Earth, Water, Air, Fire

 

 

 

 

 

Another wriggling form to struggle with for days
and fanny up an epic theme in thirty lines,
my life! So life it is, Creation through to graves,

for what that’s worth: we’ve end times and withered vines
ahead. Who trod the grapes of wrath’ll have few to squash,
their gelt-grab land-snatch flung to dust, while covert whines

from suited overlords and sharks under the tosh
and lies will dribble on throughout each ghosted land,
lost whispers in a wind that whips the world. Gosh,

Isaiah had the right of it! So has the prophet band
scrying fire across crisp woods, but blanked, ignored,
until the burned earth is deemed out-of-hand.

Out-of...? Only when the ghouls up top were floored
by hail as big as their balls and hammered heads were split
did they admit that ‘something’ needed ‘doing,’ then stored

up more muck in watered words that wobbled on, unfit
to stem tsunamic seas drowning half of humanity
on frantic shores; the last half’ll fall to the Pit

via scorch and blast and choke. We’ll suffer more inanity
before all’s done and all are sifted fine as silt
across the martyred world; it’s much too late for sanity. 

We’ll be left to weep and fail at the globe’s tilt,
its magnet lurching as its crust upheaves to drop
where most life’s out, where ruins carry our death-guilt.

We were warned. Our Jeremiahs called out, “Stop!”
for fifty years, “Block the greed; you mow what you sow.”
Unheeding, civilisation’s due to bottom its top.

No pretty form will temper Creation’s end; the blow
will leave us gone, no life here to cry out, “Woe!"

Missed

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early February mist and greys,
the gutted, gloomy one,
but sultry summer-thunder days,
though still far off, will come,
as will a caw of murderous crows,
their stick-built nests a-litter,
while puddle-paddling, fluttering sparrows
delight us with their twitter,
unlike the social media squawks
with their mad, barking soundbites
below the gold-tipped wings of hawks
gliding down the sky-heights.

There’s balance here, but is it right?
Take a look at the nation’s plight.

Brexit Mayhem

I’ve never yet blogged here about UK politics, but the country is now at a historical turning point and that needs to be logged and dated. As for politics and the duplicitous minority party of Tory aliens who are behind the current debacle, I daren’t, in detail, get started because I’d never finish – from its lies, deception, the use of Goebbels-type propaganda, distraction techniques, secrecy, proven illegality, the deliberate and incendiary whipping-up of class, race and xenophobic rhetoric, corruption, constitutional mayhem, subversion of democracy, instituting a classic civil war scenario, to say nothing of the continuing destruction of the economic, business, social and cultural infrastructures of the country.

I’ve been in politics all my life, from being born into a Socialist household in the middle of WW2, through teaching politics and political theory to being active in the field, and have never seen anything so structurally damaging as what’s been happening since Cameron took office and what he did with his ‘party first’ Brexit referendum; and, believe me, I've seen some in my longish life, including the ruinous Thatcherite years. BoJ and the present glut of Tories in power might as well be on Mars, so divorced are they from the damage their ‘me first’ policies and ideology have caused. We are now rapidly descending into being a banana republic, though, this week, the would-be despot’s shtick has been lopped a little by the Supreme Court. Mind, if the branch is so rotten, there’s often a need to take an axe to the tree and destroy its root.

And now we have this oafish goon, Johnson, who refuses to apologise over his remarks about the murdered Jo Cox, murdered as a direct result of his, the ERG’s and Farage’s inflammatory rhetoric used in the Brexit referendum campaign, as well as refusing to apologise to people, Queen and Parliament over illegally proroguing Parliament. How anyone can say that there’s an intelligence that cares for ordinary people and their needs behind his buffoonish exterior, I can’t imagine. All we get is bluster, bullying and the dodging of questions, certainly no considered policy statements or even Brexit statements so far, together with which he’s shown that he hasn’t the common decency and manners of a plague-ridden rattus rattus, let alone a human being.

On top of that, he now has the temerity, after all the damage he and the Tories have done since 2010, to attempt to electioneer on the basis that he’s a supporter of the people and that any group or party opposing the Tories is to be seen as the inferior part of his ‘people v. the elite’ campaign - utterly spurious populist nonsense, of course. Tribune of the people? How dare he!

This is the bumptious boor who was born to privilege and has taken advantage of what that has offered throughout his corrupt and corrupting life. This was the crass fool who deliberately drove 21 MPs out of his own party, leaving the Tories as a minority government, but one that is now hard core ultra-right. This is the shyster who, backed by the psychopathic Cummings, tried to drive the prorogation railroad through Parliamentary procedure and the Constitution only for it to be stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling that his act was illegal. This is the political clown who has succeeded in uniting opposition parties to the extent that, to date, he hasn’t had one of his Parliamentary motions passed through the House since he took office. This is the little tin god who can't even get a presentable Brexit policy together and is making every effort not to have one. How any ordinary voter can still support the man and not see what he and the current Tory Party truly are – tyrannical, fascistic, without humanity or scruple – is beyond me as much as it’s beyond rationality and reality.

Worse, there's a deliberate madness to the rhetoric now being used. It's about BoJ/Cummings investing in it to the extent that there could be more murders and riots on the streets. They'd then exploit that to a) whip up more division in the country by using further rhetoric along the lines of "if you want the rioting, etc., to stop, get a no-Brexit deal through the HoC," as Cummings more or less blackmailingly indicated yesterday, and b) to invest even more in the monstrous pre-election gobshite of the 'people v. the elite' in order to influence the election's outcome.  What they're doing is attempting to create a violent reality in order to force through their aims; it's pure Goebbels-type psychological manipulation.

We saw these same tactics used 80-odd years ago by the Nazis in their sweep to power. It's terrifying to see them used now by hardline no-dealers. More terrifying is that too many ordinary people haven't seen through this and dismiss it as fear-mongering, then revert to emotion-laden opinion based on the lies and soundbites they've been fed. There's nothing that BoJ/Cummings won't stoop to in order to gain their ends.

And people still say that democracy hasn’t been hi-jacked and that the British people are not governed by a despotic system constituting PM and Cabinet? Yeah, right! In fact, it's about as far right as you can get short of outright Nazism.

More on this
 

Enmeshed, Struggled, Snapped

For David Kelly

Not ten hours dead and velvet shines rainbows

stark against fields where streams sluice over stone;

upended and dropping from taut, country gallows,

moles are transfixed. Their trapper alone

climbs to the copse, where keepers in plainclothes

search out another set up to atone

for frenzied top-feeders, who, hunting in shallows,

shear flesh from the bones of - Ah, there he is! Prone.

Down by sharp reeds scraping dirges to minnows,

blood-snouted signallers, dancing, make known

to ambulance-drivers, who haul past the meadows

a red-wristed corpse, its essences flown,

that up at the house with dark-curtained windows

a widow and family wait till a phone

whispers the message, “It’s sad, but what follows

needs delicate hands to level death’s tone.”

Back on the wire where moles shift in shadows,

a fly slickens eggs over eyes that have grown

impartial, if blighted by blank-stares at sideshows

propped to the beams with the dead and the blown.

The Part of Olives

Pass the divided moon

tonight, before Friday,

Shabbat. Break it over

our bowl of green crop.

Bite bitter blacks,

fruit of the wood

whose gnarl and twist

pruning wrought for years.

There was not a time

when you, unheavy,

could clatter

the glut to market,

nor I, back

in the grove, heave

mine to the press,

unstumbling;

part them, squeeze

them in cloth,

so down it drops,

viscid,

to their pool

of first blood.

Piece by the Wayside

One hand, a watch, a wedding ring,

a peace of flesh flown off for tests -

we’ve rid the world of minor pests,

all crawling things, ants on the wing.

Let his funeral paeans sing

of perfect virtue, life denied

to God’s own son. It’s justified.

He’d still support their clamorous call

to pin the killers to the wall:
our watch's arms are sanctified.