I Like the Taste of Beer

Oliver Hammond

I like the taste of beer;
its live, white lather,
its brass-bright depths;
the sudden swirl thru the wet brown walls of the glass.
The tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly.
The salt on the tongue; the foam at the corners.

"Same again, miss."
She was middle-aged.
"One for you, miss?"
"Not durin' hours, 'ta all the same."

Other young men,
sleek-haired, pale and stocky,
with high cheekbones and deep eyes,
bright ties, double-breasted waistcoasts and wide trousers
--some pocked from the pits--
their broad hands scarred and damaged,
all exultantly half-drunk,
stood singing 'round the piano.

Oh!--to be able to join in the suggestive play or the rocking choir;
to shout "Bread of Heaven"
with my shoulders back and my arms linked with Little Moscow,
as I joked and ogled at the counter,
making innocent dirty love that could come to nothing
among the spilt beer and piling glasses.

My iron head stood high and firm.
No sailor's rum could rot the rock o' me belly.
Poor Leslie Bird, the port sipper,
and little Gil Morris,
who mocked dissipation under his eyes with a blacklead every Saturday night.
I wish they could see me now in the dark stunted room
with photographs of boxers peeling on the walls.

Mr Pharr tapped me on the shoulder.
His hand fell slowly from a great height,
and his thin bird's voice spoke from a whirling circle on the ceiling.
"A drop o' out-o'-doors for you an' me."

Two small men, Mr Pharr and his twin brother,
led me on an ice rink to the door
and the night air slapped me down.
The evening happened suddenly.
A wall slumped over and knocked off me trilby;
Mr Pharr's brother disappeared under the cobbles.
Here came a wall like a buffalo; dodge him, son!

I sat in a plush chair I had never seen before.
Who kept fillin' me glass?
Beer ran down me cheek and me collar.
My mouth was full o' saliva. The bench spun.
The cabin of the "Fishguard" tilted.
Mr Pharr retreated slowly,
the telescope twisted, and his face,
with wide and hairy nostrils,
breathed against mine.

"Mr Thomas is going to get sick.
Mind your brolly, Mrs Arthur.
Take his head."

The last tram clanked home.
I did na' ha' the penny for the fare.
The revolving hill to my father's house reached to the sky.
Nobody was up.
I crept to a wild bed,
and the wallpaper lakes converged and sucked me down.

Sunday was a quiet day,
tho Saint Mary's bells, a mile away,
rang on long after church time
in the hollows of my head.
Knowing that I would never drink again,
I lay in bed until midday dinner
and remembered the unsteady shapes and far-off voices of the ten o'clock town.

In the park, in the afternoon, I sat alone near the deserted bandstand.
I caught a ball of wastespaper that the wind blew down the gravel path
toward the rockery,
and, straightening it out and holding it on my knee,
wrote the first three lines of a poem,
without hope.

--adapted from Dylan Thomas

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