Because I have an English poem
in my lap, of green-wooded sex,
I think somehow I must try
to find a mother’s want in me.
Please, dear human friend, go away
from this gore of shyness
which bears in great silent agony
a need for you,
but think, in under-understanding this,
all this is me, dear brains
showing clean how simple how reason,
the pilot tiger of bitter nest,
feels I am a man maiden who
really looks silly
when this man bothers with another man,
and speaks plain horror
only to upset my friend’s thought
into what my deep mind feels it comes to
for you to clear thought.
I don’t know whether pain thinks pure
pain inside your insideness
but I love you in pain,
also through anonymous hellish agony
without you, my man believe me,
but I will lay down this letter law
somewhere in the hurt that settles in me.
If I ever think of you somewhere
where you are not without your image,
I will allow you to forget me,
because I am selfish to forget
every minute just past through the head
which is coloured to death,
to find myself in the lies I live
though pot-headed or pilled to sleep.
You live as my childhood horror
of something-stranger I could want fantastically
I did try to be from the early dream,
you are the horror I am looking for about me
with these pick-fingered words
that fade after death.
Please, dear friend, go golden,
without one fear of me.
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From So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts (Nightboat Books, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by The Estate of Mark Hyatt. Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.
