PETER
DANIELS
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A selection of poetry
| Annual Leave
| Breakfast, Palermo
| Crossroads
| Dull Funeral Home: Wisconsin
| Family
| The Fireyard
| Heads
| Kings
| The Lemon Trees: Eugenio Montale
| Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram
| Mice
| Natural History Museum
| Policeman, Stoke Newington
| The Representatives
| Routemasters
| Shoreditch Orchid
| Wall Street
|
Peter Daniels Home Page
Annual Leave
Picture yourself somewhere else, one Thursday afternoon.
You haven't used all your allowed holiday, I notice.
That lady, up at the castle window calming her nerves
Shoreditch Orchid
They’re grubbing up the old modern
Any day soon
We’ll be waiting for the maps to kindle
Breakfast, Palermo
One golden glazed bun, sliced open.
To be eaten in uniform by a young soldier,
Family
I'm getting used to the household here,
"I thought you might ask, and it's hard to explain,
On Tuesday I met with a man on the stairs,
"That's my ex-lover's ex-lover's therapist's plumber,
Who was the man that called last night?
"He's my three-times-ex-lover's next lover's lover,
"We've often bumped into each other in crowds
Dull Funeral Home
Opposite a car wash, on your right
And whenever you need it, they have time.
Death needn't be a time to do anything.
Follow the standard procedures
The Fireyard
At the back, the last room, lucky to get it.
I settle down with the old t.v. showing Winter Olympics,
The spyhole lens in the door
Through the venetian blinds, outside
Wall Street
We walk further downtown, beyond the Village graffiti
Being with my sacrilegious Manhattan friend,
Natural History Museum
I wish Lord let me be nervous again, as confidence makes them wary,
I don’t live like that either, I do enjoy a steady job and comforts.
I wish to propitiate the Ilford Mammoth.
Today, I wish to be as unknown as yesterday,
I wish to kneel at the rail of the exhibit.
The Mammoth is depicted walking up the High Road
They do a postcard of fleas in Mexican costume.
I am moved to set out East, to undertake the sacred journey.
I shall keep my feet off the seats, and leave no belongings on the train.
I wish to make the fulfilled pilgrim’s return, purged and serene.
Mice
In the yellow water pail
On the porch, three more mice
One mouse looks nibbled,
How long before they died?
I throw the crisp mice out,
scrape out the bucket of dried
Heads
From the first there was no help but the sky
The Representatives
It’s these people, they all come back to be recognised
I call them up one by one and attempt to take it slowly.
without regret. They must have their feelings too,
It’s not for me to crown them with jewels and ointment,
I can persuade them the best people are vegetables,
The Lemon Trees
Listen, the laureate poets
Better if the chatterings of birds
You see, in these silences where things
But the vision has gone, and time brings us back
Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram
He has paid a small coin to a glass box
a dull purple ticket
which pushes on through a city of breezeblocks
The people might be
a woman in fishmonger’s gloves
a man balancing two dusty old bikes
In this incarnation, his tweed suit
He maintains a sense of direction but
Somewhere at the end of this line
Crossroads
Through the night, forms of the untoward
They’re ordering trains across your life, got you
We can hope to face them down, one by one,
A standing stone marks the crossroads where
Think of how each of us will join them, given
Years of counting the small curses and blessings,
Through the night, watch and listen as they all move
Policeman, Stoke Newington
Standing close up to a policeman,
He glances at me sideways,
Satisfied, taking a single circumspect motion
Routemasters
Up at the Common where the buses hang around
Boys in generations have spotted them. They rattle
Diamond graffiti windows, mouldy upholstery,
Through weekdays and Saturdays, wind, rain, sun
| Breakfast, Palermo
| Crossroads
| Dull Funeral Home: Wisconsin
| Family
| The Fireyard
| Heads
| Kings
| The Lemon Trees: Eugenio Montale
| Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram
| Natural History Museum
| Policeman, Stoke Newington
| The Representatives
| Routemasters
| Shoreditch Orchid
| Wall Street
|
POETRY
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Can you calculate the benefits,
prior to the leap that might land you
outside eating blubber and berries,
a salad of weeds in a forest of storms?
The little beat under your eyelid - time to take it
out for a walk, enjoy the company of rooks, relax
on the assault course.
with a tossed lettuce - soon she'll parachute off
with the raggle taggle, for good.
© Peter Daniels
Published in the pamphlet Work & Food (Mulfran Press, 2009).
First published in The North.
Illustrated by Moira Coupe.
rusty concrete lampposts,
with a special orange grab
on a fixture removal unit.
The planters come up behind
with new old lampposts in lamppost green,
and bury each root in a freshly-dug hole.
The bus can’t get past, brooding in vibrations.
We’re stuck at the half-refurbished
late-Georgian crescent of handbag wholesalers.
The window won’t open. The man behind me
whistles “What a Wonderful World”,
and I think to myself:
the rubble will be sifted; the streets all swept,
and we’ll be aboard a millennium tram ride,
the smooth one we’ve been promised, with a while yet to go
until the rising sea and the exterminating meteor,
but close before the war
starting with the robocar disaster.
And when the millennium crumbles,
I’ll be squinting through the corrugated fence
at the wreck of the mayor’s armoured vehicle, upside down
where they dumped the files of the Inner City Partnership;
and as I kick an old kerbstone
I’ll find you, Shoreditch orchid, true and shy,
rooting in the meadow streets
through old cable, broken porcelain, rivets and springs;
living off the bones of the railway.
You’ll make your entry unannounced,
in the distraction of buddleia throwing its slender legs
out in the air from nothing,
from off the highest parapets, cheap
attention-seeking shrub from somewhere
like nowhere. But here
you’ll identify your own private genes,
a quiet specimen-bloom seeded in junk,
and no use to any of us; only an intricate bee-trap
composed in simple waxy petals, waiting
for the bees to reinvent their appetite.
as we get settled, where we find ourselves
undiscovering the city,
its lost works, disestablished
under the bridges. There’s no more bargaining
for melons and good brass buttons.
We share your niche
and crouch as the falling sun
shines through smoke, and the lampposts
fail to light the night to the place all buses go.
© Peter Daniels
First prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition 2008, with the Ted Hughes Environmental Poetry Prize.
One scoop of custardy ice cream, speckled
with chips of fruit and chocolate. Sandwich them lavishly.
with one careless hand, espresso in the other.
At the chrome bar, more coffee is hissing.
Sunshine slants in early, yellow.
Not a speck on his trousers.
© Peter Daniels
Published in Of Eros and of Dust, ed. Steve Anthony (Oscars Press, 1992)
and the pamphlet Be Prepared (Smith/Doorstop, 1994)
"informal", I think you said.
But who is the woman that brings rice puddings
and tucks you up in bed?
but let me think this out:
she's my ex-lover's ex-lover's ex-lover's mother,
she likes to get out and about."
he was holding up a length of pipe.
He ruffled his moustache as he gave me a smile
— do you think I'd be his type?
he came to fix the U-bend and stayed.
He's always handy with his monkey wrench
but he's not to be had, I'm afraid."
When I told you, you grabbed at the phone.
He was obviously someone special to you
so I thought I'd leave you alone.
we go back quite a long way.
We may not ever have been that close
but we're family, I think you'd say.
— once we met at a bus stop in Spain —
but he's dying now, at his parents' house.
I'll never see him again."
© Peter Daniels
Published 1993 in Verse, and in Jugular Defences: an AIDS Anthology (Oscars Press, 1994)
Wisconsin
a statue of a Holstein cow; on your left – "Hey,
can we stop the car a minute?" – it's that sign.
Visit for a drink with the embalmer,
take as long as you like. Their expertise
is at your disposal.
If you want fuss, that's down to you.
This is America's Dairyland,
they put trust in cows, here. They know
your dead meat turns out as lively as your recipe.
for your denomination, hire the Fort Snelling
Memorial Chapel – "Staff available for weddings
and other pastoral acts." New Age
ritual consultancies advertise
"Planned observance for solemn
or festive occasions, parenting,
competitive events, establishing traditions,
anniversaries, pet loss."
Whatever: but
if anything happens, ask for the Dull
Funeral Home. They don't need ideas.
© Peter Daniels
Published 1997 in Brangle, and the pamphlet Blue Mice (Vennel Press, 1999)
The whole hotel smells of damp curry,
facilities not special.
two rival skaters perform their separate circles
but I shift across to the local Chinese stations.
Men in suits all the same shade of grey,
seems to be the Taiwanese Parliament.
is fitted the wrong way round
– hm? There’s a label in my new
underpants – “Inspected by Carol” –
I stick it over.
I spy the Fire Station yard, the men
idly shooting hoops, playing a hose on a car.
How many visitors must bless this
pent-up exercise. San Francisco
in its own bored heat, ready for flames.
© Peter Daniels
Published in the Blinking Eye anthology 2007
that says AIDS IS THRUSH
AND IT'S CURABLE!
Life is money and the buildings are bigger here.
It's Ash Wednesday,
this is a day to commemorate
some crisis: all the last-born, maybe,
picked from among the perfect suits, the ones
wearing on their groomed brows a smudge
like a smear of sex. Look how ready they are,
it makes them hunger for six weeks without sin.
it's time to look at a few spiky old churches,
because we don't visit here often.
Remarkable needlework: the white altarcloth, with
crossed pairs of three-tail scourges in red.
More smudges: gladly humble
to wear this dirt mark in public.
And Jesus, with his robes hanging off him,
stands at a bank of candles, warming his hands.
© Peter Daniels
Published in the pamphlets Be Prepared (Smith/Doorstop, 1994) and revised version in Blue Mice (Vennel Press, 1999).
and please make me meek — as if it could make them love me —
but for now I want to shout Fuck and my tone may be unsympathetic,
though I don’t have the accent for street ranting.
I’d pray to refashion the instruments of peace,
be famous for it: I’ll be dead soon enough
and they say you can’t take it with you.
You’ll be dead, too, and then you’ll be sorry:
we shouldn’t throw away our advantages.
yet never unhappy with my broken trumpet,
even now I know that it’s mine:
I grew up thinking it’s others that are chosen,
I’m not the one that must break the instrument, then
twist it back into tone.
in front of a double decker bus its own size. I ask
do they do this as a postcard, they suggest I suggest it.
At Seven Sisters I’ll buy a ticket for Seven Kings,
to visit the spot where it fell, twisting and trumpeting.
The Borough will have a file on it, there may be a plaque.
© Peter Daniels
Won £50 and was published 1998 in Tabla, the 29th time it was sent out. Judge was Ruth Padel, so she has got something right now and then.
two blue mice are floating.
They splashed through my sleep
last night, and I ignored them.
lie in the bottom of a dry pail,
withered, with a few old leaves,
and a scattering of droppings.
keeping the others alive
to chase the walls a while
inside the plastic drum.
We could lie in wait and
count how many fall in:
but simpler to set some traps.
and this morning's two
wet and bloated ones,
with the water they drowned in,
mouseturds under the pump:
remember tonight
to keep the lid down on the water.
© Peter Daniels
Published in the pamphlet Blue Mice (Vennel Press, 1999)
where the height above our heads went on and up
and where the signs came. The ground where the dew
soaked our feet, that was our own
because we lived there, though it might turn hard
or crumble, lose us in rising to mountains
or sink to the marshes and waters.
If we could ever find ourselves in clouds
our hearts would overbalance with that mastery.
Here we live, content under our hats, and a hat
protecting for the sake of heaven
won't help us fly, won't let us disappear.
© Peter Daniels
Published in the pamphlet Through the Bushes (Smith/Doorstop, 2000)
for what they are: unspeaking, unforgiving, charmless,
jealous, persistent. I don’t like to be offputting
but I’d rather not know them, or not all the time.
I could let them all come in at once, and wait
with my head in my hands for the jabbering to stop
but it won’t. Go for one by one, but deal with them quickly
it would be unwise to encourage their attachment.
Don’t become any one of them. Their own healthy state
is roaming free, unsheltered, naked, screaming.
treat them to shopping in Chelsea, or a romp in the park
— they’d stretch out along the edge, cling to the wiggly railings.
I can commission songs for them to sing of their secret pain.
and that the tree of heaven is a weed. I can pretend
they are shells arranged on my table, representatives
of disappearance, their own loss, hard empty receptacles.
© Peter Daniels
First Prize in the Ledbury Competition 2003.
Eugenio Montale
move only among
the less-frequented plant-names:
topiary boxtrees and acanthus.
Me, I love the roads that run themselves
down to grassy ditches
where in the half-dried-up puddles
boys are catching a few
straggly eels:
lanes that follow the banks
dipping between tufts of reeds,
and lead through orchards, under the lemon trees.
are lost and swallowed up in blue sky:
you can listen more clearly to the friendly
branches, whispering in the air that barely moves,
and feel the smell
you can’t unstick from the earth,
that drizzles in your heart an unsettling sweetness.
Here the distracted passions
call a miraculous truce in their war,
here even we, the poor, get a touch of riches
and it’s the smell of the lemon trees.
give themselves up and seem close to
betraying their ultimate secret,
sometimes you think you might
have caught Nature out, discovered
the world’s blind spot, the link that won’t hold,
the thread that unravels until at last it leads us
into the middle of a truth.
You look around in puzzlement,
your mind investigates, accommodates, disintegrates
into the perfume that floods out
the more the daylight fades.
These are silences where you can see
in every disappearing human shadow
a kind of troubled Divinity.
to the rumbling city where the sky appears
only in pieces above the eaves.
Rain tires the earth, and winter’s tedium
thickens on the houses,
the light gets mean, and the soul bitter.
Then one day, from a badly-closed doorway,
through the trees of a courtyard
you can make out the yellow of lemons;
and your iced-up heart is freed,
and they roar out deep inside you
their own songs,
the golden trumpets of their sunshine.
© Peter Daniels
Published 2009 in The Bow-Wow Shop
like a fairground machine:
permits him to sway with the tram,
and neo-baroque stucco.
his second cousins twice removed:
coming home from the market,
between fellow-passengers.
is not quite threadbare enough.
there’s nowhere it can take him.
is a field of dandelions and a bluebell wood.
© Peter Daniels
Published 2009 in The North
come forward in their best clothes, and stink.
in mind, singled out when they send in the tanks.
each of us earn a road to hell on our own donkey.
Cerberus pees three times with his special tincture.
a part to play, a part of the cold unthinkable.
offerings of resentment, every grunt of thanks.
slowly through you, they rumble a little, they twinkle.
© Peter Daniels
Published 2009 in The Bow-Wow Shop
I can get a free look at his
uniform, its unrevealing midnight matt cloth
and silvery buttons, its clever gussets,
and places for his walkie-talkie,
yes, his walkie-talkie tucked under his tunic.
Serious tailoring.
the expressionless professional
caught in this personal necessity
here at the cash dispenser in the street,
as if performing a secret habit: Don’t be ashamed,
I could tell him, It’s a normal function, we all do it.
to finish his transaction and reinsert
his wallet in its place, he walks on,
a bobby in a helmet, upright in a naughty world:
he’s a policeman with money, stowed
in the safest pocket in the street.
© Peter Daniels
Published 1996 in Southfields, and since then also on Poems on the Buses, and N16 Magazine.
the buses are hanging around, red vine tomatoes
in a bunch. Still hanging around, the immortals.
through Church Street; or they progress past Selfridges
at the speed of a houseboat, showing off an aptitude for London.
rested each Sunday for a garage sabbath with the engineers.
It can’t be long before their definitive retirement.
and the dull particulate smog of this atmosphere,
drive the blood along our veins, carry us home.
© Peter Daniels
Slightly different version available on a postcard.
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