Once Central Government’s Writ no longer ran
Those who came instead agreed, before they shifted
Out of town to make up fresh arrangements
To cordon off the crime scene, Pompeii that evil place,
Piranesi Westminster and let Whitehall rewild
So that from the shell of Parliament and the deconsecrated Abbey
To the charred and roofless palace’s facade
Back down the beyond the park and through to Horseguards,
All was now Chernobyled, out of bounds.
The radiation was just isotopes of long historic wrongs.
Still, the mortmain of institutionalised atrocities
Wrought by the British State upon the world
Made that bland acreage a no-man’s-land
A haunted patchwork of disgust and honed dishonour
Its gnomen this notorious coffinish backdrop,
History’s proscenium arch, Shame’s stage, Ambition’s boards,
10 Downing Street, which, however, they reopened
Some years later as the New Museum of Shit.
Satire played no part in its new function.
The Museum’s trustees explained to all who cared
That when the state collapsed new hidden treasures
Had been discovered, sequestered far below the streets
In the medieval cellars of old Whitehall Palace, among old thrones
And secret treaties, a stomach-churning trove,
Vaults filled with dried and varnished turds, a faecal archive
Of the shit of all the servants of the State
Back to the Conquest, the spoor of Britain’s coprocratic lords.
History can never be concluded;
The heritage builds up like falling ash;
We need museums to wrangle our responses
When the Past, like herpes, breaks back through our skin.
To which end, now with sensitive curation,
The Shit Museum’s collection was displayed
In recreated Georgian glass-topped Cabinets
With rank on countless rank of medieval
Shrivelled twiglets shat by nameless clerks.
Further on, flaking Reformation Mars bars
Were labelled as authentically the shit
Of Thomas Cromwell or Archbishop Cranmer
With shining cowpats from Restoration Admirals
Filling up the rooms of most of the third floor,
Then, after Pitt, more and more examples
Were kept in pickling jars, shelf after shelf,
Pale prunes from statesmen and superintendents,
With one whole shelf of shit from Bonar Law.
A room was dedicated to the Great Turds:
Churchill and Victoria’s crap inlaid in gold;
Another to shit from unworthy recipients
Of offices or honours, who had added
To the archive, having signed eternal silence
In drops of their own blood as they had strained:
Kim Philby, Oswald Mosley, Robert Maxwell,
From the shit of diplomats, spies and MPs
Right next to Sir Jimmy Savile OBE’s.
This priceless educational resource -
In terms of the DNA the shit yielded alone -
Nonetheless remained largely unknown.
They gave up thoughts of opening a tearoom
As the volunteers who staffed the Museum retched
And no one bought a single baked shit keyring,
Or a postcard for its kitschness. In the wilderness outside
Eventually the beavers built a dam
Between the Cenotaph & where they’d killed King Charles
To form a dappled lake fed from the nearby breached Embankment.