There are drummers drumming
In the park
And boys in vests
On unicycles
Seeing the English
In the sunshine
Makes me yearn
For a harpoon.
Plague Songs - The last word /
Of course, it takes time to adjust
When you’ve been seriously concussed
And things are best left undiscussed,
Like how the whole world’s got us sussed,
Despite imagining we’re robust
We’re rotting from the uppercrust,
Our hearts corroding into rust
And just one feeble, foetid gust
From crumbling into tumbling dust...
But are we bothered? Are we fussed?
Of course we’re not! You get my thrust?
It’s cos we’ve still got Churchill’s bust!
Churchill’s bust
Churchill’s bust
One hundred thousand dead is just
Statistics! We got Churchill’s bust!
And so what if the toffs encrust
That Union Jack with jaded lust?
Brexit’s like Churchill! We got bust!
We got bust
We got bust
Thank fuck we still got Churchill’s bust!
Churchill’s bust
Churchill’s bust
Churchill’s bust
Churchill Churchill Churchill’s bust!
Repeat to fade
Plague Songs - The Banquet /
The bankers and the viruses
Arranged to have a dinner
Where the viruses looked tired
And the bankers slightly thinner.
The viruses proposed a toast:
“Chaos! And Bonhomie!
Bonded the way that both of us
Crashed the Economy!”
The bankers bridled. Several laughed.
A fat one drawled: “Pur-leeeze!
We’re the Engines of Prosperity!
And you’re just a disease!
And we’re nothing like you!
This comparison’s obscene!
And we’ll prove it by investing
To create a new vaccine!”
“Speaking,” the viruses replied,
“As disease to disease,
There’s no need to display your guilt-
Edged insecurities!
Be proud of your achievements
And how you make your cash!
We’ve loved ‘08 and ‘29
And every other Crash!
“True, you could be more proactive;
Fewer sins of omission,
But you make up for that with the monstrous
Size of your commission!
It’s just you lack all agency,
Just do what bankers do,
Which lacks the subtle beauty
Of a nasty bout of flu!
But still, your avarice and greed,
Like our infectious ways
Have thankfully hastened mankind
Towards the End of Days!
With poverty and misery
And all kinds of how d’you do!
Eventually we’ll kill them off
Together! Cheers! Salut!”
The bankers rose in fury
At the speaking of this libel;
Respectable and titled, they flung
“Who’s Who” like a bible!
Screamed “We will make a vaccine
That will see you commies off!”
But in their midst a banker
At this point began to cough.
You remember that scene near the end
Of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”?
Like that, but as to details
I shall leave you in the dark.
Many of those bankers died,
Others were very ill.
The viruses then did the decent thing
And paid the bill
Plague Songs - The Curtain /
Does everybody get that thing?
Clench the eyes tight shut
And start to see, not in the mind,
But truly see,
A vortexing kaleidoscope of tiny sepia
And burnt umber squares and stars and rhomboids
Palladianing down a tunnel whose fixed point of exit
Lies at the dead centre of
The whole field of non-vision?
For decades I imagined that
This tenebrous firework display, although
A thing, an aspect of palpable reality
And not simply the ragged scrap of a dream’s edge that
Had poked through from deeper expanses of my clear and hidden thinking,
That this must be some thing between
A glimpse of the atomic structure lying in wait in everything
And some sort of membrane that divides
Internal from external worlds.
It turns out that I’m wrong on both those counts.
These lights are called phosphenes, and what one sees -
Or what I see, because these words
Might sound like mad Sanskrit screamed
Into a cushion to anybody else but me -
Is simply the vestigial light remaining
In my eyeballs, still compelled to bounce against
Their rods and cones and rendered into sparks my brain
Displays as dirty stars and suns in the total darkness.
It doesn’t really matter either way
Even if, deep from back inside early childhood nights,
I’ve liked imagining the swirling lightshow is a curtain
I can twitch and thus check out what’s up on either side,
Particularly this year, this sabbatical from ecocide,
This failed correction, one more flawed exercise
In albeit brutal biocontrol, though now,
Accompanied by a crescendo of deadly Doppler chords of clawing back normality
The Juggernaut slips with a crunch of bones back in to gear
And on we blithely writhe, hang out the torn up shrouds as bunting
In a fresh fiesta for the Heist Christ, still led on by bumptious, loud class clowns
Whose names grace blistering boards in old school halls and, if they’re blessed,
One day a cracking cul de sac that leads to bricked up depots full of loot
Between catacombs of bedsits, where petrifying certainties sedimenting in their skulls
Squeeze people’s minds out through blocked ears to sizzle for a second
as opinions pass for politics and tantrums for debate
With extermination for dissent remaining a distinct option
As they plop onto the curling lino.
For over half a year I’ve Cartier-Bressoned all of that,
Strait-jacketing my instant take, like this, both in and out.
All that unstinting witnessing, of Death, cranked cranks, the crooks and all that
Embarrassingly gauche gratitude for just the meagrest dollop of what’s-next-might-not-be- quite-so-bad
Reminds me to get back inside and hunker round the richly glowing embers
And watch you smile, then look down to the knitting on your lap,
And laugh. That does for now, forever, so I’m drawing back the curtain
And ignoring for a bit the killing constantly begetting killing. Though remember:
However much you hate them, viruses are people too.
Plague Songs - The Flitting Muse /
My Muse flits like a startled faun,
Tossing her noble head.
Cries out “We’re through!” Can it be true
I’ve said all to be said?
She’d earlier binned her laurels, taken
Up a thorny crown,
More of the bint’s unsubtle hints
Just trying to get me down.
At parties she would roll her eyes,
Spurn an Ambrosial snack,
Abjure a glass of Nectar, pass
Instead to smoking crack
She’d pout as we crashed book launches,
Get stuck into the drink,
Flirt, as a tease, with enemies,
Then vomit in a sink
Sneer at my toga as we’d waft
Through an Elysian grove,
Then slap cheese into tapestries
Which we together wove
Read out my verses mockingly, while
Plucking at a lyre
Then feed my scrolls throughout the hols
Onto a summer fire
And now she’s gone, gone with our owl,
Both hooting with derision.
Taken her chariot to a Marriott.
I honour her decision.
But shall her curses spoil my verses
Abandoned now by Muses?
On this boy plods! I beg the gods
To free me from these floozies!
I’ll sacrifice a goat tonight so
My verse won’t get ropier!
Her victory’s Pyrrhic! I’ll tease the Lyric
From my Cornucopia!
I won’t repine! Circean swine
Could not give me the blues!
Tore my raiment, made a down payment
On a mail order Muse.
Plague Songs - The Twenty-Second of November /
On St Cecilia’s Day they change the tunes
Pumped into the waiting rooms
Of Purgatory
Where Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis and
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Are sat side by side
United in their date of death. Each tics
An instant as the music
Stops, and then plays on.
Lewis chews his lower lip, still rattled
By Eternity’s delays
Granting Salvation
Gnawed by spasms of unclear remorse
After a wingless angel
Showed him his chair and
Said “It’s just a thing with ‘The Last Battle’.
No need for you to worry,
I’m sure. Please wait here.”
Jack Kennedy pays him no attention
Continuing to toss nuts
Into the air and
Then try catching them in his skull’s chasm.
Huxley shudders, guessing it’s
An acid flashback.
Far below, Margaret Thatcher too
Observes the music changing.
That’s another year
Since she resigned and then started to die.
But there’s no time to ponder,
Pause and then reflect.
The fixed conditions of her damnation
Require that she dance tangos
For the Rest of Time
With A.E. Housman, across crusty floors
Of their designated pit
In Hell, reserved for
Those Cursed Souls Who Have Quite Fucked Up England
Infusing her with fatal
Enthusiasms,
Mawkish Deathcults, Tight-arsed Nature Worship
And Small Town Cold Hearts.
Their faces turned eternally away
From each other’s gaze, each hear
Through 4000 miles
Of clenching granite, England still whining
Above the noise of
Chainsaws play “A Walk In The Black Forest”
Over and over again
On St Cecilia’s Day.
Plague Songs - Lost /
I
Last night I heard on Radio 4
The man who’s won the Booker Prize
Be asked a questioned which contained
The phrase “you lost your mother...”
I didn’t lose mine. She lost me,
Left me for someone else to find
Then moved away. My next mother
Lost me as well, repeatedly.
Or more exactly, she’d flaneur
With us in front, to keep an eye
On us until a shop window
Caught it instead, while on we walked
And then once more I’d find myself
In a kind policeman’s arms
Him laughing and her cross, exposed,
I now suppose, as careless.
My father lost things all the time.
I’d help find them. He never lost
His wife and natural child: they died.
We knew precisely where they were.
In morgues. Then coffined. Then in flames.
Then in the ground. And if you like
I can pinpoint the exact spot
They share now with my father.
II
Yet in that expanding lexicon
Of words we need to leave unsaid,
We seem to think, to mutter “die”
Somehow invokes and summons Death
And so instead, we’re lost or pass,
Like umbrellas or passing thoughts,
Or, for that matter, water (though
In this case what we mean is piss)
Because we’re all so childish
A harsh word might scare us to death.
Or to pass. Better, get lost,
Just loose change dropped in the settee.
III
Then I remembered I’d forgot
To wheel the bins out in the street.
The instant I stepped through the door
November enveloped me
Its coldness grabbing down my throat,
Its dampness oozing like a sponge
Its perfumes rich, redemptive death
In leaf mould, coal smoke, burning wood
The evening was a slap of joy,
The kind that makes you gulp first breaths
And breathe and breathe until you’re done
The senseless scents of Rex Mundi.
The whole Autumn accreted fresh
Layers onto Death’s millefeuille
Each death podsolled and swaddling
The next arriving layer of Life.
So maybe we can’t say the name
The same way that you don’t feel wet
Fully immersed in water as
We all pass through, before we’re lost.
Invigorated, my old heart
Started to sing in inner realms
Where, once you just start to look,
In the end you’ll find it all.
Plague Songs - Normal Christmas /
The World outside is frightening,
But you might get struck by lightning
Don’t wanna spend Xmas in bed
Let it spread let it spread let it spread!
The smiles on the kiddies’ faces
As nobody tracks and traces
And Gran and her carer are dead
Let it spread let it spread let it spread!
We tried out herd imm-un-ity
And snogged neath the mistletoe
Decimating our comm-un-ity
And now it won’t even snow!
This year we’ve no tree – we’re spruceless
And the Government is useless,
These leaders are as toxic as lead
Let it spread let it spread let it spread
And because he’s stuck in lockdown
Santa’s not on his way
So we’ve started knocking the hock down
By drinking til Boxing day!
And though we’ll try to feel perky
We’ve all been stuffed like turkeys
But without the Brussels! So, unfed,
Let it spread left it spread let it spread!
Plague Songs - The Public School Ethos /
Do Etonians eat onions
With a Georgian silver spoon?
Do Harrovians drive horror vans
Beneath a blood red moon?
Are all Alleynians aliens,
Green Martians neath the skin?
Do Wykehamists hold wiccan rites
And sacrifice their kin?
Are Carthusians Cartesians,
Just dualistic boobs?
And do Salopians hatch from eggs
And not fallopian tubes?
Do Roedeanians ride on
Rhodesian ridgebacks?
Have any of these brats suffered
From physical attacks?
Do Marlburians smoke Malboros?
Are Stoics stoic? (Yes I know,
But this is what they call those pricks
Who went to school at Stowe)
And do Fettesians fetishise
How fitting is the fate
Of children who are taught to think
They’re smart, and good, and great?
But eliminate alumni
And I’m told you’ll find the jobs
The nation needs done urgently
Will all be done by yobs,
Unschooled and undependable,
And simply the wrong tool
To sort out track and trace or PPE,
And why? Wrong school!
But if you ask a favour
From a nice Public School kid
There’s every chance they’ll do it
For under a million quid!
Plague Songs - Shakespearean Tragedy /
They’ve painted King Lear Orange!
He’s mad as mad can be!
Divides the state! Will Ivanka
Be given Tennessee?
They’ve painted Hamlet Orange!
Does that arras hide Pence?
Does Dad still haunt? Melania!
Got to a nunnery hence!
Othello too is Orange!
With Green Eyed Monster pout
Paranoia drives him mad!
Melania! Watch out!
They’ve painted King Lear Orange!
On and on he rages!
I know this is Shakespearean
But it goes on for ages!
They painted Hamlet Orange!
To quit or not to quit
Has never even crossed his mind.
This soliloquy’s shit!
Now Caesar’s also Orange!
Though stabbed any amount
He yells at the conspirators
“Fake News! Recount! Recount!”
And King Lear is still Orange
Beneath the roaring sky!
It’s Tragedy, so let’s assume
Eventually he’ll die.
Although Hamlet’s still Orange!
And still he won’t decide!
But Christ! This is a Tragedy!
Isn’t it time he died?
Falstaff, Prince Hal, Mark Antony!
All Orange too! What class!
But though we all love Tragedy
Being replayed as Farce
Paint no more heroes Orange:
Such work need not detain us.
Just drop the first three syllables
From off “Coriolanus”.
Plague Songs - Leprosia /
As the trade talks recommenced
The leper leader, in his shack
Alone, was too consumed with languor
To brush the flies from off his eyes.
The envoy from Leprosia
(The free colony’s new name)
Sat opposite his counterpart,
Across a broad and flaking table.
The Isolation Hospital’s
Negotiator, in the torpor,
Squinted at the ceiling’s glare
Reflected from the dusty yard.
Flies resting on the fan’s blades
Observed in fractals compromises
Over morgue and graveyard access
Conceded morosely.
Then, at last, a vague conclusion,
Just firm enough to hold til dusk.
The Hospital’s envoy joked
“We’re now called Consumptia!”
His laugh became a coughing fit.
He screwed his hankie in his pocket,
Thumbing some dampness on his cuff.
All thought it best not to shake hands.
Plague Songs - Obsessional - after Kipling /
The oddballs & misfits depart
All futurecasters exeunt
The briefings drift off like a fart
The whole thing just a childish stunt
Dom Going’s revealed as, at heart,
A wanker - not even a cunt.
Lest we forget - and let’s be blunt:
A wanker. Not even a cunt.
Plague Songs - Beethoven’s Fifth /
Dom Dom
is gone
Dom Dom
Is gone
Dom Dom Dom Dom
Dom Dom Dom Dom
Dom Dom Dom Dom
Dom Dom
Is gone
To play Minecraft under
Michael Gove’s bed
And recount the moon,
While in his mind his enemies
Are crushed by great machines.
Bless.
Plague Songs - Burial /
Pepys buried a Parmesan
During the Great Fire
But what would you elect to save
From Fate’s Capricious Ire?
Rosetti buried poetry;
Dean Swift? A Houyhnhnm!
Dylan Thomas, twenty pints of beer
Full up to the brim!
The Pharoahs buried wives and slaves
And cats and grain and gold;
The wary bury diaries full of tales
Not to be told.
A pirate buries treasure;
A squirrel buries nuts;
Speculators bury surpluses
To see them through the gluts.
What should you save by burying?
A book? Some wine? A glove?
Your passport, or a locket
Of the one you truly love?
Some hair from your first baby?
Your old dad’s broken pipe?
The clutter of a lifetime,
Or your life until it’s ripe?
And what does Boris Johnson love,
He buries and he saves?
Why! 50,000 citizens
Now buried in their graves.
Plague Songs - Armistice Day /
Six whole months ago today
I opened up a Second Front
All of my own, my little war
To bear witness and raise morale
Through tiny actions, slogans daubed
On to a burnt out outhouse wall,
Seditious homilies on cards
Inserted into library books,
And hieroglyphs stencilled beneath
The moon’s face, masked with fleeting clouds,
Over another poster of some square-jawed heroine.
And who knows? I may graduate
To cutting the telegraph wires,
Blowing up overgrown branch lines,
Taking potshots at a general
Sipping pastis in a café
But merely singe the epaulettes
Of one of his young aides-de-camp.
Although my co-conspirator
Had disappeared after day one,
Either shot or conscripted by
One of the several ignorant
Armies that get crass each night,
Or scarecrowed on the barbed wire like
A pallid Wykehamist poet,
Or fled through furtive channels to
Drink absinthe through the afternoon
Outside squalid bars in Irun,
Or turning tricks in Lisbon and
Insanely imagining that
Tomorrow there will be a berth
Towards a Brave New World.
But still, today’s Armistice Day,
The day they say the guns fall quiet,
Although the dead keep mounting up,
The refugees cower in their camps,
Boarded up in bomb-proof shelters,
Huddling in a fresh shell crater
While rumours multiply like lice,
Of traitors, tyrants, potions or
Of secret weapons, great new breakthroughs,
Final outcomes, Victory at last...
Though over what remains unclear:
The war aims remain to pursue
The War Aims. For King and Empire,
Queen and Country, or whatever
Construct now pertains for that old
Quagmire, moating a mud island
Covered with stockades of donkeys
All of an ancient pedigree
Braying, like they always have, long
Into the crackling night beside
Full mangers made of solid gold.
But even if the Armistice
Should turn out to be real, and holds,
Despite all previous ceasefires being broken
With all the martial rallying cries
More stinking wasted breath as more
Fresh corpses give up further ghosts;
But even if it holds, what then?
If you’ve caught the cut of Armistices’ gibs
You already should know what’s coming next:
After the emperors’ tumblings, then the coups,
Then the final clenched-teeth admission that
Futility is the least of war’s flaws,
The Peace Conference, the bragging revenge,
The brutal reparations, how they’ll bodge
Reimposing pre-War status quos,
The civil wars, the famines, revolutions,
The unemployment, the hunger marches,
The hollow hopelessness of promises
Of a land fit for heroes anyone
Could then look in the eye and not feel shame,
The lock-outs, means tests, shack towns, bread lines, wars,
The bank runs, market crashes, then the Nazis
And the re-run, and the
Re-run after that,
And never ever closer to the cracked
And sun-bleached uplands in the bleary distance.
So all in all hug this war close
In case it wrestles free to run
Capering away, laughing at
The looks upon our faces.
And me? I’m working up to digging trenches.
Plague Songs - Maxine’s Vaccine in the Late Anthropocene /
Maxine? Maxine! Maxine? Maxine!
You. Won’t. Be. Getting. That. Vaccine.
From reading the Dark Web I glean
It’s made from kiddies Charlie Sheen
Has processed through a huge machine
And laced with polypropylene
That acts like nitroglycerene
When ingested! Turns your spleen
Orange, then ultra-marine!
Maxine? Maxine, Maxine, Maxine!
It’s deadlier than a guillotine!
They tested it on wolverine!
It cancels out your dopamine
And makes you bend like Plasticine
To their will! It’s quite obscene!
And when they say it’s just routine,
You think they tell the truth? Maxine!
When were you born! Where have you been?
Oh yes, they call it “quarantine”,
But only so that they can screen
The old to make more Soylent Green!
It’s the Elite! They’re like gangrene!
All went to Eton or Roedean!
Out of their skulls on Benzadrine!
Panels of “experts” who convene
With masonic Jews...
...Maxine?
Come back Maxine! I didn’t mean...!
Maxine? Maxine? Maxine? Maxine!
THINK OF HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN!!
Oh let her go. I won’t demean
Myself by grovelling to a teen.
She’s made her own bed, has Maxine,
And I bet those sheets aren’t clean,
All smeared with things like vaseline.
And nobody has even seen
This so-called virus! Call me green
But next up they’ll ban Ovaltine!
Plague Songs - The Elephant in the Room: At The Commencement of the Latest Lockdown /
The elephant that’s in this room
Just shat upon the floor.
I know what everybody says;
They say - simply ignore!
But when the bastard’s shat again
No self respecting chatelaine
Could cope with it much longer. Furthermore
That elephant’s been in this room since,
Let’s see, well before,
The end of March, and just slouched round
To block the exit door!
And now he gone and shat again!
Over my Persian mat! Explain
How we endure this for a month! Before
The latest rules I tried to tie
A face mask to his trunk.
He lifted his enormous leg
And showered me with spunk,
And now the fucker’s shat again!
He’s on some fucking scat campaign!
The worst of it’s I can’t even get drunk.
That’s because all of the booze
Long since went up his trunk.
Plus he’s scoffed all of the biscuits,
Though there’s nowt in which to dunk
And - Jesus Christ - he’s shat again!
And tough if you find that profane,
Because the cunt’s just shat another hunk!
Stuck with each other in this tiny room
We two shall skulk.
I’ll try and finish off this verse
And he, no doubt, will sulk.
And obviously he’s shat again.
Torment like this would twat Verlaine.
Very soon I hope that he will crush me with his bulk.
The alternative is paddling in his poop,
Spread through the room,
Though what the creature symbolises
I dare not to presume.
I’ll just observe, he’s shat again.
I think you might find that germane
As we glower at each other, left together in this tomb.
Plague Songs - 5th November /
They’ve gone and locked up all the locks for lockdown!
For lockdown all the locks have been locked up!
You can shake your gory locks
But you can’t put back the clocks
Get out the lox & raise a cheery cup!
They’ve gone and locked up all the locks for lockdown
As if some weird Zen riddle to promote
So tend unto your flocks
And open all the cocks
And whatever else might float your boat!
Plague Songs - The Kind Anthropologist /
Turkey vultures are still roosting there beneath the broken dome
And the shaman shuffles once again across the dusty ground
Arranging rows of old tin cans, each one representative
Of a former state and into each of which he starts to drop
With jerky deliberation, from his shrivelled, filthy mouth
Sucked m&ms, lilac and pink, guided by the ritual,
Slyly slugging dark brown hooch with every freshly filled mouthful
From a dirty jam jar that he keeps behind the altar stone,
Before which now the children, pimped in tattered fancy dress,
Move round and round in a lacklustre dance, their sullen chanting
Quite imperceptible above the rustling of the vultures
Who yawn, primping their feathers. The shaman starts to ululate
And hops from foot to foot and shakes a broken old broom handle
Wrapped around in silver tinsel and scratched with simple symbols,
The meaning of which even he’s forgotten.
The Kind Anthropologist is jolted from her daydreams
By her assistant’s sudden snore, so elbows him to wake him
As the whole performance has been staged entirely just for them
Plus the benefit of Science so she hisses in his ear:
“We’re almost at the part when the children get to kill the duck!”
She smiles at the filthy brats now lining up beneath the shrine,
An old, ruined edifice of rubble, straw and plastic bags.
And even though, in broken badlands way beyond the beltway
In pockets of tribal settlements pocked across the prairie
They whore after their different gods, she still feigns fascination
For these strange old traditions, and despite the screaming boredom
On the faces of the children now handed cutthroat razors,
She blinks politely when she takes the duck’s still warm, downy head
From the gnarled, dirty fingers of the gap toothed, gurning shaman
As furtively she starts chewing on khat.
Plague Songs - The Boiling Lake /
Across the placid surface of the boiling lake
Is spread a thin miniscus, a flimsy film,
More sheer than late Spring ice, and which is constantly
Dissolving, melting or evaporating just behind you,
Compelling you to move towards the distant shore,
Tight-roping on these fine yet thicker veins, the scars of former fissures.
Only almost in earshot, in the corner of your eye,
The boiling lake is variously discharged,
Its roiling waters roaring through the turbines of twelve dams,
Each named after a virtue as defined by its contructors:
“Wealth”, “Punishment”, “Obedience” - you get the point.
Their watchtowers seem spindly through the mounds of crashing spray.
And skimming, sliding, skating, stumbling or skidding across the lake
You can glance down crystal clearly into its churning depths
Where hulking, looming things embroil themselves in orgies of destruction.
Some intermittently float up to batter at you right beneath your feet,
Regular nearby rending noises alerting you to others, just like you,
Going under through a fissure, in a final, tiny blur of blue and red.
Yet you tiptoe on, only microns from the maelstrom’s greedy not-caring-less,
Still safe, right at this moment, closer to the distant dark and sunlit shore,
And there isn’t any other lake, there are no landscapes
Conceivable, constructable, feasible beyond what’s here,
Ameliorated, nonetheless, by amalgamated acts of random kindness
So, laughing with exhilaration and loving every second you’ve got left, you race on.