A Crack in the Ceiling

Where I’m from lanes of grubby brick houses
tilt downhill toward smoking factories.
I wasn’t sure what went on when people worked
but I knew it wasn’t good. My parents
owned a pub. People staggered in stunned,
worse than weary, as if something inside them
was finally tired. They drank
and drink did different things to them.
Some got sad and sulked in themselves
so the world wouldn’t reach them.
Others argued, a battle to be big
that forced them to fight sometimes
(the winners got more loud and wide).
Most of the rest of them laughed:
sparks of jittery tittering that shivered
on the brink of real merriment,
or raw bleak whisky laughter
from an absolute absence of happiness
that said hell is my habitat,
or laughter like a crumbling ceiling,
bright and keen and full of heat,
fierce and clear as breathing.
This sang like the singing
on Saturday nights when bands played
and the music made a wave
that lifted us higher than laughter
and when I sang along it felt like flying.
I knew this was important.

My mates and I made a band.
The blues were like a blessing for me,
a halo of serenity. When
I sang I felt utterly unlonely. When
we were done I felt like no one.
Even when we left school and played clubs
in London I never got blessed with a kiss.
It was like being smacked by my dad
when he’d catch me daydreaming as a lad.
Singing was breathing and the rest
was crashing into ceilings. Working
like a dolt in a clanging din that mocked
my hope of being more than a bloke
dimming himself with whisky night after night.
Cross-eyed and fat. Waiting to die.

Still I sang. And answered an ad
in a music mag: superstars seeking
a singer. A prayer of a longshot
but amazingly they called me.
Gnashing smiles and baleful eyes
at the audition. My right eye
kept sliding to the side
but I sang from my belly
solid and loud and during a blues
a spell spread through the room
and we throbbed in a groove that was
bigger than us and I wailed
and felt like their peer.
A shimmering crash at the end
of the tune and a keen eager gleam
in their eyes. They told me to sign
on the line—and get on a diet.

One night we recorded a song
that started with a stinging slow riff
over the thud of a dry bass drum,
a trudging heavy threnody
with shocks of organ chords
spiking the path. I sailed over this
ragged stomp with a gutpit howl
dredged from the muck of the pub,
the gouged and laughing faces desperate for ecstasy,
choking on smoke that clouded their curse,
my fear of this mirror, trying to fly,
grazing the lid of the sky only to find
myself stranded in silence,
the music suddenly gone, and I wailed
with the ache of Saturday nights
and the band charged from its hush,
the guitarist dazzling the air with shivering bursts
of furious notes, fleeing a nightmare, chasing a dream,
and I shrieked and growled in the surge as it churned
and it stamped and at the height of its stride stopped
dead—and drifted away with a groan.

That night I chased the promise
of a kiss that lurked in the air
just ahead of me and got freight
train drunk in a pub and grinned
at women in a glimmer of openness
until I fell wunk! on the floor knowing
I’d never escape what I know but now
I might ride it rather be crushed by it
and by the time they dragged me away
I was laughing at a crack in the ceiling.



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