All Life on Earth
Is overvalued;
Offers
Diminishing
Returns
Whereas the Formless
Timeless Void
Of Utter
Non-Existent
Nothingness
Futures
Are already performing strongly
In early trading as Wall Street readies
To yawn open.
Plague Songs - The New Jerusalem /
The tattered flag snaps in the gale.
The old man pouts; looks out to sea
To where, without the Tide’s betrayal,
The New Jerusalem should be.
Plague Songs - The Migrants /
In the hot stiffling tiny room
The cold dead eyes blanked
Even an iota
Of their torment or their tears
Or their mourning as the dead voice
Catechized on quotas,
Spoke flatly of the processes,
Rules, restrictions, retributions,
The penalties compounded by each error,
The limits on their movements,
The denial of information,
The incremental, automatic ratchetting of terror
Until, right at the end,
The mask slipped for an instant
As they stood to be led out and their feet began to burn:
The demon scratched its horns and shrugged
And mumbled, “I just don’t get it.
When will these klutzes ever learn?
Why do they keep on coming here at all?
Ah well. Funny old world.” The demon coughed into the sulphurous air
And picked up a pile of ledgers
As on the wall behind it
The current Hell Secretary’s portrait
Got crispier at its edges
While they were led away
To a distant pit, to wait. And wait. And wait
And wait among rank upon innumerable rank
Of those who’d made it this far,
Far further than the corpses washing through the clinker
And clumping along the Styx’s opposite bank.
Plague Songs - Scarred Borough Fare /
Are we going to fuck it all up?
Ignore SAGE, raise ‘R’ all the time?
We’ve nailed the northerners inside their slums
But once those idiots voted for us!
(Repeat ad nauseam)
Plague Songs - Church and State /
Wafting tufts of burning ermine,
A shower of shards of chipped gold paint.
No coach could handle that sharp turning
On the road to meet the saint.
The saint squats, miles beyond the backspot,
In a hermitage of bones,
Metal sheets, planks pocked with wet rot,
Flapping prayer flags, mobile phones.
The coach, heart of the grand procession,
Had been packed full of dynamite
To guard the monarch with discretion
From any little oversight.
Perhaps the watching, cheering peasants
Might yearn to seek the monarch’s grace
And storm the coach! The monarch’s presence
Now constituted half a face.
Nor were there any peasants cheering.
The recent plague had seen them off.
Though in a nearby forest clearing
Five huddled, trying not to cough.
The coach careened as it had cornered
And tipped exploding down the gulch.
Regal scraps rained; local fauna’d
Browsed upon the royal mulch.
The carts behind the coach had splintered
And the monarch’s retinue,
With whom the monarch overwintered,
Became a gory curlicue.
The pilgrimage to seek out saintly
Intercession with a miracle
Had been the monarch’s idea, quaintly,
To defy the dark empirical.
The plan had left the courtiers quizzical:
The nation could be saved through prayer?
The monarch was now metaphysical
Smithereened into the air.
The saint ignored the monarch’s lateness
And chewed upon a soggy frond
Meditating on the greatness
Of the infinite beyond
And soon was quite obscured by drizzle
Which washed away the monarch’s sins,
Not knowing if to laugh or grizzle,
Each separate as conjoined twins.
Plague Songs - Populism /
You know the one!
He’s off the telly!
Does sidekick stuff! The light relief!
And now he’s giving proper wellie
To all those wokes who bring us grief.
Who do I mean?
Well educated!
Goes on Twitter! Speaks his mind!
His column’s being syndicated.
He’s got the common touch, you’ll find.
Won’t take it from
No SJW!
Patriotic, not too grand
He’ll back you should a leftie trouble you
And now he needs a helping hand.
A brand new party!
Proper backing!
From hedgies just like you and me
To help him send the woke scum packing
And help to set the people free!
He’s off the telly!
He’s proper famous!
He’s also got a famous dad!
If we back him who would blame us?
Come on! He did that teabag ad!
You must know him!
This is too much!
He’s famous! He’s been on TV!
He’s posh but got the common touch,
Plus, he is his own chimpanzee!
Did the teabags!
Does loud hooting!
Really apey! Really rocks!
The ape bit might affect recruiting?
All right then! We’ll use Laurence Fox...
Plague Songs - Cultural Marxism /
I met a Cultural Marxist
Who took me to Swan Lake
“Those swans denote the Class War!”
Quoth he. I found his take
Compelling if naive, but now
I’m told it’s a disgrace
By a Cultural Fascist
Who then shot me in the face.
Plague Songs - OD’d on Autumn /
Fusillades of rain roiling like airstrikes
Buzzed all night, just in earshot, like jarred flies;
Not caring if it ticks your likes or dislikes,
This season’s eking out the summer’s lies;
Cheap sunshine pimps dead leaves with an upgrade,
Old sentiment is spun from sniffed decay,
What’s left of Nature’s scuffed up like old leather
As night beats back the tired, depressive day,
Moves up the cordons, tightens the blockade,
Bolts doors and then breathes “Join the masquerade!
Let’s make believe it’s such poetic weather!”
Plague Songs - Count Your Blessings! /
Just consider, everybody knows how boring you’ve become,
Covid-19 is rife round here - you instantly succumb,
Your fingers, toes & arse & nose are worryingly numb,
You’ve just found out your fiancée is actually your mum,
The soup you sip served as the bath through which a rat has swum,
The silver foil around your bong’s made of uranium,
You buccaneer the Spanish Main but are clean out of rum,
Your children simply won’t leave home and leave it like a slum,
You hear the distant sound of Ed Sheerin begin to strum,
You feel your uncle’s hand inside your jock-strap in the scrum,
You realise it’s now been eleven years since you’ve come,
That flash of purest genius last night was *really* dumb,
Everything you touch turns into shit at once - ho hum,
You find in life’s great lottery Piers Morgan’s your best chum,
No figure in Greek Tragedy sank to the depths you plumb,
You recognise an ex-lover’s tattoo on your new drum,
You wander past some roadkill and you drool out loud “Yum yum!”
Your birthday cake’s so foully baked you cannot eat a crumb,
Your boss started at primary school at the Millennium,
That’s actually an Oxo cube and not some opium,
Your ex-spouse warns your kids about your equilibrium,
At La Scala, in your aria, you forget the words and hum,
There’s a smell like rotting cabbage emanating from your thumb
And then, to cap it all, you’ve got a lobster up your bum...
But reflect, although you’re wrecked, in one major respect,
However much you’re stressed
Your life is truly blessed!
But how? I’m sure you’ve guessed:
You Are Not Tory Scum
Tory Scum
Tory Scum
Tory Scum
Tory Scum
Just thank Jesus Christ Almighty that you are not Tory Scum!
(Repeat forever)
Plague Songs - The clocks go back /
The most magical season of the year
When Time itself rewinds,
All wrongs are wrangled and all regrets rowed back.
Except, of course,
The systems still in place
Will always let us down
So that, in practice,
In that special hour,
There can be no provision for the use of mobile phones
Or even email to inform
The denizens of all the threads and webs of twanged remorse
That processes are now in train to make things right once more.
And even if the landlines worked
It’s 1am on Sunday morning, and everybody that you’ve hurt
Is either drunk or fast asleep.
And all preplanning, instrumental to
Turning Back The Clocks is, Chronologists insist, both
Unethical and way beyond the realms of Physics, as it’s understood.
And as you’ve only got an hour which then, turned back, devours itself,
All constructs complex enough to make an ounce of difference to anything
Will always miss one last essential cog or wish and break as Time, quite literally, runs out.
So you’ll just have to wait again
Until the clocks go forward, and then try gathering into yet another hour
The boxes full of things you’d like to be deleted.
Plague Songs - Solipsism /
Doubtless quite soon they’ll calculate
That limited to meeting in
A simulacrum of The Real,
Some electronic Platospace,
People denied meeting their friends
And family and clearly see
The buggers stood across the room
Will then think no one else exists.
What we can’t sense or smell or touch
Will ratchet back to broadcast lies,
A phoned face futilely fake news,
More bollocks from the Internet,
And this process of disbelief,
They’ll calculate, the way they do,
Will take from nine months to a year
To achieve full Solipsism.
That said, such calculators flee
From rigour, as all humans must,
And make this shit up in their heads
Like philosophers long ago,
Their minds the perfect hermitage,
Their skulls the thickest prison walls,
An isolation hospital
For selfishness on cosmic scales.
Though far from us, the trees still flinch
In dank, unpeopled forest gloom,
Each time another loved one falls,
Unobserved by human pride,
And mighty oak trees mutely weep
In mourning for the broken ash
In their xylem and their phloem
That throb with tears rightly unheard.
Plague Songs - the rat report /
to stop each other dying
they denied them all a life
so lived a kind of death
that was nothing close to living
except for those imposing what
they chose to choose to be
how the living
without a living
could only live by dying
because living is just buying anyway
though all of them were dying just
to live
and what’s that, ratlings?
you’re asking what were these humans
actually good at? well, i suppose,
oh, jumping, jokes.
and genocide of course, the usual stuff
but nothing special
not that they thought so
though that was half the
problem
and honestly
i
wouldn’t gnaw those bones
if i were
you
Plague Songs - Poltergeist 2 /
Forgive me - be done in a trice,
But there’s other kinds of poltergeist
Or, to be more imprecise,
A kind of noisy cockatrice
And servant of the AntiChrist
Deployed to add a certain spice
To our affairs, there to entice
The gullible with merchandice
Invariably overpriced
While bellowing (yet quite concise)
That all our enemies are lice
And not as we are (we’re like mice)
And thereby steep us in their vice
That equates hell with paradise
(Where all’s seen as a game of dice
Through lying eyes, as chilled as ice)
Explaining how, when they top-slice,
It’s their own brand of sacrifice.
Although, if you take my advice,
When watching these brash poltergeists
Slice and splice, once, twice, then thrice,
A single brittle grain of rice
And serve it up on edelweiss
Drawling “All yours! Yum yum”, suffice
It to say, the poltergeists
Make all that noise and come on nice
To blind you to their masters’ heists.
Now that’s me done on poltergeists.
Plague Songs - Poltergeist /
In Lockdown 1 I thought, “How nice
To get myself a poltergeist!
Some unquiet spook who’ll bang and thump
And cheer us when we’ve got the hump,
Who’ll make toothbrushes disappear
And lend this place some atmosphere,
A mischievously ghostly sprite
To give the girly swots a fright,
A clattering goblin from the grave -
You never got such larks with Dave!
Hearing bangs, some loud, some soft,
Echoing from the undercroft
Or from way up in the den
Right at the top of Number Ten
Where Geisty could thud with aplomb -
And be company for Dom!”
But now we’re in the Second Tier
My heart’s begun to fill with fear.
You see, what started as a joke
Is no longer so okey-doke,
No longer such a wizard wheeze.
Instead a pall, like some disease,
Hangs in a mist throughout the place,
A presence beyond Time and Space,
A dank and damp eldritch miasma
That - O lawks - quite chills the plasma...
And, for once, I won’t dissemble.
The Cabinet no longer tremble
When Dom screams at some small error:
Instead they stare in abject terror
And Williamson voids his insides
When the table creaks and slides
Then melts and flops round like a squid
Then gells into a pyramid!
And Jacob, decked in crucifixes,
Pointedly no longer mixes
Afterwards, for tea and biccies.
The Civil Servants all pulled sickies
And Dom’s weirdos and misfits, oddly,
Fled at first sight of The Ungodly.
But worse yet is the deathly gloom
That suppurates through every room,
Beyond the nauseating feeling
As flocks of books swoop round the ceiling,
Knives and forks whizz through the air,
The carpets writhe above the stair,
The framed portrait of Bonar Law
Impales itself into the floor
And just now - Jesus! - Churchill’s bust
Crumbled into seething dust
Which then reformed into a foetus
That hissed “Give up! You’ll never beat us!”
And when they say I’m looking tired
They fail to understand I’m mired
Inside a hell I never chose!
I get no sleep! I barely doze!
I’ve tried counting me shagging sheep
But as I finally fall asleep
Another sudden thunderous thud
Forms ice crystals in my blood
And boiling hot, Reason defied
I’m bolt upright and wild, wide-eyed.
Night after night, day after day!
At least C took that kid away,
But small relief brings no release!
It seems my torments will not cease!
Tried potions made from ash and jism,
Then I tried an exorcism,
Thrashed the air with bogbrush handles,
Muttered prayers by guttering candles,
But with each succeeding prayer
I’d lose another clump of hair
And hear, close by, a dreadful laugh.
Then blood began to fill the bath...
And thuds and thumpings bang and clatter
O’er splats of ectoplasmic matter
And grunts and whines and cruel cackles
Make flesh creep on my rising hackles
BECAUSE I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS!
I was just taking the piss!
It was all a stupid lark!
The darkness darkens in the dark;
A clamminess consumes my skin;
Shame coughs up my every sin;
The remnants of my soul now slithers
From my nose. I’m chained in shivers
As things behind me start to moan,
Then bleeping from my mobile phone!
A message! Trembling fingers grapple
To find what fresh torment a chap’ll
Face now, what the Faustian pact
Has saved up for the final act...
No earthly fears could ever presage
The dread I felt reading that message...
WE’RE NOT THROUGH YET - THERE’S LOADS MORE FUN
WE’LL SQUEEZE FROM YOU BEFORE YOU’RE DONE
AND SENT TO HELL - TO MAKE THINGS CLEAR
THERE’S 40,000 OF US HERE 😁
Plague Songs - Exodus 33:23 /
When Yahweh turned his hinder parts
On Moses, his celestial farts
Were lit by Satan with a whoosh
And Moses saw the Burning Bush
Plague Songs - Covid Lit: Great Classics retold for Our Troubled Times /
No 1: Romeo & Juliet
Two households both alike in dignity
Can only meet in groups of less than six,
In their own support bubble, not in their
Own homes, or outdoors, or in any public
Space, apart from indoors serving food, except
For emergency pubs, outdoors or indoors
On or in or under public transport. You,
Romeo, two metres away from that window.
End of.
Plague Songs - Team Song /
You put your tender in!
You drive your rivals out!
You send in your consultants
When the money’s thrown about!
You put the Hokey-Covid
In your Turnover
That’s what it’s all about!
Whooooaaaaaaa! Hokey-hokey-Covid!
Wheeeeeeeeeeee! Hokey-hokey-Covid!
Phwaaaoooooor! Hokey-hokey-Covid!
Knees bent
Boots filled
Ra-ra-ra!
You drive the numbers up!
You keep the proles locked down!
Send in more consultants
Who can go to town
Getting the Hokey-Covid
In our Turnover
That’s what it’s all about!
Phwoooooaaaaaaar! Hokey-hokey-Covid!
Phheeeeeeeeeeeeew! Hokey-hokey-Covid!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Hokey-hokey-Covid!
Lungs clogged
Boots filled
Ra-ra-ra!
We’ll fuck up track and trace
But everything is fine!
The ‘R’ rate’s on the rise
But so’s the bottom line!
We’ve got the Hokey-Covid
In our Turnover
That’s what it’s all about!
Seeeeeeeeeeeeerco-key-hokey-Covid!
Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiido-key-hokey-Covid!
Seeeeeeeeeeeeeerco-key-hokey-Covid!
Chums in
Boots filled
Ra-ra-ra!
Plague Songs - Sovereign Vegetative State /
Maybe it stops the screaming in his head,
Maybe it shows his mind is busy spooling Time
To back before his father broke his mother’s nose
To wind things tight and leave no room
For confrontation or the need to make decisions.
Or maybe it’s not screaming, but the absence of all sound,
The fearful silence where the laughter was,
When all difficulty’s drowned out by the warmth of their guffaws,
Feeding off the energy of everyone’s attention
In the internal realm of makebelieve where that’ll do instead of love.
Or maybe the constant flashes of pure panic in his eyes
Simply mean these days that the outside surrounding world’s
Grown so filmed and blurry with the weight of consequence
All he can do is flip his gaze and peer at what’s inside
Echo-locating futures charging roaring at another unlocked door
Into another empty, dusty room, its brown/green paint still flaking,
The only noise the hum of dodging molecules binding through sheer boredom.
Which maybe makes him perfect, in this most terrible of times,
To lead our Sovereign Vegetative State,
A country in a cack-handedly induced coma, strapped in yet more silence
Softly interrupted solely by the crass, regular pings of some machines
While the rest of us are butterflies, batting neverendingly
Against the gridded glass visages of an infinity
Of Diving Bells.
Plague Songs - Supporting the Arts /
A nervous hollow knocking on the door
The Judas window rattles open
Masked, in ragged motley, a dancer cringes
For a moment, retreating to the shadows,
Then edges forward, hunched, eyes darting,
Proceeding to perform a charmless caper
Groaning throatily in self accompaniment.
Stale crusts are jettisoned through the snapping hatch,
Are grabbed in one thin hand, the other
Knuckling the cap and bells
Before they sidle jangling out of sight
To the adjoining cell there to reprise
The whole stupendous shtick.
And inside between the bars
A patch of sky can be beheld
Still grey and heavy with the neverending downpour
Which soaked to sludge the flyer slipped
Beneath the door, where lichen spreads
Around the nailheads long since hammered
Into its frame, boasting about the gaolers’
Continuing Investment in The Arts.
Plague Songs - Slogan /
The kind of day
The work’s so dull
The mind freefalls
In Brownian motion
Ideas clump
Slogans cluster
Thoughts fandango
Cascading through the mind
As you idly
Carve arabesques
On your femur
With the point of your scythe
Nothing is good
Nothing is bad
Colon cancer’s
Just yesterday’s beetroot
The tracheal
Haemorrhage is
Puked up red wine
And coughs are simply coughs
Then the klaxons
Scream! Screens light up!
Back in action!
The slogans spring to mind!
Adland copy!
Hookline sinkers!
“It ain’t Covid
Til the thin laddie swings!”