Bigot

You can keep your tiny boxes
To yourself, my fundamental fool
Along with all the certainty
In which you have been schooled
For if I thought obnoxious doctrine
Were a relevant life tool
I’d have gladly walked the catechism
Of my own accord

So you can take your pious overreach
And shove it where imagination
Festers in your whimsy, flimsy,
Soul-refining mind and wind your neck in
Lest the reckoning
You beckon in is thine;
You mind your own soul, chum
And I’ll take care of mine.

I can do without your pity
And your precious little wisdoms
And your judgemental prescriptions –
You can stick ’em with
Your nonsense conscience
Where the sun don’t shine
Because, despite your crude reproof
I know I’m fine.

(Originally posted, August 2013)

Cognition disabled

Between want and its think,
does the intellect shrink
to reject all conditions
that challenge position
as feeling meets static
in willing fanatics,
attracted to zealotry,
simple and tacit.

Cognition disabled,
crude labels get fabled
in finely tuned riffs,
adding pith to the myths
that enable the risibly
cheap narratives

as if actual factuals
didn’t exist;
as if truth got its proof
by the gift of low wish
and the gallop of Gish

until, hook, line and sinker
the sheep become fish

Impetus

Have meme, will trope.
Money for old rope.
Slippery slope.

Misc.

Have the eclectic quirks
In people’s online heads
Replaced the curiosity shops
Wherein, among
The bits and bobs
Of whimsy and antiquity,
We browse, instead,
For random gems to spot?

Age of outrage

This is the age
Of outrage
From the futile
And puerile
In frothing fever waged
To the overdue
And justified
By restless righteous gauge

This is the age
Of outrage
From perceived hurt
Vicarious or not occurred
In the keenly sensitive
To the chilled bones
Of those who choose
Live and let live

This is the age
Of outrage
From confused followers
And blind swallowers
Of empty words
To the shocked
And taking stock
Of witnesses
To the absurd

This is the age
Of outrage
Based on any excuse
From valid to screw loose
Invigorated
For profiteering prophets
And the common sage
On a synthesised
And desiccated stage.

Insidious

I actually detest Right versus Left;
this furious cleft that separates the
warp
and weft
and
orchestrates derision between
North
and South
and East
and West.

I’m sick to death of hearing our politicos
push Britain’s countries, regions, counties
to collision, pitting citizens to competition
with each other, smothering our solidarity
and keeping everyone too busy to
unite and fight
the enemies of progress.

I can’t stand
the underhandedness of journalists
who think they are the Management;
who relish sowing spite and discontent
and growing blame.

I hate this go-comparing game that curdles
pleasant differences that weave the seams
of richness in emergent culture;
cleaves our sameness on the altar of hysteria
and immaturing whims.

I can’t abide the class divide creating bookends
for the snide deriding, moral chiding platforms
of disunity that undermine Community;
the clichéd phrasing
idol-praising
people-hazing
bullshit stinking, all guns blazing,
specious-thinking, double-speaking
pestilential,
power seeking,
puerile
piss-take
puss.

It is insidious.

Left bereft

Labour left
struck mute
by unsubstantiated
overrule
and even dumber
vitriolic ridicule

bereft, was Left
and rendered
altogether moot

call it cowardice,
collusion –
surrender to a plethora
of populist confusion –
yeah, whatever

in appeasement crept
Stockholm took root
and what was Labour
badly kept,
gave up
and left

Each strait’ning stitch of thought

The narrative of present time speaks woe of mind so constant in the framing grip of Mainstream’s and the common man’s ability to slip into pernicious discourse readily:

Some folks are most determined to rely on superstition and see sinister conspiracy in every exposition. Some people are so ego-driven even declarations of the bleedin’ obvious are put to competition. And some are so persuaded by a temporary, petty detail as to be distracted from the relevancies, real and active, all reflected in the bigger picture as connected. Some have become so much enthralled with notions of utopia, they really need an altogether, very separate world. And others isolate themselves as though the insulation guarantees to hold at bay the latest crazy, human fashion. But others, still, let go objective reason and embrace their fear by hating with gratuitous and undiscerning passion; they’ll lazily call everything and anyone ‘the same’ to justify ad hominem and blur informed and unenlightened blame. Some, yet, would rather spend their time intent on dredging well-known hist’ry scraped from barrels of old rhetoric – in immature one-upmanship – than take a risk on Myst’ry with imaginative courage.

Each strait’ning stitch of thought is tragic nourishment to fraying, tired fabric, worn as agents’ habit, causing independent thought to suffer its decline and hinder level-headedness and open heart to tell another story that most surely waits impatient for its once upon a time…

Oh, bless the Torygraph!

Oh, bless the Torygraph!
You have to laugh:
It tries so hard and yet its
Credibility decreases with
Each hoist of its irrational
Flag to telegraphic speech;
It parrots pieces of old time
And stereotype – all hype in
Frilly shirts and fancy bloomers –
This old Tory crooner preaches
Supplemental sugar treats
To those who take their slop
With a more modest garnish
Than the Daily Mail adopts.
No, not for nothing does it
Cultivate its outraged face in
Subtler tracts of seeming
People-pleasing Reason
To convince the Worried Well
And Pretty Comfortable that
Anything approaching left is
Recklessness personified.

It plies the great god
Umbrage with entitlement
From battlements bespoke
And smugly reassures the
Fearful Well and Safely
Comfortable that Earth is
Surely flat and that what’s
Right and proper is the more
Ensured by their dab hands
And fossil-brained demands.
Oh bless the Torygraph –
You have to laugh – It’s much
Too daft to be highbrow and
Somehow just refined enough
To seem a cut above the smut.

Daily Mail – Junk Mail

It is because I love this land that I despise
Your dirty rag. It is because I love this planet
And humanity in all its hues that I have never
Purchased you. And yet your reputation,
So preceding is it, that I’ve never needed to,
For what you do and say is parroted from every
Right-wing quarter every day and poured into my
Eyes and ears by all your corporate, mainstream
Peers as though your narrow, xenophobic tract
Did constitute empirically known fact.

But you are everything you claim to hate –
So rabid in your enmity of citizens and State.
You make your living sieving any information
That ingratiates you to the racists, homophobes,
Misogynists, elitists and the nationalists who’d
Have us in our places. You are bigots with a
Passion for a petty use of microscopic focus;
You are locusts to the fields of understanding,
Tolerance, compassion and perspective; an
Invective to goodwill and unity and common
Decency.

You are the dumbest form of patriot, besotted
By false flags, nametags and high-horse myths
With which to moralise. It might be funny if your
Preaching wasn’t reaching the messiahs set on
Profitable power and the happy-to-be vacuous,
Enthralled and tooled up with perceived consent.
Yes, you’re a self-important vent to fundamental
Imprecision and pernicious propaganda for a
Willing and uncivil baying mob that sees a virtue in
The seizing of some value from your puritanic gob.