GARY BECK

DISPOSABLE YOUTH

The badly decomposed body
of a young boy was discovered
stuffed in a plastic garbage bag,
near a South Bronx housing project.
The police arrived at 9.00 A.M.
responding to a 911 emergency call
and found an 18 month old child,
who looked like he had been dead for days.
They hauled the lifeless child away
in a green plastic body bag,
and no one cared, or waved good-bye,
or even knows where the body lie



GARY BECK lives in New York. More of his poetry is scheduled to appear in ANGEL HEAD.

First Day of Summer

The sun today is brighter than it's been all year,
pouring from the left over my neighbour's roof.
The birds chatter like crowds at an opera intermission.
Men slam car boots. Wind flutters through their uncombed hair.
I won't do anything today except shop for wine,
then lay back and dream awake all afternoon
like the dust motes floating in these streams of light.


~Bruce

Nostalgia

How I miss
those old worlds
that exist now
only in my head,
like when Elvis
was alive and
everybody knew
he was the King,
before videos
were rotated
endlessly on
music stations
and new young
kids disrespected
any sound that
wasn't computerised.
How I wish
I could return
to legends of
the 1950s
re-enacted by us
two decades on
in clubs where there
were always fights,
walking home along
the back roads
trying to roll
like Danny Zuko,
our parents home
waiting who had
been there when,
and understood.
Elvis, rock and roll,
our parents, these
were constant
points of reference;
now the reference
can only be
our memory of
what has passed,
ghosts of universes
once everything
now absolutely gone,
and substituted
by scenes, people,
alien to me,
conventions I
don't wish to buy.
I feel homeless,
as if cut adrift
in unfamiliar waters
remembering
the life I had. If
only one could go
back! I'd do it now
and walk on
safer streets tomorrow,
heading down to
Dix's with the
boys for chips,
pissing contests out
the toilet windows
in the Arndale,
our silver streams
descending on
the people waiting
at the bus stop
on Commercial Way

Steve Urwin, County Durham

I always feel greasy when I wear this coat; I can smell the wax on my hands. And the onion-breath clouding my speech as I regret these hours; cobblestoned streets and freezing sleet as I stand huddled in some doorway gnawing at the thick wedge of stotty oozing bloody sauce and grease. Double steakburger and...grease? No, I don't think I asked for that. Regret; I always feel it when squandering is the order of the day and the weather is of little ease. And the cocksure little students--well-versed in Eliot and Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron--pretty little things, storing up data and spewing out fact--not an ounce of soul between them... Bitterness, bitterness, here it is; the bitterness born of insecurity. I always feel it. I always feel greasy when I wear this coat and it rains and Durham is my destination; scurrying like a demented rat, from bus station to burger stall; from wet street to Waterstones--and trips to the cash-point inevitable. Ah, the guilt. The smell, the wax. This rat; my greasiness.

This Morning

This morning
I am broken
by my need
for you.

Your absence
makes this
cold house
colder.

I made a
you to sit
and make
me ache
at dawn
for loneliness.

Which shows
I love you,
and tells
of our
approaching end.

~ Bruce.

Untitled

I stayed in the car while they went in to shop.
I was tired,and needed to get some sleep.
So, relaxing in the front seat, I pressed the button
to retune the radio, from the r & b my travelling
companions favoured to a symphony;
then I shut my eyes.

They came back in half an hour,
laden down with bags, and high from the neon hustle
of a supermarket on a Friday night. "Ah, opera!"
one shrieked. "Ah, look at him, so cultured,
such an old man dozing in his seat!"

My peace was gone. As we drove out she reached
between my arms and pressed the tuner until
the r & b came back. Its slow beat and soul vocals
counterpoised. "That's better. No more of that
artsy-fartsy noise." And the rest seemed to agree
with her. The unease that had greeted Amadeus
at Sainsbury's vanished in a careless rhyme.

I am too English. I couldn't tell them
they reminded me of children stuffed narcoleptic
with Coke and crisps on a long trip home
from seeing grandparents. I couldn't say
how much I wanted her to get out of my car
for her bristling aversion to Mozart's higher art.

And so we drove on through Northampton streets,
my travelling companions hypnotised
by the trilling harmonies and the easy grooves
oozing from the radio. And I not speaking.
Perhaps we'd make the drive-thru
before we started dropping people off.