[James Midgley]

.

Berlin Grey

At the club’s entrance my companion gives a spiel
about freedom and body acceptance to the bouncer
who buys it, ushers us over the threshold

down damp steps on which one man is fellating another,
knelt as if in prayer, the receiver's eyes wide
but face deadpan, twunk body clad in dungarees.

In the antechamber we use stickers to hide
our phone cameras' narrowed eyes, strip off our day
time clothes and change into facsimiles of nudes.

An ecstatic cherry has been disemboweled to create
the red-lit chill-out zone where two mohawked tanktops
are carpenting each other into muscular crates.

One room over, the bloodied black iron lip
of a rusted cage swings open onto chains and bolts
that glimmer with cigarettes in slow collapse.

The walls piss nervously. Bass like a bluebottle.
We smear ourselves to the front of one DJ booth
and stand like cattle inside waiting pelts.

At the bar we order water but the river Lethe
has sweated over it -- he hands back too much change
and the water dizzies with the wingdust of moths.

The music clarifies like butter, the clangour
of a passing metro train that will not pass us by.
Our outlines in ascendance gather at the dungeon

ceiling and drip back down. I think of your balcony
facing a Prenzlauerberg street, the one you tried
to paint in the rain -- in the colour 'Berlin Grey'.


.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

James, you don't play with language, you play in it—to the pure delight of this reader!

Rhymically alive! And I love how we get different 'positions': ecstasy (beside oneself), descent (down steps, into dungeon) and ascendence (shadows rising). We appear to be everywhere in this nowhere (now here) place. So many points of view! Transcendent!

I love every line break. Each one serves a purpose. All the crazy, funny details -- Lethe sweating over it, the too much change, walls pissing . . . your eyes go everywhere, and keep moving.

It's all about looking, actually. Voyeuristic. So many shades of tone.

And more than this, because the final stanza undercuts, brings complexity and poignancy to the scene you've built. It's wonderful the way the poem moves to the memory of another person, another place, and an image of unrelenting greyness, and failure, really -- grey day, rain, grey paint -- that contrasts with the redlit gyrating underworld that precedes it. Trying to paint in the rain, especially grey—it's a great image to end with. It turns a fabulously decadent scene into something else entirely. Lots to meditate on, this poem.

So playful, and so much control of the language at the same time.

A wholehearted great big YES from me!


Cally

[Nick McRae]

James, I also enjoyed this and particularly enjoyed the close. The fellatio feels a little worn to me, but I guess you can't have a German nightclub without it?

[W T Clark]

I remember when I questioned if this was poetry when I was 17. How arrogant I was back then! We all flail in definition, I guess: before we realise that definition is a false floor. Now, at the end of my "workshop" era, I will say that I like it and always did, though you have improved it, but your "classical" "Styx" seems out of place in the rest of the mesh of the poem's metaphors: a weird a grasp into another territory, unrequired.

You know when I came to PFFA at 16 I was obsessed with your "Souls" in that forum they had for good poems for a year. It's still a fine poem. I think you compared me to my friend Toby de las Rivas (although that was before I knew him) in a very useful critique that affected my development. I write this all as an owed debt of thanks. But now I am distracting from your lines. You write fine poems.

Hope this helps.

[Nick McRae]

James, popping in again to mention that I discovered a funny coincidence. I checked out your bio and it looks like we might have studied at UEA at the same time. I did a study abroad there in 05/06, lived in the University Village.

Originally Posted by W T Clark

I remember when I questioned if this was poetry when I was 17. How arrogant I was back then! We all flail in definition, I guess: before we realize that definition is a false floor.

I would have said the same thing. It was an essay in Wallace Stevens' The Necessary Angel that set me straight. Very good book.

[Jim Moonan]

.
It’s definitely a good piece of writing, definitely not a subject for everyone’s eyes/ears. It’s energized, visionary and apocalyptic. It calls to mind some of the landscapes/decay Allen Ginsberg described in Fall of America. I read quite a bit of him when I was younger and this poem put me in a similar state of mind. Bukowski also, in mood. It could be a digested/regurgitated/condensed telling of Dante’s Inferno or Purgatorio. I can’t say I enjoyed it. I'm disturbed by it. I am first and foremost a reader of poetry. I typically respond to poems here simply to report what the poem made me feel. I typically don’t get too much into critiquing a poem unless my reader-eyes detect something. Afterall, it’s a workshop.

I am of two minds: first, the writing is sharp-edged and highly charged. As all have said, it's an engrossing read. You have a fluid voice that flows with imagery. Second, it makes me gasp at the slide into dereliction, the depravity of it. It’s as if you’ve written your own otherworld. There is a descent. There is also an ascent. The reader is taken down a labyrinth-like dim underworld that is either perversely pleasing or disgusting, depending on who you are. It’s as if we are being led through a wasteland of a society that is self-destructing, decaying, feeding on the hedonistic nature of ourselves (which historically has never turned out well), turning our back on higher aspirations. It’s full of hopelessness. I’m a hopeful guy, so I can’t personally relate, but I do find the poem a gut-wrenching look into a state of apocalyptic existence. No love. No compassion. No connection. No cohesion.

Nice writing.

.

[John Riley]

I like this journey into the abyss. I can't add anything to it that would be helpful. It doesn't need to be chopped up.

[James Midgley]

Cally, Nick, Cameron, Jim and John -- thanks so much for your thoughtful comments on this piece. I'm heartened that each of you seemed to have strong reactions to this in one way or another, and very grateful you took the time to say so.

Cally -- I'm happy the linebreaks, especially, seem to be working for you, as they are in the fashion of a kind of bastardised terza rima -- a play with constriction, looseness and arbitrariness, and a nod to Dante. Voyeuristic is right -- and I hadn't really realised it until you pointed it out. Thank you for that and for your far-too-kind remarks on the poem.

Nick -- "The fellatio feels a little worn to me, but I guess you can't have a German nightclub without it?" Haha! I didn't know that it was a trope. I've been to many Berlin nightclubs both with and without fellatio. But I suppose the chance (risk?) of fellatio is never zero. It's nice to feel connected via UEA. In 2005/6 I was but a babe -- a first-year undergraduate who rarely did much besides read and write and occasionally show up at a lecture. I've just noticed it was 2006 when I made this account, somewhere on UEA wifi! I'm glad you enjoyed the poem, blowjobs notwithstanding.

The personal connections both you and Cameron mention make me feel we should be enjoying this chat in a busy student union bar, the soles of our shoes adhering to a beer-sticky floor.

Cam -- What are we to do with youth if not indulge in arrogance? More seriously, the questioning of whether that previous draft was poetry was a helpful one. I realised the dry tone made it seem somehow harsh, unfriendly, maybe a little judgmental, apathetic. Thank you for your kind words re this poem and that other one, and more generally. Perhaps we will meet at some poetry gig someday -- indeed I hope so. I am grateful to think that anything I might have said may have been instructive or helpful to you on your way. I'll ponder the underworld river here. Thanks again.

Jim -- I hope you won't mind my taking your strong reaction to this as a blessing. I'm aware of the feelings you mentioned, and the poem is doing its wrestling with them both on the page and inside me. "No love. No compassion. No connection. No cohesion." -- it'd be unfair of me to say that this is one's experience of Berlin. Many do find a freedom, even a kind of paradoxical connection, in that disconnection. But living there for a couple of years was quite enough for me, though I still visit the friends I have there when I can. But yes -- these are (and were, for me) good reasons to find the place upsetting, at least this particular aspect or microcosm of the city. Thank you very much for detailing your thoughts here, for reading, and for feeling through the poem.

John -- Thank you for your kind comment and for reading the piece.

Thank you again, all of you.

[David Callin]

Hi James. I like this a lot too. I have a similar memory of a Dutch nightclub, albeit at a much earlier time, and not a gay one (in any sense).

I am probably displaying both my age and my innocence by admitting that "twunk" is completely new to me.

I wondered about the river too - Lethe, not Styx - as (to me) the reference takes me out of the tone of the poem that you'd already set so well by then.

So, I think it's beautifully written, with a terrific - dare I say quite uplifting? - ending. I felt uplifted anyway.

Cheers

David

[James Midgley]

Hi David -- thanks very much for your comment and for reading. 'Twunk' is a curious word indeed; I was given two competing definitions for it by those I spoke to. On the one hand (and this seems the much more common definition), it seems to mean a muscular twink; on the other, but more interestingly to me, it's a twink in the past tense -- one who has twunk. So, a twink who's beginning to look a bit past it. For this poem's purposes, it doesn't much matter which is which!

Thanks, too, for adding your vote to the underworld river. More food for thought.

I'm glad you felt uplifted by the ending. Thank you again.