Soho Read online

  RICHARD SCOTT

  Soho

  For Daniel

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, Rialto, Swimmers, clinicpresents.com, Butcher’s Dog, The Poetry of Sex (Penguin, 2015) and Wound (Rialto, 2016).

  Thank you also to the following writers for their words, queer theories and translations: Walt Whitman, David. M. Halperin, Valerie Traub, Sigmund Freud, Vatsyāyāna, Leo Bersani, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mark Doty, Socrates, Jean Genet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ellis Hanson, Adam Philips, D. A. Powell, Felice Romani, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Martin Sorrell, A. S. Kline, Norman Shapiro, Edmund White, Donald Revell, David Wojnarowicz, Henri Peyre, Stanley Burnshaw and Haydon Bridge.

  Profound thanks to Matthew Hollis, Lavinia Singer and Hamish Ironside; and so much gratitude to Daljit Nagra and Edward Doegar for their unflinching belief in these poems.

  Additional thanks are due to the Poetry Society, the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, the Arvon Foundation, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Snape Maltings, the Poetry Trust, Poetry London, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, Goldsmiths College, the Faber Academy and the Rialto.

  Loving thanks are due to my brother, sister, mother and father; and to Rhona Johnstone, Joan Scott and Margaret Theophanous.

  Thanks also to Alice Dixon, Owen Willetts, Abigail Parry, Michael Mackmin, Chrissy Williams, Anna Selby, Reneé Doegar, Hannah Lowe, Rebecca Perry, Edwin Burdis, Liz Berry, Maura Dooley, Mike Sims, Sarah Macdonald, Jamie George, Elspeth Henderson, Matina Goga and Lina, Alex and Rafael Mahdavi for their support, encouragement and collaboration.

  All the poems in this book are dedicated to my partner Daniel, who makes everything possible.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Public Library, 1998

  I ADMISSION

  le jardin secret

  crocodile

  plug

  four arias

  Dancing Bear

  Childhood

  Permissions

  ‘slavic boys will tell you’

  Reportage

  Sandcastles

  cover-boys

  Fishmonger

  Admission

  museum

  Public Toilets in Regent’s Park

  II VERLAINE IN SOHO – 15 LOVE POEMS AFTER PAUL VERLAINE

  blue-screen

  love version of

  tinder

  green

  pastoral

  stupid love

  the hole

  W1D

  like to go for long walks

  heath

  the presence of x

  today

  sertraline 50 mg

  in the style of richard scott

  other people’s dreams are boring

  III SHAME

  [have rubbed myself against bark]

  [mostly because I had been re-reading freud]

  [even if you fuck me all vanilla in]

  [you slug me and]

  [no muscular fields just scrub and]

  [under neon lights my arms glow scar-]

  [but our crab shells are orange]

  [5am cadaver-slack in my arms]

  [legs straight as you go forward knees]

  [are you looking for me in these lines]

  [how could I forget the hot-faced]

  [people say shit like it gets better]

  [you spit in my mouth and I]

  [shame on you faggot for bending whitman to your will co-]

  [I am the homosexual you]

  IV SOHO

  Oh My Soho!

  About the Author

  Copyright

  SOHO

  Public Library, 1998

  In the library where there is not one gay poem,

  not even Cavafy eyeing his grappa-sozzled lads – I

  open again the Golden Treasury of Verse and write

  COCK

  in the margin. Ink stains my fingers. Words stretch to

  diagrams, birth beards and thighs, shoulders, fourgies.

  One biro-boy rubs his hard-on against the body of a

  sonnet, another bares his hole beside some Larkin. A blue

  sailor spooges over Canto XII. Then I see it – nestled like a

  mushroom in moss, tongue-true and vaunt – a queer subtext

  and my pen becomes an indigo highlighter inking up what

  the editor could not, would not – the violet hour of these

  men hidden deep within verse. I underline those that nature,

  not the printer, had prick’d out; rimming each delicate

  stanza in cerulean, illuminating the readers-to-come …

  I ADMISSION

  loose the stop from your throat …

  WALT WHITMAN

  le jardin secret

  boys were my saplings

  my whiff of green my sprouts

  a hundred soft palms

  reaching for my warmth

  boys were my herbs

  square-stemmed furred

  scented with musk dank clove

  & lovage boys were my

  crops my ripe-red yield

  my seeds each one exploding

  onto my lips like sherbet

  boys were my vines my

  creepers my climbers

  tattooing my neck back

  & thighs with suckle boys

  were my nettles my thistles

  my thorns tickling me with

  scratches & painting me

  scarlet boys were my berries

  my doll’s eyes my yew

  bitter on the tongue dizzying

  & psychedelic boys were my

  pitchers my fly-traps my

  venus a petalled mouth wet

  throat around a grave

  crocodile

  I know how I will die then

  in a death roll scales to my

  cheek claws sunk into my pale

  shoulders water burning my

  throat like whiskey the un-

  countable rows of yellowed

  teeth ringing my scalp and

  in the heat of the thrashing

  river he will press his white

  rawness into me like that man

  who held me from behind

  when I didn’t know sex and

  gripped my mouth like a muzzle

  and unsheathed his anger

  stubble grazing my neck see

  I have died already and somehow

  survived hauled myself up from

  the river mud to taste blue air

  though I was not the same I

  was carrion bleeding into the silt

  and didn’t I wear those wounds

  well pity me the boy who cried

  crocodile I have these moments when I

  know I wanted it asked for it even

  to be special to be scarred

  wading along the riverbank feet

  in the brown flow flirting with

  wildness the green violence in the

  shallows and I know he is swimming

  back to me his horned body slipping

  through sediment and weed for

  nothing ever really heals he can

  smell the red meat of me

  bait lighting up the river

  plug

  remember when I ached to bottom be sub-

  missive after a lifetime of playground fisticuffs and you

  you urged patience bought me a valentine’s day gift of moulded

  silicone this marbled root which shone like a newly hatched

  grub and glistened with spit whe
n you put the tip into your mouth

  and pressed its malleable girth against my hole

  remember how I flinched and you bit my ear to distract me from

  this muscular shuddering this movement of internal peony-dense

  flesh this sting-twisting and somewhere near the centre of me I could feel a dilating

  like how a sea-anemone releases its blood-rich tentacles into the

  saline current remember how I came in your hand then external

  symbol made fetish I tell you now I had been waiting

  years to feel this brimming over this stoppered-up this

  ripe fullness

  four arias

  after Vincenzo Bellini

  Perduta, perduta io son!

  FELICE ROMANI

  I don’t remember when I lost it my

  greenhorn my cherry my

  only wedding satin is the

  skin of my inside wrist thighs and

  as far as lilies go I’m an arabesque

  amaranthine puce scarlet etc

  all those fancy names for red

  that just mean red

  you can be humble white

  unopened but I tell you

  we all bleed when it comes to it

  you can sing of the april lily the

  pearl the ice cave

  but we all bud in muck and shit

  you’re a little boy when you

  sleep all curled up shrimp-

  like your pillow-creased cheeks

  dank brow and is it me you’re

  dreaming of eyelids caught

  in birdlime clementine lips in a

  mid-dream duet who is this

  sound that comes to you in the

  beetle-blue night an O a B a V perhaps

  just never an R tell me his

  name darling roll closer

  sing it into the feathered pillow

  so I might hold it against

  your gorgeous mouth

  there you go again silver-

  plating the bus stop

  you make my veins pop blue

  as a boy I could name all your waters

  sea of crisis sea of cold you

  did not turn away as I

  jerked off explored my down with your

  darling beam oh satellite

  follow me home and I will open my

  walls for you tonight I want

  your lidless eye your pearly hum

  wash my beard with translucence

  transmute my skin to semi-precious metal

  enter my mouth my anus with light

  lidl roses don’t last

  they rot

  even a dash of 7up in the vase can’t save them

  the skin-pinks slacken scrotum-

  like the reds

  crumble to eczema scabs

  I did not know you would fade so soon oh flower

  and in the cemeteries

  after pentecost

  boys are heaping the

  overblown fetid and sick into

  wheelbarrows

  scrubbing the gravestones with horsehair

  wiping the lichen from your initials

  Dancing Bear

  Children bring me coins

  to watch him balançoire, tombé –

  they imagine he has a

  forest inside, they close

  their eyes to see him

  foraging on a high cliff

  above a burnished lake –

  belly to the wet earth

  but inside is just a savage

  who loves with only his

  claws, his wild mouth,

  tears at honeyed flesh

  with his barbed tongue

  so I tamed him with

  a rod, a crop, my fist –

  starved him until he would

  dance this way, that way.

  At six o’clock you should

  see me count my money –

  hatfuls of brass and gold.

  I uncouple his snout, rub

  a drop of lotion in, pour

  myself a drink as my

  father unzips his bear skin –

  places his naked head

  on my lap – throat exposed.

  He apologises to me

  for all the places on my body

  his hands have scarred

  but I just close his eyes,

  sing him to sleep,

  nuzzle his ears – a blade

  in my other hand.

  Childhood

  Can I come with you? asked the clown

  in his caterpillar-green silk jumpsuit.

  If you’re going to say no then give me a crisp!

  he spat, thrusting his fist spelt L O V E

  into the open mouth of my Golden Wonder.

  Crumbs stuck to his chapped lips.

  I watched his grey beard struggle for freedom

  under a smear of hastily applied pan-stick,

  I counted the missing buttons on his coat,

  the soup-stains on his ruff …

  Can I come with you or not, you little

  tease? His breath all salt and vinegar.

  I nodded and gingerly led him home

  by the path that winds through the cemetery.

  Permissions

  I am always writing my pamphlet of abuse poems collecting rapey verse like a tramp pocketing bin-butts fuse ’em together later have one magnificent slow cigarette and when my chap is read readers will sharp intake of breath just as they do mid-poetry-slam over a glass of house

  red white pink whatever tickles your how daring how dark what marvellous images the one about what was it the schoolboy’s sphincter being like a I never realised how pink the inside of a cheek confessional surely not this writer wasn’t that would be too awful

  but how does one ask outright my dear boy is the I you well I am not hinting anymore please take your hand out of my trousers

  ‘slavic boys will tell you’

  slavic boys will tell you

  when the chill of a journey sets in

  simply upturn a chanced-upon mushroom

  & taste the stem starting just above the dirty root-

  pad – you must lick the length of it – dry out your tongue

  on the spongy white limb & if it’s spicy drop it – but if it’s

  salty, sweet or bland then eat especially if it’s salty – eat

  eat your fill

  of the beautiful

  firm growth

  in your hand –

  gorge on the

  dense white

  meat – eat, chew,

  swallow hard – for

  the forests are will-

  ing to provide – stern,

  cap & gills – they

  know the hunger

  of their men

  Reportage

  When I read how they poured petrol over that man

  I see my own death in some outlying federal province.

  Men I went to school with drag me into the arable scrub

  chanting queer! in a different language – they slip off

  my hood, wet my body with tractor fuel; the ringleader

  spits in my face before pulling out his tarnished Zippo –

  eyes skittering with white hate, his hand steady

  and as if Europe were a funfair mirror I look back

  across the thousand miles of moving corn, the brick-wall

  estates, the shuttered-up villages – to see myself free,

  pacing the avenues of a liberal city, scanning a tabloid –

  poem forming in my head. We are not so different

  that poor sod and I – I too was born into this world to have

  dirt on my knees, another man’s saliva in my mouth.

  Sandcastles

  A tall gent waits

  inside the playground

  not looking at any one

  child but rather mostly

  at the darkening door

 
of the public lavs

  and the shadows

  pooling within.

  I wish I could enjoy

  forging sandcastles with you

  and your two-year-old,

  filling the lime-green bucket,

  packing it down

  with the luminous shovel …

  only now this man is

  watching me –

  he’s caught me

  among the families,

  caught me trying to play daddy.

  His gaze is iron-heavy

  as he walks

  to the lavatory door,

  pauses

  like he were crossing a road, enters …

  In one version of the poem I

  follow him in, slide up next

  to the cistern. He bolts the grimy

  cubicle door behind us. Un-

  zips my jeans. In another I stay

  building with your daughter,

  perfecting the castle’s invulnerable

  keep. In another I am your

  husband. I yearn to leave our

  daughter alone for just a

  handful of minutes and be loved,

  in there, by him. In the last

  version I am your daughter,

  sculpting the intricate castle

  from damp sand, oblivious to the

  men, the poem being written.

  cover-boys

  top-shelf rags are not always pink curves&tits

  sometimes an out-of-date LATIN INCHES hides

  forgotten behind RAZZLE – three pixelated pricks