BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play Idea #3: a glockenspiel indicates a train
A psychiatrist’s office
Patient: problem? I want to tell stories but I never know
how to round things up you know how to give someone
a perfectly circular tale they can spin around their hips
for an afternoon take the other day for example:
in a carriage between London and Manchester a man
got into a fight with the conductor the conductor had a face
like a dilapidated barn and he was trying to make the man pay
full fare because he hadn’t bought his ticket on the station
the man said he hadn’t had chance he’d been rushing his wife
was in hospital ‘cos she’d slipped down the stairs
he had to get back to see her and didn’t he understand
and couldn’t he let him off just once? the conductor said he was
just following orders and the man replied that that’s what they’d said
at Nuremburg and the conductor snatched his money and stormed off
and the man with the wife with a sprained ankle and a broken arm
was left contemplating the thin orange slice of meat that was his ticket
And isn’t that a perfect place to end? I suppose it would be
but why was there a button missing from the man’s coat?
and where did the exhausted metaphor of the train
sleep that night? and what does the conductor smell like
first thing in the morning?
cityscape
backslash of corrugated roof single cheek
of light across the broad chest of city
the potholed avenue the moon has been reduced to
landscape
hills dawn crowning to the east
planes beat their wings
against the moon’s dull bulb
seascape
the bells of night’s train ring out
the sea is a half-learnt song the sea is unsingable
the moon’s mute conduction
BBC Radio Four Afternoon Play Idea #29 rent boy in a small town dreams of the big city
truth I want out to fade
like an unfashionable pronunciation
it started with the recurring dream
of a car journey there was opera
there was a possibility of rain
and other times I was an over thumbed
button dropping rolling through
this oneplatformsinglestraightline of a town
until I’d wake to find myself in someone else’s
morning window city
where the sky is scraped away to pure light
and you can't hear yourself scream for the breathing
--
Andrew McMillan was born in 1988. These poems are taken from his second pamphlet, the moon is a supporting player, due to be published by Red Squirrel Press in October 2011. A first pamphlet, every salt advance, was published in 2009 and is still available from Red Squirrel. Andrew has been Poet-in-Residence for Off the Page and the Regional Youth Theatre Festival; writer-in-residence for the Watershed Landscape Project and Apprentice Poet-in-Residence for the Ilkley Literature Festival. In 2010 he was commissioned by IMove, the cultural olympiad body for Yorkshire, to produce a new sequence of work. He is featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets.
