Tag Archives: satire

WEREN’T WE?

WEREN’T WE?

weren’t we
supposed to hold
up the mirror
to human nature

not let it fall
splinter, shatter

crash and burn, break
into a billion tiny
diamond-bright pieces

jagged shards, blood
soaked, blood
painted, bloody

never to be fixed
never
       to be returned
never reclaimed
never restored

all those bits of light
dancing in the Sun grotesquely

hold
up the mirror
to human nature

who the fuck, nowhere
near his right mind
came up
     with that idea

(go not pass go
        leave the planet
sail steadfast, venture into the cosmos
               cross
the galaxy

not, never
in a trillion lifetimes

nothing out there
     to mirror what
we
   might well be)

weren’t we?

RECALLING MR POPE

RECALLING MR POPE

sound
echoing sense

but what if there
is no sense

rule of your nonsense
Mr Pope
     descending into
the entropy
of brute power

I decline
to add

for why say anything
when gets so grossly filtered

crushed by the imposition
superimposition
of hideous, ruling
mythology

under which stone rubble
words die, asphyxiate
cannot breathe

BACK TO

BACK TO

I was back to
the futured
to my
old university

one of those ribald
dreams where
the basic narrative comes
courtesy of
capitalist content creator

and there I was
both ancient alumnus
and yet feeling
the total freshman

all my higher degrees
revoked
    on grounds of
relevancy

struggling in the climate
contrasts to make
         my way both
upstream
and downstream

intellectually frigid, frozen
broken
       desperate to
if not remake
at least
reshape
    the wheel

whilst the Sun scorching brains
leering contemptuously
through
    the stratosphere

protoype for every
      god Emperor, every golden
King
    and, yes, indeed
I am afraid to add, every
trivial
    trivial Dean

as I made my way through
the panoply of departments
renamed
    where not structured entirety

every theory
  so local, limited, narrow
yet
    same same-same

not of the intellect
but of ideology

servile, appeasing, without
a mind
        to contemplate thought
of difference, thought
                    of resistance

triumph of appearance
      and death of shame

back futured, back dated
                 limbo lateral
shifted
what else should I say?

SACROSANCT

SACROSANCT

the revolution
is beginning in Rochdale

any shock to complacency
is revolutionary, let alone
the pointing out
of moral turpitude,
cardinal sin

and so
    raise the drawbridge
erect the barricades

terrorism is expressing
itself democratically
through the ballot box
people
    who have no right
to be heard
having a say

else the thousand year rule
of the best sort, the ones
who perennially gloss
over
    the horrors
of our history

will be broken, in tatters,
and we will be left
like infants
wandering around
clueless, without diection

wondering how
we could have thrown
into the garbage can
of time
    something though
so
   fictitious and mythological
nevertheless, so so sacrosanct

BURNED

BURNED

I sat in the shadows
where else better

to hear you proclaim
the light

proclaim yourselves
the light

and as
the light

to fight off the darkness
one must go
deeper into the darkness
than the light
could possibly know

I saw you
proclaiming yourselves
the light

messing with
the light
to counter the darkness

and getting burned
horribly burned.

CONFLATION

CONFLATION

so much conflation
in this V For Vendetta parliament

it could well
lift off, fly away
like the Hindenburg
or the Montgolfier balloon

fly away
    to a sunlit upland
nativist Britain

one science-fiction secured
against any alien threat

for how will these tentacled
monsters in their
mother ships coming
to genocide
    and colonize us

in their leaky sinking
dingy boat
        fleeing the anarchy
we created
wars we started

just like anyone would
     (but being British,  they
look hideous to us)

HOUSE RULES

HOUSE RULES

there is no
poetry
about
this house

no fibre
in this room
    to speak of

just so-so people
who
     when the word
was elevate

when the word
was transform

were absent from school
dreaming the dreams
that children
of Empire dream

of securing power
of the ever so nicely
polite and
compliant backs

of the suffering mass
of the British people

MOREOVER

MOREOVER

got shot
at point-blank range
but you say
I ran straight
into a bullet

a good bullet
        moreover

one that knows
the difference between
right and wrong

a silver bullet, a golden
bullet, a Willy Wonka
eternal
     gob-stopping bullet

made by the great
celestial munitions factory

over the rainbow
before that got
shot to shreds