Alan Moore - Jerusalem

An unaccustomed surge of urgency

Propels Den out into a tired rose light

From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,

Across worn flags that vandal time deletes

Where names and mortal numbers disappear,

Erasing status, sentiment, and year.

Dead information sulks beneath these streets

And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld

Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,

The war memorial’s black memo-spike,

Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls

When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,

Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like

Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate

Then over Marefair, observed with disdain

By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;

White hair and beard, officious little sod.

A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,

He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally

As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane

Towards a new low and a legal high.

Why did he come here to pursue his goal?

These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,

Here to a town that nutted off John Clare

Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.

These are the yards where sonnets come to die

As with the local poet he’d been shown,

The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze

He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.

Rousing from reverie barely in time

Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays

Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,

To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end

Between the shabby flats where it cuts through

To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he

Must brave declining visibility

Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into

The shadowed valley of the psalm descend

Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,

The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.

He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom

Only to misstep in the gathering gloom

And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp

The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.

He calls himself by an unflattering name

Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,

Making for where the high-rise windows glow

From sombre violet altitudes and so

Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,

Scraping one foot behind him as though lame

And, too late, suffering anxiety

About his bald host, whom he barely knows,

Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound

Like the most selfless altruist around.

Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,

Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,

But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass

Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense

From brief illusion, a great cog of night

That smoulders and revolves then fades from sight.

He frowns and, finding the right residence,

Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass,

Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane,

His benefactor shimmers into form.

“Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died?

Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.”

While Den complies, allowed into the warm,

His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain

Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall

Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?”

Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee

Where books on psychopharmacology

Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point

On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball

Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red

Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds

In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug

Into an origami doodlebug

Then lights the stout white paper fuse which leads

To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head

That explodes into giggle, gab and cough.

Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood,

Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke

And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke,

If in return for lodgings, dope and food

Dennis might be prepared to suck him off.

“Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity.

I’m offering pizza and me special stash.

This hooker wanted some. Said I could do

Her up the arse, but no. I’d promised you.”

Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash

Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity,

All the hard bargains that it will entail

Keeping on the right side of a front door.

He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save

Time done while waiting for the microwave

To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor

Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail

And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead

On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest

Such poetry as might be had among

The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue,

Attempting to maintain an interest

In De Profundis while he’s giving head

But failing to recall a useful quote.

Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things

Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme

Save chance events acted at the same time:

Just as the heartless oven-timer pings

Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat.

They eat in silence. Den discovers he

Can still taste his aperitif and hence

Does not enjoy his entrée. When they’re done

The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one

Announces that it’s now time to commence

With their ethno-botanic odyssey

And shows Den the datura he has grown,

Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page,

With the Salvia Divinorum which

Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch

That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage

The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone.

“I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see.

I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke

The other later.” They both masticate

The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.”

So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak,

Den gulps and swallows apprehensively.

He pales, as if at the approach of some

Fierce, underlying pandemonium.

Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall

So that how long he’s sat he does not know.

The dismal room has undergone no change

Save that its cluttered details now seem strange

To him, and meanwhile simmering below

His tongue the bitter vegetable ball