The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For April, we are delighted to publish three new works by P. C. Evans. The second of these, ‘The Deathwatch-Beetle Serenade‘, is published today with the final poem to follow next week. The accompanying photographs are by the photographer and artist, David Street.

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The Deathwatch-Beetle Serenade

 

Christa’s uploaded some photos of us to the net.

It’s thirty years, and you still make me catch my breath,

Nicky. Sometimes I forget who we were or are,

Working the red-light strip from the Torenzicht Hotel to the Banana Bar.

 

I’ve heard that Karel’s dead, the Hells Angel with the long blond

Hair. Somewhere in Brazil. Santos, I’d guess. He phoned

His girl, Gail, to say that he’d been shot up badly. That’s unlike

Karel. He’s the only Angel with who I could see eye to eye,

 

Whether running coke from La Vela to Willemstown,

Or cruising the kathoeys in the brothels of Mokum town.

When the police picked me up and drove me down

To the east harbour, where I had that sloop, I unwound

 

In the back seat like a snake, and felt the first rays

Of the sun ricocheting off the ripples in the bay –

The car nosing towards the becalmed Zuiderzee.

They offered me carte blanche to the heart of darkness,

 

But their pitch to recruit me as their snitch and infiltrator

Ran against the grain of the better part of valour.

Anyway, Louis would have had my guts for garters

If he knew, as would Bill and Rats, our New Forest butchers.

 

It was good to hear that they were blown away

In a firefight with the gendarmerie on the road to Marseille.

Too late for John and Corinne, though, who had their skulls cracked

Open with the mechanical precision of a Black Forest clock.

 

But what of you, Nicky? You can’t still be working the strip clubs in Miami.

I asked you to stay, stay with me. It can’t have been for the money?

Fat Charles would have feathered your nest,

And as for Wolfgang, we could have laid that prick to rest;

 

You’d take your revenge with a Judas kiss, feigning

Forgiveness of the deceiver to sever his lip, leaving

His bloody moustache dangling from his face.

To be loved by you with such passion. Then you’d take

 

Your mattress, the altar of your love, and let it fly

From your attic apartment’s black and furious eye,

And watch it float down forever, as light as a love-letter

Or a Pisan feather, to settle on the public thoroughfare

 

Of a market square, where it would be ferried away

By the vile hands of street-scum to the squalor of a secondary tale.

But do you ever think of me, Nicky, wherever you

May be? Assuming that you’re still above ground? Do you

 

Remember how I first found you in that breakfast bar

On the Warmoesstraat, and said, I know all about

You, I know from Christa who you are?

Quite the wrong move, and you’d bite off my head.

 

It would take me a year to earn your touch, your trust,

Though you kept the reins in your hands as you always must.

But you having me take and pass your client’s test

Meant that for a while we could make a nest.

 

I see us lying in room 19 of the Torenzicht Hotel,

While the streets outside are teeming with the souls of hell.

I hear the Deathwatch Beetles tapping in the rafters of our ancient house

As I keep vigil upon the rocks of our past and build you a lighthouse.

 

 

P.C. Evans is a Welsh poet, writer and translator of poetry, novels and drama, resident in Amsterdam. His latest publications are Grand Larcenies (Carcanet) and The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street (Scribe).