mock verse

mock verse (for crabs)

skaters

Bald men on roller-skates !

I tell you, I saw them,

bald men on roller-skates,

I mean, grown-ups.

They had all the gear, they were hard,

knee-pads, in-lines,

mountain-biker's helmets,

mobile phones,

they didn't need their Mothers,

they were grown-ups,

roller-skating on the Promenade;

Their Mothers are in wheelchairs.

They're so brave,

roller-skating

on the Prom

in Hove.

colour supplements

'One hundred years, a Century.........'

the Colour Supplements define

a bourgeois wish for history

a culture not yet undermined.

The status-quo, a locked embrace

of nouveau chic and fossilised,

a situation under glass

that keeps the dust out of our eyes

Death alone is changeless as

the vanity this represents

cherished in expensive things

displayed in Colour Supplements.

Those glossy epitaphs to this

the age of flushability

selling things that don't exist

to Corporate Identities.

Thus the culture fabricates

the evidence of better pasts,

and lets the future recreate

our present prison, frozen fast.

Unless the Media invent

a final, perfect compromise

where everything's convenient

and life is like it's televised.

The Colour Supplements are means

towards that factive falsity,

which titillate with coloured dreams

our matchless mediocrity.

Page on colour page of it,

an empty detour from dull paths,

more trivial and pointless shit

and lots of colour photographs.

See Nero burning as he plays

amidst these adverts and events,

the people in the new Pompeiis

are reading Colour Supplements.

Death alone is changelessness

'Buy Death' the Supplements enthuse,

we sit upon our powder-kegs

and warm our hands around the fuse.

The Colour Supplements advise us

'Salve your boredom, ease your pain,

save new values and old lies as

gold,

and glass,

and porcelain.'

frenzied clerk poem.

Turn on the tap.

Out spills a hideous gush of rented clerk.

There are clerks in the cupboards,

clerks lurking in the secret holes,

clerks in dreams, and silent clerks in crowds.

Clerks, considering the ways,

engraving rule-book mantras on their lily thighs,

damp clerks discussing mildew,

dreary clerks.

Clerks clerks clerks.

Clerk's shoes, clerk's feet, clerk's heads, rat-trapped with files,

the lives they sieve with rules

will I not fit ?

Why is the moon so distant and so big ?

Why is the secret night so dark ?

Is it so that clerks might spy on me ?

Is god a clerk ?

love poem

The courting pair obey the urge

concealed in courtship ritual

exhibiting behaviour

which is entirely typical

and each responds as they have learnt

and as their instincts force them to

this endless tide of ancient urge

is all that people ever knew,

and this is all it ever was,

though poets may elaborate

on deathless love and high romance

whilst dreary priests expatiate

on standards and morality

(designed to bind each to a mate

in order that society

may thus ensure they replicate

what instinct and conditioning

and that morality dictate -

the mortgaged life their parents led

in suburbs and in triplicate.)

A stable unit for the care

of offspring programmed to repeat

the endless cycle;

breed and rear and cease.

The story of all meat.

The old pair-bonding pattern holds,

the race must copulate or die

the lovers play out ancient roles

reacting to such stimuli.

Exhibiting behaviour

which is entirely typical

I linger in your softest kiss

and talk of bliss perpetual,

it's just blind instinct and blind lust

made bland by courtship ritual.

funeral

He did his whack, was laid to rest

within a still November day,

his wife seemed numbed, and dressed in black

we took her to the church to pray.

The Vicar uttered solemn words

and we all muttered empty things

and tried to sympathise with her

amid her many sufferings,

but as the organ music rose

a woman's voice was heard to say

"I'm glad you're dead at last, you sod,

I never liked you anyway."

love's the disease

Well, you won't take me back.

It's over then.

I might ask what has caused this change of heart.

Don't worry, I won't bother you again,

I never thought you liked me from the start;

two people jumped together, fell apart.

Perhaps you make your mind up like your face,

or change your mind each time you change your dress,

last week we were young lovers,

what a pace one has to travel at.

Well, what a mess.

I've never known a girl with such vitesse.

What if I cut my ear off, or grew wings ?

No.

If I knelt I'd only hurt my knees,

and if I begged it wouldn't alter things.

I won't embarrass you with further pleas.......

A week in bed's the cure.

Love's the disease.

ionised

Did I dare to show affection,

an expression of attraction ?

Understand from this confession

it was never my intention;

if I should have sought permission

please explain by what convention,

I am guilty without question,

and I acted from conviction,

since I could not find expression

for the wealth of my condition.

If I acted without sanction

or was forward in my action,

it was not of my volition,

I was misled by my passion,

please excuse my indiscretion,

I am stricken with contrition,

I would merely like to mention

that I love you in my fashion.

science

(Jackson Pollock, in his trance,

celebrating paint and skin

knew citadels of eloquence

as places men hang wardrobes in.)

Cæser's rotting in his chair

the question's not of this or that

there's little left worth saving here

I'd have the dead wolves chew our fat.

Excalibur was not our sword

but borrowed from the elements

civilised's a bartered word

defined by mere self-reference.

We have angered savage Gods.

Even now you hear them roar

you tinker with the crazed machine

as sequences of lightning pour.

Can we acknowledge higher power ?

What man is not indictable ?

The death-throes of the dinosaur

make atom-bombs excitable.

Mazy truth has clicked its lock,

empiricists imperious,

mystery's a ticking box

and all things are mysterious.

Crippled remnants of our lie

make us remain the quiet men

lest Napalm, pouring from the sky

must save us from ourselves again.

sid

Sid died for us,

our cravings and our lust,

a lost boy drifting on a sea of sharks

filled by those murky trickles of disgust

the gutter press pretend are Noah's Ark.

His fame exploded, martyred for no cause

fools and heroes fuelled front pages,

died,

a sick world bred a scapegoat, fed him laws

and filmed the rebel dying,

crucified.

The Necessary

The Department of Obstruction hereby promulgates decrees

which invite the population to starvation by degrees

there are forty thousand volumes, in the office, on the shelf,

if you cannot understand them it is best to kill yourself.

There are fully-detailed fact-sheets, an appendix about worms,

and that is just the Glossary of Necessary Terms.

But if you fulfil your quotas, and respond to the injunctions

and you put in your appearance at important social functions,

you may avoid my sort of life, and rise above the masses,

and go winning Nobel Prizes, and inhaling noble gasses -

there's no end to the laughs

(until they turn into the screams),

when you may find the gloss peels off unnecessary dreams.

Hove

Bill and Tracy set off on a holiday,

picturing some sheltered strand or cove,

it’s raining as they shout about the pushchair and the agony,

and they are not in love, they are in Hove.

Shattered by the strictures of her Mother

Eglantine eloped with Matty Groves,

Each thought they had sacrificed themselves to liberate the other,

they were not in love, they were in Hove.

One man took a dwarf to be his lover;

the purloined midget melted on his stove,

yet pity them, and pity all those couples who discover

that they are not in love, they are in Hove.

Darren pulled an heiress from her Mister,

thought he’d found a secret treasure-trove,

but Tansy was a junkie and a waster like her sister,

and they were not in love, they were in Hove.

Heroes in antiquity loved Ladies;

Hera got the run-around from Jove;

it’s the tales of Poet’s Corner that will lead us all to Hades,

yet,

if we are not in love, we are in Hove.

batterey bread