Tag Archives: satire

HYPOCALYPSE NOW

HYPOCRALPSE NOW

loving the smell
of white phosphorous
in the morning
will he still love
you if you script
all this a la Apocalypse Now?

will he promise you
sign of sanction and
spiritual favout
that is
    yet another
overwhelming victory

or is he taxing your faith
testing your strategic patience
by making this
a possible new
battle of Stalingrad,
advances only in inches
forward or
     underground
stop start
stop start

pity when it comes to
kill ratios even if
targeted and
supremely intentional

collateral damage figures
(including toddlers, infants
women and pensioners)
cannot
        be allowed to
seriously count

but there is no Kurtz and ghere
is no river

             no Dantesque journey
through the circles
of Hell

which makes no sense in a wotld
where it has become
impossible to differentiate between
    our
      angels and demons
      gods and devils

where everything and
everyone have their unique insane
      totally
clueless plan

       to deal with the shadow of
all evil

by massacring everybody
since
         we can no longer
be saved

cannot
       save ourselves

ALONG

UK OK (not so very)

        still solid
    (courtesy of Victorian
architecture)

crazy high aquaducts
    (now exactly what
               do they do?)

university I went to
down main road manchester
freshly
    returned from
south africa

settler colonial
(apartheid to
           god knows who else
and me
and you)

but on that diet of dismal
how stuff going to grow properly?

how stuff going to flourish
when for best moral fibre
getting
     force-fed gloom

red, white, blue
flag should be slate grey and
colour
     most exploitative

see your politicians now
scared at the thought
                               people

might
     have their
                       own ideas

university down oxford street
(or was it road?)
                 taught me something
about the
    economic of F and K
(plaque proclaims
them
                    the previous tenants)

anarchy
OK OK    strawberries
spoiled, by
                      this time
was
          the late 70s

ust rattle your cheap jewellery here
                                  and I’ll
imagine
            in falsetto

less than happily singing along
        

STICK

STICK

stick to football Gary
and

over and above that
stick to your job
        (not down
the left
wing but
        finisher in
the middle) 

stop
    sticking it to
all those true
Britons, guardians
of the long
ball game

who never won
a sweaty sock or
dinged
    shin pad

no thought
of golden boots and
golden goals

won
against Beckenbauer’s
band, Maradona’s
mob
    serious rivals, experts
in dishing out
national
    humiliation

nor
are they ever
likely to, spending their
careers on the pitch
like demented ducks
lacking
    all
        sense of the game, worse
than headless
chickens

scoring goal after goal
after crazy own goal

from
every outrageous angle
and somehow
always what
is contrived to be

a totally illogical
offside position

NOTTOKNOW

NOTOKNOW

crash the cymbals
bang the gongs
trumpet the
chosen

for they
are multitude

you are
so holy
you are
so handy

are so
holy handy

you have crucified
more souls this month
than in its entire
history

   did the
little city of Rome

have slaughtered
so many
   seems you
were you
to go Genghis

given permission
from
    up high

and dig a hole
    big enough to bury
all of us

while we all shout “hosanna”
and raise nailed
         fists to the sky

MR DARWIN

MR DARWIN

the observation
became conjecture,
became hypothesis, became
theory, became
scientific truth
    (most
assured of
        truths)

but it was
    when it became
metaphor that the world burned
                      burned
in the interests
of survival of the fittest

when extended into our
                realm of analogy

      a monstrous fitness
giving itself license to brutally contrive
        rewrite the world

                  slaughter half
the species

        in name of room to maneuver
space to
be

fresh habitat to colonize
      build that new fantastic civilization

some of us always dreamt of
          the rest, our worst
        nightmare fear

                    this on the supreme strength
of the
        shape of a scale
                          length of a
feather

THINK I MUST HAVE READ SOMETHING LIKE IT BY H G WELLS

THINK I MUST HAVE READ SOMETHING LIKE IT BY H G WELLS

I feel it now
something
    burrowing
into
my brain

know the strategy;
see the tactical plan

how they plot
to nuke that landscape,
shred
    my opinions

reduce me to a compliant
all-accepting wreck

crucial my contribution
to this war
      of the worlds
upcoming election.

GASHED

GASHED

a butterfly
flapping its wings

can tip
the scales
in a chaos dynamic

as can
    as many bombs and shells
fired and dropped

onto an area
the size of a postage stamp

as dropped on Laos, Cambodia
and Vietnam entirely

         to save humanity
from itself

lucky
     we have
                 the power of
these skygods
              to look out for us

this
    the most angelic
of all butterfly effects