered family and friends
that you have been
unsuccessful
on this unique occasion
with your application to be
yourself. It’s just
you came across as
too good,
something wasn’t right, we decided
you were either lying
or overqualified, and therefore
likely to let us down,
primed for better offers

besides,
the successful applicant is so
perfectly almost,
his charming vagueness
suggests such potential.
Even when asleep he smiles
but with business-like empathy.

You would benefit from hearing

his pristine platitudes.

We can offer you

the position of
your own second cousin
twice-removed.

7
Proof

I made a machine to simplify everything.

It was enormous and very complicated
so I made another
and ran the second machine through the first.

What came out didn’t appear to work

but was a pleasing teardrop shape, smooth
and the shivering it did when activated
seemed to approximate high worth.

I put this outcome back into the first machine.

It hasn’t come out yet. A noise offers hope
but I need guidance on how long
is too long to seek.

8
Complications

JS was born reluctantly in south western, pre-corduroy

Mesopotamia during the eighth Faustian Plague. His double-parents
were each constricted in their separate ways and blind local
woodsmen were employed to throw ‘privacy blankets’ on each
while the other took turns to conduct their banking and
‘movements.’

While the Pineapple Wars played out, JS was conscripted to labour

in ambiguously-labelled biohazard hangars where he repeatedly
attempted to dislocate chemical weapons at the design phase; the
unfortunate accidental outcome being he vastly improved viral
efficacy leading to the single biggest kill-count in post-normative
battle theatres.

Following the wars, JS scammed a job penning epitaphs in coloured

ink, a fad popularised by Mimet, the froufrou niece of popularist and
Northumbrian ingrate, Geoffrey ‘cork soot’ Bellchamber. Having
read his sepia and neon ode in prose to a gamey pastor, the
chronically left-handed poet, Günter Umlaut employed JS to colour
his sonnet sequence, ‘All the Eggs, Simultaneously.’ It was an
embarrassing success, securing for Umlaut a nightly five-minute slot
on state-run TV – after the weather updates forever presaging fog –
where he would expound on everyday objects, sharing with the
dozing cognitions such as, ‘…a steak tenderiser isn’t going to
mind...,’ and, ‘Mugs? Yes! Of course, mugs!’

Furious at receiving less than a seasonal, peripatetic abattoir

operative for his art, JS wrote his only novella, ‘Way Too Taut,’
which imagined an impotent theocracy forever seeking – though,
hilariously, never attaining – financial stasis on a wonky continent
where everything stank. And rhymed.

9
Following pointedly lukewarm reviews, JS acquired an inbred
solution in an experimental format and the rest is history.

Les Enfants du Paradis

We would wait
until the light inside and out
found dim equilibrium
to start work at the dairy. Slipping
sharp plastic lids on cream pots
or putting a suspect heat into forearms
when we shrink-wrapped hot yoghurts
to the bang and comedy clank of machines
which spat blackcurrant scraps and sicked-up
vicious solvents that grew holes
in my Egon Schiele t-shirt
like grey matter degenerating.

A piggy man leant back

his paper boiler suit ripped
at the gusset to give him cool air and room
to fart. He smiled as he packed
with defective friends. His hands were
ten mini penises on steaks.

Breaks were hidden from the fox-stunned night

in an underground cafe, strip light
deleted shadow.
On the back of a magazine
in blue and grey, the classy script
in the advert for new Artificial Eye classics:
Les Enfants du Paradis, Police, L’Atalante,
peering into one frame of a film that might make
it better than two crates an hour
of posh yoghurt and bog standard,
funnelled from the same vat

10
into varying qualities of receptacle.

The Waters of the Zambezi

In the basement we found his tools for separating Siamese Twins, a

pew, an excellent drawing of a rabbit and fifty assorted lockable
cases, all different colours and sizes. All locked.
We had spent more than a decade upstairs thinking we were running
the whole show, when all along he was down here, doing important
stuff.
Where do you think he trained? asked Jake’s wife. She was usually
the last to speak.
I had not thought he’d been trained. Perhaps I could be trained to do
this, I thought at that moment. After all, my grandfather had been a
midwife to a Hereford Cow and controlled the flow of the Zambezi
over the Victoria Falls. This sort of leadership potential was in my
blood. My mother had raised an army of petunias every spring and
never shed a tear when they were mown down or rotted. It was
always just how it is.

11
Now their Robots Can Cover Rough Ground

One balances on a leg, righting itself

with the moves I thought only belonged
to you or I, us
but is simply the most elegant configuration
the cheapest solution
to falling.

Another is just legs,

they didn’t bother with the rest,
so this half, chained, wobbles and balances
quickly across ball bearings,
translated hot coals.

Now their robots, poked

adjust or hop patiently like penitents.
They push and push to see them fall

but look where they are

tottering in rooms, readjusting,
sum totals nearing the majesty of poise
of standing up to

ancestral hinges, the dimmer switch

whispering untruths about history.

12
Conjoined

Do you have a purpose? Or

do your days billow out empty,
the way washing whipped and jerked
in bright gales?

If you have purpose

can it be unattached? This conjoined twin,
are all the organs in her half?
Could you carry on, at least
stagger towards
a mechanical alternative and, plugged in,
regrow? Now?

At the bottom
where your memories pop like bubble-bath bubbles
a single kind word
is more integral than you can bear.

13
Revivifying Bees in the PRU*

A tennis racquet leaves a waffle imprint on the foreheads of boys

that get too close.

The Jackson 5 at full blast at 08:45 bounces off the Georgian

townhouses that surround the PRU. This Island Earth from the 50s
was on at teatime last night; benign alien super intelligences
ultimately couldn’t problem-solve their way out of spectacular
galactic doom.

He sees everything. He is alive like sparrows, their pinhead hearts

beating too quick to count, every leaf twitching is threat. He makes
an origami knife with so much masking tape it is nearly hard
enough. He bites his forearm and wants to be Iron Man. How does
he know so much about guns?

He climbs the unclimbable three-metre-high perimeter fence and

pisses on the sports coach.

Instead of lunch, we extract a still bee from a dusty web. Its

surprisingly moist proboscis uncurls into a spoonful of sugar water
and in the end it takes off but it’s a drone and there are more spiders
in this square mile than there are humans on the world.

14
*Pupil Referral Unit

Slow

She says
I know
my son is slow
and the rest of their lives
is in the room
with us
the dripping urn,
spout caked with rusty limescale.

Let there be
other-shaped
medals-not-medals
being tooled to glorify
those who angle their hearts
to push back
against what’s coming
because
it is the right thing to do
and that contract
love.

15
Seasons Of

There are more seasons than you think. Like senses.

This season sees an incremental rise in apparitions. A toad gives

birth to a bloody pebble. Ghosts bend into holloways and hawthorn
bushes. In the frozen food aisle, a black dog with saucer eyes guards
Quorn mince. At the end of your bed a heavily patterned cloth curls
in morning gloom. You daren’t move.

And there is a glut of Virgin Marys perpetually turning to camera

like Sinead O’Conner. In a trunk. Not upstairs. Not in the library.
Nowhere until seven-ish then she is shouting something and
pointing. Warning, but you can’t hear of what, just that she is as real
as the woman on the train today who seemed to recognise you but
couldn’t place you.

Next season will be the one where people lie on the grass and get
bitten and in the evening just stare from their front room windows
because they can’t start anything. It’s the season when it is always
too late.

16
No

One morning
it seemed necessary to repeat it to you –
No. No! Not
loudly but
there like a cliff

like carving initials into tree bark,

herding you like cattle,
pre-empting school and work.
But really, spite’s program played in me
and I wanted to cut into you.

Look at me.
I’m not what you thought.
I can hurt.

17
‘…a knight sticking his sword into a snail.’
Mary Ruefle.

The student of poetry scribbled ‘WHAT!’ in green biro, closed the

book and walked into the clammy provincial Friday evening, short-
cutting through the old people’s flats where you can’t tell where the
paths end and lawns – NO BALL GAMES – begin because of the
vigilantism of moss.

We exist unbidden on the radar dishes of parenthesis, or as rust on

Horse Chestnut leaves which pat the air above us.

Given A we extrapolate C, incidentally immolating B. Water curls

one way down the plughole. Books, lives, gravestones and a new
business which will pick up your cadaver, ‘convert’ and return it in
biodegradable storage solutions. Who can say fairer than that?

So many people have been right in isolation, but sit two Alphas
together in the green room and watch the sparks fly. Think drippy
Thales and Trakl. A deer hoof print in the Johnny-strewn scrap of
municipal forest and how loud the crows became when lockdown
happened and they ran the streets.

Gift wrapped memories of a drenched decade weigh too much. You

know what you’re doing. The crime is perfect.

18
Tonight

Cruelty in architecture gets me

right here
tonight.

These words make me a poet

tonight. Because
I say so. Tonight
I will not explain myself or
like your work more.
Tonight the shine is gone off people. Or worse:
is explainable.
Tonight
everything I thought feels right
that is words’ comfort;
it is too bright under streetlights
and the fact
of everyone and everything being somewhere
is the thought that needs pinning, labelling and archiving.

Gift Tokens

I’m helping squirrels communicate with horses. I’m a geranium.

This is not a drill.

19
A pink sun has risen fizzy with hornet larva. They are eating it from
inside. You can see them jerk and flex in preparation.

We drink radiator water. Someone hopeful was gashed and bled out
so quickly. Completely empty, but with time to dispassionately
contemplate a foil number-balloon escaping into cumulus.

I will employ a sociopath to join our team in case we need to shoot

someone in the back of the head to make corned beef rations last.
The blueprint of our office’s air ducts is also the map of how to get
to your heart.

Sitting Down

I love sitting down. My friends love sitting down so we started a

club over the fields. We would sit in trees like birds, or on rusty
seats slung in ditches. Sometimes in the snow we would just sit as
we walked along.

That’s a good bit of sitting! one of us might say to another. Or, Not
bad, but it looks painful to sit on that corner, we would comment as
we had learned that giving thoughtful critical appraisal is priceless
and really the only way to demonstrate you care.

We were already old. One of us was an ex-surgeon. Several of us

were farm workers. Later on, younger men and women joined us
and we realised that we weren’t as good at sitting as we had thought
and that we were much better. As one of us sat in the style of
Lincoln in his memorial on a fly-tipped sofa, a repeat-offending
joyrider escaping from the police in a stolen Audi smashed into a
group of us appraising. There was blood everywhere and he got off
because it wasn’t his fault.

Since then, an additional key indicator of success is ‘readiness to

bolt’.

20
Unknown Unknowns

Viciously calm silverback, he

is moving gold spuds up
through the mud, his broad hand
coming to the surface like a net.

Now he’s hosing them

as if water goes on forever,
an expansive act of cleansing, moving
new tubers around with the jet,
the trees restless around him, this
lump of nature, a pent-up force in the garden,
then the trees all but touch their toes
and transporter planes bring in
a fresh round of war dead, and
he takes it all in and defies connection,
simply disallows one thing from leading to another,
just cleans potatoes on the crazy paving.

At night dinner digests in the yards of guts we add up to,

water levels peak and the gutter
amplifies a tapping that gives our sleep a beat.
Something, not very much,
wakes the whole house;
you could hear us all
silently awake.

21
He was lying there full of potato,
remembering cleaning the potatoes, considering
lunch then dinner tomorrow, wondering
if this rain will smear his windscreen
and I wonder, does he get something right
I don’t know needs correcting?

I’m showing the children how to paint and he comes in and says he
can’t tell what kind of fish it is and it’s the wrong colour anyway.
He sits and draws a memory of Peter Rabbit but what we see is a
kitchen sink full of plates then someone does a rocket and someone
else explains theirs is what a scream seems like to a mouse.

A girl searches for Charlie Chaplin online without knowing his

name.

Stick. Bent stick. Old houses. Hit.

He plays ‘Strange Fruit’ and looks to me for reassurance. I’ve got a

say because early on I shared I know little. His buzz cut is too well
faded around the ears and into the neckline. In two days he’ll be like
us again but today all his boundaries and borders are well policed.

A new type of military plane/helicopter hybrid fizzes past like a god

of wasps. Something’s going on. The mean learning is: things might
look the same, but they’re not.

22
Overhanging Grief Makes Short Work of Indulgence

Everything is wanting to seed, to get out of itself

even though that means being left at a station
watching the train pull away.

Not a problem, says the stuffed Georgian kingfisher

that we stroked having picked off the putty
to slide out the glass,
petrified by the non-sound of non-existent Cruise missiles.

On a pier with chubby legs repeatedly slapped by waves

there is a cork booth that sells suggestions and advice
and a fishing tackle shop with exactly what you don’t know you need
under the counter.
What you need is multifarious absences and what you can’t have.

See that helium Unicorn balloon escaping in a Bank Holiday sky?

It won’t reach outer space
but that shape is hope.

23
Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements and thanks are due to the following for

publishing poems from this collection:

The Judge’s House & Les Enfants du Paradis, Interpreter’s House

There is no Evidence of Contagious Yawning in Red-Footed
Tortoises, Perverse.
The Waters of the Zambesi, MIROnline
Now Their Robots Can Cover Rough Ground, Neon
Proof & Application Denied, Magma
Revivifying Bees in the PRU, Ink, Sweat and Tears
No & Tonight, Dreich
Wishful Thinking (an early version), Sitting Down & Uri Gellar’s
Fork, BLER

24