Showcase: Wayne Burrows

Our featured writer for April is Wayne Burrows, well known as the editor of Staple magazine and a widely acclaimed poet.

Wayne Burrows’ first collection Marginalia appeared from Peterloo Poets in 2001, and his work has featured in the British Council anthologies New Writing 12 (Picador, 2004) and NW15 (Granta, 2007), as well as the Forward anthology for 2002 and many magazines and anthologies. The Protein Songs, a sequence about genetics commissioned for use in Retina Dance Company’s Eleven Stories For The Body, Distance To Our Soul toured the UK and Europe over 2005 – 6 and appeared in Poetry Review’s ‘Bread and Roses’ issue. He is currently completing a second collection of poems, a book of ‘documentary fiction’ called Shrapnel and a novel set in the musical underground of the 1960s and 70s, provisionally titled Albany 6. He writes regularly on visual and performing arts for Metro newspapers, reads for The Literary Consultancy, and took over the editorship of long-established literary magazine, Staple, in 2007.

http://wayneburrows.wordpress.com

Emblems VIII: A Curse (New Authorised Version)

“The world’s a popular disease…oft arising
From ill digestion…th’ unequal poising
Of ill-weighed elements, whose light directs
Malignant humours to malign effects…”

Francis Quarles: Emblems VIII

May your every chance be almost grasped
but each time seized by someone else.
May you remain always in sight of true content
as it recedes before you like a rainbow’s end.
Above all, may you be distracted by happiness
as it hovers close enough by for you to feel it lost.
I wish you these things for your past misdeeds,
your backstabbing, boasting and rich disdain;
and should your child prove a cockroach, your money straw,
your bed a gravestone and your father a liar,
may this be all you’ll ever deserve, or desire.

That Afternoon

(from The Protein Songs)

She sleeps, and into consciousness
swim fish and flatworms, a cloud of moths;
termites building ziggurats, beetles crossing tarmac roads.

She turns, and from the midday heat
comes a fever of lizards with iridescent crests,
a carpet of serpents, a sunlit rain of frogs.

She murmurs, and as her body twists
trilobites scuttle across the coastal shelves,
jellyfish ripple translucently with the flow of the mind.

She stretches, her leg muscles flexing
like the wings of a ray in the turbulence, prised from sand
to pulse and float like breathing gills

on the edge of the shore. When she wakes,
beside her on the floral sheets, is a body, of the species hominid,
picking crumbs from the folds of its clothes

like a chimp with a straw at a termite-nest.
In the window, the windows of another house,
red brick and rain, the aquatic light of TV in a darkened room.

Shrapnel (part lxx)

“You must realise that a coin, even one of unalloyed white gold, is of no more value than a dog’s excrement or a tea-pot lid without someone making it so”

Sir David Whitehorn: A Letter To My Son (1849)

Back at primary school in the early 1970s, I remember the mystique of the Wendy House, its yellow canvas walls and red roof, its clear plastic squares inlaid as windows. Inside was the girls’ territory, out of bounds. We would try to peer inside, putting our heads through the red flap of the door, seeing piles of dolls, tea-sets laid out, a grey plastic till with its drawer open, full of tokens, while empty cardboard boxes, printed with dried peas and washing- powder logos, stood around like goods on sale.

We’d be seen, and there’d be squealing, and our heads would recoil from the hands that pushed them out then held the flap tightly shut afterwards, while whispers would be heard inside, and giggling, and other, indeterminate, sounds. We’d slope off, push yellow Tonka trucks and Dinky cars at each-other, make pile-ups, squash Action Men between bumpers, dare each-other to swallow small objects, or just look and point at pictures, mostly dinosaurs and military hardware, in gloss-coated hardback books.

I remember this today, walking quickly towards the Arsenal tube-station, a silver plastic token clutched in my hand. Printed on it are the words Ten Pence, the number 10, and it’s an imitation only plausible from the several paces distance at which it fooled me into picking it up, like the squashed milk-bottle tops we sometimes tried to use in vending machines, that because they were round and metallic must, as a consequence, fool the machines into giving up bars of Dairy Milk and Galaxy for nothing.

Close up, the silver of the plastic is pale and clouded, its weight wrong, its thickness three times that of the real thing, double even that of the old heavy coins with the lions on that you now never see, and even if you did, passed out of legal tender years before, like the big five-pence pieces and one-pound notes.

The serrations around the coin’s edge are too chunky to convince, and you can see the thin lines of its mould pressed into the sides. It is nothing more than training money, worthless in itself, but designed to mimic a real coin so that it can be used legitimately in a game, where empty cardboard boxes stand in for goods, which this coin can buy.

You learn the system, graduate from parental treats to pocket-money, from there to weekend jobs and paper rounds, from there to full-time work, each stage deepening the dependence on holding coins to exchange for property or rental, food or clothes, and only now, thirty years down the line, is it possible to see through this plastic token, only worth anything within the rules of some mysterious game inside the Wendy House.

Then see further still, going right through, in a moment of clarity, to the worthless jangling of base metal and the rustle of clean notes just dispensed from an ATM in my pockets as I walk. They will buy me anything to the limit of a worth decided by a different mould, a printing press, a credit-file held in some great machine 300 miles from here, for as long as the rules hold, and not a moment more.

Sometimes the rules change, and once-coveted coins revert to junk, worth nothing from midnight on a particular date. Whole currencies go, dying like the fairy in Peter Pan when belief is withheld. It is almost five o’clock. I close my fist around the plastic coin and quicken my step to catch the shops.