MEN OF STRAW

Talking of feckless rubbish, it’s what they expect
-orate, politicos of slender intellect.
Hot air on air, polluted atmosphere.
Managed dispersal system the new jargon here.

He’s not discussing refuse. Refugees,
more human flotsam – a distasteful theme
for Government to deal with – will, he guarantees,
be allocated nationwide. His dream

is that the regions play their part, so those
asylum-seekers, torture-victims, all
aliens (bogus claimants too) are thus disposed
of fast, hygienically sown far from Whitehall.

An underclass with vouchers to present. That way,
abuses of the system can’t take place.
The interviewer lets him have full say:
he blames his predecessor’s policies;

swears this whole situation was allowed
to escalate, till now it’s out of hand.
Does one dissenting voice sound from the crowd
to criticise our screened, unpleasant land?

None interrupts, few listen. Everything
is someone else’s fault. When distant war
so recently pursued, so undeclared,
made hearts sink and armsdealers only sing,

still Our Brave Lads flattened the unprepared,
flooding some foreign field in fire and gore.
Where were the protests aimed? Had so few cared?
The usual spokesmen told lies, as before.

Bold media persons fought by proxy; they
let fly with bylines. Whether to appease
or slaughter hardly mattered anyway;
airtime and graves were filled and refugees

became a talkshow ‘problem’. Now this man,
keen to defend some petty, grudging plan,
spoils breakfast with his garbage. (People can
switch off officials – ostriches hate fuss.)

Set, mindset, match, each conflict has an end;
old scores may stay unsettled, foe turn Friend.
Words melt or rot, evasions various:
finical verbiage covers dearth of feeling.
Are buried heads all truffling treats in store?

---

 

ON A RECENT REPRINT OF WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Examination setbook floated complete with a mass of notes.

Theses there, Bibliographies here. The parasitic growths abound,

original insight drowned - lost in inevitable quotes

from, or references to, the likes of Desperate Dan Lacan,

Bo Diddley Baudrillard and Derring-do Derrida.

Most students breathed from Barthes just farts,

from Foucault fuck all... Cue

for whichever (preferably foreign) Profs

newest flavour. The current jerkoffs

in seminal scholarly fashion?

This term, next year, some might back Bakhtin...

Not all the above were duds, nor carnivalesque,

yet spawned their Sargasso of jargon, seriously grotesque.

Tides of tedium came filling screen on screen,

piled impenetrable, high across each desk.

Still, the real classic resists - lest it

spell out or be quite engulfed by-

Creepy

Academic

Sludge

Hideous

to read. An acronym, you guessed it,

prompted by the graceless greedy rise

of Women's Studies, fuddyduddies, offputting editions

with wild angles to promote, and axes ground.

All the tortuous processes of expedition

move neither to story nor book, but toward something

else, cunning or blank. Canonical discourse.

Discuss: not Plot - a Narrative Trajectory rather.

The whole colonial subtext being privileged,

foregrounded here... whose topos it's clear

is, arguably, emblematized...

I kid you not, kids: such ballast's not required

to weigh down reader wading through Whatever's Set.

And if, and as, it must be picked apart,

try an intuitive dive - you'll find

truth's always submerged in the truest art,

resisting alike the Fool, the professional Wise.

Such types were seen through, through great blue eyes,

while the hypocrites too were seen to, their lies

identified, lives dealt with,

without fear or favour, unwavering from the start.

Painstakingly, line after line, draft upon draft,

the crystal spirit lightened everything

until soul could clap hands and sing

and sail a frail, ever enduring craft

resiliently, breathtakingly

through any version of a life's Sargasso Sea.

But bland or creeping idiom may spread

to blunt her keener words,

dull the persistent edges of her world...

So reader, watch out for slippage and closure,

the sort of thing which shows you

how clover's the critic, how foolish the seer.

It's even possible none need fear

the great bluff will ever be called.

In that case, then, as in many another,

here's a Set Text, whose dangerous author

escapes us, is safely dead.

Jean would have been appalled

to be read so blindly, Rhys so misread.

DOWN UNDER AND UP ABOVE

Stealing the thunder on R3
bold John Kinsella, digger don,
showed listeners to the BBC
octosyllabic mastery,
so poms might hear and ponder on 

that brainfund ransacked to discuss
Ned Kelly's band and banditry
Let's hand it to the swagman, he
brandished one word to menace us
-verisimilitudinous.

Episode in the War Against Error

[Stockwell tube station, London, 22 July 05] 

******* 

Hired guns hunted down one… Brazilian,
young naïf coldly rendered to death.
They collared the sinister Alien,
who gave up, underground, his last breath.

It seems he was seated – no hurry at first.
Did the marksmen yell boldly, as they’d rehearsed,
and pin flat the accused or rather, Accursed?

The name of this fair game is Kill-not-cure,
codenames and no packdrill, its aim unsure:
targets exist to be hit with each burst.

While passengers freeze, turn sideways in dread,
seven bullets point-blank blow open his head. 

*  

[ Note:    An eighth bullet hit 27-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes in the shoulder.   Three more shots missed.
The Daily Telegraph later announced on its front page (16/11/05) that hollow-point – or dum-dum – ammunition,
‘banned in warfare under international convention’, was used.]

WHITER THAN WHITE

A 110-kiloton bomb was not 
technically a bomb, he's supposed to have said-
Jacques (pure-as-his-name ?) Le Blanc, 
the French Ambassador to N.Z.
since it was set off underground 
and produced no mushroom cloud.

Did this dumbfound a far-flung crowd 
of Press in the Pacific ? (Max Miller got 
his stories right: "Now, here's a funny thing…)
Diplomat Jack-the-Lad sailed on with sang-
froid, unabashed, as purely, to propound:
"It's a device which is exploding".

---

TORY CANVASSERS IN THE LUNCH HOUR

If I were fulmar, or fuller 
from a - now interrupted - meal, 
I'd puke over the pair of you, 
by way of my say on your spiel.


("Fulmars react to intruders by ejecting a
stream of foul-smelling oily vomit from the beak."
Book of the British Countryside)

---

ARTS WORKERS

This region's Mutual Administrators' Society 
For Arts, when quizzed on policy, resorts 
to waffle. MASSFARTS staff freeload with zest, 
on leave, off sick, at meetings, out to lunch. 
None is accountable, so that bland bunch –
blase old lags, young dears, smooth cheats with bleeding hearts-
hangs on. Spokespersons cheerlead for the Arts. 
Their self-awarded titles vary by the day. 
Paid to spend (no, 'disseminate') large public funds, 
they relish gibberish, enjoy full latitude
for fiddling, fuckups, trivial pursuits. 
They're primed to cover backs and private parts, 
use power-dressed jargon, streetwise platitude. 
Remits accumulate, duly require Reports –
covering Gender, the Community or Roots. 
When paper-shufflers can see fit to shift 
widespreading adiposities off office seats, 
for faxes lengthier than fucks they're known; 
their ostentatious highs come as they lift 
the latest-state-of-the-art-NEW mobile phone. 
But brains stay static, since it's never done 
to spark ideas, enthusiasm, anyway. 
Executives act Seriously Bored
if forced to meet an artist: why reward 
the latter's crackbrained work, sheer deja vu?
"Fill in these forms. Six copies each, required of you! 
No, next financial year's far-from-substantial budget 
is spent...." (Audits confirm there's no proof how they fudge it.)

"Clearly regrettable... .Too bad.. .A pity... 
We'll address this shortfall with a Sub-Committee, 
something on the lines of an Advisory Panel. 
You'll play a major role, of course." ( What finest flannel!) 
"Restoring confidence by mending fences..." 
"We'll take your views on board.. Offer expenses..."

Of Boards, Consultancies and Panels, plenty 
of narcotizing packs exist. Ten, twenty, 
can be shuffled or regrouped - few of whose 
well-heeled token members need to abuse 
a flexibly creative Ex's list:
no worthy window-dressing bore gets pissed. 
Sinecures are endorsed, index-linked salaries, 
perquisites, indispensable pension schemes. 
(Sir Peter's paw is creeping toward Valerie's.) 
And are there better-than-equal opportunities 
for money and status to bait us beyond fondest dreams? 
May we grope whom we please, pleading immunities 
of diplomatic allsorts that conveniently outflank 
PC ? Do polls reflect (it's plain to see)
how smug bastards wank all the way to the bank? 
When's the whistle blown ? You know how soon it is? 
Yet folk at the Mutual retain their right senses, 
are trained to mix glibness with poorest pretences. 
Rigged games and changing rules suit their team best. 
If - stuck with honest talent - anyone 
should question this Society's consuming greed 
for getting goodies, gongs end quids pro quo, 
"Sour Grapes" provides both greeting and retort. Indeed, 
such mud sticks first and worst. Mind how you go.

---

DEFINING TERMS

Yours are, it must be stressed, weapons of mass 
destruction. Ours ? In no sense, not at all. 
They keep us free, while on the other hand 
forming what henceforth we propose to call 
smart hardware nope, .necessary deterrent. 
(That last phrase you'd do well to understand.) 
We're world police, the ones who flatten words:
our critics are irrelevant or crass.

Let's drop it. Argue if you will for peace 
but in the end it's strictly for the birds. 
You have no say. Split hairs or atoms, we 
can amply demonstrate what’s plain to see 
that we have ways a matching lunacy. 
The difference between us is self-evident.

---

MAKING IT

Careerist filled with venial cunning, greedy fool 
alike, share one grey maxim, a simplistic rule:
these days It's money signifies success. 
Which means, while giving old dross a new dress, 
publishers find their firms gripped in accountant hands; 
the brightest future on PR depends.
So journos, ghostwriters and crooks seize chances to 
promote those ‘personalities' they don't possess
themselves. Nonbooks and huge advances for the few 
see off the struggling freelance (me or you?) 
Queasy millennium. Crazed dawn for telling 
any awkward truths. Reduced to selling 
souls and words like soap, most pushers taste mishap. 
Creative minds avoid surrender's trap, 
turn anguish into anger, take fresh heart.
Writing is no easy business
but always a difficult art.

---

                            
THE 1913 DERBY
                            
Years later it's clear that Queen 
Alexandra must have been 
more concerned 
about the jockey Herbert Jones 
than anything....

When she learned 
of the unfortunate incident, 
a telegram most graciously sent 
him made no bones 
about her fellow-feeling:

Queen Alexandra was very 
sorry indeed to read 
of your sad accident 
caused through the abominable 
conduct of a brutal

lunatic woman
But while Emily Wilding 
Davison, who dashed on course, 
succumbed to the pounding 
hooves of the King's horse,

the other main loser in the race, 
Herbert Jones, survived to keep 
an album of that Derby Day. 
World newsclips vexed his sleep, 
Like 'the look of horror on her face".

The Great War soon drove everybody mad, 
yet Jones could not exorcise regret:
some ghosts will never fade away. 
Was she hysteric, heroine or martyr for the sad, 
that never-quite-forgotten suffragette?

Now the Royal Message is being flogged at Sotheby's 
some fool's gold may revive those coldest memories.

---

A BIG HAND FOR DIDEROT

Women's written work was wittier, once.
The formula for Millett? Miller 
whether just jerk, naif or knave, 
gave excellent head-fodder, nonetheless... 
Selective quotes make any god a dunce, 
so that shrewd Kate might fill a book, 
berating intellectual male sleaze.
Miller or Mailer (stinker! jailer!): He's 
a prick talking balls.

Millennial form? 'New' feminist slaves of fashion 
mouth off the more, In vying to confess. 
Flaunting crude literary envy till it paIls, 
these creatures con most liberated journos for a while.

Truth means their primal duty is to Ms. Behave-
She-who-has-it-All-Ways - missing brain or style. 
Hence the whole hype for what's a group emission 
of self-promoting, laboured missionary bile:
cunts talking cunts.


vide: Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, 1970.
Eve Ensler (et al)' The Vagina Monologues, 1999. 
Denis Diderot, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, 1748.

---

 NEW LABOUR. NEW LONDON. NEW MILLENNIUM

Well, what did you expect?
A shining skyline turd, smug lump of Dome?
Pay to appraise it anyway, then exit from
the doubtful joy of grandiose Big Wheel!

The vista's quite unarguably clear enough.
The spin doctors have prescribed fine Stuff:
The Blair Shit Project
is where It's at, and that's for real!

To Tony's roost now wobble home 
all sorts of Politically-Modified fowl, 
gutless species who'll in turn infect 
apathetic Albion's irritable bowel.

Parasites infesting every view, the very air of 
Metropolitan Millennium, 
grow greedier for cash, to grab respect:
one of these creatures may yet make a Mayor...

End of the line, whichever way you go or come. 
What, democrat or daydreamer, did you expect? 
That body politic, newly madeover, might reject 
its own insidious mad maladies? How it might hum 
a healthier, changed tune into the-next Millennium?

---

FAT OF THE LAND

Six times richer than Palace admits.
Ring out the celebration bells: that headline fits
so cosily. And God saves an ancient billionaire Queen
whose divine right to reign over cretinous shits
is laudable or laughable, if not obscene.
Abject zombies wave - braindead grunters culled from high and low,
poor extras of a royal movie, wallowing at the sty. 
Respect's doled out to porkers as old hogs roll grossly on. 
Nothing must spoil the Spectacle, nor put paid to the show:
Hunger, fed bread -&-circuses, chews humble pie-in-the-sky. 
Avid swine swallow each lie, gulp down both God & Mammon. 
Slaves, praise Our cash, admire Our pearls, Our bacon saved ages ago... 
British beefs orf? Then let them eat tripe. Hail Jubilee of gammon!

(The Times 15 Oct 2001)

---

BLAIR'S PRAYER

O Guard, or Gawd, or Dear Prime Fraud,
vanquish the vainglorious sinner, lest he wax rich and give up nothing.
Moreover, over a good dinner, our psalms and anthems we did sing:

Saddam and Gomorrah, every rogue must go! Down with 
Hussein's banner, Hosannah here below!

Blessed are the Warmongers, for
any speck of blood on their hands
remains arguably righteous. But there's undeniable gore
which - as I’ve lately remarked, if never so feebly before-
staineth the millions of culpable hands
waved high by misguided People of Peace.
I say unto you, the crowds of craven appeasers should know:
War cleanses evil and frees civilians in vilest foreign lands.

Yea verily, our Sacred Oil Shares shall increase! 
Please praise most unctuously Amerika, therefore, 
whence all smart bombs and naive blessings freely flow. 
Expansive (though expensive) thanks to Yankeedom. Let's pray 
to the Great Mercenary Greedhead, our King of Mammon today...

Lift your faces and your voices, gird your fierce loins for the fight, 
well ride out world disaster, our Banks can survive all right. 
Two great Allies will walk on water, disperse the global fears.

Wait, just hang on a second - Apocalyptic Silence, pray,
as I blare out and nobly lead and try to orchestrate
a handful (at least a fistful) of truly inspiring cheers.
Let's hear it from the Doubting Toms and for the Empire State:
Gungho and Hurrah and Hip Hop Hooray!
Friends, Holy Romans, Countrysidemen,
lend me your crocodile tears:
I intend to end up a Lord, if there be any future years.

Right now I await your plaudits, recorded loud and clear. 
This bunker's getting empty, but I hope someone can hear. 
I feel a breeze, yet we're down on our knees, 
we're ever so saintly-sincere - O deliver us please from our enemies – 
Save us from burning, Bush & Co.!!!
Our Men

---

IN OUR MIDST

Safe at Fylingdales
spies from a friendly Empire 
track down stars and oil

---

VIAGGIO IN ITALIA
(pace Roberta Rossellini)

Tony the phoney 
meets Belusconi: 
how will our own crook cope 
with an anti-war Pope?

---

WAS THE BUTLER SORE?

Orton oughtn't
to have missed
tales of tapes
rapes of males
misdeeds when pissed

What petty hypocrites, 
what parasites, what shits. 
Such class-perpetuating twits 
these meanly suppurating 'Royals',
swollen pimples, foreign boils 
fit to be squeezed - that does the trick! 
or lanced from Albion's body politic.

Pay some flunkey peanuts,
scream if that monkey's penis 
is waved in one's imperious face:
cry shame and yell disgrace! 
These foolish things like queens and kings
they shall all pass 
Meanwhile it remains important
to value satirists like Orton 
to poke fun at each poker face 
and ridicule each righteous arse!

---

THE BITERS BIT

Muse and poet alike get bitten, each is not 
always love-drunk. Smiter or smitten cries So what 
game do you play - Demon-Bard or Dangerous Sot ?

Smart fought with Barker, found the nerve to give him lip -
forty stitches - still, theirs was a full lifetime trip,
The End never signalled. Moustache disguised that nip..

Plath promised fervour, first meeting and biting Hughes 
over booze. Which showed cheek enough, having him choose 
poetry's bitter route, sharp blood-gift none refuse.

Rebellion, provocation, short or long lives - tales 
drily retold by scholars of wild furies, errant males, 
whose parlous squabbles endure. Good old squalor never fails.

---

OUR LATEST LOGOMACHIA

Albion, aptly dubbed by Lawrence Durrell
Pudding Island, always was perfidious,
begrudged a welcome to the displaced lover.
George Barker, in the Fifties, headed for the States,
reckoned Little England inhospitable
to any poet manifesting talent:
bard-logic deemed it shrunken, the sad isle.
Empire had dwindled, its contaminated wave
(as most creative spirits would discover)
seemed to invest the mercenary brain,
find ways to flood each dull consumer’s heart.
All floundered selfishly, drowned by black gold,
ruled by the ebbing suction, irresistible,
which owned and drained body and soul.

True poets might be monsters and yet none
of that species, menaced or menacing,
quite thought the body politic, grown gross,
could give them cause for pride. Bards dead and gone
would find words now reduced: loud propaganda
strives to form Life-Style; no dissent or decency
left, where control-freaks, empty greedheads reign.
Exiles and expats, refugees – all the disgraced,
the disaffected misfits, knew their time
had come: they heard, and fled the thunder.
Threatened by low finance’s bigotry –
high fashion making truth de trop, fine art a crime –
they guessed no room remained for passion
and feared Authority would not relent. 

Their status seemed unsure: why should one stay
classbound, half-suspect or unheeded guest?
Historical exclusion left them blank, depressed.
Though desperation sometimes looked like vanity,
the only way to save one’s soul was flight
toward some promised other land. No Vacancy
was fit to match the English death, that joker’s void
breaking you gradually, which ground you under
and flung poor aching fragments briskly at the night.
Nothing, then, mars that vast Imperial condescension:
words may not make a mark on those who will not read.
Fast food is what is needed, junk unsafe
but profitable, tasteless fare, for greed
is how one governs. Artists are replaced,
some flicker briefly, gain a measure of success,
cash in, crash out, sell out, sell up, repeat
themselves, play dumb, dumb down, fall by the wayside or
settle for being set up for life. Others become
each a Narcissus, creep to Academe,
imbibing slime as stooges of the status quo,
or else, plainly astute, play the Established Whore. 

Nothing’s improved. Now, in that next Millennium
Barker and Durrell, Bacchic duo, never saw,
writers of newer vintage are themselves grown old
and work as best they can, loath to betray
whatever legacies remain… We’ve not U-turned –
a few of us – who all too often recently
have struggled to express our hatred for
the present crop of blind fools and bland crooks,
cretinous warmongers, vile hypocrites.
Who likes to live ruled by unmitigated shits?
The only form of freedom these rogues know
is media time and space to spout fond platitudes.
Bugger such well-heeled, racist, always righteous attitudes,
they’d censor truth, drown poets, burn their books!

---

TOADY BLAIR: AN APOLOGIA

There are good wars: what rotten luck it's the young men have to fight them.
If troops are brave, so are MPs, and no patriot should slight them, 
guardians committed to our cause. Re WMD threat, let's pray 
lines be drawn under such questions... God's will is for despots to pay. 
Lawyers may lie, but Just Trust Us - while we propagate my Fourth Way

AN EMBATTLED BOOK

The proofs were returned, punctiliously read.
The scatterbrained printer – a curse on his head! –
undid such care, adding new typos to the text.
Instead of the fine, considered, small-press book
to savour, emptor demands a caveat:
how best decipher where the poet’s at?

Errata slips apologized to the perplexed.
Error in any case abounds, bequeathed by fool or crook
while words endure… At random, a few vultures fed
on verse they reckoned scarcely worth a second look.
Slimmest of volumes, it still found its way without them.
Jap chaps, perhaps, can treasure a ‘corrector’s item’.

---

SONG OF SENEX THE CYNIC

     Life’s for the living
yet each day we’re dying:
 cold fate’s unforgiving
  for there’s no denying

 we’re in or we’re out –
   whisper or shout,
    turn, turn about –
  why are we waiting?

 Scheming, creating,
warring and mating,
  loving or hating:
the time that’s to spend
  has only one end.

 

Mercenary Colonials or MCs 

To cheers they march! Air: “Soldiers of the Queen, my lads”.
Cue smart salutes. The price of glory here is learned
by little guys with mythic status dearly earned
protecting native Brits from big bad foreign cads.
Plucky stars of the distant battlefield circus
mustn’t moan about bounty or homeland rewards,
facing that gratitude the Commonwealth affords.
Strange attitudes tarnish some military workers:
surely medals suffice? What’s bugging these Gurkhas?