Creative Work

24 February 2024

New York from Someone Who’s Never Been

Peter Shukie Poetry 0

New York

From someone who’s never been

New York has a king

He’s tough too

At least he was

Looks like Christopher Walken

But it’s not him

Last time I saw Walken he was doing community service with Stephen Merchant in Reading

Not the gaol

which would be Wilde

 They have gangs too 

The Gangs of New York

Infamous these

They like to wear colours but I am not sure which ones

Never really specified

I presume red and blue

But not a clue

and

In West Side story it seems to be a lot

Of finger clicking and to be honest they

Do not look that tough

A bit too dancy, prancy

Singing as well

More like a weekend in Blackpool than

Welcome to hell

But they have Other gangs that are based on countries of origin

Italians like to eat pasta first

Then kill in the dark with music playing

Operatic slaying

That’s what mobsters like to do

Stabbed in the throat by a bloke

In a shirt stained with Ragu

The Russians like a tattoo

Or two

The King that made the biggest NY groove was not a gangster

The only guns he had he ate,

A presence so big he remains famous

A story that always remains great

Even today, when we doubt right and wrong

We can agree the best King

Is Kong

Those simian swings from gigantic ape arms

He took a bite from the big apple

But it only did him harm

This was before the greatest showman

When these circuses became cool

This was the age of the freak show when these maniacs were just cruel

That massive monkey was life encapsulated in a brief escapade

with a showman’s lifestyle

He didn’t get the good bit

The champagne, the tuxedos, the Broadway smiles

They chained him in an undersized cage and Kong got oversized piles

No wonder he was fuming when the big night came

Snapped those metal tie downs and hit the sky high tiles

Where does an angry mammoth monkey go when his anger is spiked

Hopper had not painted a bar big enough for this

Hairy nighthawk on a manic night

I mean why would you do this

Treat this giant so bad

Not a friendly face or a walk in the park

Sometimes you forget that this city can be so dark

No wonder Kurt Russel wanted to get out so bad

Kong was ahead of the bonfire of any vanities, he was going to pull this whole place down

As soon as he could find a tree

These human monsters needed some King Kong Karma

Ideally filmed by Brian de Palma

Then….

But then is it wrong?

Kong?

Seems it

But what camera lucida I have to

Draw my place

My world?

Coronation Street

Gail Platt

Her mum

Long face

And dead bodies in council flats 

And clouds

and hard working put upon detectives

divorced

With errant children

And sinks

And hard angry friends

And insight unheralded

Worlds of grey cold and harsh surfaces

And humour of the basest kind

so Carry On looks like Beckett in comparison

And Neil Fucking Morrisey 

As a fool with a heart but as thick as the custard

In a Manchester tart

Enough then

Of dead chimneys and 

Empty solidarity

And cheerless bonhomie

Tuneless karaoke

Black puffer jackets

short back & sides

Union flags

Looks always snide

And anger

And petty 

and shadows not light

And no fucking poetry 

And so many fights

Yes

It was wrong 

What happened to Kong

But as he fell to his death 

Past every

Empire

State

Plate

glass

window 

Glorious or bland

I bet he thought

it’s better than fucking

Skull island

Those small minded servile bastards treated me like a freak

At least here I got to swipe out at geeks

In biplanes

And a love interest

Inter species

Beauty tiny, giant ape

A Size impossible to overcome

Differences they’d never allow

But now that it’s done and the floor is coming at me like a bullet from a gun

And even in that final descent

Kong I am sure

Not a single doubt

Thought

fuck skull island

I’m still glad I got out 

24 February 2024

New Boiler (Do More)

Peter Shukie Poetry 0

Nothing chills the ego

Shows how dreary things can get

Than two hours of a Tuesday

Spent in the laundrette

In there the ambitious flounder

In fact ambition flees

finds a metaphorical shot gun

Puts it between its knees

But the universe is a mystery

Dharma lies in those fragrant metal drums

This Tuesday held fate itself

Between its powder softened thumbs

Through a plastic washing basket

One panel kicked clean through

I saw a vision in acrylic

Pink hair in curlers

said she was 52

or maybe 53

she lied about being a backing singer

one time with ABC

She puffed upon a roll up

Blew smoke rings on my smalls

Took a bottle from beneath the tabard

Cleared her throat and drawled

Want a swig of frosty jack?

She offered, broke the ice

I’d been in there 90 minutes

I didn’t need asking twice

And off she went as we quaffed

and we chewed the fat

Of her cats n kids and weeping mould

Each a plague that ruined her

flat

Then the plumbing that rumbled

and the stench from out the pipes

The rent man she said was a rascal

Or something not so nice

I’ve rang the council a hundred times

For plumbing they’ll do fuck all

But it’s different if you’ve mice

They’ll be round once a fortnight then

Rats, they’ll make it twice

I was finding it hard

To want to go on living

Cider Gloom and Pink’s tales of woe

My joie de vivre had Joie de gone

Then she told a tale

That hit me like a stone

From her eldest’s catapult

“I saw my old man last week

He just appeared in the kitchen

He’s been dead five years

I shit myself

My eyelids would not stop twitching”

What the fuck

I thought I’d thought

It turned out in fact I said it

I know, the prick, That was me too

I said do you know you’re deaded?

“Did he speak?”

my eyes now wide

The dryers din now silenced

“Well sort of”

she whispered

Her fag smoke now a holy vapour

Wrapping her in mystery

from pink hair down to floor

He struggled and was raspy

He just said

DO MORE

I imagined what she’d seen

This octogenarian poltergeist

His long dead face all wizened

In that flat above the bookies

A fading ghost in puddles of ectoplasm

I felt the tearing of every last atom he had

In that

body

in nowhere

His Straining purgatorial persona

Every ounce of whatever he was

Boiled up in hellish fumes to go there

To Pink

One

Last

Time

All of that to whisper

To this princess in a tabard

Smoking Drum

Now was the time

To get it all done

A breath beyond the last allowed

Do more!

It cut me through like a jagged knife

This prophet from the afterlife

His words though few

Tolled all that’s true

A bell of doom

For me and you

He reminded me in that perfumed hell

Of lavender and alpine bluebell

That his words to Pink were for me as well

His bony fingers rapped out on his coffin lid

That today’s doing

Is tomorrow’s

I did

What this story needs is a dream sequence

And that my friends is what’s coming

A chance to escape the smell of fags

and stories about plumbing

I felt myself transported,

the Laundrette melting away

a kaleidoscopic universe of colours

swept open the self locking door

and me and Pink were away

We flew above the rainy clouds

found blue beyond the grey

kept climbing higher

and further off

and then

I saw us both

Me on the deck laid out and Pink

In charge of a speeding Schooner

Her hard brown arms taut like the ropes

She pulled skilfully toward her

In golden sunlight dolphins bounced in the wake

Of this streamlined streak of fibreglass and honey

Me and Captain Pink,

Her, the chieftain of the Med

Deep green eyes plotting our course

straight strong back and billowing locks

This goddess steered us toward the docks

We moored in Tangiers for Martinis by the bay

Had aperitifs in a jazz club

then camels

to her mountain hideaway

This poetess of insight

this harridan of hope

she swam in pools of turquoise

on this perfumed Moroccan slope

Her paintings hung about us

Sinsemilla filled the air

A harem of brilliant wildness

Sprawled on cushions everywhere

Songs of harp and calabash

Birdsong and sweet melody

Played sonnets dedicated to her eyes

Her voice

Her transcendent beauty

We listened as she read her work

The prize she’d won at Booker

While a contortionist danced through incense clouds

Entertaining these ephemeral fuckers

Pink, now resplendent in her silken robes

A caravan of acolytes

arriving now in droves

Every one brought precious stones

Meagre gifts

To the one that knows

The true workings of our human souls

Truly, these ecstatic pilgrims

would proclaim

No one could do more

in this earthly domain

I watched and waited for Pink’s address

And then a snap and no more tenderness

As the words came out

Bollocks, coin slot’s jammed and pinched my quid

All that was done is now undid

That perfect world remains not yet

I see I’m back in the laundrette

Pink is struggling

cider sweat in every pore

I ask what she thought

he meant

when he had said

do more?

I’ve not a clue. The daft old get

I bet he means ring the council

But he’s off his nut

if he thinks they’ll do owt

It needs

a new boiler.

22 January 2024

120 Year Old Rhubarb

Peter Shukie short stories/ flash fiction 120 year old rhubarb, Ashton in Makerfield, creative non fiction, Shukie Writes, Wigan 0

Either side of a congested road lie two rows of terraced houses. Enter dad’s front door and you go through a vestibule, into a front parlour and through that into a back kitchen. Beyond this lies the yard, a hard surface of paving slabs, three feet wide and 12 feet long. Either side a brick wall high enough to mark a boundary but still allows for neighbourly morning greetings and grumbles about the weather, or less commonly updates of births and deaths and shenanigans between the two. The washing line cuts a diagonal swath across and in warmer weather than today would obscure any passage with billowing sheets or towels hardening in brisk winds and infrequent sunlight. At the opposite end of the yard is a red wooden gate, when unlatched it allows passage to the backs, a strip of dirt that runs the length of the fifty or so terraced houses on the street. In winter, a mucky rivulet runs the centre of the backs and ruins football pitches cricket wickets and shoes picking their way to leave bins for collecting. Across this strip of winter sluch and summer dust is a series of random fencing, crafted from reclaimed wood, de-industrialised gates, old signs and mismatched trellis. And beyond this ramshackle boundary lies another world.

The world of the pens has existed as long as the houses, the earliest block built for farm labourers. The strips of smallholding fenced from the agricultural land beyond them. These pens offered subsistence, not gardens for pleasure but for food, a space to swap waged labour for graft paid in root vegetables, fruits and leaves. The terraces grew tenfold to accommodate the reapers of a three-hundred-million-year-old harvest in subterranean fields. Coal brought new inhabitants, from the surrounding fields, from Wales, Lithuania, Poland to hew the rock formed in ancient sunlight and cloud their own with its belching murk. Within the pens, these slivers of dirt, open to the skies, allowed more than food on plates. Disappearing lives, histories of land and season, skills in agriculture and cultivation were kept as tiny cultures, traded and passed between generations. Cultures from the East and West, dunked in darkness together during the waged week, created spaces to share as they grew. Miserable wages meant feasting came from the abundance this freed labour brought. A liberation of tilling and heaving, caring and nurturing that partially fended of the poison of the pits and the brutal practices of paid work.

The mines have long gone, the slag heaps of the Wigan Alps now themselves returned to a greener today. The flooded pits a lake sanctuary for birds, the millions of tons of rock dragged from its resting place, now a series of ash forests, meadows, bird hides. These three sisters of tortured earth now bringing a wildness that masks the muscle-ripping endeavour, the mile-below explosions that stripped men of life and limb. The gentleness as the earth reaches again to the sun and forgets the pulse of humanity that brought us here.

In the pens, some legacy remains of these unfolding communities of families and their struggles to survive. Here, in the pen, we continue to grow, if less now, different now. More of the land beyond the still trembling fences is given to lawn, furniture to recline, trampolines, flowers and inedible plants. Bird tables offer pet warehouse grain and seed to replace the seasonal abundance lying amongst tilled soil, crawling about leaves and bark. Lost now are my own gnarled childish hands, black from digging the spuds patch, weeding, scratched by nettles, soothed by docks. But by that old potato patch, now mowed not struck with spade, is a strip of history. Fifty golden crowns that shock a history of another world and reminds us of the fleeting nature of our own. Rhubarb. In a strand of earth that runs the length of the pen, this leafy waist-high forest was the first thing our octogenarian neighbour showed us as he passed on the pen. In the mid 1970s, Mr Davis, a miner for fifty years and grower for all those and more, waved his arms about these veined swathes of greenery. ‘Russian Gold’ he told us, flourishing when he took the pen on in the 1920s, bursting with late summer growth now as he showed scant regard to the rest of the plot. As we took in the fruit bushes, the onions laid out, the cold frame made from some demolished house windows decades earlier, we came back again and again to the rhubarb. Into the shed, then as now a series of old doors and one grimy window, dominated inside by an oil soaked sleeper bench, the air rich with oil and of wooden handled tools worn smooth by never-ending activity. It was to the window we went, ‘great view of the rhubarb’ he said. These crowns were the touchtone to a whole lost history, of dipped stalks in sugar, of Mrs Davis’s crumbles and pies, of ruddy coloured wine and summers sipping away a sunset. He talked of trading these riches, wrapped in newspaper, a prize from the East. He told us of stalks in a jackbit tin, consumed a mile beneath the sunlit earth and bringing just a little light to that darkness. Back we went, to his own handover from the miner that started this crop, brought over from Lithuania, or Poland, or somewhere in sacks, a few at a time. The times when the Baltic farms gave labour for Summer and the Lancashire underground fields took the rest for Winter. He reckoned that the crowns were seventy or eighty years old, as old as him ‘but dealing wi’ it a fair bit better’. Dad remembered Mrs Davies giving us a dozen stalks in newspaper when they moved in, that symbol of kindness an ancient one. Purple stalks, hard as the arms that cut it. And still this miniature forest of ancient wealth gives its bounty.

Dad tending to the rhubarb

These huge waving poisonous leaves, the proud and relentless stalks, the pulse of a lifetime of which our own is only fleeting. The houses and the rhubarb, solid fixtures for more than a century as all the waves of humanity that brought them have gone. Back out the pen, across the backs, yard and house and onto a road now choked with a blue smog of Saharan oil replacing the murky haze of coal fires. The parting gift, if you time it right, the newspaper packaged stalks of a Russian Gold from dad, himself the octogenarian. The headlines change in that inky wrapping but an ancient thread runs through those veins and ours.

Listen to this as a sonic essay here