I S S U E 3

Gregory Leadbetter

Lord of Misrule

for Ian Marchant

Throwing up at the result of that referendum
My hot graffiti dripping from Parliament
I bequeath thee shitte
Spamming every feed and trending now
The remedy, I say to the tired Christ
Slack in my skin
Is to be drunk, ‘on wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish’
Preferably all three at once.
O for some Weimar easy virtue, given wisely
To snuff the insolence of office out
And dance a tango
Through their sober death.
I mean to teach these suits morality.

After a dunk in the Thames, black as oil,
I board my zeppelin.
Far below, the city streets are floes of fire.
Pepys runs to bury his wheel of Parmesan cheese.
He, at least, takes my advice.

You are invited to the Feast of Fools.
Come dressed as the century,
Each of you a prophecy.
I will supply a little theatre.

Pale mummers, their tongues all told,
Haunt year zero:
Remind you that the dead can live
And will perform for food.
Will Kempe in his cap and bells
Dances a morris to Primal Scream
And conjures a crocus from broken earth.
The homeless, housed in Kensington
Drop pennies into the cups of royal rough sleepers
Cold on their thrones.
Those who once made money out of money
Even in ‘crisis’
Find life in laying a hedge of hazel and willow
In the Midlands style.
I thought er wuz jed, one says, audible
Tears in the voice he has found in his blood.
I thought er wuz jed, an the spudgucks n’all
But they ay, they ay
Er’s in this wand, an the spudgucks n’all.

Our revels last three days of night.
The players breed with the crowd.
When at last the lights go out
I let a full breast slip from my dress,
Dance with the living and the dead
Our mouths at our necks
Until Albion shudders its petite mort.

The suits drop their jaws, enlightened.

Shh. Go easy on that hungover head.
There are those who would hang us by an ankle
Until we bleed dry.
I play myself as a Tarot card
To see their fear eye to eye.

They will trespass at dawn
To drag me from my enseamèd bed
In the name of the crime they’ve dressed as the law
And ungratefully frame my jest as offence.
Someone will shout: My poor fool is hanged
But I will wink
From the gallows
When they think
I am dead.

Gregory Leadbetter is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. His next collection, Maskwork, will be published by Nine Arches Press in September 2020. His previous collections are The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016) and the pamphlet The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012.