Tag Archives: satire

SUDDENLY SOVIET

SUDDENLY SOVIET

suddenly one morning
woke up transformed
no old
nostalgia for
Cold War days
but fully newborn
Soviet

ready to
assume my place
as Commissar, apparatchik, or
on the sly, samizdat
publishing
poetic
dissident

that the West
would fete, and defend
and love

until
    Glasnost days and
the walls all fell

at which 
(so quick
to change their mighty tune)
suddenly

they
didn’t

HEAVENLY

HEAVENLY

torture is Heavenly
after the rapture
you will have all
of blessed eternity
to devise the most
thrillingly painful
horrendous
punishments
to dole out
meatily
to the enemies of God
and the Nation we
are sworn to offend

how beautiful
it is, and feels, to
be one
thousand thousand
percent correct, utterly
holy and forever righteous,
given complete
carte blanche
to crush underfoot
bend to
our will

for
what matter
if a man
destroy the world
but lose his soul

the destruction of the world
always part of the plan

FIRESIDE CHAT

FIRESIDE CHAT

you thought it would be
a great idea, a jaunty
self – promotion
to give
us a fireside chat

be we all
got incinerated

before which
you told us a great joke
which you were sure
we would love,
respond with ratings-
boosting love
whose punchline just
so happened to
be that
we were all now at war,
update, quick correcton:
that we were
all dead in the war

nevertheless, we loved it,
your aporoval rating
simply shot through
the roof,
the recently-remodelled
trillion dollar roof and ceiling

whereupon
it went ballistic, fully hypersonic,
caught us terminally ill-
prepared as it
did shoot us
in the foot, and
running to you for
not in our price range, not
in any price range medical cover

you droned on at liberty
focusing on the extremity of doubt
written across the touch-screen
of all our citizen faces

swearing it was all AI,
we had been duped by
the extremely accurate powers
of falsification
generated in some
secret hostile media bunker
by pretty terrible
election-
stealing, fake
narrative AI

being dead, however,
we were by no means able
to respond to
or comment on the veracity of that

burnt to death
by your fireside chat

THOSE LITTLE GIRLS

THOSE LITTLE GIRLS

let us not
be too hasty
to condemn

let us not
rush to conclusions

little girls now
all of them I do
believe under
the age of ten

but give them
another ten, twenty years
who knows, who can forsee,
what they might not
grow up as,
horribly change into

who can show me
their note books,
their sjetch pads

assure me
there everything is
as the weepy weak press
are telling us

pictures of Mom and Dad
the sun, the tree, a house,
a swing, a cat
themselves
     in their best dress

little poems and prayers
celebrating life
and love

like normal little girls
our Western girls

and not, as I am more
inclined to believe,
curses and tirades
calls for
   a world full
of destruction
and death

drawings of drones, pictures
of missiles raining down
vengeance on
bad bad cities
ballistic rockets shooting
up into space
with (drawn in red
red
   blood red crayon)

blood red noses
and fiery tales

who
can dispute this
deny
this possibility?

the evidence
disappeared

UNTOUCHABLE

UNTOUCHABLE

politically
I am untouchable

pregnant
with bold ideas

in your face
about to
drop a
truth bomb

many megaton
nothing your battery
of lies,
weapons of
disinformation
can do about it

no hope of
saving yourself
building deep
underground
anti-truth bunkers

the truth radiation
will get it
if not
the unbelievable
shock wave
flash of a million
degree light

CHOSEN

CHOSEN

Thank you Bibi
for choosing me

epic fury
roaring line

hearing those names,
feel safer already

protecting me
iron dome
nuclear
umbrella

all your power
aiding
and abetting

felt so
insecure
in this parallel universe
cartoon world
where
nothing makes sense
no sanity, not any

terrified that
a stray missile
or drone
homing in
on me
got my name
written on it

bound
to cut
me down
        to size, or
worse fate entirely

I tell
you no lie,
no lies
in my armoury.

IN OUR HOUR OF NEED

IN OUR HOUR OF NEED

so these are
our great leaders
the one we asked for,
begged for, swore
binding oaths
we would give
our lives
in the holy
protection of

most sacred symbols
creme de la creme

steering Ship
of State between
Scylla and
Charybdis

charting the perfect
course to ensure
the entire crew gets
devoured by
the former
before the Ship
itself gets
swallowed by
the latter
pulverized into
microscopic
perhaps subatomic bits

no fear
no fear
     enough spin
doctors on the shore
think tanks well
bunkered
to call this
what it no doubt is:
perfect solution;
strategic victory

reassure us 100, 200,
3000% in our
our need

and yet
our poets and philosophers
(bless them) the ones
already marked for death camps
but presently well
and living

try to
get through to us
contact us to
tell us

all
  common sense
is now
gone to Hell

something so fucked up
about our evolution

and all our voting, political,
social, economic
and natural selection processes

centuries we had
to see
    for ourselves, live
and learn

tragedy we didn’t

WITH EVERY DAMNED THING

WITH EVERY DAMNED THING

look what happens
when you put pressure
squeeze everything
you can out
of us ordinary humans

reduce the quality further
of our less, than stellar lives

force us
to turn within
find what
we can all bring
to the party

fish for and
snare
what stories. fables,
myths, legends,
and, dare
I say it?, poetry
that we are sitting on
that we
have always hosted

and, to give
supreme benefit
of the doubt,

try to
touch your heart

believing it not
irredeemable, for
argument’s sake

but of course, as you have
gathered, as we have
always gathered nothing there

bereft of empathy
devoid of
understanding, no
place
for anything but
profit and greed

and a polished ideology
premised on a need
to never let anyone
smell
let alone see (in
all its abject glory) such
ceaseless hypocrisy

at which
revelation

we sigh, close ranks, recite
poems, tell our stories

back to
work
putting pen to paper
hit you with every damned
thing we got