John McCullough

I Was Born in an Adidas Tracksuit
 
 
The midwife gasped as she tugged me
and the markings emerged: three parallel
white bars along my shoulders, arms, legs,
 
the rest midnight blue. The woven kind –
perfect for hurtling through alleys,
dodging showers of stones.
 
It disrupted interviews. I tried
to slough it off but the zip wouldn’t budge.
I entombed my tracksuit
 
under smarter clothes: creased trousers,
blazers, my back molten as I layered up
for posh restaurants, church. I bolted
 
to the coast. I hid in bars and met avid hands.
They waterfalled down my thighs.
I realised my stripes were showing
 
but here it was fine to be stain-resistant,
to don sweatpants you could spy
a cock through. If you look closely,
 
you can see I’m still wearing it now,
this uniform with an elastic waistband,
my true, synthetic skin.
 
 
*
 
 
Giraffe
 
 
You’re working-class, my lad,
don’t you forget it, said Mum.
She was talking to a giraffe,
a lanky boy prone to ideas
above his station, soft ways
of slipping skyward.
I loved being a giraffe, 
a vegetarian in fairyland,
the staircase of my neck
leading nowhere sharp.
I loved not being a lion
even though that meant
being hunted, carnivores slashing
at me till I galloped away.
I loved withdrawing to invisible
acacias – cathedrals of leaves
where my elastic tongue
licked what it liked.
Because I loved discovering
other giraffes, entwining
bodies and probing necks
or simply standing together
as a crowd, a forest
of extravagant breathing.
 
 
*
 
 
Family
 
 
Oh God, who invited them? The queer ghosts
rock up, unfixable, at Christmas: hell-bent relatives.
No prezzies except calamity and wonky ideas.
Dusty loiters under mistletoe like a purple smell
while Roland cracks his quip
about the laundry truck, as Radclyffe complains
to brandy butter. Only cheesecakes understand me.
 
Can’t they leave you alone? Don’t they understand
there’s a finite number of times you can listen
to a 400 year old essayist reminisce
about a paper cut, watch Katherine disappear
up a ladder of lies or Algernon’s bloodless rump
on the banister, avalanching towards you?
 
There’s no arranging them like tinsel.
You can’t seat Langston next to Virgil
and his pet fly, paper hats for all.
Badgering the living is part of it, with the greats
as much as the nameless crowd outside
who flank your windows, nosing at glass,
their bodies packed tightly as snow.
 
 
*
 
 
Parallel Circuits
 
 
In 18th-century Paris, for a fee, humans could hold hands
in a chain and fizz together when an electric shock crashed
between them.
                        Now you sit at the café and your friend falls
into his phone, eyes trapped by the screen’s bright suck.
He returns like a parachutist smacking into ground, confused
by the room not plunging.
                                          It starts with release,
much as things did for the man who slung an old ring
into the ocean’s body, later found out he’d married it.
No one is immune. In this democracy you, too, can make
a spectacular entrance wearing roller skates
before smashing headlong into an enormous mirror.
Here are former acquaintances you thought you’d locked
in a cupboard. Here is a private message that opens
your door with an axe.
                                    Often you try to be diplomatic,
each sentence you edit leaping through seven hoops
of politeness. Gathered strangers, it’s broadly accepted,
become a voracious amoeba that crams itself with cat pics,
viciousness and recipes for opera cake.
 
In Paris, the shock sometimes ended halfway
down the line, a vanishing blamed on castrated men
or frigid women before someone murmured
it always took place on damp ground.
                                                           The ocean of voices
colours everything you hear, sudden hailstones outside
not simply loud but brash, a deluge of minor celebrities
gatecrashing a private morning,
                                                  your finger hovering
above the screen like a seraph, crackling and blue,
before it slams its volts into the crowd.

11 Choir
 
I  The Body of the Crowd
15 Giraffe
16 The Dreams of Moss
17 Bad Habits
18 Dawn of the West Pier
19 Legs
20 Marginalia
21 Queer Studies
22 Night School
23 Field Trip
24 Portholes
25 Interview with the West Pier
26 Family
27 Masses
28 Quiver
29 The Red Houses of My Ancestors
30 Non-Stop
31 Popcorn
32 I Was Born in an Adidas Tracksuit
33 And Let’s Not Forget Tables
34 The Humans
35 The West Pier Tries Arizona
36 Parallel Circuits
37 Rainbows Don’t Exist
 
II  The Crowd of the Body
41 If Loneliness Is a Moth
42 The Innocents
43 To a Glass of Water
44 The Visitors
45 Shotgun
46 Blacksmith
47 Rungs
48 St Simeon the Stylite
50 Sunfish
51 The West Pier’s CV
52 I Am the Mob
53 The Long Jumper’s Diary
54 Chirp Chirp
55 Against Me
56 Greeting the Hoverfly
57 Shut Up and Jump in the Jeep
58 Abracadabra!
59 Watermelon Man
60 Don’t Mention It
61 Small Green Thing
62 Disclaimer
63 Please
64 Flight of the Birches
65 Push the Button
66 Song of the West Pier
67 Looking
 
69 [‘I don’t want to have everything I want’]
 
71 Notes