Hello visitor,
These poems were uploaded by Heathcote as he progressed to the digital age. Enjoy.
Time Travel
Time Travel
The one thing we know
About the future is that
There’s no time travel.
Otherwise people
Would be here telling you,
“I’m from the future!”
But there is no one.
No one who says, ‘I was born
In twenty-three ten.
‘My name is Zarzan,
And I have a second home
In the Milky Way.
‘I commute from there
To here, and I’m bilingual
In Alpha Centaurian.
I bring you Greetings
Stranger, from my world to this!
Tell me, who are you?’
There just aren’t people
Like that, from another time,
Though there’s a film-clip
Which looks like someone’s
Talking into a cell phone,
In a Chaplin film.
It’s called ‘The Circus’.
It’s black and white. A zebra
Stands at the entrance
To the box office,
Then a woman walks past it.
She’s holding something.
She talks into it,
She even turns to look at the camera,
In a knowing way.
She’s a large woman.
Her fingers are curled around
This thin black object.
It’s pressed to her ear
As she bustles down the street;
She talking, half-bumping
Into everyone;
Not quite looking where she’s going,
Just like ‘phone users.
Yet there weren’t such things
In Charlie Chaplin’s day.
Not in 1928.
“It’s a time traveller!
It’s claimed in an Internet
Posting from someone
Eager to believe
In such things, or to persuade
Others of such things –
Or with time to kill
(Instead of travelling through it)
Or, who needs to get a life.
But in it you do seem
To see someone in a crowd,
Holding this ‘something’.
It’s hard to explain.
Maybe it’s windy; and they’re
Just holding their hat.
Maybe it’s ear-ache
And she’s holding a poultice,
Or ice to her ear;
Or it’s photo-shopped
Or it’s done by CGI.
Whatever it is,
The clip is silent –
You don’t hear a cell ‘phone ring,
She just walks briskly
Talking to the air.
Chaplin’s subtitles don’t read:
‘Hey, that’s a neat phone!
Hey, look everyone
There’s a phone that has no wires!
Must be the future!’
Bustling past she seems
To be holding a cell phone
In a silent film.
No one notices
This odd hiccup in the space-
Time continuum.
But it’s intriguing,
And you want it to be true.
If the time barrier
Could be broken, then
You could go backwards in time
And forwards again.
Knowing what you know now
You could take that knowledge back –
Back to your own past.
Undo your mistakes.
You’d see that forked path again,
Take the road less travelled
But would you be you?
You’d be another you, and
One you might not know.
Every second counts
When you are time travelling,
Which everyone is.
You’re in the future
The particles that make you,
The Muons, and Tauons
And weird Tachyons,
Can go backwards and forwards
In time with quantum leaps.
And you’re in the past
Now was the future. It’s gone.
And now it’s the past.
•
If anyone hears
Of genuine time travellers
The first thing to ask
Would be why they chose
This particular moment
To make their entrance?
Will you recognize them
By some distinctive feature,
Such as looking lost?
Heathcote Williams
Hollywoodland
Gaia’s Last Gasp
illustration: Elena Caldera
“We need the tonic of wildness”
Wrote Henry David Thoreau –
Knowing humanity’s hard-wired
For nature to kick-start its mojo.
And Wordsworth agreed, saying, “One impulse
“From a vernal wood can teach
“Us more of man – of moral evil and of good
“Than all the sages can.”
In Japan it’s known that shinrin-yoku,
Or “forest bathing”, reduces cortisol:
Stress hormones and blood pressure drop
If you watch trees instead of a wall.
Fresh country air swirls with phytochemicals –
The airborne defense mechanisms of plants –
Which exist to ward off pathogens and predators,
So each inhalation is equipped to protect.
Yet man sophistication urges him to defile it,
To replace the air’s goodness with poison
And the exhaust fumes from his ‘civilization’
Test heart, brain and lungs to exhaustion.
Imagine if planetary life was just a fairy story
Where the shoes man needed for transport
Had an evil power to kill thousands every day –
Someone might advise man to go barefoot.
Yet whenever someone presses a car’s pedal
And releases diesel particulates
They slow down man’s respiratory skills
And cause death in vascular units –
Where rows of patients languish in hospital beds
Plugged into oxygen machines;
With amputated limbs due to poor circulation
And bloodstreams that cannot be cleaned.
The carnage from consumerism is no different
From concentration-camp corpses;
Both created by poison and an empathy by-pass –
Cars kill as surely as armed forces.
Consumerism and war’s industrialized death
Have come to cross-fertilize each other:
One group decides that another can’t breathe
So they sentence them to be smothered.
In Britain thirty thousand a year die,
Due to their breath being stolen,
But it’s regarded with tolerant indifference
Rather than seen as a malignant omen.
Airborne pollution tops and tails human life
And slows down neural transmission.
It stunts infants’ brains, it reduces attention
Until dementia clouds all cognition.
Then, thanks to nanotechnology, the air itself
Is now very directly being weaponized:
There’s ‘smart dust’ that can recognize life-forms
For micro-drones to ensure someone dies.
What sounds like science fiction is fast becoming fact:
Minute particles with artificial intelligence
Can be programmed to target certain strands of DNA
And corrupt the air with a demonic arrogance.[1]
But the sea can’t be stored in a mainframe computer
To be down-loaded after its death,
Neither can fresh air be screen-saved and kept for later
When we’ve finally run out of breath.
Imagine if the earth’s atmosphere became deranged;
Imagine oxygen being stifled, and then not there.
The world’s not obliged to keep mankind breathing –
What if Gaia goes rogue and cuts off man’s air?
People who have money have less atmosphere –
Somewhere en route they get neutered.
What if money was to cost the earth its atmosphere
And its airy goodness be irreversibly looted.
Diesel exhaust prevents honeybees from finding
The flowers which they wish to forage.
It masks floral scents and thus prevents pollination.
The world’s food depends on the bees’ knowledge.
The use of the air is common to all, yet money’s filth
Feels entitled to stake a monopoly
So the air that’s fuelled laughter and cries of elation
May no longer serve man’s odyssey.
In Japanese there is a concept known as “yūgen”
Which describes a soaring feeling for the sublime
And an awareness of the subtlety of the universe.
It occurs when your breath is pure and calm.
Heathcote Williams
Heathcote Williams
[1] Jeff Halper, ‘War against the People: Israel The Palestinians and Global Pacification’, London: Pluto Press, 2015, p.132-4
USE YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE AS A CREDIT CARD
photo: Roger Perry, from The Writing on the Wall, Plain Crisp Press, 2015
Believing the world to be a common treasure house to all
I spray-painted this slogan almost everywhere:
‘USE YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE AS A CREDIT CARD’ –
To suggest being born entitled you to a share.
I’d then keep an eye on the graffiti’s lifespan
And would often find myself amazed
By its lasting for years in the poorer districts
But if they were gentrified, it’d be erased.
Heathcote Williams
A Murmuration of Starlings
After a visit to the Wordsworths in the Lake District,
Coleridge caught a glimpse from his stagecoach
Of a gigantic flock of birds as it swooped, rose then fell
Above the frozen, wintry fields of a passing farm.
It was November 1799 and he described the phenomenon
As “a vision” in his Journal, then detailed the way
This “vast flight” drove along “like smoke, and expanded
Then condensed”, then continually shifted shape.
First he saw the starlings as an arc, then as a globe –
A force field of matter that changed from an oblong
Into an ellipse, “glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy,
Now thickening, deepening and blackening!”
The vision stayed with him all his life – a mystery as to how
“The one be many.” How thousands of creatures
Operated as a single entity, performing extreme stunts
Of swirling acrobatics – free from gravitational pull.
Coleridge was at the time devising an ideal community,
A utopia, which he called a Pantisocracy,
And which, together with his fellow poet, Robert Southey,
He planned to introduce to America.
Now here were starlings creating a miraculous order
Just by instinct. It was an object lesson,
Spelled out by nature herself, as to how human beings
Might happily interact and co-operate.
Watching starlings, on Otmoor, two hundred years later
I saw them spelling out the same lesson:
A towering organism was moving in perfect formation
With no discernible leader. No President.
It whooshed through the air at forty miles an hour.
Each bird reacted to another bird’s movement
In a hundredth of a millisecond. They tumbled and banked
In synchronized, spatial symmetry – collision free.
They moved like iron filings drawn by a magnetic field
To create their sophisticated, aerial society;
A society that flies, instead of creeping along, suborned
By unnatural pressures and alien orders,
And the flock’s structure echoes the physics of magnetism
With each particle’s electron spin
Aligning with its neighbor’s in a symbiotic harmony
Like a metal entity becoming magnetized.
It hints at the discovery of a universal principle
Which seems to tap into a natural order:
A physiological mechanism, happening almost simultaneously,
In birds that are separated by hundreds of feet.
Since they can mimic us with an unusual facility
It shouldn’t be too hard to mimic them:
To rise high on nature rather than wrecking it;
To enjoy a life that no one can condemn.
There are no controlling starlings exercising force;
Not a single bird’s left behind in isolation.
Not one wastes time voting – they’d lose height if they did –
It’s anarchy in motion, and a glorious revelation.
Heathcote Williams
True Love in the Impossible Emporium
Searching the aisles for the right kind of birdseed
To feed my inner nightingale,
I wandered the shelves of an outlandish store
Filled with customers chasing their own tail.
The store’s speciality was impossible objects
Such as tins of rainbow paint,
And four-dimensional sprocket-holes
The sight of which made you feel faint.
There were devil’s forks in the cutlery section,
Each prong was an optical illusion,
So that morsels of food eluded forked stabs
Leaving consumers in hungry confusion.
The stairs to the different departments ascended
And descended in a continuous loop
Meaning customers climbed forever, getting no nearer
To the free bowls of mock turtle soup,
Or to the tin-cans that produced instant laughter
Or the horse-feathers, as used by Groucho Marx,
Or to the edible gravestones for cheering up cemeteries,
And the invisible coins for an inaudible jukebox.
There were blacked-out mirrors that helped you
To ignore the irrelevancies of life;
Their non-reflectivity forbade self-absorption,
The source of man’s endless strife.
Every item in stock was designed to unsettle,
To undermine reality’s status quo;
Shoplifters were encouraged to help themselves
By a Tannoy urging, ‘Ready, steady, go!’
On entering the store, a hidden force-field
Installed the Economic Equalizer App.,
Which hived off funds from those with too much
So the poor found they’d money on tap.
The Impossible Emporium’s owner and director
Could sometimes be glimpsed in the aisles:
He looked like someone homeless and penniless
Yet he gave off a radiant, solar-powered smile.
The owner had an ancient black-and-white collie
Attached to the end of a long piece of string
And he said, “I’m glad you’ve found your way here;
“I hope our anti-consumerism was amusing.
“Now today we have ‘True Love’ on special offer
(His smile made it impossible to frown).
“What’s it like?” I asked. “Oh, the tiniest sample
“Will turn your entire world upside down.
“‘True Love’ can come in delicate doses
“Or we can supply it in the mega-size;
“It can put a spring into a dinosaur’s step
“And give your entire body a surprise.
“Everyone needs to adore and to be adored once
“And to inhabit an impossible dream –
“To eat a whole box full of spiritual chocolates…
“I hope that you’re warming to the theme?
“Try to imagine every one of your brain cells,
“And every cell in your body being kissed.
“You’re a long time dead, you should try it once.
“True Love is not to be missed.
illustration: Elena Caldera
“We’ve now bottled the prime ingredient
“From all the great lovers of the past,
“From Romeo and Juliet; Heloise and Abelard…
“And we’ve found a formula that’ll last.
“It consists of serotonin, of kindly eyes meeting
“And of hearts fanned by angel’s wings;
“Take a drop, it’s free, the tincture of true love,
“Then be quiet while a nightingale sings.”
I drifted off in a beatific reverie while the essence
Of Tristan and Iseult, and of Jesus and John
Was invoked by my ingesting the impossible juice.
“It’s the blueprint,” he said, “for a global love bomb…
“Just think if instead of inhaling the poisonous fumes,
“The by-products of competition and aggression,
“You were feeling the tingle of unutterable loveliness,
“That, my dear heart, is our deranged mission!”
Then he faded. The supermarket daydream was interrupted
By a uniformed figure stacking shelves,
“Can I help?” he asked. I politely said no, wanting to tell him
That with true love we could help ourselves.
Heathcote Williams
No Regrets
Commemorating the centenary year of Edith Piaf’s birth
It is little known that French national treasure, Édith Piaf, aided the resistance to Nazi occupation in World War Two. She sheltered Jewish friends, and although criticised for her performances before French prisoners in Germany, her tour formed part of a resistance effort when prisoners’ photographs with Piaf were used to make fake passports, enabling many prisoners to escape.
Words Heathcote Williams Music Martin Wilkinson Video Claire Palmer
from the Stop the War Coalition website
http://stopwar.org.uk/music3/heathcote-williams-martin-wilkinson-no-regrets
The President of the United States Is Really a Tree.
A sequoia in the Sierra Nevada is known as The President.
It’s a three thousand, two hundred-year-old redwood.
It’s two hundred and forty-one feet high, or twenty storeys,
With a billion pine needles that whisper, ‘Beat that!’
It was called The President after Warren Harding,
One of the most pointless Presidents ever:
Harding admitted, “I am not fit for this office
And never should have been here.”
By contrast the arboreal President presides over a forest,
And has grown from a thin sapling to thirty feet round.
Like Louis Armstrong, the President’s gone from poor to rich
Without hurting anything or anyone on its way.
Not one of the White House’s serial imposters can say that.
Instead of sequestering carbon, producing oxygen
And refreshing the air, they deliver stale, wooden platitudes,
Scarring the world’s countries with their body counts.
In three thousand years this President’s crushed no bones,
It’s trod upon no one on the way up;
No one was tortured, no one killed, for this tree to ascend
With its effortless, breath taking nobility.
Every tree’s relationship with its fellow trees is communal.
Trees warn each other under insect attack:
With chemical triggers, their collective immunity’s strengthened
Without single trees telling others what to do.
Man’s yearning for power and celebrity is rooted in fascism:
The idea of one person being adored by millions
Appeals to those who have their eyes on the seats of control
But no one’s heard of fascist trees. It’s inconceivable.
The real President is still growing, in amongst its stand of trees
Known to the local rangers as ‘The Congress’.
These Congressmen are uncorrupted by corporate lobbying,
They just soar in uncomplicated lines to the sky.
The real President is president because of its virtue
Not because it’s placed there by vested interests;
The fakes are uprooted after four years, or they’re assassinated,
While the real ones live to over three thousand.
In a graph showing the biggest military spenders
A tall red pillar represents the United States.
It towers above the rest. Seven hundred billion dollars
Is what the fakes spend on their trunk of death.
The real President conducts water along taproots,
Two hundred feet long, up to the tree’s top.
The water of life is cleansed and the air is purified
By a tree that’s standing up to the Anthropocene age –
The age in which man is creating a global gear- change,
As threatening as the meteor falls of the Jurassic,
And centuries from now fossils found in the White House
Will testify to the follies of the oncoming age –
The fossilized remains of the dead wood that was pretending
That it was President of the whole world,
Whilst a life-enhancing tree in the Sierra Nevada was outliving them
And was airily disdaining America’s death-wish.
Heathcote Williams
.
Misprints
illustration: Elena Caldera
“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”
Said Wilde, who was far from being a pedant,
But he knew that the right word in the right place
May often make for society’s betterment.
In the so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ printed in 1631
The 7th Commandment left out the word ‘not’,
So the verse read, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery”
And doing God’s will became invitingly hot.
In 1905 in St Petersburg a typesetters’ strike
Sparked off the October Revolution.
They’d been asking for a higher piecework rate
Per thousand letters, including punctuation.
“This small event”, said Trotsky, “set off nothing more or less
“Than an all-Russia political activism.
“What started over punctuation marks,” he added,
“Would end by felling absolutism.”
The Czarist regime was toppled by a magnate
Refusing to pay for setting a few commas.
History turns on a sixpence and psychological misprints
Can lead to holocausts, gulags and mad bombers.
In his Annals the Roman historian, Titus Livy,
Wrote that, “Often events
“Of great consequence can spring from trifling matters.”
The world’s end hides in an atom.
Heathcote Williams
Ex parvis saepe magnarum momenta rerum pendent, Titus Livy, Annales, XXVII,
Heathcote Williams 