Bloodshot Monochrome

Patience Agbabi

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782114888
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Bloodshot Monochrome is a glorious poetic take on all things black, white and read. Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Whether resurrecting the dead in 'Problem Pages', playing out noir dramas in 'Vicious Circle', or capturing moments of her own life in perfect snapshot, Agbabi's verse is sublimely lyrical and spiked with gleeful humour.

BLOOD LETTERS

‘RUBY THE HYPODERMIC DJ’

after Thom Gunn

We watch through tinted shades as
Ruby begins. The boy has

picked a lyrical armband
for his lush desert island:

‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
Ruby chooses black ink, drops

her fine, electric needle
onto, into his clear pale

vinyl. His skin sings crimson.
He hears pain, an endorphin

buzz, the sound of the lyric
translating into bold, black.

. . . Now it’s done, he pays Ruby
with crisp, clean notes. Beneath the

bandage, each wound bleeds a tone
deeper. Now he’s Number One.

R.A.P.

for Carl St Hill

The last song you sang was a love song
that took your whole life to write
and the room crammed with home grown men
cried like they were shedding blood
ink on love letters
as your minor chords cast their spell.

This was the gospel
according to St Hill, the song you sang
at your own funeral Let us
pray as if performing last rites
on your own flesh, blood,
your soul inspiring men

and boys to men.
This was the spell
stirred your blood
brothers to battle using
Eminem-feminine rhymes, write
rap in the air in capital letters.

You should have had letters
after your name, Carl. Amen.
I hear your rhythms as I write
R.A.P. but how do you spell
septicaemia and how do I sing
knowing poison blocked your blood

stream of conscious lyrics, blood?
You wore letters
instead, NIKE, FUBU, made them sing
out loud, the showman, shaman
of sound who could dispel
the blues and still retain the copyright
of rhythm. Rewind. I must rewrite
these lyrics in your spirit so the beat pumps blood,
my heart jumps up when I thumbs up your spell
to set us free from the ghettos of grief, let us
break those fetters, dismantle the . . . damn! You’re the man
made my tears flow like a flood of lyrical slang.

OSMOSIS

Nurse says I’ll soon be well. Read!
It’s the mind that makes the body rich.

The Complete Works. My kidneys have failed,
nurse says. I’ll soon be well? Red

is all I see, the roller-coaster of blood
black words dissolving in bleach.

Nurse says I’ll soon be well read.
‘’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.’

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE

1

There was an old shoe, a lace-up, leather,
cracked by ambition, twisted by weather.
Black as a beetle dissected and bled.
Worn by the woman whose hair was dark red.

There was an old shoe that somebody buried
with a broken brown bottle for luck when they married.
Under the floorboards they laid down their roots.
The shoe gave birth to a pair of glass boots.

There was an old shoe, a laced-up space . . .
black leather walls draped with black leather lace,
black leather floorboards, a black leather shrine
where she knelt down to pray for a word, for a line.

There was an ‘old’ woman, thirty years old
whose hair was the colour of antique gold.
She lived all her life in ambition’s embrace.
You could almost decipher the lines on her face.

There was an old woman who lived in a Sh!
The twins are asleep. She was writing for two.
She prayed for red wine inspiration. She drank.
As her liver got bigger, the tiny room shrank.

There was an old bottle that met an old shoe.
She said, I dare you and he said, I do.
She said, You’re broken and he said, You’re thin
as a rag. She had bottle: he put the boot in.

A boot in her brain, and it grew and it grew
till the big black glass boot split into two.
Right brain, left brain, needle and thread,
they kicked and they danced themselves out of her head.

2

There was an old woman who lived in her head
with black glass walls and a black glass bed
and a fibreglass lamp that went red, that went black,
that went red. On her scalp was a hairline crack,

a tiny thin line you could barely decode,
another, another, another. They flowed
like fine-lettered stitches, like intricate lace,
a row of black letters, a row of white space.

Her head got bigger, a balloon made of glass,
the black glassy walls became spider’s web scars,
the floorboards groaned as if heavy with flood
till they smashed. And the red wine turned into blood.

They split her head open. They opened her head
like a book. Stitched her quiet with black leather thread.
She cried out in splinters, her tears bottle brown.
They took out the boots, stitched her up, held her down.

There was a glass box like an intricate mind
where the delicate pair of glass boots were enshrined.
She looks through the glass at each side of her soul.
She’s writing but feels like she’s shovelling coal.

There was an old woman: there was an old shoe.
She lived like a foot till the sole was worn through.
There was an old shoe and a narrative thread.
Her words are alive, and her story’s undead.

3

There was an old shoe with a stiff leather tongue.
There was an old ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by Patience Agbabi
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Shots
• Monologues
• Problem Pages
• Blood Letters
• Vicious Circle
• Notes