TOLCHOK

TOLCHOK

got clockworked by a plod
me and my droogs we did

next to Maine Road
for playing street football
alongside a football ground
(none of us
even a
City supporter)

and pushed around by
the law severely human right
violated
   and seriously affronted
aforementioned street
being empty
the thought
    did cross our minds of
doing him in
(burying that fat
navy blue body beneath
the Kippax Stand)

and all of us
at Manchester Uni
me for
me Ph D

working on Swift’s excoriating
satire
  most violent stuff
confined
to print

tolchock called down
on mostly everything

got
clockworked
but no orange

that
C-charged
most creative of
colours
Eden-juicy
most sustaining of fruits

LET THE SATIRISTS

LET THE SATIRISTS

Let the satirists arm themselves
with.357 magnums
and Khorammshahr missiles

using expanding hollow point
and cluster ammunition

time to
defend themselves
against gangsters
local and global
indigenous
and international

who have never
throughout all of history
taken criticism, mockery kindly

hence
the need to arm all satirists
if any exist these days.

STOP MOTION POEM/AMONGST THE EXPENDABLE/THE PAINT/IMPERATOR

STOP MOTION POEM

this is my
stop motion
animation poem

took thousands of shots
of the poem as it
unfolded in
the process
of writing it

stuck them all together
advancing them
frame
by frame

see how, magical it appears
ss if, before your very eyes,
the poem
is writing itself

cartoon mechanism revealing
serious
metaphysical meaning,
emotional truth


AMONGST THE EXPENDABLE

it is the small
swuidgy, rather
pathetic sins
of the poor

that outrage the gods,
elicit their contempt and fury

lead to punishment inflicted
consonant with all
you believe
in your dark theology

of a divine law supremely
vacuous in
its viciousness

not to be compared, or
mentioned in the same breath
of the immaculate sins
of great
heroes and leaders

the Greeks at Troy the.
patricians of Rome
the political elite utterly
at home
on Epstein island

whose infractions, at
first glance horrendous
are things
viewed from high
Olympus

divinity adores
confirming their trust
in these best
kinds of people

in no sense expendable
as with the lowest of the low


THE PAINT

the paint wore off
and with it a sense
of vibrant
ordinariness

and with it,
of course, the graffiti

spelling out the rich and
quite vicious
concerns of and life

in Rome

and where
the disjunctions arise
where voices
have their say, not
buying
into the myths entirely

see here, in this corner,
in the coarsest Latin imaginable
an up to date dossier
on the most
recent excapades clandestine
and extramarital

of none other than
the great
Julius Caesar himself?


IMPETATOR

and this is
the plain God’s truth
as to where
you
are now

what your history has
done to
change you
from what
you were

ending the democracy
for which
you were never
really, actuallt suited

gave
you your Imperator
so useless and stupid but
what you
were ready to
die for

finger on the button
about to
annihilate
humanity

that scum of
the Earth, beings
far less
exceptional
than you

WHAT TO DO SHANTY

WHAT TO DO WITH A DRUNKEN
NATION SHANTY  (EARLY
IN THE MORNING)?

Oh America!
America!

after those Lego
diss videos
          (while we are about
it give that what
to do with
a drunken Hegseth
one a
frigging Oscar)

you are going to
need
to come up
with something
truly blockbuster, titanic,
brilliantly epic

find your
new Lincoln, Roosevelt, Walt
Whitman, Henry
James, William Faulkner,
Kennedy,
Stanley Kubrick, Scott Fitzgerald,
         Sylvia Plath  George Carlin

to put
     forward your
counter argument, redress
the balance
    stop the entire world
killing
     themselves with laughter

upping  your smarts
to compete
with such
       outrageous wit, pure
satirical talent

          grow such artistic,
intellectual, literary,
political luminaries —

which
makes it a pity you
slashed education, downgraded
critical intelligence,
stripped your
universities to purchase
another trillion
dollars worth
of essential weapons

rather
    plant for a future
a different path
entirely

that one
    you always refused
to take

now your
only survival

IN MUNDO SATIRAE

IN MUNDO SATIRAE

“It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.”

Jonathan Swift, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

tene cervesiam meam. Horati,
Kings and Emperors
cut their fingers
on egg shells
every day

not that that
makes it a logical
defence for
jettisoning
the Republic
(the side, dear Horace,
which, I believe,
you once fought on)

not that we know,
are told, anything
about eggshells
and the grievous wounds
inflicted
upon royalty

stuff
that might
Humpty Dumpty style,
bring that entire
playing card tower
edifice
crumpling down

no
no one has a clue
about this
and other
spurious
causes of war
reasons for battle

not a whiff of any of it
outside mundo satirae,
that treacherous
world of satire

and here I remember, as
no doubt you do too
the doyenne of us all, a
man of the cloth,
a most acerbic, ironic,
comic fellow
whose factual
       account of
travels I quote above
was seen
   through by many
a stately bishop
not believing
a word of it

but there it was
on the page
          cutting like
a razor,
worse
    like oxy-acetylene
and not a soul to realize
they were
bleeding. burning,

his like today
we do
    not have

do not see
       and for
the satire world so
much more the pity

as today’s titanic giants
supreme in
    blissful idiocy

proclaim themselves Jesus
proclaim themselves Pope
proclaim themselves God

which we being
humans are wont
to believe

slaughter, torture,
martyr

those who don’t
for ultimate crime
of blasphemy, heresy

CLOSE

CLOSE

we are so
close, on this dambed issue
despite the percentage owning this
percentage owning that
furore

need to give, my
masterclass on economics
and sacrosanct
role of the market

what ot all comes down to
what it all lowest
common denominator means
at
the basic level

there is, nothing
but a piss pot of wealth
currently
dividing us

and yet
to hear you speak of
us being
as many diamonds as
there are stars
between us

pyramid high hierarchies
there to keep us
tear
us
apart

is nothing less
than political bad faith

STONED AGED

STONED AGED

We are bigly going to
bomb them right back
into the stoned age
because they are
an evil people,
criminals and fanatics
so very bad

we’ve got some good people
some very good people
the 82nd ranger marines
such very
good people
some of the best people
can do really amazing things

and we
got some really terrible
small, small baby
terrible weapons
to take out all
those stop animation
Lego fundamentalist
terrorist rap videos

the ones calling me pedo
and loser, and
mocking my hair

and as
payback
and retribution
we are going
to take all their all
because it’s our
oil actually since
it is our exclusive right
since
we own the whole planet
but we can
do good business, spread
it all around
something for everybody

yes a bomb
all their cities and
cripple their infrastructure
for they
are calling on us
to do it
crying out for us
to do it
so many DMs on
Truth Social it is
impossible to believe

better to
be vaporized that to
live life
0to strictly

that’s what they are telling us
and we are
determined
to
comply

watch this space carefully
soon Nobel
Peace Prize
to arrive

we are
going
to win bigly,
ourselves, and
the state we
are but
a colony of
holy, mighty, God is
great Israel.

SORRY FOR

SORRY FOR

Sorry for pulling you
out of the world of your smartphone
if only for a moment
to scroll
through these lines here

reading this thing
history will decide
is not
even a poem

presuming that
there will be history
and that world
outside your phone
but now
contained immediately
inside it

goes full Dr Stangelove
full we’ll meet again
total exchange nuclear

messing with
the service courtesy
end of the atmosphere.

LIVE YOUR LUXURY

LIVE YOUR LUXURY

live your luxury
your life of luxury

would strongly advise
(were it not so
flagrant a contradiction)
that you
live
it deep

and so then, on the other hand,
let me warmly recommend
that you indulge
it shallow

revel in its shallows
as extravagantly as
can possibly be

no need
to feel the edge
anyway, anyhow

best repudiation
of that stupid FWN idea
of living dangerously