Christmas Eve
(For Martin)

Nick Burbridge

As stained glass fades through the dusk
the crib lights burnish; in his makeshift pen
by the confessional the donkey shits.
Pews dull Sundays leave void
pile up with families
armed with candles in cardboard skirts;
the church curtseys for its happy hour.

After the first avuncular anthems, creaking up
and rustling down, the Sunday School nativity,
a rake of half-remembered lines and pre-recorded riffs,
led by a middle-aged pink fairy bopping by the pulpit.
For his sermon the priest takes Joseph,
swathes him in wrapping paper and gaffer tape;
when he breaks out we sing Happy Birthday Jesus.
Prayers are likened to the bubbles he blows from a pot,
but down to weak lungs or heating cuts
they drop, viscous, at his feet on the stone steps, pop.

And yet, so restive is our trapped urge,
in hush and shadows cast by candle-flame
for the communion, it might seem
some are transfigured,
like Sassoon’s stuck soldier,
by the shaft of an almighty answer.
It is just a trick of the light.

The circus rolls to an end;
the faithful are not called to come,
but anyone, in choruses
more vaudeville than Jerusalem.
Children shuffle in litter by the stable
torn between horseplay and sanctimony.
Bells collide. Sole sticks to sud.
As he shakes hands on the steps outside
the vicar sighs and warms to his next sacrament:
print tablecloth, mince pies, mulled wine.

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Monk’s House
(via Ashdown Forest)

Nick Burbridge

Patient and poetaster, Flynn,
had to piss on the outing
which ended at Monk’s House.

By the outdoor closet
he waited for
a constipated tourist

ten minutes
till he reappeared,
tucked his floral shirt

into his shorts,
and confessed,
‘It’s kinda blocked.’

Flynn used the basin
but curiously flushed
and stood awash.

At the house he wiped his feet,
stepped into the vestibule
and, like a boy, gasped.

A pair of brown boots,
rain-hat
and walking-sticks

stood as if left
that morning: spares
for Mrs Woolf.

The stone bust
on the garden wall
induced a dizzy spell.

‘Against you, I will fling myself
unvanquished and unyielding, o death!
…The waves broke on the shore…’

The wind sighed through the elm.
In the valley the Ouse plashed.
A train to Lewes hooted.

Flynn turned to his shadow:
‘Does my trouble lie
in trying to digest

a smackerel
of some gift, or curse, like this,
across the years?’

He got short shrift:
‘Possession of notebook
and anorak is a recipe

for spotting trains.
Driving complex engines
through heaven and hell

(let me be tactful)
calls for infinitely
better skills –

and, don’t forget,
hours and conditions
infinitely worse.’

Flynn grinned. ‘Medication,’
said his shadow. They joined hands
and danced across the grass.

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Minutes
(Fellowship of Depressives Anonymous, 23rd June)

Nick Burbridge

Eight o’clock, at the main man’s top floor flat
in a Regency building near St Michael’s Church.
The tea-set ritual. First brew, formalities.
The failed Irish writer arrives late.
No one complains. Assembly on the three-piece suite.
Ten minutes each to navigate the week’s depths
clears the second pot. To lubricate the free-for-all
a last dance round the kettle. Introduction of the biscuit tin.

So the one-time teacher on a hot evening –
t-shirt, sawn-off denims – marshals his quartet:
a thin pale widow, tugging her stained roll-neck,
lists failed sallies to the shops and yields
to the maths postgraduate – impenetrable lenses and thick beard –
with medical snippets from radio and library books.
The Dubliner, fresh from a Section unvisited,
picks up the Sun and eulogises on bare breasts.

No one objects. Order is kept at all costs.
Moments when it crashed are not forgotten:
Christmas, when the student’s sausage-rolls uncurled in the oven;
serotonin raised by too much punch, he groped the widow,
as they left, she pushed him downstairs and broke his ankle.
Or the evening in Spring when the Dubliner announced
he’d downed a pack of Prozac, but when help was called,
he danced a jig and bellowed ‘April Fool’.

They settle as the main man, unaware
his left testicle protrudes, leans back with eyes closed
and takes elegantly phrased passages through hell;
though, half-way through, flooded with fatigue,
he watches his mind drift, dreaming
he has turned the helpline message on its head:
Welcome to the FDA. If you’re looking for support,
forget it, we’ve gone home to bed.

No one bridles when he snorts. Through open windows
pigeons in the crescent trees compete
with Wimbledon highlights borne on the breeze.
This is as close as they come to peace.
Curfew is at ten. No one wants to leave.
So the Dubliner cavorts – ‘May God go with you!’
And they go alone. The tea-set’s washed,
and hidden for another week. Like them.

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As We Forgive Those...

Nick Burbridge

Suave tongue and spread lips aside,
Fiddler Molloy recalls his lover Maia
for their rites of passage
in her seedy attic lodging.

Drunken inquisitions as they trailed back
through city streets meant his secret was confessed.
She squatted on her bucket in the corner pissing;
he undressed and waited for her like a child.

She covered him with tenderness.
Though they kicked a candle over
and suspended their contortions to fight fire,
when at last he came across her breasts

(a stab at birth control)
fingering the limpid pools,
she said, ‘It’s time I was baptised,’
and wiped her brow and cheeks.

A Cork boy intimately schooled in Roman habits,
spent Malloy felt newly sanctified.
But when he left, for his now extant wife,
the landlady, old hippie in her kitchen

drinking herbal tea and licking a tahini jar,
met Maia’s entrance (glistening face,
shift too short and torn,
to the uncommitted, smelling rank)

not as a celebrant – ‘Is that the third this week?’-
and wondered if she were
the lost and lonely tenant
she had been led to believe.

Stepping from her tattered lamplit hall
into the dark night air,
Malloy stole homeward like a fox,
barking sorrow and delight.

(For more Nick Burbridge, see: http://magazine.brighton.co.uk/)

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