That period of Tyranny
In the Khanate of The Golden Horde
When the infant khan’s six uncles
Despoiled the land until each one
Was strangled by a Kurdish eunuch
Himself then sacrificed in gratitude
To their gods of
Steppe and eagle’s cry.
That Pythagorean formula
That proves that six,
Divided by itself, is
Neither greater nor lesser
Than the sum of its own square root
Subdivided by itself.
The title of a Sherlock Holmes
Mystery somehow involving
Half a cricket team
That Conan Doyle himself
Burnt in the grate
Once he perceived
It was, after reflection, just
Too farfetched and ridiculous.
A lost bejewelled straight edge
For measuring the Golden Mean
Created by Fermat himself
To measure the immeasurable
Until Descartes, with a dirty laugh,
Claimed it was the length of Fermat’s cock.
They say the rule was melted down
By order of a secret Papal Court.
The mocking epitaph scratched on
The cell doors which served as tombstones, Of those now nameless functionaries
Who, the legends say, coined a phrase
Of such aching banality, not fiendishly
Thus to disguise the true despotic nature
Of their draconian edict
But just because they were themselves banal.
The words - it’s claimed they are the same -
Were scratched by unknown hands
Some centuries
after The Reckoning
By which time
tempers
Had somewhat cooled.
Plague Songs - The Rule of Law /
“Boris” has fucked The Rule of Law!
And what’s in there not to adore?
Now we can batter down his door
And piss upon his parquet floor,
Steal everything he’s got, and more,
Then sock the fucker on the jaw
And he can’t even call The Law!
Posh twats straight out of Evelyn Waugh
Survey vast tracts of fen and moor
Their family’s owned since days of yore
And every fat complacent boor
Assumes they’ll own it evermore -
But not without The Rule of Law!
For “libertarians” ignore
That mutual aid’s required before
You smash the state and ditch the law.
They think that they can simply whore
After loot and furthermore,
Unbound by rules that they deplore,
They can pillage even more
And safely stash the swag offshore!
But typically, they don’t explore
The flipside in this tug-o-war:
That WE can steal from THEM, and nor
Can they stop us, without The Law.
Nor will the sound of dropping jaw
Of Tories who’ve been so cocksure
Prevent the spilling of their gore
Without protection of The Law.
So now they’ve dumped The Rule of Law
Let’s prise open their grasping claw,
Deprive them of their homes galore,
Smash their Oxbridge boatclub oar,
Land our ships upon their shore,
Bring down our hammers just like Thor
As we even up the score.
And if they scream “WHERE IS THE LAW?”
They should’ve thought of that before
They let “Boris” fuck The Law.
Plague Songs - No, I’m Not Michael Rosen /
We’re going on a bear hunt
We’re gonna kill a big one
What beautiful day!
We’re not scared
We know our 2nd Amendment Rights
We’ve got automatic weapons
We’re gonna fire them from helicopters
We’re dentists from Milwaukee
We’re gonna get some trophies for the lobby
We hope we get to use the napalm
We hate those fucking bears
And those SJW Bears Lives Matter Snowflakes can go fuck themselves
Cos they’re gonna go through the fucking roof!
Dakkadakkadakkadakkadakkadakkadakkadakkadakkadakka!!!
Plague Songs - Bystanders and Passersby - September 11th /
The obnubilating thunderhead
Of broken building, planes and faith
That billowed foully, pumicing
Those gruesome flecks of human bits
Down on the canyons of New York
Provides the perfect object lesson:
That the Chivalry of Modern War
Waged between rival dilettantes
Pumping up on certainty is the
Bodycount of bystanders and passersby.
From stadia in Chile
To the suburbs of Baghdad,
Mining towns in Congo
To a cop car in Detroit,
Death camps, death squads, death cults,
In Ramadi or in Alabama,
Even to the killing fields
In care homes in Home Counties,
In war or peace or in between
This is how fragile fuckwits
Become Caesars, through the
Bodycount of bystanders and passersby.
Plague Songs - Mantra /
My friend Georgina Morley’s
Mother was extremely posh
But had a useful mantra
For moment’s such as these.
So repeat it to bring good luck,
Whispered like a pacing nun:
“People are cunts”, she’d say,
And that was that.
Plague Songs - Cartoon Animal /
There’s a smirking cartoon animal
From off of Kid’s TV
On a pastel coloured plaster on your chest
But if you wash too often
Its edges start to pucker
And eventually it drifts off in the scum.
There’s some scowling cartoon animals
On the ducal coat of arms
Tattooed over the scab the plaster hid.
The scab is black and crusty
Like a dried hard dirty pan
And you tease its corners with your fingernails.
And the scab’s big as a grapefruit
And it softly tears away
To expose a deep and ancient open wound
That’s pustular and seeping
And goes down to the bone
And you can barely look at it, but must.
Then you’ll see the crosshatching of scars,
The tissue start to split
And that’s England, that is, hewn into your chest
By a millennium of conquest,
Dispossession, theft and lies,
And festering with gangrene in your heart.
So best go to the biscuit tin
Where we keep the first aid
With a Cotswold Cottage printed on the lid
And get an aspirin like a Smartie
And another pastel plaster
With smirking cartoon animals from off of Kid’s TV.
Plague Songs - The Uroboros /
The snake coils round again and starts devouring its own tail
The scorpion arches up to lick its sting
The cassowary bends to peck at its own poisoned spur
And in a yogic miracle Johnson kisses his own ring.
Covid swerves in a tight circle and starts over again
Old No-Eyes frugs a circuit with his scythe
And Johnson fists himself with his own tousled turnip head
Though none of us would ever guess the wanker was so lithe.
Everything comes round again, eternally recurring,
In endless repetition, like a comet.
Johnson sticks his head up his loose arse biting at Brexit Deals
Like a fat, thrashed dog returning every evening to its vomit.
Plague Songs - 7th September /
The trees rose in solidarity
Refusing to be felled
But when news of this atrocity
Reached those gold towers in which dwelled
The avaricious psychopaths,
A small one of whose capers
Is to print lies about those they hate
In their various papers
On sheets of extruded woodpulp
They flew into a rage
And told the fascist lackeys that they hired
To fill each page
With coruscating columns
Denouncing those sick trees
And likening the wooden scum
To traitors and disease
And calling on their readers
To fight back! Take back control!
Chop down those commie trees and burn
The bastards to charcoal!
Lay waste the whole damn planet!
Purge it of each blade of grass
Guaranteeing that sweet freedom
To talk out of your arse
Insisting all their prejudices
Are Talking Truth To Power
When really it just helps pay for
A taller golden tower.
But still the trees refused to budge
Beyond some sacrifice
To fall to block printing works exit
Routes, to be precise.
So the avaricious psychopaths
Ordered their hireling hacks
To open a new front by writing
Withering attacks
On every other type or kind of known
Printed material
Which, the hacks lamented, could spread
Diseases venereal
Sure to infect your kiddies, drive you mad
Then kill you dead
“SO FOLKS!” they yowled, “SEND ALL THOSE
EVIL BOOKS TO US INSTEAD!”
They stripped bare every bookshelf,
Pillaged every library
To acquire more printed matter,
Through threats, blackmail and bribery,
And then pulped all written records
Recording deed and name
To get out the next edition, headlined
“MIGRANTS ARE TO BLAME!”
The trees just shrugged and shed their leaves
Now turned a pleasing yellow.
“DEMOCRACY’S UNDER ATTACK!”
The hacks and lackeys bellow.
But when they’d used up all the books
(Not an infinite resource)
There was nothing left to print on,
Which also meant, of course,
There wasn’t even toilet paper
For wiping off the shit
From the avaricious psycho’s arseholes,
Then publishing it.
They stuffed their mouths with bearer bonds
And thousand dollar bills
And whined “Writing was invented,
As were ink and even quills,
So that avaricious psychopaths in
Gold towers can tell lies
About the weak and powerless,
And then praise to the skies
Our client politicians and print trash
About “D” listers
And columns by such massive wankers
Their hands are pocked with blisters,
To help tease out our nation’s Id,
Promoting fascist trash
In order to spread hatred through
The People, like a rash,
Dressed up in patriotic drag -
Flag and Hope and Glory -
To furnish our gold towers
With a further Golden Storey!
Attack any tiny part of that, and
YOU’LL KILL FREE EXPRESSION!”
Then again, you have to wonder
Who chooses to freshen
Their stinking breathe with more shit
After each shit-eating session.
Plague Songs - Kinlochmoidart /
Nineteen and I’d just past my test
So drove us all to John O’Groats,
My passengers now both old men.
Both of them still friends.
With youthful recklessness I damn
Near killed us nineteen times before
Our Sunday lunch in John O’Groats
Then I drove us South.
We stopped to pee in Sutherland
In a passing place. Clouds cleared.
First time I’d seen the Milky Way;
Pissed over my shoes.
Then drove off through the bristling night.
Unknowingly, we aquaplaned
Fort William’s yellow, spiky streets,
An hour’s drive from here.
By 26 I’d wisely said
“I think I love you.” You: “Oh good!”
And with your friends you’d come back here
Now with me in tow.
We sat in bed, gazed down the glen
On your birthday and sailed to Skye
While night skies never quite broke free
From the May gloaming.
At 28, we’re married now:
A mad fortnight of drunken nights,
Canasta and hilarity
While lusty stags belled.
At 31, we’re parents now.
Fred’s 2nd birthday sees me bid
£10 to buy the show’s prize cake,
Making locals gasp.
Aged 38 we’re here again
Before a damp cottage on Mull,
And their first flight. Diana died
Later on that night.
41, this time my in-laws
Invite themselves, don’t do a stroke.
We picnic on the Green Isle, Loch
Shiel’s burial ground
Before your erstwhile step-father
Drove us all mad half-planning his
Birthday barby on Kentra’s sands
In a howling gale.
At 50, with some fractious friends,
Long walks and late night whiskies and
At last we tour the Big House and
Find the dog’s gone blind.
And dinner in Acharacle
With Michael Brambell in whose arms
Guy the Gorilla died. We spoke
Of foul-mouthed parrots.
And now I’m here at 61,
And Fred’s turned 32 today
With us, wrapped up in Martha’s love.
Little else has changed.
Nino Stewart walks her dogs as
Buzzards shriek above the tops, lochs
Specked with isles with gangly trees
From a Durer print.
In truth the greatest changes came
Between when I was almost here,
My shoes still damp from my own piss,
And that trip with you:
At 19, on the cusp of hope,
Set fair for Cambridge, as they’d planned,
One life ahead of me on tracks
Leading God knows where.
Then, whatever hope I’d had, that
Cambridge wasn’t all I’d guessed, a
Timeless playpen of unchanging
Old complacency
Rotted away to fuel that rage
That blew me, laughing, off the rails,
Spin in the air, then land wheels down
On the open road.
That Post-War world of me, 19,
Was slashed & burnt. Yet thieves still rule;
The land round here’s still lorded over
By their landed kin.
The change is coming, like a curse
That festers through the centuries,
To pay us back in fearful kind
For all our old crimes
The mists will boil, the bracken bleach,
The red deer drown as glens fill up,
The Highland archipelago
Just beyond clear sight.
But until then, hope fills my heart
With deeper draughts than at 19.
We’ve all to play for, you & me,
Still in our run up.
As the leaves are turning russet,
Cloudbursts pulsing down the hills
We measure out our lives in cats
And trips to Kinlochmoidart.
Plague Songs - Highland Haikus /
Lichen cracks granite.
Lochs cough rough bought droughts of clans.
Planned, cleared rewinding.
Leaves rust up hillsides,
Beauty belying pillage,
This stolen landscape.
Imagine Eden
Under Estate Management.
Sheep. Stags. Anglers. Voids.
Plague Songs - 29th August /
I met a traveller from an antique shop
Who sold me a teak Georgian fire surround
That, when I scratched it later with my car keys
Proved to be of plywood, stained in tea
And bought last week from Homebase, out of town.
This shows that bastard well our passions knows,
How gulled we are by snobbery & greed
We’ll buy his pedestals and old commodes,
Even two vast and trunkless elephants:
“You’ve got osteoarthritis, your poor things:
Just buy my works, all righty? (then despair). ”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of this colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level shires stretch far away.
Plague Songs - The Hauntings /
Jon haunts me in bright pulsing waves
Like an early RKO Radio film ident;
Ann haunted me last night, in a cameo in a dream;
Nick, who drowned at his own hotel in Wales,
Snuck in through a brief and callous text
And haunted me for that whole week;
The other Jon, quite long ago, haunted me in the garden
Unappeased by late night monologues and alcohol,
And triggering an abject tic, as I’d look up
Instinctively each time he crossed my mind,
Towards an empty sky;
My father, weeks after he had died, caught my heart on
Charing Cross Road, quite suddenly,
Then sucked out blinked back tears
On trains deep in the rush hour;
Then he and Jos, not even sensed but through their absence,
Fouled half our summer holiday
The week after we’d sold their home
By leaving hints of all of Life’s futility
Lying randomly around my mind;
And my mother’s trod my dreams for over fifty years.
All ghosts cling to their half-lives,
But however kindly, well-meaning or benign,
Just trying to cadge a light, a glance, your life force
Or remembrance,
The ectoplasm still congeals as damp lint,
Slopping in to fill the voids where
Joy and hope have shrunk or melt away,
To clog the soul.
And yet the weirdest shade to haunt me was myself,
When I got back my birth name (though no more)
And the ghost of Who-I-Might-Have-Been
Sat in the car beside me
And followed me morosely round, just on
The brink of palpable, all of that bizarre and long weekend.
Like all the rest, it would have been too cruel beyond enduring
To turn a single one of them away.
Plague Songs - The Haunting /
The second wave came right on time
36 hours after the curtains closed
With the kind of cliched crassness that these common rites require.
And now Time, like a heel, contrives
To make the waves increase their frequency
To 24, then 12, then 6 hours between each stab of grief.
The sudden downturned mouth, the frown,
The sense of emptiness, the nagging fear
Of something torn inside my head I try to glimpse with wild eyes.
A pebble spat out of a pond
Might outfox physics in this fashion
And likewise make the ripples tighter the further out they spread
But that’s the way all hauntings work:
Nothing to scare you, simply a sadness
Jaggedly soldered to the welcome pulse of any trace at all.
Plague Songs - Rewrites /
I
Rue, Britannia!
Britannia, rue that knaves
Have for cent-u-aries
Kept us slaves!
Rue, Britannia,
You’ll always kid yourself
That Pat-riot-ism
Will trump wealth!
II
Land of Hopeless Tories, smothered by the Sleaze,
Whose history is gory and riddled with disease,
Wilder yet & wilder howl the Tory Press,
Regilding the dung heap of this fucking mess,
Regilding the dung heap of this fucking mess!
Plague Songs - Lines Seeking to Describe A Hangover After A Best Friend’s Funeral /
A drowsy numbness...
A lousy dumbness?
A blowsy glumness,
A frowning rumness,
A Fausty chumminess,
A ghastly crumminess;
A grisly numbness
A ghostly numbness.
A drowsy, Fausty, ghastly, grisly, lousy
Glumness,
But still we fuelled the flights of angels
That took you to your rest.
What, as they always say,
You would’ve wanted.
Plague Songs - On The Way To The Funeral /
The ice cracks like a gunshot,
Cushioned in cartridge paper;
The forest fire crackles closer;
The encircling ring of rust,
Eating jagged gashes in the
Corrugated iron floor
That jangles with forced intimacy
High in the creaking scaffolding
Tightens.
Death haunted my dreams last night,
With me explaining, in bizarre locales,
To long dead parents, or former friends
Long since estranged,
How other people, also
Dead for ages,
Remain so.
And yet, still half the world imagines
This is just a step to everlasting life,
An invitation to unending bliss,
The prospectus for a time share
With eternity itself.
Though I continue thinking it could
Do with improving its old sales pitch.
Right now, Death’s still got a
Fucking funny way of asking.
Plague Songs - Isle of Wight Haikus /
Trees are broccoli,
Pale soup floods through the mudflats,
This teatime landscape.
Narrow lanes, small minds;
The thatch neglected haircuts
On lairy Young scalps.
The Solent coughs spray;
Waves break like instant coral;
Flags flap like blisters.
Sunshine on white sails
Seduces complacently
With afternoon lies.
London haiku
London’s Pompeii now,
Its denizens vulcanite,
Tube train catacombs.
Plague Songs - From the heart, on the way to the Isle of White /
O fat white fuck sat maskless in First Class on the train
With, judging by your conversation, football on the brain,
Glowering like a fat dog eating shit out of a drain,
Sat slumped behind your table like the growing, darkening stain
On a passed out drunkard’s trousers when they’ve shat themselves again,
I imagine that you fancy that you’ve gone against the grain,
And you burn your own umbrella when it’s coming on to rain
To show that you’re a rebel who’s entitled to maintain
That you can do just what you want, but let me make it plain
O fat white fuck sat maskless in First Class on the train,
It’s your attitude that’s unmasked, your effortless disdain
For everyone except yourself, so I will now explain
That I hope that you catch Covid & die in screaming pain
So you will sit no more in pomp like fucking Charlemagne
And everybody else can cheer & break out the champagne
O fat white fuck sat maskless in First Class on the train.
Plague Songs - The Higher Theology /
When you’ve sacrificed
The Old Ones
And you’ve sacrificed
The Young
To the blankly staring idol
That you formed
From ash and dung;
When you’ve sacrificed
Your servants
And you’ve sacrificed
Your slaves
And you’ve sacrificed
Your ancestors
By digging up their graves;
When you’ve sacrificed
The shamans
And you’ve sacrificed
The witches
And offered up their
Powdered bones
In sacramental niches;
When you’ve sacrificed
Your livestock
And you’ve sacrificed
Your crop
And sacrificed your parents
With your scythe’s
Redemptive lop
And sacrificed
The animals
And sacrificed
Your pets
And sacrificed the usurers
Who held all
Of your debts,
And sacrificed
Your honour
And sacrificed
Your skill
For sacrifice, and
Sacrificed
The terminally ill,
And you’ve sacrificed
Your children
And you’ve sacrificed
Your friends
Til the blood flows
From the temple
Down to where the river bends
And you’ll sacrifice
The Nation
And you’ll sacrifice
The Earth
And sacrifice each
Living Thing that’s
Clinging to its girth
And you’ve sacrificed
All supplicants
With sacrificial
Rigour;
When you hear, below the
Ziggurat,
Someone begin to snigger
As you raise your
Onyx dagger
To sacrifice
Some more
And then you skid, arse
Over tit
In pools of puddled gore
And you flail in
Sanguine Slapstick
And you’re sliding
In the blood
Offered up in
Sacrifice
To the idol made of mud,
This blank-eyed, baked shit
Dolly, spawn
Of hobgoblin
And elf,
Then remember, you must
Never, ever
Sacrifice yourself.
Plague Songs - The Washed Up God /
It was, they say, three hundred years ago
That the god first washed ashore,
Vast, indescribable and awful
In every way you could conceive
And dead, long dead, they’d then agreed,
But wrapped up in a caul of death
So wholly freed from hints of life it
Transcended comprehension,
Proving it as the source of Life Itself.
Its flat thousand-eyed face
Was its first part to rot
As hunks of morbid lip
Fell from its many mouths,
Serrated fangs dropped out with sighs
And cells exploded in its brain
With startling thuds, and stenches
That made cows gag twenty miles
Inshore blighted the whole land.
But as its carcass was so large
The head - around a stable’s size -
Was all to rot. The rest maintained
A kind of stinking stasis
Which merely served to reinforce
The thing’s monstrous divinity,
Its leviathan girth, limp tentacles
That shifted with the lice,
Tail flukes as vast as icebergs.
After several centuries even most of the pilgrims
Breathing in gasps through masks of sackcloth
Furtively dreamed a high Spring tide
Would wash the god far out to sea.
And yet its bulk defied the tides,
Miraculous sour skin long since fused tight
To the shingle, while now rare borborgym
Echoed in its empty bowels
Prophesying who knows what.
Occasionally a scale would float away
To clatter like a hubcap through
The pathways of the empty shrine
Where, only on the holiest days,
Masked priests would shuffle mumbling prayers
Not even they now understood.
Up in the Castle the Grand Inquisitor
Continues sending out the snatch squads
To deliver up more unbelievers.