Graham Clifford's winning portfolio

There are six poems in this portfolio:

Searching for sleep

I'm searching for sleep, for its AM frequency.
I start at the top and wind down,
thumbing the focus into
purple throbs, over a serious clicking-
it's that satellite on a deteriorating curve.
I carry on through the numbers, find
a black and white sitcom in Spanish
recorded under a duvet
then a dalek giving his hurling commentary
from inside a baked bean tin, then
there's a God-bothering channel dealing in clean-cut chat,
talk in a forever rising tone that suggests
an answer around the next corner, or, if not,
then definitely round the next.
A heat ray from the fifties wipes them out
after which I discover a huge machine
by some fluke transmitting its own chug, chug
and I'm one foot in the Land of Nod
until pirate radio elbows in,
the fast, crunchy beat of a speeding heart
so I press on, get the end to the theme tune
to Tales of the Unexpected then arrive
at the proper AM doldrums;
a record needle shush-ing on the last bit of vinyl,
an outdoor conference in the rain in Paris,
Alpha 60 broadcasting to The Lands Without,
a brass band on its own in a barn,
world-shattering formulae hastily chalked up,
A-line ghosts arguing, whispering my name,
glass rims singing, congress erupting a corridor away,
a Theremin concert audience in corduroy
being seated without word or cough,
real Morse code, fat butchers' laughter,
tape un-spooling onto a tiled floor, trains,
rain tutting on my childhood tent

My friend was late

because last night
he took ecstasy and cocaine and drank
and was dancing until three o'clock
when he saw an old flame and got talking
and they did another pill each (of what he isn't sure)
then they went back to his house where
they took another pill to calm themselves down
so they could at last drop into sleep, ears
ringing like an old television set on its way out,
light fizzing from the curtain, birds singing.

He turned up, red-eyed
taller than everyone else
that spilled from the tube station.
We had a cappuccino each and talked
as fast as we used to when I would stay over
in the big, posh, messy house his dad had built
where we would watch anything until Ceefax came on
and then he would tell me stupid,
impossible stories about celebrities.
I believed every single one.

On a slope.

Trapped for ever in this town
a green, open prison with too much sky,
too much surface area cooling quickly down

where spinsters and wealthy men who wear
ironed jeans scowl along supermarket aisles.
You serve them, burning up, desperate for

your share. Perhaps you have been forgotten
or the very best you deserve is a carnival
by the canal locks, featuring the local librarian

and her Silver Thread choir echoing into cul-de-sacs
through a P.A. system that plays
Devizes Hospital Radio simultaneously

while children that you used to be, drop their jaws
at the 70-something balloon-twister.
He has a fight with the puppet on his hand.

He makes them cry and rain darkens pavement and brick.
Swans refuse to be fed any more, to make givers happy;
what wring-able necks.

The supermarket clatters shut.
It's light for hours yet.
You go to cross the street, stop on double yellows-

all these roads lead to relatives, or abattoirs
frantic through the night with pigs and cows, or worse,
bend back on themselves.

Truly Thankful

The girl in the play park is getting nowhere fast
in a spaceship on a spring.
Under the bridge a sign broadcasts

In Event of Structural Damage Ring…then a gap
where the number should be. Wildlife is mostly
snails stalking something too slow to see.

Fence-wood has been splintered open
by air-rifle pellets and everywhere shrubs release
spoof berries- red as STOP,

bruise-blue and those off-white ones
that pop then crumple to skin and goo.
Someone has prised a metal box by a lamppost

to reveal the staggering tangle that makes clear
the effort it takes, just to stay still. Manhole covers
have words worn to murmurs. Windows go like this;

glass, bars, nets, gloom containing people.
Jets keep well away, showing off mint-clean throats
while scaffolding crystallizes

up a windowless, wind-bashed aspect
of the old people's flats: they're going to deflate the brick lung
and build the same again, but taller and thinner

and hide it behind another- everyone is set to make
a fortune. Sometimes, after dinner, the light gets just so;
it's like a picture.

What I really want to do

In the hotel I wait in a fresh suit,
the material hanging on me cold and heavy.
My palms are clammy, cheeks burn
from adrenalin. Muffled TV applause
and premiership results haunt the air.
I'm about to piss again when he arrives,
shakes my hand well then leads me
by the grinning receptionist, down thin stairs
past a Spanish argument in the kitchen
into the back room.

Through the net curtain there is a wall.
A two bar electric heater
from a Giles cartoon has filched the oxygen.
He asks me to sit. I already have
so he thanks me for coming and
thanks me for wearing a suit and I say
it's new, this morning, I'm trying it out
to see if it works and he laughs.

He asks the big one first,
What do I want to do? but he's friendly
and funny and he wants me to be frank
so I tell him, I'm lost, unsure
and he tells me my CV is intriguing, a jigsaw
with bits missing then extra bits,
snippets from another scene. And that's funny.
But what do I want to do?

He tells me about him: he loves opera.
His hands are thick and small and he's perspiring
in the receding Vs and he's fat and he's written
articles on interview techniques for IT graduates
and reviews opera. Sometimes he's in Geneva.
He has a suit on. No tie. It is Saturday.
But what do I really want to do?

I hold my hands out, palms up.
They're empty.

The Best Poem Ever Written

I write a poem that is the best. Massive.
I don't just mean long, but
huge intellectually
and although it ends up as quite a few pages
it's so easy to read it's like freefalling- each line
teeming with genius thoughts,
whole other worlds you hadn't thought of.
The poem makes me famous.
It's on the lips of intellectuals
and cleaners; teachers
and drinkers because the breweries
print stanzas of the poem
on the bottom of beer bottles.
On hot, oxygen-depleted nights
I walk down city streets and hear
lines of my poem being whispered
by sticky people. On the tube,
I peek over the top of a book about me
at a man in a suit nodding off
and recognise the words he's mouthing
in his swoon.
All front pages, every day
have the entire poem in small font, so it fits-
bombings or knifings get tucked inside.
The new novelist pays well to get
my poem printed as an introduction:
she knows her work makes no sense without it.
Systematically, everyone I have ever known
rings me to ask how I did it.
I say I don't know, and that's the truth.
After a year the fuss doesn't die down.
One morning I sit at my computer
and hear downstairs turn the TV on.
I put my ear to a gap in the floorboards.
It's an actor and he's reading my poem.
It's a good version; I've heard it before.
He has a Shakespearean voice
doing justice to what the introducer calls
The Best Poem Ever Written.
I listen to it all, I travel where the poem takes me
then get back in my chair
and write a better one.

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