Tag Archives: satire

LITTLE LIZARD


LITTLE LIZARD

“The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry.” Ray Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder

I am a little lizard
in a time of final, feral dinosaurs

they shut down the children’s  library Mr Bradbury,
where I first read you

i think that they imagine
if they lock the doors
they burn ideas

children it seems
     do not need, should
not have
their minds expanded

no sublime terrors to
enrich the joy and horror
of their being

if I ask them regarding
the evolution of mind,
the fulfilling of the species

they tell me

      this is not my place
this is not the time

bite
    and swallow

there is no legend of a carnivore
greater than the nation

and my dead end is
a supreme blessing

       to those who dictate
the terms of all illiterate life.

BYE

climate change
has not touched me yet

maybe
warming is not real, neither
have I been seared
nor likewise broiled

the talk of the Poles South
and North shedding
their huge
ice
   falling apart
does not seem
real to me now

as I lie here
      contemating the eternal
verity that we as species
will continue
      forever as we are

the dread of our demise
      just brush by

SUREFIRE

Ah, yes,
social Darwinism
be your inclination
pitbull terriers —
      they
are your thing;

but would you pit, against
a tank, this,
or some other poem

without ceramic armour,
without armour-piercing
depleted uranium shell?

For all
       poem got going for it
is knowledge of shadow, and
pulse of humanity

and that is
sure-fire defeat, on
hiding to nothing,
as a Nobel Laureate does suggest
himself suggest

Oh, if only tanks could be
stopped in their tracks
by bloke
     with shopping bang

barrels get so stuffed with
gorgeous flowers things
might
       misfire; shells
and bullets simply melt

in the face of all
         that sweetness and light
(and
     metaphor, let
us not forget)
the antennae
   of the species
       wrote on paper, in clay,
on the digital universe

who dare order?
         what dare fire?

but then, who has ever
really talked to the mind of a tank?
               


IN SUPPLY

IN SUPPLY

I saw you wearing
the darkest, hugest
sunglasses imaginable

necessarily so, what else
might shield your blue blue eyes
from the Heavenly Sun in
full heavenly glare

light so bright
you would be forgiven
for imagining
that light
to be everywhere

and there you were
tucking not
into ambrosia
but a fat, juicy, meaty
(perhaps
the meatiest pie
imaginable)

knowing that
everything you had
ever dreamt
is
here realized

a paradise of demand
never short
of supply.

RIGHT AS SHE BLOWS

RIGHT AS SHE BLOWS

Human rights
human rights

you have to squint
through a microscope

to get the gist of where
she is coming from
in her text
on human rights

Oh my humongous Suella
Sulla Braverman Braveheart

you will stand by your principles
fight for them lie
for them
kill and almost
die for
them (not
really, but it rhymes)

and rhyme is good
and euphemism too
and repetition
a zillion times

uncovering the frustrated
inner poet in you
(not that you would
ever stoop to elegy
not
the job of
Home Secretary)

to bewail
lost migrant lives.

DOLLDRUM

DOLLDRUM

we have drifted
we have drifted

an accursed mariner
at the till

      we have drifted
into a patch of dead sea

our island settling
somewhere
            between Shakespeare’s
garden and Eliot’s Wasteland

as droll and dyspeptic
      a dolldrum as
                    ever can be
zombified
      from head to toe

the specter that shadows
our humanity