TOROJAN WOMBMEN
Toorojan Wombmen
have helmet heads
love licorice
(it is their
most guilty pleasure)
hate
allsorts
would send all allsorts
down to Poseidon’s locker
something fishy already
felt about the smell
Oh but the Achaeans
are coming
the Myrmidions are coming
loaded with logic
and rationality
their armour as
bad-bullet proof
as Blackpool rock
(so many cavities
in the fangs
you
are bearing
so much yellow enamel
in need of bleach)
HARPIES
They tug at the heat strings with state of the art wirecutters
so let us call them
“Harpies”
double envelopment
they have
broken through
both flanks
and encircled humanity
the minds they have captured
headed fod relentless torture
but this
blue bunting, red-
hot pokers
is all about mythology, about
Palladian architecture
and ancient meanings
the ocean sighing as it pulls
back from.the Dover shore
before biting further
into ths landscape
no time to
set fire to the ships we
must imagine them burning
must instruct
the plebs to
see them burning
everything so gaslit
it is plain
as day
and there
quoting disparately
in elementary Latin stands
our Caesar
sort of stands our Caesar
Oh when will
such a Caesar ever
come again?
Satire on Rishi Sunak’s idea everybody must do Maths at school until 18.
DEAD ISLAND
Oh something sank
in the history channel
something sank
having run aground
for our part
we floated nonchalantly
around that dead island
all those high tales, great fables,
dead as the stone
of a cenotaph to me
Oh spectral place
and yet
the juries are still out
it is conceivably not death
but a morbid moribundity
that plagues this place
fed its viral rage
a flag burned
not the whole fabric but
just a few cigarette holes skewered
right through it
as apocalypses go
it is like a half-wit
smothered, a
candle snuffed
the air
heavy with phosphates, nothing yet
so sulphurous
stared down to find the bottom of the tide
but there
not a live fish swam;
nothing
swims in this.
poems 2 die for