Visible Man

Four Books of Satires

by Duncan

McGibbon
 


First Book of Satires:


An English Romance

 
Biafrans

I wonder if their fate they’d missed,
starved in the bush for a soldier’s kicks,
had they been white non-conformists
instead of black and Catholics.

1970

The Children’s Crusade

There were no soldier ghosts to rise within
that hall, so safe in anti-academic mouths;
no visions of De Toqueville, Camus or Koestler.
No doubt, the books and the ideals nestled
on shelves, in minds, in other worlds of care,
though speeches continued and postures sprawled;
we couldn’t mention Dubcek as the CP had the vote.

It was a sudden midnight whim.
After the tedium of card vote debate
none wished to return to bare hostel rooms.
We were too many blokes, but with beer enough.
Not knowing the way, Barney, at the wheel,
did his lurching turn at the roundabout,
leaving the sterile white wonder of halls
far behind us in the night, heading first
for the bleakness of the moors , then
someone decided for the sea.

The beach was black and cold, a bare expanse
of mud and protoplasm, rancid with weed.
On the sea front hotels were silently
hidden in the albumen of neon lights.
It ran to blurs and unseen Irish waves.
A jetty sank down to estuary flats,
brooded on by rotten, wind-swept shelters
We stood there feeling perspicuous, joking.
There was no further we could go

The cry was heard against the charred sky-line
Someone had slipped. All I could remember
was the sudden sight, a girl spread-eagled
in the mud. It was the merest fall,
but no-one wanted to touch her,
no-one wanted the contagion
of her mud on the few clothes
they had brought with them.
From head to foot she was black
with stinking sand and oil. She went
from one to the other in her sodden dress.
Feeling wooden, I never knew how
she cleaned herself up, how love ever thrived,
how our consciences survived

1972


Fall Out.

Truth will not be published this year,
due to lack of funds,
but an edition of everyone's
emotional guesswork
will be forthcoming.

It will liquidise all we value, mean much pain,
but none will be overlooked, be clear;
even though cities will shatter
in the blast of a billion breaths.

Though claiming a privileged point of view,
survivors will have little to gain,
as the truth of their statements
depends on what really is the case.

And we will have abolished
every case that’s true,
once our devices have been launched.
In the present circumstances
the prospect is more equal than we thought.
1985

The Grasmere Cuckoos

The village was cut off for fifty minutes
under the hazy air of a May morning
in Cumbria. Tourists and school parties
stared dumbfounded at Saracen cars
and foot patrols which ringed its limits
and came to a halt in a line across the lane
from the A592. By the time they could
advance, eight women members of a
creative writing school lay pregnant
in a stupor of innocence, defying the doctors.
Then came the bitter January births.
Midwives under the Official Secrets Act
delivered eight blue-eyed, flaxen infants.
Having leaped up at once in their mother's arms,
they topped the percentiles with un-Piagetian haste
and at six months questioned the care
of their homely nurses in complex scansion.
Juveniles, they brooded at home in Grasmere
zapping out miscreants who blocked their vistas
of rainbows and lovely roses or cut across
the splendour, or spoke while cataracts sounded.
Later they dropped speech and kept in touch
through eternities of thought. Thus they
tapped the still, sad music of the population.
All found out in dialogues of business and hate
were blasted with lazar eyes
From their mission control at Rydal Mount,
each meadow grave and stream was
kept under surveillance. They could drive
any developer or National Trust worker
to suicide, the minute they touched an unhewn stone

The nation, in its grim concern, called in
the Minister and MI6 and promptly
informed them that similar bardic delinquents
had been found all over the world.
One had liquidated the K.G.B. in Leningrad
with tactics based on the works of Puskin.
The international order was under threat,
so a force of regular practical critics
was dispatched from the University Department.
Aged Leavisites advised them on strategy
and the purity of English Diction.
The Regional Arts Committees confiscated
old, unhappy, far-off things. In the end
close Urban Warfare by a television arts
programme presenter staked them out
in a roofless hut where the children
had gone to muse in solitude.

As they writhed in hysterical pain,
brought on by anaerobic negative ability
the children gasped a last message.
They were aliens, here to imitate man’s best.
They had not meant to take poetry seriously,
merely to control the earth;
the emulation of poets was merely a trick,
based on the assumption that mankind
would give anything to realise a fantasy.
This instant the aliens’ computers were
re-programming for social perfection.
The Arts man ran out. The TLS was rung.
The deal was on, but too late,
he found the poets dead in frozen prosody.


1985

Intruders on School Sites.


To all the Authority's Headteachers,
Deputy Heads, Department Heads, Year Heads,
cleaners and school secretaries.

We ask all personnel who work in the
authority's schools and structured centres
to be on the alert for a circle
of prowlers who have shown anti-social
interest in our children and students.

A scale two teacher of Social English
reports that an old man of average height
with white, thinning hair and rustic clothes
(possibly stolen from a museum)
was seen to take a group of her children
to play 'horses' down by the canal and
encouraged them to steal a house-boat
and then to write about it in blank verse,
(which worries the advisory teachers),
heedless of their level of cognitive growth.
He is said to be violent, morose
and to carry a heavy walking stick.

Around the dust-bins of a local college,
a stout, pale faced man, with wispy hair
has been seen by Appendix Two staff,
offering link-course students opium,
on glue to sniff, in exchange for dope.
He has attempted to convert them
to a cult of absolute beauty.
He can be recognised by a large,
decomposing seabird round his neck.
Like the other intruders, he advocates
conventions of Romantic diction and
threatens German, metaphysical doctrines
when challenged or prevented.

The Head of remedial (restricted-code)
Communication Studies had told us
of a small, periwigged, crippled man
who takes children down to grottoes
where he inculcates the acceptance
of non-participatory Tory dogmas
and encourages the criticism of innovation.
He has also been seen to indulge in
acts of Augustan detachment
in the presence of our changes.

A member of the Disadvanataged
Department was seriously hurt
in an encounter with an old, stout,
balding man who rides a moody horse
who tells the children sexist and
class-biased stories then entices them
to go on pilgrimages and drink
beneath the statutory age.
He has a compulsion to visit
Church of England sites where his gang attempts
to walk through partitions
to the detriment of restoration work
He claims once to have been a diplomat
and has reactionary ideas
which verge on Monarchic despotism.

Another, this time tall and thin,
with a limp and wearing a long cloak,
has been seen distracting school leavers
from sexual counselling and imposing
attitudes of remorse, contrition
and socially divisive distain
in their pre-marital relationships
and petting behaviour among their peers.
He frequents groups travelling to off-site
swimming baths and is rumoured to have
made a highjack attempt on a school bus
and demand that it take them to the Hellespont.

Finally, the entire Social Studies Department
of a nearby comprehensive
were accosted by a small, thin man
speaking a Northamptonshire accent
and rumoured to have escaped from an asylum.
He lures our pupils into noticing
the seasons and ruins council open spaces
by breaking down bushes and stealing eggs
to encourage the children to recognise
their colours. He has also been seen to push
them into responses of unrequited love
for dangerously unrealistic ideals.

These men are malevolent, have no fixed addresses
and no visible means of support
and seem determined to prevent our educands
from coming to terms with life in a socially relevant way.
They are an organised cadre
and have often been seen holding meetings
in waste grounds where they exhibit
perverse interest in a rotting, decapitated head,
which has been known to sing aloud
all night long, causing considerable nuisance,
fear and annoyance to the neighbourhood.


1985

Final Report of the Secretary to the World Council of Cults

By now the fission and fission chains
have accelerated under a determined law,
which you, in traditional inhibition,
can be relied on not to interfere with.
The North Western sector has taken
the impact of the cataclysm
with clichéd predictability.
For famine, time was waiting,
but pestilence and death is
much in demand and all the
screenplays have been superseded.
As for the East, the fires and
destructions obliterated more than
the experts ever thought they had to lose
And as the final siren sounds,
activated by tracers counting
the fall-out levels metre by metre
as they sink to find me here
alone in my studio cell
with Papacy, Episcopacy, Ayatollahs,
burned from the surface
of a blackened world,
I give my last report to you,
via a satellite link to my distant moon,
frozen in its seas of ice
to relay my voice to infinite eruptions
of interstellar space, I have this much to say.
We sought You everywhere
and at all times in our history.
Now at last we have You cornered.
Your deistic fantasy is ended
as the fallout weighs on my tongue,
we have eliminated all reference to your Son
and thus we bury both ourselves
and You in the null eschatology
of final, unjudgemental burnout.


Epistle from a Lady.

I admit you have a point of view.
Just as I must let the fundamentalist
destroy his children's lives
Now if a doctor intervenes,
I cannot repress a sense of justice
but what you fail to understand is that
we have consciences too. Granted you and
your batchelor priests view every scrap
of life as having humanity, but
I will not concede my responsibility.
The lives you talk about are part of me.
They share my human mess. We are not islands
but I alone have authority to judge my acts
and those parts which are mine to prnounce.
No one else can move my hand if I choose
to defend myself or not. As a woman
and a mature administrator of lives
I must choose conditions that but ensure
the happiness of those whose rights cannot
be expressed except in terms of possibility.
I must decide the effect such lives
will have on all of us. We are happy now,
and know how hard a struggle it has been
to make this so. Would other lives
keep this group balanced and , if not,
what value hangs on lives that are not able
to answer, yet if born must be fulfilled.
Others here are not so fortunate,
privilege has not yet been fully shared.
They struggle still to make things work
often they're on their own, having found
intimate sharing difficult. Of course,
you could expect us all to stand aside
and let whatever our love plants
grow uncultivated by prudent foresight.
And this is a problem you have to face.
Sometimes I think if it wasn't for Catholics
no one would find time for Freud these days.
You speak of a natural law
but never let nature govern you.
Though perhaps I should not have said this
I respect your views, though I cannot
understand it, nor why you care less
for seal-pups which cry in pain as cullers
mash their skulls. Though perhaps I should
not have said this either. I respect your views
and know you have your puzzles to solve.
We too must spurn sentimentality at times
but you must have the strength to realise
I too need your love. I too am Christ,
for this is your belief I suffer torments
of my lonely choice which no-one can
relieve me of. It is cold thing I have to do,
but it is done out of warm concern
I consult professionals and knew I have
a task to do. Pray to your Spirit
for me and in your prayers remember
only I can decide the future
of the gypsy people in this county.


1984

A Radical Theologian Predicts His Election As Chaplain To The Damned:
Jerdan Place, Sometime After The Last Judgment

I know it shall happen in this way.
The reprobate, with grudging steps
file in to celebrate their loss,
which is our gain, our family's joy.
Those with some weight to throw about
might shout for justice brazenly.
The rest will quietly perspire
through naked skins at what will come.
(Their only problem will be posture
which shall reveal how ill-prepared
they are for resurrected flesh.)
All will have earned the sentence passed
on legalistic conscience.
I shall forbid them any talk,
but meekly ask them bare their hearts
and from their Parish Hymn Books sing
'Peace, peace will come' but if they choose
'Jesus, My Lord, My God, My All'
it shall not wound us as of old,
for two-by-two with hymnals shared
they sing not for their own release
but for the triumph of our hope.
Felicity shall not be theirs
And once the sign of peace is passed
from each to each in wretched cure
I shall assume my priestly role
and, blessing them, give last advise
in their condition as the damned;
My homily should run like this:

Past members of the body dear
there is no peace assured for you
for Man Transcendent had advised
with true collegiality
that ignorance invincible
should thrust you from his blessed sight
Now your mentality of threat
will not discern how this can be
If it should keep you, bear from us
how you are part of His great plan.
And should it not, then I'm still here
to tell you how you met His gift
with individualistic threat.
We tried to cure your legal hearts
Through us the Lord once sent you help,
from Lumen Vitae came a priest
who strove to raise your bourgeois souls
from curial limitations.
Yet your tongues did not distinguish
law-like rules from special cases
and talked of Canon Law or worse,
of teachings magisterial.

At this, I know they shall be crushed
A silence now will rub it in,
before I prick their memories.

He came to tell you how his heart
was full of the experience
of holy matter in this world
and God's designs so intimate.
Why did you frighten him with thought?
He came to speak to you of love
and of relationships for which
he struggled to express a sense
of bodies close in warmth and care
His homiletic skills were moist,
especially on the theme of wheat,
or oats, of rye or fresh-mown hay.
Their nutty taste or squeezy feel
should have held you rapt in prayer
and stirred a caring urge for brutes
And yet you bullied him with talk
of open meetings in the hall.

On hearing this, the weak will break
which makes my work much easier
And yet the arrogant will fight
ungrateful in the very thought
my service has delayed their fate.

You would not let his body speak
of transubstantiation's joy
when viewed as loving act, not bread
So one Lord's Day with strength reviewed
in love he took a priestly mate.
Theirs was sacramental union
God, world and man it sought to join
You should have warmed to their affair.
Instead they suffered much for love.
On feast-days and on ferias
they used to amble up the aisle
concelebration was their aim.
He with his arm so gently slung
over her wet and hairy muzzle
She devoutly trotting along,
both vested in white amices.
They neighed through sacred history.
Page after page they taught to you
from cycle C, then B, and A
Yet you mocked this gifted couple
The stable-smell of innocence
which wafted through the Church, brought hate
The little worms that sometimes came
to worship, you would tread upon.

Here the younger ones may falter
I shall adopt a gentle smile
and intimate it is God's will
to list their faults before they burn

Your worst offence was when you forced
your hirelings in St. Stephen's Guild
to stage a futile bloody coup
when last the Parish Council met
under fadged up, shabby pre-texts
of injuries endured by them
at grooming vigils during lent
His mate had natural desires
to taste the substance of the word
on which you turned your backs and wrest
your nibbled missals from her teeth
Your wickedness would not admit
what word once swallowed must create
At Stations of the Cross, you moaned
though in pretence, that prayer was forced
while on both knees in fresh manure

At the bishop's visitation
your inherent violence flared
when, to reconcile the parish
meditative prayer was held
with charismatic Friesians.
At which you left the diocese
The turf accountant and the vet
alone held to the liturgy.
Their faithfulness has its reward,
Vatican 3 upheld their claims.
First at the Curragh, now in bliss
horse and rider are exhalted.
They would forgive you, if not outdone,
despite the special pleas we made
and plenary indulgences
of yours we've totalled more than once

After this there should be readings,
we'll have been through all that before
Besides they might decide they want to stay
such torpor I shall not allow
and with these words I'll lead them out.

Try not to reassure yourselves
that things will not be physical.
The subtle body's counterpart
implies humiliated flesh.
It will be sordid, but not for us
the witness of your sufferings.
Though we nurse a sense of grief
at your pains which have begun
the thought of you will soon expire
For half this time brings sense of loss
then half again the pain of sense
half that and nature drives you off
then the soul in decimal time
will thrust you in the dust again
Again in finite series, filing down,
the fires will have begun to near
that alien flesh you wear again
In our minds only it shall end
for you these torments shall go on
Now pass your hymn-books to the back
blow out all your Advent candles
Try not to stumble in the dark
which is inevitable yours.
Do not attempt to clothe your friends
or give them food or visit them
It will appear obsequious
Now go quietly to the vans that wait.
Do what your driver tells you to
We have negotiated strict
instructions with their unions.

Then vainly they shall troop outside
clinging in tears to new-made friends
This is the sight I know will be
Come Lord, forgive presumptiousness
let it come soon, the day I tell them;
‘Serve the Lord and go to Hell.’


1985

An English Romance

Her daisies still matting the sunk lawn
picked out the colour of celandines and
tall meadow-sweets which fringed its lime-green swathe.
to where creepers stretched on the south wall
their blossom hiding the vernacular brick.
Inside the house, she sat alone. The Times,
open at the obituary page, lay beside her.
Another of her father's colleagues had died
(tax undisclosed) 'He is survived by ten grandsons!'
The sofa was the size of a bed, but her sveltesse
took less space than one. Over a printed dress
she wore a smock of navy blue cloth which
her friend had made for her, 'hors de commerce'
It was late morning and a studied sunlight
from the French windows, filled the drawing room.
Benedict's car had just left for the city
(Predictions of foreign exchange were firm.
Though in Kent, word of marketing was heard
through the telex inside the stripped milk-churn.)
Schubert's molto moderato in Barenboim's
hands was easing itself into the space
left by her husband's departure.
Tonight the de Crespy's were celebrating
at Nani's. It caused her a momentary pause
that the place should be owned
by the wife of a television impresario,
but it was important that they were seen.
Thus the day was left for the garden; she had
seedlings still to bed out in the bare soil
along the east wall where the fuchsia
would bloom in late August. She stood up,
a small figure. Her pale, impeccable face,
a doll's porcelain which would have been
severe had not a child-like jauntiness
belied its features. Traces of scarring
could be seen by a sensitive eye
as she glanced up at the Paolozzi prints
from Kelpra's above the fireplace
She was far from those naive years at Keele
and those she had spent with a journalist
an Belsize Park. Robert had been ambitious.
He travelled and she with him, covering
the heady world of ‘sixty eight from Haight Ashbery
to Prague. A year later, with two film scripts
accepted and a contract for another,
she was pregnant. Robert never spoke of
the abortion. His work for the Fourth
International presupposed a more urgent
and theoretical commitment to future generations.
Their ground floor-flat was littered with projects,
but the main one, theirs, had been interrupted.
She went back to her father and to Sonning.
Their silence angered her and that night
she’d phoned Robert to come and get her.
After taking her to the flat, she never saw him again.

Outside the garden bloomed, punctual for its
present month. Its wild plantations of lupins
and heathers carried a balmy refrain
into the room. The sonata's first movement had ended
and the recorded fingers traced the chords
of the Andante, a shade too melancholy perhaps
She closed her eyes and thought of the cottage
garden she had known as a child in Kent.
The informal seas of simple flowers,
drifting in shimmering colours before her,
which blended with old stock of roses and wild lilies.

After the curiously prolonged pain of the operation
she joined Health Committees and wrote about
social services in the inner city for liberal papers
She met Benedict at the Jennings’ party
in Chelsea where he had rescued her from
a well-soused economic journalist.
They honeymooned in an old friend's Irish
estate where they rode, discovered
a dislike for shooting grouse and discussed
her fears for socialism now that the
rise of Euro-communism had been checked.
They agreed that the cause of independent
radicalism was best served from a platform
well within the confines of the establishment.
She felt secure with him, having seen so much drift before
and he, more restful, wanted to subsidise her dreams.
She could support community cells and
helped squatters and women's groups defend rights
(which Benedict used to call her 'gynaeciums')
The urgency of the ecological threat
impressed them both during that long, but
summer, near Portleix where they swam, naked
in his Lordships pool out of the Derry earshot
In the knowledge of both drift and reward.
She was fascinated by the domestic apples,
which had become naturalised in the hedgerows.
She brought grafts back to Highgate.
(Since then they had holidayed in better climates)
The stereo clicked. She sacrificed the Sonata's fourth movement
She picked up her mother's pair of leather gloves
and the large basket she used for 'garden days'
from the broken shed and lifted the latch back
on the rusted, knotty door by the goble-wall
and knelt gauchly by the bed she had dug
for the geraniums which she had brought from the greenhouse
She concentrated on the task, kneading the watered
surround of each plant and remembered
that smell of mulch which whetted her memory
of the little daffodil patch which mother
had given to her and Graham, her little brother,
Her mother had written about Gertrude Jekill
and of the wild, untutored gardens
of Sissinghurst which she left unvisited
in a bleaker world, after she had
given painful birth to her family of eight
One day, her parents had argued and her
mother, turning from the bathroom, a wild,
tear-lined, despairing face had looked at her
in jealous rage. She, her daughter had run
out to press her fists in the damp earth
and wishing away that reproachful glance.
Only after her mothers' funeral and her
own rage that she could not see her again:
her savage desire to prize up the coffin lid
so smugly pegged down did she recall a wizened,
ungiving invalid they had put into the ground
of whose intellect, humour and style eight
children had washed away all recognisable features
She had made a breathless, afflicted vow
that those wraps would not enfold her.
Since Keele,now, the garden told her months,
apart from sporadic bleeding her doctor
had told her to ignore once she took on
the twenty-one day regime of oestrogen.
Now she thought of her next children's book
and how the illustrations would match the text
She snapped her clippers at the odd dead-heads.
Behind her short, coiffure of charcoal hair,
a great bunch of rose-bay from Sonning
studded the corner with vivid purple and rose
Behind it grew the apple tree, older than the house,
on which she had grafted cuttings from Portleish,
yet they had not taken. She left them, black and crisp,
as if daring their brittle hands and fingers of decay


1986

Deadly Londoners

1.Neil Sproxby-Stokes at Funghi's


Hello old man, never seen you here before.
Its been months since I fell out with that bore
in Chelsea.You see I left at once.
He made me out to be a proper ponce.
Couldn't take that sorry sort of pressure.
Fancy asking for a cheque! Had I'd the leisure
I'd have told you it was down to him to pay.
Not that I wouldn't help in any way,
but you know I have this inheritance
bound up in trusts.They lead me a merry dance.
It's just so hard to get one's hands on cash.
Have you heard about the U.F.O. Protect crash?
Awful to say I set him up, dear Clive.
Shame they took his Roller. Lucky he's alive.
Should have worked out just the way we wanted
Our payment plan to offset being haunted
was a real success, until they used the lever
that Martians can't be disproved either.
I've been away in Cannes. They want my script.
I thought I'd call it By Fever Gripped?
Now all I have to do is write it down
a tough thing to do up here in town.
It won't be like the last thing I put on.
They took me to Court. Accused me of a con
I told them when I hired the studios
it was just a test to see whose videos
would fit the casting people's books.
Those beastly girls never had the looks.
As for the naked-vampires-on-the-slab-scene
that's how the screenplay should have been.
Those cows threw off the sheets for all to see
with such bad taste, it didn't suit a mortuary.
D'you know what they said then, those wicked tarts
that I had demanded sex for giving parts ?
I did say If they couldn't simulate it
I'd give them a cue to stimulate it.
Yet like so much I've said and done,
they never understand my sense of fun.
Odd seeing you again in all this whirl
last time we met I'd picked up this girl
who helped me out with a jam I was in
I had a little neice in Wisconsin
killed in a plane crash over Delamere.
I needed funds to have her buried here
and she stumped up, the lovely creature.
Her name's Camilla. She'd love to meet you
What's that? You know her too. She's sent you here?
I don't think much of this is very clear.
I know my neice was never on the list.
They held back her name..You get my gist?
Of course she existed! Don't be so uppity
My family tree's not common property!
What d'you mean she wants the money back ?
I told her I would try a different tack
with the trustees than I had before,
without recourse to a court of law.
The money's not come through yet
but it'll come through soon I'll bet.

She's thrown out all my things onto the street!
She never even tried to be discreet.
Sorry have to go. I'm due in a meeting
If you see her, give her my fond greeting!

2.Sergio Lickpenny at the Palladium Exit


London’s the place I make for
the trader’s game to ache for.
To Westminster I once went
for bonuses long since spent,
where I careered with bosses
to misprice heavy losses
which I’d win back tomorrow
with mortgage cash to borrow.
Sucking on a single grape,
I speculate on my escape.
I’m a rogue trader
who knows he’s done wrong.

(Enter chorus of dismissed misses,
who do splits with Baring kisses)

He knows he's done a wrong.
and won't be staying long
and for want of money sings this song.

As I elbow through the throng
To the High Courts I have come
to be bailed and not to pay
It's s.f.a. the F. S.A .
Future insecurity
provides my annuity,
in the hands of the Ordainer
whose lottery 's my retainer.
I'm just a young trader
who don't know he's done wrong.

(Enter chorus of suspended top executives
and high kicking suspender Armani wives.)

He doesn't know he's done a wrong!
his is a case we need to prolong
and for ready money sing his song.

As I stumble through the throng
to Threadneedle St., I come.
where grey options panthers prowl
sniffing for risk, cheek and jowl
with the boys in the open pit,
outcrying the swaption market.
No room now for big, black holes
with ninety million sterling souls,
Only an I.M.F snide
with ambition in his stride.
would guess that I'm a rogue trader
who knows I've done wrong.

(Enter chorus of lurking, bank recruits
in second-hand Top Shop evening suits)

He knows he's done a wrong!
Soon we'll be taking him along
For want of bail money, he sings this song.

As I shouldered through the throng
where the sleaze was thick and strong,
to Parliament I did me take
my MP's conscience for to shake.
He said, “There isn't any law no more
just a new Porsche 944
and a case of fresh-chilled Krug,
if the booze becomes your drug.
The star dealer's calling
is not so appalling.
If the bet comes to dust
it's the firm that 's gone bust
but those s.o.bs at the S.I B
won't you and me forgive.
You're a rogue trader
who don't know you've done wrong.”

( Enter chorus of pinstripe control toughs
and Horlicks girls in golden handcuffs)

He doesn't know he's done a wrong.
He was always a bit headstrong,
and for envelopes of money sings this song.

As I jostle in the throng
a busker I've become,
to sing the High St pitch,
deep as any City ditch.
Humbly here I tried to pray;
consumers alone should pay.
Have pity on a younger man
who faces a five-year ban.
The man with the F.T.view
cried from the public loo?
“Lickpenny ! Lickpenny ! Here!
get your futures into gear.
We haven't the expenses
to prove your offences.”
Sleepless, lone, I live on air,
for Mr Blair still isn't there.
The mother of all positions
collected my commissions.
Now I spend my money
on Kingsley's pot of honey.
I'm a rogue trader.
who knows I've done no wrong.

(Enter night chorus of pit traders in ties
with big red numbers and little black lies )

He knows he's done no wrong!
For he that has no money
will for ever sing this song.

( Exit the choruses with no returns
wearing top hats over Bear Stearns)
Both Published in London Life Online 1995

3. Lord and Lady Black in the Hollinger Chronicles.

Give us, press lords, daily fiction,
should our dreams desert us.
Shore up all received opinion
lest our conscience fuss.
Happy liars press injunction
on our truth-beguiled construction.

Ever let the truth be held back;
atrocities observe unsung.
Slip injustice to your back rack,
honey from your tongue.
Happy liars press injunction
on our honest heart’s seduction.

Hotel spongers, travel freely.
We will never query print.
Your style so easy, mouth so mealy
to ensure you’re never skint.
Happy liars, press in junction.
Let the trumpet strain your function.

Blessed celebs, loyal deceivers
take our praise in megabites.
Let us knight these stern achievers
blog their websites to the heights.
Happy liars press injunction
down our mouths, such ready luncheon.

Looted pension be our safeguard
as we honour life-style debts.
Out of widows’ heirlooms marred
kleptocracy has fed its pets;
happy liars’ press injunction,
spread with wrathful, right-wing unction.

Free the market, close trade unions,
corrupt toil deregulate.
Bethlehem Arab feel the truncheons,
you’ve Just War to celebrate.
Happy liars press injunction
dry of all absurd compunction.

Forty thousand dollars charge
for happy Babs’ birthday bash!
Ninety thousand’s not too large
if you’re not designer trash.
Happy liars, press, in junction
with dissemblance up for auction.

Enter the courts with happy steps.
Shareholder’s give way.
The marketplace, we know, accepts
that egotists must bray.
Happy liars’ press injunction
bless their labour’s sweet dysfunction.

Locks and bars won’t spoil the fun.
We’ll pay the bills again.
While endless lawyer’s pages run
and maggots sue for gain.
Happy that liar’s press injunction
on a future felon’s term reduction.


2004
 


Second Book of Satires


Canticle for A Peacemaker:
 
Blood-soaked Graf Bismarck
drew steel from the Rhur
Lister, old Lamarck,
Dunant and Pasteur
marched out of the ark
to campaign for cure.

Dukes in the Kinsky
weighed out each bet,
while Lobatchevsky
prevented upset.
Chance had its ruler
in Leonid Euler.

Chomsky and Weaver,
for the State Department,
worked like the beaver
on their argument
that Skinner's receiver
was a lousy deceiver.

Brute power has begot
a self-dealing hand.
Now peacetime forgot,
how to be underhand.
Human progress has a plot:
demand supplies our lot.

1990


Closedown


The reporters and starlets fade out,
bounced from their photon glare.
They can't beat what the show's all about,
live on the scene of nowhere.


1991


Chorus of Politically Apathetic Poets
A country bored with democracy
is a dangerous place
for Tory control freaks.
Though life is easy enough
for what is left to the superstitious.
Tabloid star-charts substitute for
the dangers of repression.
There the only revolution is in the stars.
Yet the real ones,
those nebular creations,
change every day, like safe houses
for political agitators.
Like women, the stars
photograph badly,
for they were created to move,
not be fixed in the Ptolomaic grid
as Cleopatra in a still from
the Tragedie of Liz n’ Richard
Take Canis, Pope’s dog
barking mad, sick or dead.
Whatever breaks
out of that giant inside
is only a thin pencil of light.
Inside is such a Rilkean giant,
competing with a mass of angry light
from warehouses, flood-lit goods yards,
runways and security beams
that light the furnace of the liberal market.
That makes it difficult to go on
without sins against profit.
We do not survive our goodness:
the hourly stress of unambition:
the desperate refusal of suicide,
of drug-related common sense,
stress-induced generosity,
depressive courage,
the breakdown against despair,
the burnout that forbids aggression.
and other plagues of human nature
caving in on the sheer callousness
of equilibrium.
Injustice often has the better poets.
Yevtoshenko wrote better for the K. G. B.
Pound was better than Pudney,
Pendercki than Panufnic.
Listen it’s about talent,
not goodness.
Or the Keats’s Main Sequence
love-flare, that drifting, stellar,
peeping- Tom corpse.
Plath and Sexton died of worse tyranny
than Tsvetayeva, or Mandelstam.
Death is not a style, but a rhetoric
when freedom turns despot.

We do not struggle with words.
We struggle with love
and words fail only our lies.
Meanwhile the smoke rises
from a little warmth
fanned into profit
and it is a question,
Left or Right,
of reaching the window first.

1995

Chorus of Blakean Currency Speculators

Then came the clerks of treachery,
the solicitors of betrayal
with slobbering jaws
and grey, restless eyes
to sell the British graveyards
to the Erms of time.
Heseltine in fetters grown
from his own heart,
knows they will reverse
the judgement on the dead.
Thatcher, daughter of the light,
would not attend him.
She had sensed his dark spirit
and weak resolve.
Enraged, he had sought her in the
places of illumination
which cast his vile shadow
on the ground of purity.
Thatcher sat, her face to the sun.
Her body glowed white
with a fierce flare, which
Heseltine could not reach,
nor could he see her beauty
lest his eyes burned to the core.
He wass delayed in his workshop
and would not sign over the Westland
dead to the managers of the aeons.
He had a final grave dug deep
by Thatcher’s curbed
and broken brothers.
Open, dark and still, it would
support the endless sleep,
of the Sons of Disraeli away from
the Erms’ mandibles of greed
and the armour of their avarice.
Yet he hungers to kill her light
by which the raiders navigate.
Heseltine waits by the places
of desolation, the theatres
of death and captivity.
Now, Major, with a radiant
smile and happiness in his eyes
announces the mercy of the elders
at the exchange rate of being.
The Erms have a right
to ravage time, as it was they
invested in the cosmological
ravines where time’s flow reversed.

Enraged, Heseltine, speeds in flames
to the final horizon and meets
with the elders, as evil has a say
in universal destiny.
The evil-one takes out the Book
of Neo Liberal Conscience
to show how all will stand
condemned among its pages. Only the
extinction of the poor will cancel it.
The entity of guilt itself
will destroy the frame of vision.
All elementals face the void.
His massive brow is wrinkled.
His hair, dire and furrowed.
Thatcher must die for impiety and justly,
or Heseltine will expose the illusion
of being and bring down the universe.
Both protagonists are confined in the
temple vaults that darken being.
The elders know that even the raiders
are illumined in Thatcher constant light.
Is Major a traitor with the clerks?
The elders debate with lesser entities,
While in the hangar of darkness
lewd shapes celebrate their malice,
And Heseltine observes them, debased
with dread, having seen the last grave filled
with ash and clinker and having heard
the howls of steel feet moving in
to claim the victory in a harsh new wilderness.
Yet as the last vile demon sleeps
the fire of right has not gone out.
Major, taking Thatcher’s ashes, shoots away
with a new and powerful aura,
which Heseltine sees and curses
his gentle light by which the Erms
already ravage the sleep of human dead.

Chorus of Cataloguing Librarians


The ‘A’ bombs mushroomed at his birth.
B sixty twos brought him down to earth.
C.S. gas brought friends suffocation.
but Wilson’s ‘D’ notice barred publication.
News of the ‘E’ Wings caused him no concern,
The Ascent of F6 another text to learn,
pin-up girls in G-strings his only newsread.
To injustice in ‘H’ blocks he paid no heed
His IQ by teachers was judged fit to serve.
He invented the J cloth, despite his reserve.
He read only Kafka and saw himself as K.
and the L shaped room taught him to lay
He took the M4 daily in a Fiat saloon
with an N registration not a day too soon,
while his O level children swatted Auden by pat,
then a P 60 thudded dull down on the mat.
Belief in hope was blocked by Bultmann’s Q
Dad’s photo of R101, summated his view.
The ‘S’ bend flushed away life’s joy.
At the ‘T’ junction he injured a boy
and made a ‘U’ turn hit and run.
The trauma of Mum’s V bomb left him undone.
as did the ‘W’ formation of fighters in Burma,
An X- ray showed up a hostile murmur.
His Y fronts hid the scar, or so he said,
for later he died on his own Z bed.

1994-5

 
Epitaphium, F.Hayek

The falling shadow of an autumn leaf
joins the precision of its shape
to its yellowed original and lies beneath
as it touches an unlit landscape.
The death of a dreaming, sceptical man,
joins with the voices in another room,
repeating history as only historians can
to make a fixed pattern of his loom.


The Mossbawn Man


That puzzled frown, preserved for all...
You can guess his profession from
the noun-hoard they found in his imagery;
a dated meal in a leathery crop.

Its features, as if filled up
with lore, giving the lustre of life
to a thing so dead , Homer was a child...
Ink stains tell he is of the O - Level folk.

His hooded eyes conceal the loyalty
he brooded on to the mythic Empson
and the possibly - forged White Goddess
to be found in Graves as far as Majorca.

Canticle for a Peacemaker

The white world on the blue
is beginning to fade on my helmet.
The incident that started it all
took place yesterday.
I read your faxed memorandum
That the forces insist
the town surrenders.

Then the shelling started
a day after we told them
the people had laid down their arms.
The town was full of refugees
and yet I remember
it was a clear, sunny day
and hundreds were dead or dying
as the explosions struck the school.
A surgeon stayed thirty six hours
operating in a church hall.
He told me of a blinded boy
whose eyes he could not save.
Then we were told
to declare the town safe.
We arranged for the withdrawal
and made no protest
when the shells began to fall
on the football ground.
No trial was arranged.
No guilt assigned
As I said I am considering
resignation, or a transfer,
unless you can answer a question

We arrested one person
from the town, whom
the forces accused of
concealing arms.
He had that awesome,
passive quietness
you once said fools use
to make them brave.

The forces claimed
we had supplied him weapons
but we had to say
even in the strange heat
of blood fresh on concrete
we refused him them.
as you said they might
provoke attacks

They shot him for
provoking the whole attack,
though he was not in the town
when the shells began to fall.

You told me not to resist
as it might provoke attacks

As his cronies were putting his
bloodied copse into a body bag,
you told me you measured a tremor
on the Richter Scale,
but not to tell them
as it might provoke attacks.

I received a delegation
asking for custody of the body.

When we got back to the hotel
I found it safe. Next door
you could see through the floors
they dead lay carefully in their beds
and the living were extracting
anything with a human look.

We took away
someone’s mother who was
having visions of history
and did not explain
whose side she was on.

I include this in my report
as everything is now back to normal.
I would like you to answer my question,
every time I ask, you just laugh
and change the subject.

You say the actions of both people
are morally equivalent,
yet we have no definitions here,
like a new truth
you haven’t issued me yet.

What is the truth? 1996


Candlemas, 1998
i.m. Karla Faye Tucker

In West London,
the wakening
whirr of a traffic
helicopter,
winnows
the harvest
of the clouds.

It is morning
in the Texan,
cycle of silent revenge,
while I sleep
through midnight’s
and whatever dew falls
will never dry.


The Flight

The State grows well. The forces grow subtle.
And yet they doubt the matter of our calm.
Stories of immigrant philosophers
and not state-aided moral education
led to our inclusion on the social list.
The services of power broke the fluids
and defective genes were found inside.
We left that morning. Now we stay away.
Some innocents may yet stand a chance.
The surface of our tickets for return
are scuffed, now, frayed and torn.
And yet we keep them safe.

1999

A Sorite for Jane.

The train so late and slow, the thirsty hours that go,
the chaos of the untended house, the cat I refuse to know,
the work so crass, the pleasure brief, the sleep so quick to come
the neighbours loud, the traffic crazed, the street kids dumb,
the weekends stressed, the pub depressed, the phone so dead
the TV vile, the Sunday Papers dense, the wine like lead,
the party shrill, the kiss no thrill, the way home cold and dank,
the key mislaid, the bills unpaid, the cleaner slow to thank,
the gardener thick, the evening cold, the visitor without charm,
the Church so long, the sermon trite, the parish so uncalm,
the relative fussed, the last fresh crust, the houseplants turned to dust,
the radio pompous, the gossip stale, the bank you cannot trust,
the daughter fierce, the night time vague, the bed unmade,
would it were not so, would it another place and idleness my trade.


 
Third Book of Satires


Jacob’s Ladder


Searching for the Sense

1.Festival.

The flat full of the casual
effects of making words,
books strewn open,
spent clothes, helpless
on the homeless floor
to which I have returned.


Ulster voices, set high
on the Geneva radio;
a journalist’s toy.
It makes a good story;
the marching season
tamed by a daycent
concert or so;
drowned out by
the lambeg
of poverty on hate.
They will find
someone to kill.

You can be sure of that.
Death, like any church,
is a sign of itself.

2005

2.Poetry Day

The particularity of poetry that must be recognized is that it does not
convey clear words that can be instantly grasped, but constructs new,
unprecedented forms of language that owe nothing to common codes.
M. Koechiro Matsuura, Directeur General de l’UNESCO, a l’occasion
de la Journee Mondiale de la Poesie, 21 mars 2007

They have reprocessed them, the GM poets,
those tongues of awe; grown transgenic
dictators of freedom, they can no longer
infect us with the imperfection of hope.
We lie in the water now, no longer a threat,
our signatures on the surface, so visible
on poisoned cataracts across the world. .

2007


3.From a Lithuanian Folk-Song

Wolf-craft kills the calf.
Fox-craft kills the hen.
Dog-craft scares the thief.
Flea-craft wakes the worker.
Bee-craft stings the bear
and gives us honey.
Man-craft stings the heart
and gives no honey.

2007

At Ferney

We are less happy now and new estates
approach Voltaire's chateau and his stone church.
Your age of sensual freedom came in search
of pleasure, thought new hopes; now Middle Classes
with different aims and Gucci glasses
focus on old loves and blur new hates.

Candide left us his garden, then betrayed us
just as surely as the Old Regime.
destroyed the dignity and self-esteem
of men and women in a past of dated
sophistries and systematic decorated
violence. His inheritance undoes

the slow drift of rights against dictators.
Voltaire knew revolt, not revolution
old lore, bad rulers, cruel punition.
Now all have passed away, leaving a plight
in our hearts, that self-destructive blight
that runs from European anti fascist wars

to the Islamophobic international.
Diderot and Rousseau are long dead.
D'Alembert and Maupertuis unread.
and all along there is one enemy,
the vicious human heart's ignominy
that poisons all in us that we think rational.

The garden Voltaire paid to look like Pope's,
the secret passageway he took when visitors
outstayed their welcome; the registers
proving him a crook, despite his God of thought
and this estate for worthies his corruption bought;
The people keep them, not to honour monied hopes

but to keep a style awake, a confidence
that kept you writing too, left you free
to think tradition inside out, no mimicry
of past illusions.I honour your humour
and honour Voltaire's too, not Deist stupor,
or priapal dogmas of sensual pretence.

In this house lived a man who wrote
and to it came another of like trade.
Both grew in strength to master the tirade
against those brutal fronts of history
that justified injustice as sacred mystery,
for whose brave styles the people's shoes still vote.

1999

Interior Psalm 3

What on earth do you want now?
I’m not taking any more rides
to fascinating landscapes,
or museums of frozen imagination.
I’m not cruising those parties
of the sad and the rich
whose language I am
forgetting to speak.
I don’t go to the great,
empty houses where
decision-makers smile
at my guileless thoughts,
or cut me dead.
I wanted to live
on the surface of my hopes
away from significance
and its innocent victims
away from the projects
of happiness and
their duped clients,
away from the counselors
of sanity and their tearful
waiting rooms.
Ground level means
you cannot see beyond
the curve the earth makes
to keep going and I do not want
to see beyond my being
and then you come
rising from the other side
that’s also beautiful
and say you’ve found me.


Virga
“If the cloud is high, the air warm and dry, and the raindrops small, so that they fall slowly, they may evaporate completely before they reach the earth. If they do so, the drops are called virga.
From: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2007, Rain

Hazard raindrops spatter on the skylight.
All is what it seems to be, the cat asleep
on the dry armchair, the garden wall
overgrown with fruiting ivy, the slanting
roofs of terraced houses with redundant
chimneys, pillared against a woollen sky.
Yet we do not own the times we live in
any more, as the dead did, presumed
more primitive, in the extant past.
Each day's survivors ate, slept and bought
the necessary hours from vicar, beadle
or master. Their future was modelled
precisely on some carved and ornate presence.
Even the thinkers sought to elucidate
the present only to better a yesterday wprld.
Now we manufacture rival futures.
for we have more possibilities
than raindrops falling in the cubic
airspace of this South London suburb.
We can add years to our lives,
not subtract them from brutish death.
We can turn the planet on and
off like a light-bulb. We can play-off
God, with genes and leave the table.
All we have lost is that intimate
belonging to the certainties
that gave us our place in time.
Poverty alone does not confer it.
Electric hands have stripped the poor
of their own simple dignity.
Once, though ranked, we prayed life together.
We were happier once, despite fear.
Now our poetry is a virga raindrop
that dries before it falls. We cannot tell
tears from blessings, nor add up the rainfall
on old habitations, as new eyes cannot
see old rain, nor our shoulders take its weight.

Transmission

It was easy getting through the tide of Solar flares.
Beyond the arcing spout of Helium, it seems the Sun
has planets each with its own merit and
attraction. From one we can take methane,
from another argon. X-rays abound.
Our little ones will smile to learn about
the thermonuclear springs we promised them.
Yet I must warn Control against the use of this
far-flung and so richly favoured system .
As I was cruising low over a bright
blue and white world, I saw creatures like
our pet scorpions with mobile fibres
frenzied with activity. They have all
the talents needed to accomplish love,
a phrase they use that seems to bear no sense.
And yet their energy is sapped unless
they have the time to witness closed colonies
in which the withering away of dignity
and life is witnessed by a crowd so huge,
it must provide mass fascination.
Further they have developed rituals
of destruction no intelligence known
could be the equal of and yet they kill
their own kind for this communal sport.
They sing of it, report of it with tears
and yet promote it by the very means
that could prevent it. Even their best
are kept in cages. Often waiting complex
folds of time before enduring what I’d call
an art form of annihilation.
Others in their millions are left to fade
under the glare of footlights and cameras
which extend the pleasure even to their homes.
This is no world for our simple lifestyle.
No force I’ve met in the universe can help.
I have obliterated this account from
all the channels save this brief encryption
that only final breakdown can access,
clearing my cobalt heart of the reek
of these polluted heavens, glad I shall
expire before I reach you and a chance
accidental word should slip my mouth
about this region and its horror kill.

 
2004

Toxic Assets

I saw them all, McCaig, Hewitt, Heaney
and Muldoon. Frost, Kavanagh and Hughes,
sniffing the spines of each others’ books
for the real mud, the whiff of myth, high on
smoking landscapes, unaware their fix
was dealt them from the same academic chair
they thought they had escaped while Real
Estate dealers priced their vistas for the
Sunday glossies, converting myth
to mortgages all at the latest rates.

2005


Jacob's Ladder

1.

What would you
have me be
sincere to?

My next omission?
My next rebuff?

Obscure my obscurity?
Silence my silence?

Should I leave
the pages
of this notebook blank?

Right now
the pendulum
swings for
the stricken,
the poor, the rude
and the hurt.

I who speak
of the unseen
dead,

the genetic
market place,
that deals on-screen,
through the prying
lenses of a science
that has coded fantasy,

while news-
gangers mouths
spit justice
and the culture
of protest
swings to the tunes
of oppression.

2.

The business
of poverty
turns profitable.
The MBA people
gather in the halls
like insects
at the perfume
of the dead.
De-consecrated, their
sons and daughters
will rasp in anger
and crunch
the smooth gears
of the Campus,
the Party
and the Corporation.
They will dig up
their parents' hearts
to show
they never
beat at all.

3.

I will turn poetry
into ice, into its
animal soul;
my veins open
to the thrill of
pure water.
I am the son
of cliff edges
of rational isolations
and their horror
of settled thought,
where the living
do not know me.

4.

I will be a bull
for young poets,
bucking them from
smug armchairs,
those subsidied
hirelings,
dithering at the landfill
of the imagination.
My sweat discolours
the print of their books,
my muzzle rocks the fences
of their slender spines.

5.

I can only be
a function
of my habitat
of my stubborn,
classless faith.
Remember
the charity-shop
in Twickenham
where I found
a copy of
Elie Halèvy.
I looked up
his footnote
on The Place
of Catholicism
in Victorian
England
and learnt
his conclusion
it had no place
at all.

6.

We have only
the Dream of Jacob,
in this dreadful place,
the feudal shimmer of Waugh,
the village virtue of Tolkien,
Greenes' urban hells.
The rest is the tidal pull
of secular bigotry,
Anglican carpentry
and a slow
lazy drift
into
the pig-sty
of self-esteem,
the rancid sewer
of individuation.

None will be
without sanction
in this time
where we have
more riches
than the sum
of the wealthy past.
And more die
of want
than ever
lived before.

7.

We perch
on a barrier reef
of excess.
The apron impinges,
to lurch
from Aukland,
sloping in flights
to Melbourne
and Sydney fringes
vanishes until
it rears up
from Hawaii
in a ribbon of Tokyo
and Osaka
and vanishing again
to re-emerge in the neon lights
of Vancouver
Toronto,
Denver,
New York,
London, Paris,
Berlin and Aachen.
It fringes St Petersburg,
Moscow,
Odessa
and diverts to
the Cape Town
and comes back
detoxified.
It is a surge
of carved
motorways,
eerie street-lights
and artialised
skyscrapers.
Like a pulsing
tapeworm
that feeds
so strong
on a dark ,
lagoon
of need,
a Stalag sinking
so long
under open greeds.
that tapers
into famine.

Man starves
and woman starves.
Child starves
and land starves
in the great
Continent of wrong,
the wronged Asian field,
the pasture wronged,
wronged
in Africa,
the houses of Islam,
wronged ,
the periurban
islands
and the New World
landmass,
an ash-choked
cistern,
while our planes
purr overhead
like swarming
mosquitoes,
farting
carbon ash;
we slope
on iniquity's
biotope;
on the
ecosystem
of mass-murder.

And yet they walk
like the dust
that grows seed.
Those families
of the earth
past the observation-posts
of our evil archipelago
and its
humanism of slaughter.
As the wheels
of our crisis-flight
unfold
to scream
on runways
of open hate.
Ours will be
the only level,
the only midden
searches will find
that made
possessing life
in the wrong place
itself a crime,
on the abdominal borders,
in the barbed wire wombs.

8.

The voices of dry
language
cough from
the bookshops,
ascending and descending
the doh re me
stories
of precious
futility,
the squawk
of a civilisation
that found death
and left
addicted to it.


9.

They have found
the dead,
and left them
dressed in Cavalli,
in those nervy,
curvy lines
in a saucy wrap-around
shroud,
in a Marni silhouette.
Dress them in Gucci,
the dead, skin and leather,
those ectomorphic
hauntings;
bold as a bubble-gum
balloon;
cocking a half-worn
calf,
pink as candy.
Lifeless as the
new-born calf
for a Giannini bag.

10

We sang for you
in Babylon alone
and stranger, you didn't eat.
We sent soldiers
to free you
and, stranger, you didn't cheer.

“I was too far away
to hear your songs.

I was too busy
burying my children to hear.

I was on your borders
being declared a criminal
on your bastard earth.”


‘Big Brother’ Site, Almere
It was late autumn.
Casually-dressed
men, women ,
with a few belongings,
walked into a disused
factory

outside a small
Low Country
town, whose name
they did not
know.

A small wind,
cold, yet fresh,
had ruffled their
hair, their clothes.

There was a
smell of rust,
oil, a hum of traffic,
distant.

It was late autumn,
when someone
did not follow them in,
closed the door.

They will come
out
in some early
winter,

as silent
as thirty
million
eyes.

The level
land will
put them
in their place,


these
people
turned
into waves.

The odours
of oil
and rust
stronger,


they will
come out
to walk away
from
the question
of existence.

The Invisible Man Catches the Geneva to Paris Express

This made it easier for the train from
Geneva he was always catching
always at the same time, eight twenty five.
In formal terms, it was always
the same, now. Though significantly
the locomotive shifted from
a two six two steam engine and mutated
to an electric Krokodil before his empty eyes.
The carriages changed constantly,
boiled into wooden third-class benches,
then into padded first-class lounges.
Two point five million bottles,
writhed around him, like maggots,
as he sat systematically unseen.
Two million tin cans squirmed and flashed,
three thousand six hundred tonnes
of paper and magazines thrashed about
in a seething tide of grey-matter print.
The hoards of passengers were only seen
as history-less, combining with
and substituting for each other
in a torrent of manners, dress and lore,
as a farmer, putting his hand in his pocket
would force everyone else to change
until his travelling companions were
reduced to their least distinctive usefulness,
such as a headless boy, a rich idiot,
a sexless atheist and a pure corpse.
This was necessary in order to
carry out essential repairs
in the way God read the world.

.

Post-Modernist Contract

The poet (hereinafter the “signified”)
agrees with the media provider
(hereafter “the signifier”)
that he will care for the premises
(hereby “the mind”)
in which, allowing for wear and tear,
both have been deposited.
the poet will pay the landlord
(hereof the “meta-narrator”)
a monthly rent of encoded myths
minus the content-tax
into an account
(heretofore “ a shared
universal structure.”)
controlling his hereupon mind.
The signified will disagree
with the signifier
as often as circulation allows.
This includes the text
of this contract,
which could be considered
null and void,
were it not.

Myanmar, A Ballade of the Outrage.

The countless dead can only grow.
Agents and Generals keep their own
from aid that workers thought too low.
Many entities are carved in stone,
yet to leave emails and the phone
to pause and polish pilot’s wings,
to poll, although the storm was known,
I cannot believe the reality of such things.
Sun-glassed, human, even so
to keep the envoys out who’d flown,
for miles and still they did not know
if the survivors died alone,
while sunlight stiffened life to bone.
Perhaps a General showers, sings.
The water hits as if on stone…
I cannot believe the reality of such things.
What will they do when out they go
to death and grief, stay in alone?
Turn up in military row?
Generations rot in flyblown
holes and poisoned rain peals down
on the sick, deprived of livings.
A cold iniquity has shown,
I cannot believe the reality of such things.
Junta, the faults were not your own.
A grim force held you by the strings.
The devil sat upon your throne
and could not believe the reality of such things.


Crunch

It was all predictable,
but the money was stacked too high
for the dealer to reach with his winning
hand.
To break the bank turned out to be a real
job for somebody.


The Fourth Book of Satires:


In Time of War


In Time of War

1.
The smell of violence,
cordite, sweat
rises across the state.
When actors visit morgues
For real effects,
It is the smell
They cannot take;
The figures don’t smell
and the dead ?
Like that joke
someone told
about a dead actor,
If he’s acting now,
he’s bloody good.
Only the bloody dead
can’t be an act.

2.
The pressure
on words
grows;
thin grounds
pile up convictions
before the storm.
Then heavy silence;
the tongueless,
who got into it
and the
dumbfounded,
who get away
with it.

3.
Ex-squaddies end up
doing time.
There’s no room
for traders of death
traded out
to a country
where murder
is always
a trade.


4.
The butcher’s bill
blows across a dusty highway
through a parched valley.

It blows under the camp bed
of the man in his tent,
after a warm shower,
playing war-games
on his laptop.

His mind punctuated
By the sudden profanity
of unseen destruction
left by smiling, local
friends.
Death’s bill
had to be personal here,
drawn only
on an enemy with a gun.

And then he was asked
to treat
the wounded Taliban,
who blasted
his colleague to ashes:
the butcher’s bill paid.


Casualty

1
He walks out
of the barracks
in the shuffle
of a man who
has taken sadness
aside as a companion,
or a difficult brother.
He does not notice
how people see them,
with a different compact
on existence.

2.
He has spoken
on the page of fear,
where words
fail after speech.
The blank prints
a silence
where those
who loved him
gaze because
they cannot
hear him now.


3.
The men in business suits
and women, wearing black
bring him to the pavement
where he lies,
as if he has his hands
in the pockets of his life
and no longer
marks his own position.

Shamir

1. 17, May,2006

A Midrash on Tadeusz Borowski’s The Sun of Auschwitz

“Villagers of Artas depend on agriculture and its related sub sectors (tending livestock) for their living. The confiscation of Lands of Artas will severely affect their living as the lands most suitable for cultivation will be confiscated and/ or isolated behind the Segregation Wall, which will seriously affect the amount of agricultural produce of the village.”

The Segregation Wall threatens the lands of Artas Village, Southwest Bethlehem City
Palestininan Agricultural Exchange:17 May, 2006


You recollect the sun,
when the Lord led them.
We will walk this green valley
of the nothing that is want.
We will walk this valley
they cannot walk.
To exorcise fear, to balk,
its order, its sweet forgetfulness.
Be woeful of distant valleys, to get,
through. Let leaves tremble, don’t regret.
They will walk this valley,
their world, that cannot flood
for sewage and mud.
We will forge
what was foretold.
We will urge, be getting old.
The ordinal follows us
At threescore and five
we’re very much alive.
What we heard,
we will survive.

2. March 18, 2008

A Midrash on Celan’s Welchen der Steine

Dalia Itzik of the ruling Kadima party, Speaker of the Knesset and acting president while Shimon Peres is overseas, called for the demolition of the mourning tent for the killer (of the Mercaz-HaRav students) and the demolition of his family's home. Tuesday March 18, 2008 Adar 2 12, 5768 Ha’aretz

1.
The Caterpillar crushed stone walls that were
a temple, once,
to prise open the hardened shelters of
the naked dead.
The iron rang on the unwitnessed house.
Rats sped down drains.
At civil twilight, stones were nodded through,
and turned to hills.
Beneath a lens of glass, the nestling-young
claimed their hunger
and the hoopoe on the unstruck stamp
dropped its poison.

2.
The orchard trees trembled to pile up like beds,
open as books.
The poets traced their feeble words on brows
grown hard with cold,
waited to breathe life on a stilled Eden
and hollow breastplates.
Yet their nibs punctured the quiet, naked rocks
with rules of law.
Under the body armour, young limbs lay stiff
for the worm-word
in the beak of the bird that found in paradise,
a death-shamed grub.

3.
We thank those who wove the soft, woolen cloth
that wraps the dead.
We thank those who built the box of lead
that hides their glance.
We thank those who harvested the corn
that soaks their blood.
We thank the pure who cannot smell the stench
that stains them real.
We thank the loafers who forgot their prayers
and kept them cold.
And yet we give no thanks the silent wind
can split love’s rock.


3. January 1st 2009.
A Midrash on Mandelstam, January 1, 1924
Nizar Rayan i.m.

The Year hit you from its
stone sky that screamed
with the Phantom Two Thousand
and two hundred pounds
of ripened fire that fed your family
with the scattered anger of fruits.

Who wrapped the bloodied sheet around you?
where you lay on the death-grime in the street?
Lemons from your grove fell on a Byzantine floor
that stirred the letter and the sound of God.
An old man from an old era folded the law
over your face, making no analogy,
and spoke the word without the unword,
the sound without a human shadow.

Life’s dying here too. Even now the house
is settling at moorings under a Somerset sky
so seized with the rubble of abuse that it tinges red,
the tiles of Vespasian, Ine’s Francisca
locked with skegox , the Norman count
of murder, bewigged assizes for the strangled
to the raucous irony of observant gulls.

I cannot come back with you
to when you sang of the Hanbali Madhab,
‘We are so few’ they say. The few are famed I say.’
Yet I can’t get out from under Sky news,
its cremation elocution at the Liberal
jangle of studio trombones, a last judgement
on the killers of the blameless, the smell
of white phosphorus firing creeds.

The bookshop’s smug perfume
of literary glue sets up this man
to brood over the Waterstone’s
Milton, a sterner monist than you,
but he is to be forgiven theocracy
his slaughtered sinners hang nicely
with a fit –up constitution.

It’s this Phantom 2000
we all I live in, the sentinel
centennial that stops us asking;
who didn’t you kill,
we haven’t killed already?
Who didn’t you curse in the name of God,
we haven’t already cursed?

There is poetry
in your death
because only poetry
shows what can never be cured.
And remember just because
we were killers
in the morning of the Age
does not excuse us now
except to speak to you
and your poor dead,
in the silent wind,
our tyrant hate
that taught you yours.

Agitpoems

1.
They jail the man and fine the woman
that steal the parking off the common,
but let the greater villain loose that steals
the Commons through some ruse.’
The Law demands that we atone
when we take things we do not own,
but leaves the celebs and MPs to dine,
who take things that are yours and mine.
Immigrants and debtors don’t escape
if they conspire the law to break;
this must be so and they endure
those who short sell to sting the poor
The law locks up the man or woman
without cash or licence with a summons
and banks will make their lending slack
until men go and steal it back.

Based on an English folk poem, circa 1764

2.
It was the law stated he should have no concerns.
It was the law stated his every need should be met.
It was the law stated he should be housed,
he should be clothed ,
he should be fed,
he should have friends,
that his illnesses be treated,
that he should drink,
that he should be buried with due rites.
Is this why he lies, shot and bleeding
at the borders of the great society,
not having the password for entrance?


3.The Man At Usher’s Bank

There lived a man in Usher’s Bank
and a wealthy man was he.
He had three billion default swaps
and convertibles oversea.

They hadna’ bin a week in trade
a week, but barely one
when emails came to Usher’s fund
that all the dosh was gone.

I wish black holes should still increase
and turmoil in securities
until my cash returns to me
from Hedge funds overseas.

It fell about Contango day
when accounts were dim with murk,
the banker’s cash came back to him
in quantity eased by a man o’th’kirk.

Blow out the Krug champagne!
and book a private jet to Macau
a bonus let my bank be paid
since my loot is back for now.

Up then crew the red, red debt
and up and crew the Nasdaq.
The people to the banker said
It’s your greed we cannot back.

Fare you well my Sterling dear
farewell to dismal swaps and debts
for I must to a classroom drear
to repent my toxic debts.


4.Fright Size

Fright Size

We’ve thrown you all our aid-
even sent some of our fleet.
We wanna make some trade.
with you crazies who have no feet.

Some day we’ll give out food.
We’ll be the heroes too.
and when we do, don’t be so crude
as to protest or look too blue.

On the aid ship, Lollipop,
it’s a sweet trip through a seismic shock.
where the makeshift stray,
on the bloody beach of Labadee Bay.

Riot police stand everywhere:
crackerjack bodies in the seething air.
And there you are
happy landing on Catastrophe Bar.

See the cardboard tootsies into ooze,
with the big, bad men of the earthquake.
If you say too much, ooh,ooh
you’ll awake with a military ache.

From hospital ship, Lollipop
its into a deep mass grave you’ll hop
on the bloody, bloody beach of Labadee Bay.


5.Athlètes Maudites

Secure at the hub of your little world
the athlete is born so bored,
her manager swears her innocence,
fit for profit, the concern of gossip.
And the architects of purity and health
look down on this Queen Bee of strength.
In bread and honey wanted for the lips
they mixed the filthy steroids of the damned.
Then came the day when they plucked
it from her guts and tossed them in a plastic box.
Dry, beautiful and banned under an angel’s aegis
not once, but twice her nobility became
not laudanum’s, but an Olympic fund’s indignity

Unelect

How the stone that seems a face
cries and beats its feet
on the tongue’s floor,
a painted latch to a private door.
Yours were the only hands allowed
up the arse of the printed page.
Ruth gleaning on the BBC Solitudes
a die thrown for an unseemly gown.
The breath-paws promises renown.
Yours was the only kiss for cash.
The soul writes on private language,
makes a lie of your lay, a liturgy of permits.
A rape of the bar, a Carribean Caricatwalk .
How it says this – to your rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric
to your heeled and mealed, how it whines without conscious
kicking the downed, dialling the ready-fingered,
poetry, poetry, poetry.

Tale of a Tiger, or Survival of the Fitup


I am the tiger and my skin survives.
I fasten on the famous
and make poems of their lives.
First it is the Soho leopard
on which this tiger dives.
Now I’m digging into Darwin
and have my wordy knives
already flashing for
a fabled host that thrives
in Post-Colonial gloom.
I slip into the myth he hives
and send out a smear
that hatches and connives
to settle in the skin,
where metonym thrives
until his ethics pulls him back.
Fat cats pounce that Oxon shrives
my literary guile and guilt
and then the public strives
to seek me out and pour on
fame that infamy derives
from murk, seeking further
hosts in poets who led bad lives:
Eliot, so nasty to the Jews,
Ted Hughes who killed his wives,
Verlaine and Villon for all their arts
just useful, poor, dead farts. 
Two ILO Limericks

There once was a President, Obama
who hated a man called Osama.
He said, “If I can”
I’ll get this man,
or I stand to lose Alabama.”

There was a young man called Hadad
who tried very hard to be bad.
The closer he got
he found he had not
the gift Ahmadinejad had.

2009

Bye-Bye-Election
From the analects of K’Ung Fu Tse

The servant wanted an explanation
of good authority. The Master answered
“You must invest in Tory funds.
You must keep the Labour watchdog
and make sure the LibDems have
the confidence of the people.”
“And if one of these three had to be let go?”
“Then let the Tories go.” “And out of the two?”
“Then let the Labour watchdog go.”
“and what about the LibDems?”
“The confidence of the people
is not the authority’s to dispose.”


Health cuts

I have cut the scabs from law-words
Which the strong shaped from wounds
they inflicted on the weak, who made them strong.
The grammar of blood flows downwards
With the gravity of pain seeking nature
To witness the silence all people observe.
I have torn off the bandages wrapped round
The language of losing, of the homeless,
Huddled under plastic signs of banknotes
That gave the rich, the profit of their loss.
The tears of want flow downwards
Into the whitewashed page that witnesses all.

Essays on the Big Theory

Of Person

Of course the word is adhesive. It flaps
Onto a pig for example survives its last breath
Bubbling with careful death, or onto
Something human with the same sense ending.
To collect in a common grave of language
Heaving down the walls between
objects and persons and loosing the powerful verbs
that govern composition and decomposition.

Of Freedom

To raise the question of freedom is to witness a beating
Or a humiliation and say nothing
because others say nothing, knowing once it is over
the victim is free to go, or gone to freedom.
It all has to do with the how powerfully
The masters take their aim. To be born free
Is no more than a hypothesis given to chance,
Who does not know the rules of the human game.
The authority begins with a list of those who fought
Too hard for freedom and need rules to tell them
The limits of hope in the language of bandages,
Hardening sores and the hypodermic kindness
That re-brands the shape of humans into strangers.

Of Ownership

Not everyone who breathes is legally entitled to do so.
Some last too long. Some do not adapt to revised techniques.
Others are too young to release the oppressed
As their carers cannot tell whether their charges
would need them in future, or face a future of need,
or need a future at all as “either” has a way of vanishing
from the language of possibility, once the speaker
has got a grip on enough reality such as not to let go.
Besides what can the law do with the heart cut loose
From its consumer conduits and measured circulation?
The secret is never to use words for ownership inexpertly.
The authority does not own, dreams, fantasies, tickles. faiths and
Metaphysical visions out of copyright. The need for consent
On shared stimulation arises from the difficult question
Of how to cost such a commodity out of barter.
The problem with simply letting everyone go free
Is that the powerful own only the freedom of others,
Being invisible and subject to the silent deduction of threat.

Out of the Sky

The students have fallen out of the sky
onto the roads without a reason why.
Of course the media multiplies its myths:
it’s the power lines, or poisoned piths.
It’s the Apocalypse, or coastal spills,
or varieties of ecological ills,
lightning, snowstorms, or fault-lines,
mid-air collisions, or unexploded mines.
Be reassured, the explanation’s clear.
It’s just an ongoing mortality, dear.
Some people complained and we had to fix it.
for boozing youths were taking the biscuit.
It seems they collide with elite course fees
and maintenance grants. It’s just a tease
we’ll send yours home in a vocational box
so long as you pay for his darned socks.

Of Power

Some people end up in the hands of others.
To be silent, terrified, weak, or wearied
Is to give up rights to another.
As there are not enough rights to go round
Such dependency is highly economic
and saves the cost of a form to fill in.
Owners have the right to recycle their goods,
unless it is a book, statue, painting, landscape
or composition that might upset licensed
stakeholders holders. Labour can be recycled
into unemployment, but is usually stored
As imminent threat that pays for its space
through cowed dependence. Life can be recycled
into flesh. The aborted, suicides, murdered,
dead in battle and those fallen
on the field of production show
the same uniformity in the landfill
of transplant as other refuse.
Those who waste their own property
Deserve its confiscation, though want of space
Makes the repatriation of the living
a surface problem, given
to the mapmakers of space to sort out.


Of Justice

Yet should anyone sell himself to another,
Want life-security in exchange for complete
Labour capital and obedience to work schedules,
Such actions must be ruled out, as they show
To others what they cannot be entrusted with:
the secret reality of greed that is the only good.
Besides who’ll answer for their crimes?
All who have the potential to commit crime
Can be defined as suspects, which saves
Bad-bank investment in higher education
Concepts such as citizenship, or liberty.
This is why we persecute the activities
of serial killers, as they have no right
to execute a privilege reserved to few.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 12.02.2011

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