Monday 31 January 2011

Time of the toad – ode to Alastair Campbell







Alastair Campbell still thinks it was right
To invade Iraq – the pornographer-in-chief
Still spouting the same, self-serving bullshit
The foul-mouthed spin-doctor was Tony's boy

His unhinged Messianic self-belief
Echoes that of his master, Mister Blair –
Whose moral crusade besmirched the UK –
Known as the “Middle East peace envoy”

Campbell was famous for four-letter tirades
Against other people in the media
Made the BBC ready for Murdoch
Attacked Gilligan, in the name of “lies”

He goes on believing; he's not ashamed
Mythologising his own part in history
Does he sleep soundly, without a trace of guilt?
Because of Blair, a hundred thousand died

Who put the light on?





















NB: Triolet

Someone has put the light back on
I thought that it had disappeared
You remember that thing – the sun?
Someone has put the light back on
It offers us protection
It removes our night-time fears
Someone has put the light back on
I thought that it had disappeared

The bright half

It's not that the winter is longer
Although it seems so
Its grip on the soul is stronger
Harder to endure
The consolation of days is
Still available
Certainly – the chatter of friends
But heard more faintly

We grow old; the night gives relief
Coveted, not feared
It's dangerous now. It has
Death in its embrace
Each year we leave the bright half with
A little less hope –
Fall into the dark, not knowing
If we will come out

Thursday 27 January 2011

Ode to Rupert


To Tom






And so, the old Moloch is moving in
His sterile mission to accumulate –
His burnt offerings are being prepared –
To monetise the assets of the state

Britain's being re-made for millionaires –
A Rupert-friendly Big Society –
The asset-strippers waiting at the gates
We're all in this together – except me

He would place a pay gate up in heaven
So as to exclude the poor, if he could
He's widening the eye of the needle
Murdoch is a Puritan; greed is good

There's plenty of sweet prey for the old beast
The problem in Britain is quality
He does satellite slush, sport and crap news
They buy a licence – for the BBC!

He likes the sneer of the playground bully
Requires his papers to pick on the meek
The world is merely his Monopoly board
I think I'll buy a new country this week

Eton Dave is putting the hours in
He is carefully crafting a new breed
A nation of servile proletarians
And country houses, where the rich succeed


Monday 24 January 2011

Football is ballet














This pub is London's unfriendliest scene
I'm merely waiting
The decor is brown and corrupted maroon
Like a diseased lung
Stacked chairs, like a junk shop or lumber room
Blue neon glowing
A pool table's violent shade of green

The pub flies the local team's tattered flag
In a faded display
Of embattled and proud hostility
It's hardly gastro
Seriously, it needs a makeover
The locals don't care
Grimy authenticity is is their bag

A giant screen dominates every angle
As the flat-capped men
With their grunts, four letter words and pints, seek
Amber oblivion
Watching inarticulate millionaires
Prod a small white ball
Gracefully, around a green rectangle

Bravely, I request some food and coffee
No? Do you have crisps?
A grudging yes from the barman, he's the
Tormentor-in-chief
These people's lives lack colour, poetry –
Football is ballet
For Christ's sake don't tell them. They would kill me

Sunday 16 January 2011

The wrong kind of luxury

















Tonight at Ford we'll all go wild

Cos the salsa is too mild
The glaring faults are there to see
There ain't no silver cutlery
Frozen croissants - please don't start
We're takin' this friggin' place apart

I knew weird things were going on
When they brought my filet mignon
'You call this steak well done,’ I said
'What colour is that, yeh? It's red
It just ain't good enough, you arse
An' what about my drama class?'

It's not just that they feed us sparsely
Only three kinds of friggin' parsly
Or that the wine list is deficient
The cultural offering insufficient
The Feng Shui is a friggin' disgrace
My emotions are all over the place

Been banged up for a year and half
I still ain't had a scented bath
This place is a friggin' liberty
An' whatever you think, it ain't just me
Last week, the tomatoes weren't sun dried
I hugged big Vernon, as he cried

He misses his music and his nan
Big Vern is a Schoenberg man
He yearns for the emotional schism
Of polytonal serialism
Take a man like that and feed him drivel
His soul is going to waste and shrivel

I told the screw – I ain't being Orphic
Vernon is culturally polymorphic
Ford Open Prison, tonight we go gaga
Ain't drinkin' no more Tesco's lager
This place is an indignity
It's the wrong kind of luxury


Saturday 15 January 2011

Winter villanelle











For Sarah

Today's a day for being in
It's supposed to be a holiday
To do nothing is not a sin

Like a feral pigeon's wing
The sky's a million shades of grey
Today's a day for being in

Some rotter has stolen my zing
The swine's taken my energy
To do nothing is not a sin

On these occasions, the best thing
Is an absorbing radio play
Today's a day for being in

Scrunched-up paper misses the bin
Even though it's four feet away
To do nothing is not a sin

Well, that's my opinion
It justifies my lethargy
Today's a day for being in
To do nothing is not a sin




Thursday 13 January 2011

Why oh why?











I saw the snowdrop thief today
Lurking in the shrubbery
Tube strike threatens royal wedding
Can't be bothered to change my bedding
Conditions are dismal, cold and grey
Across most parts of the UK

Everything's bad, not just the weather
Bankers have taken all the treasure
If Murdoch wins his little war
Radio 4 will be no more
The government's making a mighty mess
Of Bevan's dream the NHS

The cost of onions is soaring
Every film I see is boring
Disease, famine, fire and flood
Fire fighters engulfed by mud
The Martians are about to attack
And my boomerang won't come back


Tuesday 11 January 2011

Violence and hope: controversy on the 63
















NB Martin Amis author, Christopher Hitchens, journalist


Two people sit on the bus, discussing Shakespeare.
Another: “Your Uncle Vanya was superb”
Our driver, a classics scholar with film star looks
speaks Greek to his friend. He's never forgiven him
for those comments, in the London Review of Books.

The sky's a gigantic, suppurating bruise.
There's Peckham Rye common, where Blake saw his angels
puddles, with tower blocks in them, slide by us.
Queen's Road, where the palm trees of Peckham parade
listlessly. But who is this getting on the bus?

It's only Hitchens and Amis – Starsky and Hutch!
Hitch's last book is on everybody's mind.
The atheist tract set Lewisham alight –
God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion
Everyone has an opinion all right!

A stranger joins them. Looks like a varsity man.
His Oxford scarf is an exclamation mark.
He and Hitch are friends, they met at Balliol.
Precocious union debates were their platforms –
rowing on the Cherwell at dawn, the May ball

We have entered that liminal zone, the Old Kent Road
the least favoured spot on the Monopoly board.
Every pub claims to be Henry Cooper's gym.
You can still smell the Brylcreem and aftershave
“Splash it on all over”, they used to call him.

Here, thin yellow men regret the smoking ban.
Punch drunk, their fingers twitch for untipped Rothmans
collecting beer glasses in their frosted-glass lairs.
They are Charlie Chaplins, without his millions.
Violence and hope flavour the atmosphere.

We slither past Tesco's; to its rear the Shard
a slim, grey needle, pierces the sombre sky
“A point well made,” says Hitchens, of his new mate.
“Martin?” The upper-deck debate's in full swing.
What would Amis pere have thought? Martin hesitates.

“I'm sorry I don't agree,” he announces.
He will overcome this upstart; fuck him up
Like an unleashed Staff, he goes on the attack
“I see that you haven't read Christopher's book.
If you had done so, you would understand that ...”

As we pass through the Elephant, the boys
go at it, hammer and tongs, giving it some.
At Blackfriars, the brown river staggers by.
Does God exist? At least they have entertained.
The 63 bus is themed by their colloquy.







Monday 10 January 2011

Elegy for an atheist

















The apartment was in darkness and he invited me in to watch the sunset. It all seemed rather forlorn

Andrew Anthony visits Christopher Hitchens in New York, November, 2010

God is the life that inhabits us all
Even in Christopher Hitchens as he
Watches a sunset standing in the dark
Life leaves our bodies; we do not leave it
It's flowing through us. It shines in our eyes
God lives in the colours and metaphors
Of medieval frescoes, and of bars
God is most honoured by the innocent
God is always where beauty and love are

Clapton is not God. God is the idea
That placed Clapton is God on the wall –
God vibrates in Eric Clapton's guitar
God is love. Love exists. Ergo God does
God is most of what we cannot see
Ineffable. That which we cannot touch
It's too simple for some, with their degrees
But God's in them. God is not he or she
God is immanent. God is harmony

Smoke and mirrors


















NB I believe in God. It's religion that I don't believe in

What kind of a God would do it?
That sadistic Abraham trick
You sent him on a wild goose chase
Asked him to kill his son – that's sick!

And then there was that apple thing
Placed in the Garden of Eden
You must have known what Eve would do
Eat it! She was only human

That old-fashioned Godfather schtick
Don't you think it's just a bit crass
To terrorise your enemies
And give out presents at Christmas?

All the favours that you call in
It must all be such a big laugh –
Your ambiguous salvation
The rigged “tests” you choreograph

It's all smoke and mirrors your thing
You are like a slick TV host
Heaven and Hell – yours to dispose
Your warm-up man, the Holy Ghost

Like some glib settee salesman
Worship no other, you exhort
But you are a monopoly
You've got us by the balls, old sport




Monday 3 January 2011

Leaving


Yellow smudge of moon in grey sky
Chin like a porcupine
Sagging face, pale as gruel

Slowly, like a garden fading
Your life, in its shadows and glories
Is going away

The creaking bed
And the Hoovers that mow
Breath goes in. Rattles like pebbles. Goes out.

You are like a huge creature washed up
On an alien shore. I watch as
The light fades from your frame –
An inexplicable event. You are leaving

Soon, you will depart from this room,
With its intimacies and indignities
A space that you barely inhabited
Breath goes in. Does not come out