One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich
Graham Fulton
Price: £7.95
One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich
If you don’t want to see fear in a handful of dust, then look away now. How do we control the uncontrollable or reconcile the irreconcilable? Should we accept the world as it is or rebel against it? Whether we choose love or hate, make the law or break it, go mad or snatch brief moments of happiness, we all must cling to someone or something to complete the ‘the me-shaped space’ of our lives. One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich is book of poems about entropy and cruelty, ‘shrapnel heads’ and airport toilets, digestive biscuits and marmalade. It’s a 1970s double album about trying to keep calm in a random and accelerating universe. It’s a mercilessly bleak, blackly humorous contemporary Totentanz of shoplifters, bankers, looters, dead poets and men who can’t tie their own shoelaces.
Sample Poems
Apollo 13
so we sat in the pictures
watching
Apollo 13
myself
and Steven
and Mad Nad
and Steven was a bit of a lad
who liked the ladies
and Mad Nad would soon acquire
a love
for ecstasy heroin and crack,
but
we’re still here in the not-quite-darkness
of the soon-to-be-demolished
to-make-way-for-a
retirement-complex cinema
in 1996
myself and Steven and Mad Nad
and Tom Hanks and
Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon
pretending to be
Jim Lovell and
Fred Haise and Jack Swigert
in 1970
and Houston We Have a Problem
although it was actually Houston
We’ve Had a Problem that Jim Lovell
said or was it Mad Nad it’s hard
to remember
if anything
has really happened
at this moment in time,
if anything really existed before
this very moment, this very moment,
and
if I look away does anything
I can’t see continue to exist
in 2011
as we sit in the retirement complex
watching ourselves on the screen
myself
and Jim and Fred and Jack
who has a huge car parked outside
full of ecstasy heroin and crack,
and Steven had acquired
a love
for black and tan and whisky mac
and I would recently acquire
a love
for Gordon’s gin and low calorie tonic
and unstable modules of thought
in the not-quite-Saturday-night
soon-to-be-demolished unremembered future
where we sit in the slowly shrinking darkness
watching
nothing in the past
The Optimist
in the corner of the bookie's doorway trying to light his fag in the storm
One Day in the Life of Jimmy Denisovich
Bearded dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn
enters the retro-chic
pre-post-revolution
Glaswegian restaurant
wearing a See You Jimmy hat
and sits at a Leninist table
and orders a Stalinist pot of tea
for one
before
proceeding to happily
pretend to play the piano
in accompaniment to the
Russian-Jewish-Negro classic
Summertime
which is coming out of
the sound system
above his wig
which seems fair enough
until the waiter spies him
pouring Whyte and Mackay into
his Dostoyevsky memorial mug
and asks him
to leave the premises
to which
he replies
Av ordert a T-bone steak –
ji no whit
a T-bone steak is?
followed by
Don’t touch thi customer!
and
Ahl fuckin kill yi!
before his Marx and Engels chair
is dragged backwards
and he’s frogmarched
out of the premises
and onto the pavement
where he stands
for the next five minutes
sticking out his tongue
and pressing his face
against the unbreakable
Vladimir Mayakovsky
glass
