In Veralynn, freshly renamed
Capital City of Churchillia
Where the tannoys rasp all day and night
Alternating episodes of ITMA with
The World King’s greatest jokes,
The felon’s corpse
Twists from the gibbet in the brittle breeze.
His crime:
Not mentioning The War.
Mothers turn their children’s faces
From the scene,
Tug tetchily along the length
Of their fraying gasmask cases’ straps
And hurry on to queue for hours
For meagre rations
Of the most basic of Life’s Simplest Essentials.
I wanna be a
World beater,
A
World beater
A
World Beater
A
Woad Botha
A
Veldt Pouter
A
White Buddha
And a
World beater
And though I’m just a
Wet bleater
A
Warped boaster
A
Windy Bunter
My
Wild banter
Gonna make me a
World beater
A
World breeder
Whose
Whack butter
Soaks
Wank blotters
Gonna be a
World beater
A fucking
World beater
A
World belter
Who
Would batter
The
World, bladdered
And make the
World bleed
Until the
World’s bitter
And the
Welts blister
Cos I’m a
World beater
A
World Beater
A
World Beater
A
World beater
Who’s gonna beat that sorry World red, white
Black and blue.
When the stores ran out of similes
The poets queued all night
In growing sullen anger round the block
Like a queue of poets queueing,
A line that no poet could write.
But nobody was ready for the shock
When they then ran out of metaphors
And the poets, in a rage,
Rioted in mayhem in the streets,
A riot of poets rioting.
But none would soil the page
With trash like that. Such lines dishonour Keats.
Then the non-glut of litotes
Made them be not unafraid
Oxymorons would be next! A living death!
A shortage of synecdoches
Would hancock their whole trade,
And no periphrasis left to speck their breath.
But the shortage of superlatives
Made columnists and poets
Unite, although its cause is no great mystery
For this means no “Greatest Crisis”,
Nor “Most Fearful Time We’ll Know”. It’s
Not even now “Worst Government In History”.
Every previous time they’d dropped Death round
They’d always phone to say if they’d been held up,
By a contraflow near Calvary
Or resurfacing for miles and miles
Along the Road to Hell.
And even when they dropped Death round
To gather up my parents and my dearest, sweetest friends
They’d get here 7 at the latest
And Death would look round from DBeebies on the telly
When the doorbell rang and sneer
“It tolls for thee.”
But Death’s been round here now for months
And every day I think I must ring The Authorities,
And plead, There must be somewhere else
For Death to stay, with someone closer, some family,
Where Death might be,
Well,
Happier.
But dropped right in it, it’s got to me.
Death’s not easy. When we tried home schooling
Death just drawled with unanswerable finality
“Frankly, what’s the point?” and sulked for hours
While I searched all day online
For fun activities
To do at home
With scythes.
At least now we can get out
And meet Death’s bffs off down the park
Though if I’m honest, watching Death
Morosely hanging out with War and Pestilence
Push Famine on the swings has palled
As quickly at attempts to build
Vast hecatombs and
Mausoleums
With Duplo.
And now the shops are open too,
Though I glimpsed the gathering darkness
From the corners of my eyes
As we queued up outside Primark for new cowls.
Still, tomorrow I have promised Death
We’re going to the Zoo. And yet
Amidst all those
Endangered
Species
There’s just no knowing exactly what Death’s going to do.
You’ve been stuck indoors so long you’re Monte Christo’d,
Scratched days runed on the walls,
Your eyes Ben Gunning madly,
So stir crazy now most mornings you can’t stir.
You’ve been stuck inside so long you’ve gone full Withnail
Breakfast every morning
From last night’s takeout’s tinfoil
Cold Korma which you spoon in with a shoehorn
You’ve been stuck inside so long that you’ve Rasputined,
Charles Manson in the mirror,
Homer Simpsoned in your y-fronts
De-evolving til you’re now the Missing Link
You’ve been stuck indoors so long you’ll Dr Manette,
But you’ve been recalled to life!
The shops have opened! There’s a fire sale
On strait-jackets and shrouds on down the High Street!
A Conscript in the Culture Wars,
Press ganged by the press
To take the World King’s shilling
And a mission to oppress.
Brutalised through basic training,
Then square bashing for hours,
Soon we’ll be bashing Pakis,
But we’re such a useless shower
Then it’s guard a slaver’s statue;
He’s as British as warm beer
The serjeant-major tells us
And we’re here because we’re here
Then another camp to train us
To tweet death threats without fear
But we’re hanging round for hours
Because we’re because we’re here
Next it’s counting all the rounds
In the Spectator Magazine,
Then blancoing our braces,
Then it’s chips in the canteen
Then it’s off Psychops Training
To learn how to provoke
With thumbs poised on our keypads
The battalions of The Woke
And our officers exhort us
To go right over the top
To emulate the actions
Of a US riot cop
Driving back the SJWs,
The commies and the gays
Using earthy language
They won’t let you say these days
Like in every war we drove them back!
The frogs! The beastly hun!
Let’s drive back our next door neighbours!
Don the khaki! Grab your gun!
In their columns our brave officers
Screamed “Better Dead Than Red!”
And that’s the day we mutinied and
Shot our officers instead.
Let’s play statues!
Stand stock still,
Never moving!
What a thrill!
Never change
And never shift,
Just stand rock solid
Like God’s gift.
Never give,
Never alter,
Never move
To lift the halter
Never apologise,
Never explain,
Never say
Never again
So let’s play statues!
Don’t move an inch!
All play statues!
(Fetch a winch)
All human beings start out female,
The human species started black;
It takes some pretty fucked-up magic
To turn all of that on its back.
All human beings are born as social
Beasts who need to help and share
But fucked-up wizardry has fucked us
Convincing us we mustn’t care.
All human beings are born to crave love
It’s hardwired in as we gestate
How fucked up is the occult fuckedness
Enchanting us to make us hate?
And if you don’t believe in magic,
Are immune to legerdemain
How else have we become so fucked up
We’ve fucked over the human brain?
What sleight-of-hand, classic distraction,
Ace of spades palmed up a sleeve
Could consequently fuck us so much
That we believe what we believe?
That fucking chanted mantra: This is
The one way fucking things can be,
We’re only human, & if you’re quiet
You might be human too. Fuck me!
This fucking curse is special magic,
Of church bells, banks, and cringing knaves,
Accountants, clowns and riot cops
All underpinned by grateful slaves
An ancient curse that takes some shit,
And shapes it to some fucking thing
Waves a wand, knocks back a potion,
Hocus pocus! Here’s your king!
All human beings have been enchanted
The bad way, in this living hell,
So break the charms, spit out the potion,
Crack mirrors - and let’s fuck this spell.
Stumbling out of Lockdown
Like a 70s British porn star
Falling shackled from the wardrobe,
Streaky y-fronts round your ankles,
When her old man comes home early
because the abattoir’s closed down.
Opening up the schools
Like the janitor in “Please Sir!”,
Kids’ heads caught in the railings
And bodging up the carpentry
With make-do-and-mendy comedy
and jokes about The War
Tackling systemic racism
Like a blacked-up back row chorus boy
In The Black And White Minstrel Show
As seen on prime time telly, and
Now headlining the Summer Show
down the pier in endless rain.
Strategising everything,
A genius wearing tracksuit pants,
Dressing up like Jimmy Saville
In standard-issue rapist wear
And fixing it and fucking it
all up with a sneer.
Crumbling a curly-wurly
Into his bowl of Special K,
Benny-Hilling “Oo-er Missus!
It’s getting really close in here!”
He slops in slugs of Rohypnol
to forget the stench of death.
Then we chorused to the virus
As it stepped towards the door
“But at least you’ve changed the World!”
And someone cheered.
All the virus did was eye us
And as it spat upon the floor
What it had instead of lips curled
And it sneered.
“But everything is different now!
Nothing can be the same!
It’s the time to change our ways!
Everyone cried.
The virus creased its many brows;
Drawled: “Didn’t catch you names.
Though frankly I’m amazed
You’ve not all died.”
We shuffled slightly nervously.
With an embarrassed laugh
Someone said “We baked some bread!”
And then they coughed.
Hissed the virus: “Heard of Malthus? He
Could show you all a graph
To prove you’re best off dead.
Now just fuck off.”
“But virus!” we all cried at once,
“At least you’ve made us pause
Our ecocide!” It roared loud
“Christ! Stop whining!
You’re just my scoff, you stupid cunts!”
And left. Through our applause
Some of us thought, can shrouds
Have silver linings?
Each night they tied a fresh balloon to
A fence post in the field.
You could see them from the by-passed old coast road,
A bouncing pinprick beyond the nettles
Each balloon the same dull colour as
The last one, pukish ochre,
But each day with new words scrawled on its paunch.
The words came clumped in phrases of three words
In large and childish letters,
Illegible to the rare, far off and speeding traffic
From across the scrub and cowpats,
Whereas the kine and sheep and creatures of the soil
Clearly cannot read.
Daily, a fresh balloon’s there nonetheless.
The harvest mice & corncrakes speculated
This is an angel’s lung,
Opaque inside from layers of caked mucus, a
Mysterious gift of hope from God.
Some bank voles scoffed. A porcupine’s insides,
They swore. The earthworms laughed.
Although yellow the balloons smell faintly malty.
On windy days the balloons thrash in seizure;
Flop limply when the sun shines;
Drum meaningless staccato freeform riffs
During summer cloudbursts,
Deflating slowly through the long, dull afternoon
Into shrivelled condoms
Pierced with petty uselessness and protection against nothing
After dusk.
They tore down Number 25
Cromwell Road in Gloucester
But not before they’d disinterred
And laid to proper rest the victims
(Many of them his children)
Fred West had raped and murdered and then dug
In to its foundations.
And now downstream in Bristol they’ve torn down and thrown
Edward Colston in the dock,
Boston Tea Partying the kind of killer
Whose trade gestated Those United States,
Dealing in the blood and bones they ground
To line and waterproof the pits
Of their self-satisfaction.
Let’s list the things we should tear down,
An inventory of shame,
Those edifices pocked by Time
Which History pimps as shrine and not memorial;
Where the Crime Scene serves as sacred
To the criminals still sacrificing human offerings
At all these altars and these icons to propitiate
Themselves.
Though when the bulldozers are done
With Windsor Castle, Bath, the Bank of England,
Oxbridge, Eton, Kew, the Stately Homes,
And blood bubbles in the rubble of the pebbledash
Of heritage & shackling charm beside the gift shops,
And that whole haul from conquest, theft & slavery
Starts stinking in the exhausted sunlight, then recall:
Swift, too, lived off the proceeds of the slave trade.
Because the thieves’ and killers’ projection of reality
Has even had its knee on satire’s throat as well,
It seems forever.
Though where 25 Cromwell Road
Once rumbled with the screams downstairs
There’s now a public right of way.
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Though your mouth’s a toothless gash
Like the slits in all those throats which you have secretly had slashed
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Though your ponytail’s panache
Was, despite a certain brashness, thrown away with last year’s trash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Though each time you take a lash
The pain and time it takes to do it leaves you unabashed
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Though you’ve lice in your eyelashes
And the rust will keep on eating its way through your weapons cache
Guard your stash
So guard your stash
Guard your stash
Because you still hold the lash
In a system which has spread just like a suppurating rash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Because you gave the morons sashes
Which you can use as nooses and then watch the fools’ limbs thrashing
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Because you create the clash
That your gunsels still will shill in streams of shriller balderdash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
And then trim your moustache
And then run again for office while you’re laundering your cash
Guard your stash
Then guard your stash
Guard your stash
As your cops throw thunderflashes
Because any minute now this all will crash and turn to ashes
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
Guard your stash
An Ogre shuffled through his mountain throne room
And slumped beside the moraine of his hoard,
A few loose geegaws at the gradient’s sill.
They landslide, hourly, to the cavern’s floor.
This pile, his wealth, his loot, these spoils, he’d got
Bamboozling a dragon he then rode
On raids throughout the villages around.
He didn’t need the dragon these days, though.
Despite razing their slums and silage dumps
The villagers now cheered him when he toured
Their villages (they’re villagers; they’re dumb)
To pick which of their children to devour.
The Ogre had cut off the dragon’s head,
Scooped diamond eyes from sockets of gold plate,
Grabbed the rubies from its spilling blood
And, garnished with a child, ate up its meat.
The Ogre yawned, the dragon quite forgotten
(He stole some other dragons just last season;
The topsoil smells of smoke although it’s sodden
With blood in villages where they don’t cheer).
And now, amidst the scree of tumbling treasure
The Ogre spots a thing which gives him pause.
He held it between thumb and thick forefinger
And glowered. It impudently matched his gaze.
He turned it on its side in case its contents
Might spill out, then he sniffed it like a cat,
Was going to smash the thing in his impatience
When a tiny spark of Grace flashed in his head.
And thus he saw himself. He saw the monster.
He blinked. Then something else was there instead.
The mirror showed a saint with shaven tonsure
And a halo resting on his stubbly pate.
One should not mock the chronic sick,
And nor should we mock Dominic
Whose road-based therapies recall,
Damascus-bound, those of St Paul
Who was, you lot should be reminded,
On a road trip when unblinded.
Dom need make no apology!
It’s not just opthalmology
That sees Road Treatment’s benefits!
It’s a cure-all for the many! It’s
A tested and well tried procedure
From whooping cough to paraplegia!
For instance, the old dean of Keble’s
Gout’s returned: drive him to Peebles!
Abjure the lure of penicillin!
Simply drive to Inniskillin!
Infantile paralysis?
Why not try a drive to Diss?
Your child it born with a cleft palate;
Drive the brat to Shepton Mallet!
A cerebral catastrophe?
Fixed by a drive to Leigh-on-Sea.
You find your mum’s airways restricted?
Motor her to the Peak District;
A femur pops out of its socket?
Drive all the way to Drumnadrochit.
Obviously, you have a stroke,
It’s in the car to Basingstoke;
And likewise cardiac arrest
Demands a drive to Bristol West!
So if your stomach ulcer bleeds
Jump in the car and drive to Leeds;
Carries rot your yellow teeth,
They gleam before you’ve got to Neath;
Struck down with Huntingdon’s Chorea?
Simply drive to Hazelmere.
A touch of cancer? With a whoosh
Drive off to Ashby-de-la-Zouche!
And when they say you’ve caught malaria -
Hull Regeneration Area!
Just even feeling sort of sick
You’ll cure on drives to Walberswick
And when they say you’ve got Corona
A nice long drive to Barcelona
Should see you right! Whate’er you have
Just punch a route in your sat nav
And soon, on the A23,
You’ll find the perfect remedy!
All you have to do is DRIVE! It
Cures what ails ya! Or go private.
The Centre fell apart an age ago.
They poison falcons now
Protecting grouse chicks
To be killed by corporate clients at weekends.
The loot is laundered through the flood planes
And the floodwater gets browner every year.
They boast of their intense insensitivity.
Worse, there’s no earthly chance there’ll be convictions.
And the rough beast crèche is full to overflowing
With more arriving as each hour comes round
Til now there’s hardly room enough
To slouch.
Every time they reach
For the handgun of free speech
Just pay attention to their other hand:
They’re speed dialling the cops
To kick you in the chops,
The cops that rich men have at their command
And every time they preach
On the godhead of free speech
Pay close attention to their iron jaws
They don’t want speech to upend
Their privilege to defend
Their right to call you niggers, queers and whores.
And every time they teach
About the value of free speech
Please watch the lips on either of their faces
For they’ll fight & fight & fight
For their inalienable right
To scream the shit that keeps us in our places.
Wanna Corona boner?
Check out a COO VID!
Thumb through our “AHHHHH!” NUMBERS!
LOCK DOWNS! MASKS! FUR, LOW!
Phwoar!
Cummings cummings cummings cummings CUMMINGS!!
There ought to be a law!
What’s that, mate?
Been stuck indoors too long?
You yearn for something truly squalid?
Look, come back here; we got the really nasty stuff
Galore!
Snuff movies, mate. A million of em. Gonna float your boat?
There ought to be a law.
Ten weeks dodging contagion from a barber
Has left me with Victorian Bishop’s hair
Until I sleek it back after the shower
And in the mirror a Victorian Liberal millowner
Is now standing there.
You could pretend these chance tonsorial echoes
Mean something deeper about just right now
Either truths Utilitarian about Profits
Or Faith in God’s revealed Religion serving us better
Than Science might allow.
39 Articles versus the Market:
Even boiled down to homeopathic particles
Both prick-tease with capricious inhumanity.
As of yesterday it’s killed thirty-eight thousand (that’s 974
Extra deaths per Article).
When you’re asked to join the Cabinet
And think “What jolly fun!”
And they then remove your backbone,
How exactly is this done?
Is it ripped out like Excalibur
Or is your hour of bliss
Disturbed as they dissolve it
With an antiseptic hiss?
Or, when you swap your vertebrae
For a thing you might adore,
Do they ratchet from your arsehole
To the polished marble floor?
But whatever way they calculate
To confiscate your spine
Do you think it’s wholly dignified
To squeal, “Oh! How divine!”
And if the blotting paper spine
You’ve now got’s all you wish,
Please remember, your condition
Would disgust a jellyfish.
