Best Dummies Poems
Once, I think, you said to me
That poets are like the sand in the sea
But each grain plays a part in that ocean
To set each wave in motion.
Taste this
Little oasis
So you feel
The appeal.
Listen, my friend, to know what we are
How writing, in rhythm, does take us far
Every word takes our soul on vacation
To the culture of a new nation
We are open
When broken
For we know
How to grow.
Open your eyes, and you will see
That though we are like sand in the sea
Our work is parchment coated in emery,
Every word a recorded memory.
The Chinese tend to take the long-term view.
They do things differently in Old Cathay.
A thousand decades, almost to the day,
have come and gone. There’s really nothing new.
While foreigners fixate on Fu Manchu,
The Eastern mind sees things another way.
While we pervert, prevaricate, parlay,
the “chink” prefers to chew, review, construe.
“Since Revolution’s what you like to do,”
some western wag asked Mao in sixty-two,
what of the French?” (Vendée, Charlotte Corday,
the sans-culottes, et cetera.) “Your view?
A triumph, or disaster?” Like Sun-Tzu,
Tse Tung replied, “It’s far too soon to say.”
"Two kinds of people in this world, my friend,"
as that great thinker, Tuco, used to say:
the road to Wigan Pier has reached its end?
We're staying on the road to Mandalay?
The first type jabber of equality
but (humans being humans) there's a throne,
and someone grabs it. "Hence, so shall it be,"
he says. And as So-Shall-ists are they known.
The other lot have hides as tough as shellfish.
They have a ton of chutzpah, but no shame.
To cap it all, they're really rather selfish,
and that's why Cap-It-All-ists is their name.
So, which are you? A nervous-nerd-Ralph-Nader?
Or do you kiss the coccyx of Darth Vader?
The thorns-in-sides are various
which mar incumbents’ slumber.
Could Belgium bear Lumumba?
Would Britain brook Makarios?
There’s Bolsheviks or Mensheviks,
Parnell or De Valera:
Marat had Robespierre, or
the Romans, Vercingetorix.
There’s Che Guevara, Spartakists,
the Mau Mau, Mata Hari,
the Contras, Carbonari,
Hamas, Harmonious Fists.
The song that stops the show?
“It Ain’t Necessarily So”.
Complicity is easy for the Right,
one single flag to which they all adhere –
“someone might steal my loot”. This primal fear
prompts pistols under pillows, sleepless nights
and riot cops. Who needs a Stagyrite?
But Lefties hold their differences dear.
Each Keeper of the Flame is more sincere
than Cash-Is-Trash-ists, Ogden Nash-ists, quite
apart from Crypto-Fascists, Widow’s Mite
Apologists, Red Guards, or those who steer
by Stalin’s light (Stakhanovites). It’s clear:
you’d never have a play without a wright,
and so each faction finds its Miller Lite:
Kropotkin, Castro, Kopp – who’s cool this year?
Though Canton claims it’s communist, it’s not.
Beijing, like Belarus, breeds oligarchs.
There’s nobody alive who’s heard of Marx:
a rickshaw ride’s the only kind of trot.
Seek Mensheviks in Minsk, you’ll end with squat.
In Kursk are cadres countable as quarks,
and proles in Petrograd? Like hunting snarks.
It’s Putin’s perestroika, not Pol Pot.
Why did the whole thing vanish in thin air?
Why’s Sputnik spat on? Why is red so square?
We needn’t be complacent in the West.
There’s lots to learn within the Warsaw Waltz
for, as a tool to scrutinise the faults
of Christian Capital Conquest, it’s the best!
There’s nothing lacking in the thing itself.
In some ways, it’s the very best of us.
It’s not like Marx was some egregious elf,
or Rosa Luxemburg some succubus.
The deal is, if you subjugate the masses,
they might not like it. Corner them, and they
will fan out fiercely, as do poison gases,
and pimps and prelates will be swept away.
So simple, so methodical. So why
did communism curdle and collapse?
One short, scant century it took to die:
a flimsy, flawed philosophy, perhaps?
We messed up, through our immaturity,
the grandeur of that peerless theory.
As Arkansas could never be Alaska,
so no-one wants Montana to be Maine.
Could North Dakota claim to be Nebraska?
Can Vachel Lindsay double for Hart Crane?
If Sing Sing isn’t Appalachian Spring,
and Justin Bieber can’t be Frankie Laine,
or William Burroughs isn’t Stephen King,
then Terminator Two’s not Citizen Kane.
If Fifty Shades is not The House of Usher,
and Ginsberg couldn’t write the Wayside Inn,
why should you think that China’s part of Russia,
or Kim Il Sung is also Ho Chi Minh?
Why should they be colluding, callous elves?
Why can’t they be as different as ourselves?
B52s above the Aleutians?
It never was a Red Dread global mission.
Fidel was just Galician patrician,
and Ho and Mao were scholarly Confucians.
They wore those uniforms like horsehair vests,
to carve from abject nothingness an entity,
a national and regional identity,
ingredients which only coalesced
when nascent nations donned that soviet skin,
abhorrent to the blinkered Baywatch mind:
unowned, untethered, boundless, non-aligned –
but with Kalashnikovs airlifted in.
As Mary Jane moved in on moonshine stills,
the five-year-olds rehearsed their fallout drills.
Imagine, if you will, working the land.
You knead it, tend it, love it. You belong.
Its wants, its moods, its needs, you understand,
for you arose from it. You sing its song.
The Father-god sends fluids from the sky
to fertilize the Mother, here below.
You help her raise her young. Who need ask why?
It's as it's always been. You simply know.
However. There's a steam-forge in the glen,
a brooding squatting thing, which reeks and groans.
The fat man in the stove-pipe hat gives tokens
to those who'll quit the land. Pity those men!
Those rootless, soulless wraiths, diminished, broken,
divorced from soil, machine-oil in their bones!
There’s none more racist than your Working Man.
Conservative. “Let’s keep it as it is:
just give me Tic-Tac-Toe and Criss-Cross Quiz.”
No greater sexist since the world began –
that foxes have their prices, he’ll accept,
and swallows whole the tabloid rag he reads
(the breasts of teenage girls are all he heeds).
Compassion for his Comrades? Jesus wept!
He’s happy with his Fangios and Faldos,
admires Samantha Foxes, Katy Prices.
His only Cristianos are Ronaldos,
and God alone knows if he’s heard of Isis.
Keep feeding him his Oprahs and Geraldos,
but pray you don’t encounter him in crisis.
Mosaic tablets are not monoliths.
It all depends (despair, or last best hope?)
whatever end of Tocqueville’s telescope
you happen to be viewing. One man’s myths
are gospels to another. Freedom fighters,
or filthy terrorists? A vexing ton
of evidence encumbers Lexington.
Our certain self-assertion might indict us.
A foreign army’s trampling our soil,
despoiling farms and cottages at will?
We’re justified (according, then, to Hoyle)
in using violence? It’s never quite as
simple as they say, those righteous writers.
Is Dien Bien Phu so far from Bunker Hill?
The Corsican was never really Gallic.
The Austrian was not remotely Prussian.
Jugashvili (let's put this in italics)
could not be, in a month of Sundays, Russian.
The point of Communism is, it's global,
or else it's nothing. Swimming or it's dead,
like sharks, it fans out (kind of like Chernobyl).
Like peanut butter, it was made to spread.
This in-one-country nonsense once held sway
(Archangel, all the way to Kazakhstan),
but when he died, his system blew away,
as do all systems centred on one man.
Napoleon's snowball stopped with "Viet Cong".
The wonder is, it lasted quite so long.
Marx and Spencer
Were I to tell you what I think of Spencer
(the middle-manager, without the “man”,
and vilest cockroach since the world began),
my poem would incense the meekest censor.
But when our hands in insurrection join,
we arm ourselves to take back what is ours,
red banners streaming from the highest towers,
my first clip’s going straight in Spencer’s groin.
Don’t tell me that we’re going to do it clean,
that revolution’s flawed unless it’s surgical.
Old Shakespeare knew (and why not get liturgical?)
let slip the dogs, you get mujahideen.
Drag Spencer out and bludgeon him to death.
Revenge, and not reform? I’ve seen Macbeth.
There’s far more kinds of Lefty than just one.
There’s Marx and Morris, Blanc, Bakunin, Blum,
the Comintern, the Spartakists, the POUM,
St-Just, Zinoviev and Saint-Simon.
The working class may ask how this lot failed it:
so many brands, but nobody is buying.
So why’s the Trot from Trier death-defying?
Well, Marx explained it, ascertained it, nailed it.
The Gradgrinds have their Hueys and Husqvarnas.
A self-sufficient paradise is nice,
(if beri-beri lets you live on rice),
but who will bring bikinis and bananas?
We’re trapped inside the capital machine,
and drip-fed baseball, bingo, Benzedrine.