'SCHMIG' - Two Poems by Chris McCabe

Tabs


Genuinely peculiar or just trying to be?

Dial 3 for genuine

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lardon : pig erection

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so what’s the closest thing
to the sea, to happen,
between any of us?

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Put the stones in the empty rose bottle to do the Bez-maracas shake. This is what happens when you hit 30 you said : just throw it away. Look : the dry stones stick in the still-wet neck. Recycles Box – just place it there – to take it where the glass breaks back. Can the stones be made again? The wine inside & the air in my hair felt nice. Just freaky-dance I said, to the woman of 26. Don’t be such a miserable cow

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REMINDER

memory loss
(or do you prefer
the one
about Memory Loss?)

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correct use of language is about context : you would never call a man who had murdered a woman a ‘ladykiller’. yet the definition is accurate & in some way deferential to the victim –

police said they were looking for a ladykiller aged between 35 & 40

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They tried to market the other side of the river as ‘northbank’ but that’s how people already knew it, due to the absence of what makes the south appealing. And you can’t market absence

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Poseuring for photos inflates the sense of self until you don’t recognise your own image. Then you eat porridge.

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(work okay today
quite quiet)
[ CONTENT ]
(get stuff done)

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Shovel-loads of horseshit across the film set. Who would want to act across that? Just loads of it. Shitloads.

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The quartz fly landed on the ESCAPE key. Made my teeth CAPS grit. Knee joints LOCK. Made me sick. Viscerals SHIFT.

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so what’s the closest thing
under one roof, to the sea,
to these two
who love like this




Free Gift



Before bed she said : Have you seen the slug?
I answered : I’ve already flossed. If I had not
misheard I would have offered to remove it.

The morning brought a red teapot of hope in the post.
Its aroused spout stuck out of the bubblewrap.
If a teapot could be sexual, if a teapot could be socialist.

We thought a baby was either hungry or happy
but inbetween he made a noise called SCHMIG
like a jester preparing a gig for the King of Tourettes.

We had to teach him that moral dilemmas
dreg the spontaneous & here was a case exercise:
I’d lost a nail in the cornflakes trying to scoop the free gift –

I’ve found the plastic prize, but should we tell anyone?










Chris McCabe published his first book, The Hutton Inquiry (Salt) in 2005. A book called Zeppelins (Salt) is out now in hardback and a pamphlet of ludic elegies called The Borrowed Notebook (Landfill) will be published later this year.