Yesterday saw the annual all-day poetry extravaganza at the Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell. Which means today sees the annual all-day nausea extravaganza at the spinning couch in my piercingly bright house. From what I can remember of it, I had a pretty good time. In the afternoon, there was the launch for the new Fuselit publication Coin Opera. The whole collection is inspired by video games and features work by Simon Barraclough and David Floyd, among others. My contribution is a couple of sonnets about Street Fighter 2.
Late on, I participated in a project where myself and 24 other poets all read a poem inspired by the Christmas No.1 from the year we were born. Here’s the poem I wrote for 1979: Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.
How To Be Another Brick in the Wall: A Survival Guide
Synchronise your watch with the school bell. At registration, amuse classmates by suddenly opening your mouth, wide as you can, so that when the bell rings, it sounds as if the school is lodged somewhere in your throat.
Classroom resources are scarce and must be bartered for. Your class alone has over two hundred pupils, many of whom are without chairs or first names. Milk monitors Hutherington and Legett can sell you black-market fountain pens, protractors, etc. Always face the front. There is a jar of frogspawn on the window-ledge for no reason. Somewhere behind the blackboard, you can hear the hum of a generator turning old PE kits into muzzles for guard-dogs.
At nine-fifteen, Mr Trehane will arrive and begin to indiscriminately whip the class. You have a copy of The Beezer permanently taped to your rump in anticipation of these beatings. So far, Trehane has torn his way through to The Banana Bunch strip on page 10. Look up. Trehane will be towering over you like a really hard sum. In your own time, turn over and begin. Do not cry out, as this contravenes one of the school’s golden rules: no laughing, no running, no dissent, no talking, no black crayons (only purple crayons masquerading as black crayons), no screaming, no lock-picking your shackle, no eye contact with dinnerladies, and no going home, the surrounding badlands filled with nothing but dry ice and spider patrols.
During handwriting practice, Johnson will ask to borrow the eraser that is shaped like a panda. Do not give it to him. In the slit in the panda’s back, you keep your prize possession: a suicide pill. Many have tried to bargain with you over the years, but today is not the day. Johnson already owes you seven ink cartridges, a Hardy Boys mystery and a Twix. He is too valuable to you for you to let him die.
Mr Trehane asks you to take the class register back to the office. Note that the register appears to be written in Trehane’s own blood.
The dim corridors will clank with the sound of prefects. It is a matter of minutes till they corner you in the assembly hall, wearing papier-mâché masks of your face, each one fixed into a different expression: you quizzical, you laughing hysterically, you thinking about sex, you in a private moment of bewilderment.
Try to remember that this is not a school, but a memory of a school. One that goes thirty years underground, single file classrooms, desks loaded onto a conveyor belt that snakes through the syllabus like the Pirates of the Caribbean. It is a ride, designed for the amusement of people who will never ride it.
You pass a painting of Mr G. Hopkins, your illustrious head-teacher. Know secretly that if there is a head hidden somewhere deep inside this building, he is long dead. The History unit has been firebombed out of recognistion, Woodwork does nothing but shave statues of saints to dust, and poems are handled like Hellraiser cubes. Finding one in your satchel means you have until sunrise to solve it, less it grow spikes and burrow into your chest.
At lunchtime, secretly watch your friends gathering at the peripheries of the playground, quietly singing songs of resistance and snogging their fists in defiance. From the high streaky windows of the science lab, they look like, well, like children. Miss Gatlock kisses your neck and slips her arms through yours.
“If only I wasn’t your teacher,” she says, “If only I was something else.” And you will want to turn and slap her and scream HERMENEUTIC POLYVARIANCE IS PROHIBITED! But Miss Gatlock will already be stiffening in your embrace, her mouth open, pointing towards the mass of infants squinting up at you both. Their baggy trousers, rippling in the wind like pirate flags.