dark is the morning dark is my phone with aliens rushing our border
i watch these vermin with contempt
i take my eyes off at 8am sharp
the commute is only an hour but a good first impression i will attempt
i bought the new phone today
it’s 0.5 centimeters bigger and even has another camera to survey
i stopped by the restaurant because its payday
the cashier’s wage is pitiful and yet they obey
that restaurant is slick with oil in the night
tomorrow the donkeys wake up to the styx
it's just the usual politics
though no darker than the previous night
some donkeys have houses, some half detached
some donkeys work carts, some clack away at keyboards
all sleepy
but passionate enough to wage wars for pigs in hordes
our fat shadow casts a melatonin over them
honing an crepuscule covert with its shape
sluggishly, one eye scans for solidarity
satisfied with the turbulence over the landscape
Wrongthink is any think
You might do on your own,
You know, in the vastness
Of your inner space
As cloud trains drift by
Morphing into shapes
As fanciful as you allow.
Rightthink in contrast
Is mind control from without
With nothing fanciful or free allowed,
Just dogma and doctrine
And all the usual stuff
That makes thinking a chore and bore
Leaving us free to accept
Whatever it is they say we need to know.
Rightthink becomes our think
When we have lost touch
With what it means to be free
‘Cause being free
Means not knowing what might come next
As cloud trains pass
And shapes morph
Outside the boundaries of our mind.
(2/19/24)
There is reason why evil
has persisted, Man does not
wisely use his power, rejecting
God's council, a Better Plan – the
devil having no power, but for
the power given him by God's Man.
We are co-conspirators, feigned
ignorance no panacea nor bliss...
on what Christ Loves the Devil uses
a pulverizing fist –
Free Will has glorious Manifestation –
but such freedom does not
come without risk – let not
one's lesser ego, lead to internal
cancers, electing to office bloody stools
and piss....
I ask, at what cost?
Coiled beneath the leaves, nothing is seen of his reprieve.
The viper’s warning is curtailed.
Silently masked among the decay, a wooden shelter becomes his stay.
The viper’s ambush is prepared.
Wanting, searching, like field mice the children are learning.
The teacher prepares to pounce.
Writhing, frothing, innocence from adolescence is fleeting.
Status quo, they begin to denounce.
Like poison, consumption, coveting is quickening within the arterial circulation.
Rebellious youth herald Marxist slogans.
Crying, suffering, parents beg for an answering.
Who trespassed within the kindergartens?
Forty Years now lost.
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.”
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!
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 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”.
The key, for me, must be those onion domes.
Concentric skins, like Russian dolls, contain:
they don’t obtrude. Defensive rings explain
the posture. Let’s not bother Sherlock Holmes
with this one. Save Bill Bailey’s fine-tooth combs.
They feared for Minsk, like others fear for Maine.
The Wall was there, so brains would cease to drain
towards those tail-fins, all decked out in chrome.
They tried to build a comely comfort-zone,
a space to place a hundred home-grown flowers.
We couldn’t wait to see it overthrown
(Archangel, Wayne, Polaris, Gary Powers,
Capone, Stallone, Cohns, drones and Sharon Stone).
They wanted only to be left alone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Related Poems