Caroline Bird Surreal-Absurd Sampler

This fortnight we have the award-winning poet and playwright Caroline Bird. These poems are from her Carcanet collections, The Air Year and In These Days of Prohibition. Here is her statement:

Sometimes I think trying to write a poem, especially about something that is currently happening, is like standing on burning hot sand. You have to dance from foot to foot, or else you literally cannot stay in that place. Every poem is a confession wearing an elaborate disguise and sometimes a funny hat, and by the end of it you've made a totally different confession that you can't paraphrase, and therefore never need to disclose. And it’s ‘true’ insofar that it truthfully captures our relationship to that truth: the hotter the sand, the more frantic the dance.

Dreams are a good comparison for me. We’re all poets when we’re asleep: translating our emotion into imagery (in poetry - and dreams - the imagery is the emotion) and when we wake up, we only know two things: 1) the dream was about ourselves 2) we will never fully understand it. And that’s the beautiful, infinite paradox of poetry... it is as personal and private as a dream and yet if you write it vividly enough - make the experience real - then the reader can dream it too, in the privacy of their minds, and it becomes theirs, and they wake up from it, scratch their heads and feel simultaneously closer and further away from themselves.

FANCY DRESS

A hand in a glove costume
A wife in a traitor costume
A stranger in a hope costume
Your face in a listening costume
An expectant mother in an expectant mother costume
A phone-call in a goodbye costume
A plea dressed as an anecdote dressed as a joke dressed
as doesn’t matter dressed as never mind
Sex in a conversation costume
A hopelessness dressed as an action dressed as a mouth
dressed as a lie dressed as a confession dressed as bravery
A hopelessness in a bravery costume
A window getting changed behind a towel made of sky
A window in a sky poncho
A window holding up a large blue sign
A wooden table in a family costume
A nightmare in a reality costume
Our reality costumes are really, really good
The Sun rings the Moon’s doorbell
Ding-dong. Party!
The Moon says to the Sun, “What have you come as?”
“Darkness Man!” says the Sun
“Not again” says the Moon
“By day he’s just average Sunny Ray but when night falls he becomes…”
“It’s been 4.5 billion years mate, no one cares about Darkness Man”
“Watch this space”
“That is literally all I ever do”
A sadness in a wit costume
Sad mouths in long flowing robes of laughter
Sad eyes in attention masks
Sad voices in perky fascinators
An unwanted mental image in a physical tick costume
Masturbation in a respite suit
A fall in a getting up again costume
Photographs pretending to be real people smiling at you
The past tarted up like the present
Our present costumes are really, really good
Water in an ice costume (rent only)
Death in a meaning costume
Good lighting in a beauty costume
Infiltration in a giggle costume
A void dressed as a chock-a-block digital calendar complete
with actual appointments and perspiration hairspray
that induces real stress, in a passion hat
A marriage still wearing its passion hat
like a Christmas cracker paper crown on Boxing Day
Every single fucking day in a passion hat
You in a me costume
Me in a wisdom costume trying to staple the cloak to my skin
An evasion in an answer costume
Time dressed as a decent amount of itself
A closed door in an open door costume
Our open door costumes are really, really good
Have you ever seen a moment in the nude?
Of course not. Moments never remove their costumes
Not even in bed. If you were to see a naked moment
you would be appalled. Their bodies are clammy and vague
like half-finished sculptures. Never let them hold your hand
Their skin is silicone mould. Their palms will retain an imprint
of your fingerprints. Their hand will become yours
Moments are like spies or chameleons
Their voice is the breath that precedes a question that will never
reunite with its words. You wouldn’t recognise
a moment outside of this fancy dress party
You’d probably mistake it for a patch of nothingness
“I’m always getting mistaken for a moment,” says the patch
of nothingness, “It happens at least once a week. Strangers
on the street. Sometimes I’m so exhausted I just go along with it”
Likewise a Moment is often mistakenly invited
to talk about nothingness on the radio
Air in a tension costume
Distance in a space between us costume
A little boy in a grown suit wearing old-age makeup and liver spots
painted on his hands dressed as my granddad dressed as a final memory
dressed a dying man wearing an ‘it’s my time’ costume
Our Letting Go costume is biodegradable
and designed to disintegrate after a few wears
4am in a revelation costume
My face with the horizon drawn across it
A line in an ending costume, brand new, created for the occasion
with this nifty reversible lining, look: just turn inside out
and the ending transforms into the silence that follows

BIPOLAR PURGATORY

Hey! I’ve got a theme song in my tooth,
Tabasco spleen, a reason to say ‘halcyon’,
a cobbler on speed-dial who specialises in
stretchy glass slippers, an honorary degree
from the Hot Pink Sensorium, two tickets
for literally every aeroplane, all laid atop
the chiffon in my valise but right now I’m
thinking about moonstruck linen, beaded
skin, a lover swallowed by my sighing or
maybe I’m planning a heist, it’s hard to tell
with my hood up and sunglasses, shivering
in sweatpants etc but I am a neon fish, an
interstellar anomaly, undercover angel sent
to test you, yes please do admire the greasy
knots in my hair like precious gems dipped
in chip fat or perspiring padlocks – or these
dirt-smeared stars dangling above me, look,
that my Limbo Support Team say I have to
polish back to shining brilliance using only
a j-cloth and ‘cleansing teardrops from my
congruent mind’ before I ascend any higher.

WIFE SWAP

While you were bathing in condensation
in half-mythical Nordic villages built
into giant rocks, discussing agapē
with blimp pilots, dissolving
then re-forming like a trick aspirin,
mattering on a programme note
carved across a diplomat’s leg,
giving sixteen-hour lectures about
silence and how it lives inside
symbolic glass acorns from which
‘ideas’ grow invisibly or something,
stretching a napkin into a flag and
using words like ‘vibrancy’ to describe
a bucket, I was here still gnawing on this chip.

ROOKIE

You thought you could ride a bicycle
but, turns out, those weren’t bikes
they were extremely bony horses. And that wasn’t
a meal you cooked, that was a microwaved
hockey puck. And that wasn’t a book that was
a taco stuffed with daisies. What if
you thought you could tie your laces?
But all this time you were just wrapping
a whole roll of sellotape round your shoe and
hoping for the best? And that piece of paper
you thought was your tax return?
A crayon drawing of a cat. And your best friend
is actually a scarecrow you stole from a field
and carted away in a wheelbarrow.
Your mobile phone is a strip of bark
with numbers scratched into it.
Thousands of people have had to replace
their doors, at much expense, after you
battered theirs to bits with a hammer
believing that was the correct way
to enter a room. You’ve been pouring pints
over your head. Playing card games with a pack
of stones. Everyone’s been so confused
by you: opening a bottle of wine with a cutlass,
lying on the floor of buses, talking to
babies in a terrifyingly loud voice.
All the while nodding to yourself like
‘Yeah, this is how it’s done.’
Planting daffodils in a bucket of milk.

BEATIFICATION

My father was a hundred and five years old when he discovered the pleasures of crystal meth. At first I thought his gurning mouth and disjointed speech were symptoms of dementia. Imagine my relief when he slipped a baggie of white shards from the netted side-pocket of his Stannah Stairlift. He called it by its street-name, Tina. As he lit the glass pipe, he reminisced about a repressed Blackpool girl with the same name he’d courted gingerly after the war. ‘Those days were clogged with woollen tights and shame,’ he said, his pupils exploding behind his spectacles; ‘Can you make me a website?’ ‘What?’ I said, thinking I’d misheard. ‘I want to advertise my wares,’ he said. ‘What wares?’ I said. ‘Bondage. Water Sports. Sadomasochism. People will pay good money to lick the toilet seat of a silver fox.’ When he smiled his face lit up like an electrocuted skull. ‘But you’re a hundred and five years old...’ He sunk in his sweater. ‘...Which is all the more reason’, I added, ‘not to waste another minute. Of course I’ll make you a website. I’ll even take the photos for you.’ ‘Will you paint my spare room dark, dark red?’ he said. ‘I’ll buy the paint this afternoon,’ I said. ‘You’re such a loving daughter,’ he said, ‘I’ve never felt so alive.’

He called himself The Pounding Pensioner. He was extremely popular. Women and men of all ages came and went at all hours of the day and night. The neighbours complained about the ecstatic howls. The Meals on Wheels bloke refused to enter the house, instead opting to leave the cloche of turkey mush and cauliflower cheese on the porch step. My father didn’t mind. He didn’t eat anyway. He wore his BDSM get-up twenty-four seven now: leather trousers, dog collar, studded platform boots. The kitchen lino was lacerated with whiplashes. The last time I visited he was slow-dancing to trance music in the hallway with a young bodybuilder. They were both naked. ‘Dad,’ I shouted, ‘Dad! I’ve brought you the Radio Times and that John le Carré audiobook you asked for!’ No response. Embracing, they resembled one mannequin sporting a creased shawl of skin. His hearing aid was curled up in the condom bowl like an elf’s liver. ‘Dad!’ I watched for a minute then let myself out. He wasn’t coming down again. Not for anyone. He was with the angels now.

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. She has six collections of poetry published by Carcanet. Her most recent collection, The Air Year, won The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020, and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and The Polari Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and The Ted Hughes Award. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.

‘Fancy Dress’ originally appeared in The Poetry Review.