satire – Page 29 – poems 2 die for

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.

SPIT AND

SPIT AND

we polish
the statues

of those
we imprisoned,
tortured, killed

bring out our
Muses of
history and, yes,
poetry

fiction is apt, though,
to re-cast this scene

knowing the story told
false to fact, unless
true to the certainty
of our
hypocrisy

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

UNDESERVED

UNDESERVED

take it away
take this away
keep
well to yourself
I refuse to read rhis
we refuse to read this

you have nothing
to sell
you havs sold everything
this poem is immired in
bloodshed and murder
holy lies,
false propaganda

the slaughter of poets
right next door, through
the barbed wire

right outside
your secure (impossibly
insecure)
contrived
golden cage

take them awsy
these poems, your writings
this so-called poetry

forgive me
forgive us

if we give them
the contempt we feel

where you tell us images,
symbols,
metaphors

we see
only blood, find only
complicity

no matter how much you
tell yourself
do everything human
and barely human

to convince us
it is
undeserved

and so

plesse go

we csn suffer you no longer
take your sad, broken
failure of
a Muse with you

and
just disappear

FIELD THEORY

FIELD THEORY

a thermonuclear blast
that’s real loadshedding for you

have to
figure out
lightning, atoms,
electromagnetic field
how they connect
what
is the exact interplay
between the four forces

all this at
a University

built
from twigs
and leaves

so much needing
to be re-
invented

not least
ourselves

REFAAT

REFAAT

so now
they have resorted
to killing poets

because
the pen is mightier
than the sword
it is said

and they took that literally
and
as is well known
James Bond carries
his old Q branch
speciality
of rocket-
launching pen

nothing
more deadly

which
you know,
       we know

every spy agency knows this
it is something that
military intelligence
                even one
caught false flag asleep
at its post
has prepared for
extensively
trained for
exhaustively

knows
only too well

and how can
target
be a poet

if they are all animals?
that is the syllogism for you
to
take to heart
the
reactive-armour
heart they
gave you

as you plough through
guilty humanity
steel-skinned in
your Merkava
kampfwagen

hunting for the tunnel
will take you down to Hell

where
poets, great poets,
will all be waiting

to raise a few things,
take issue with you

by hook
or by crook

endeavour to persuade you
that there is
something in
this voice, about
this speech
that justifies itself