|
Note
on
The Cleaner
Many
of my people-poems are about criminals, failures and outsiders, or about
extremists like Julius Caesar. There
are many instances too of the opposite, nicer kind: Ta Hes, Wych Hazel,
Helena Nagel, the woman in Love Story.
In The Cleaner is a portrait of a hitman, or someone who
thinks he is. He seems dangerous:
I
have names, aliases, doubles,
In
other respects he’s fairly normal, though he manages to make normality
sound rather troubling:
[I]
watch my food by reading labels.
He’s
a bit of a philosopher, too:
Reality
is at no removes...
He
thinks the world is too close to him, too much in his face, and needs to
think he has special access to information.
A
CD encyclopaedia
tells
what TV don’t give away,
which
ain’t so much...
He’s
pathetically deluded, as obsessives are, and he probably really believes
he was not at the scene of the (unspecified) crime:
But
I did not do that piece of work.
I
was seen with children down the park.
This
was written at a time of paranoia regarding
stalkers of women and lurking paedophiles.
The prevalence of sociopaths in drama, from Iago to Hannibal
Lecter, shows our fascination with evil.
We are divided selves, a complex of conflicting animal instincts
desirous of moral unity. We
know, most of us, that there is a destructive element in us, and this
little, or not so little, demon relishes his counterpart on page, stage
or screen, though not usually on the streets, unless he’s part of it
in a mob. Poems cannot cure
us, but they can warn.
Alan
Marshfield
top
of page
The Cleaner |
