DIG

Tags

Empire, History, Humanity, Imperialism, poem, poetry, satire

DIG

the deeper
you dig
the less
the glamour

bust of marble
turned to
feet of
clay

the mighty
testimony of
the Colosseum

not enough sand
to swallow

all the blood
that came its way

JETSAM

Tags

Empire, Fall, island, Ocean, poem, poetry, sea

JETSAM

jetsam
between
my toes

washed in
by the tide

last remnants
of Empire unknown
too far
across the ocean

for me to
have heard anything
of its rise
and fall

to find in these poor
trace elements anything
worth reading
likely to
paint
a picture

all we
can assume is
that
it outlived it’s purposes
lost
its logic

sacrificed one
last gamble on a
failure of (so-called) intelligence

how it is
always with history

(as we
are always forgetting)

the machine
that is time

washes, rinses

subjects
to recycling

ROME

Tags

Empire, Humanity, poem, poetry, power, ROME

ROME

the golden greed of Rome
marble knuckle-dust
of her high achievement

template of how
it is done
how it
has to be
done

a power standing in the way
simply burn that
city, annihilate
a people, dissolve
that civilization

no words, no trace,
the text of a history
reduced to ash

reduced to what
the victory column says it is

in business of war, in
business of
State you
came such a long way

shining example of
what an
Empire
must be

WHEN I RETURNED

Tags

BREXIT, Britain, British, decline, Empire, Ending, entropy, poem, poetry, Postcolonial, postmodern

WHEN I RETURNED
“entrenched and calcifying
class stratifications”
Gary Younge

when I returned
everything was crumbling
but not in that happy
melt-in-the-mouth sort of way

a land of
broken statues

historical memories
grown ever more painful
with each passing year

once this
machine worked

once it ran on ahead
outstripped the pack
at full steam

but now how bleak
how dour
cement coloured skies
divulging near toxic rain

that somehow, magically,
stays within official limits
and so no one gets sick
no
discernible ailments

and there the images
that once rejuvenated
reminded us of
the great musical hall and
other popular traditions
feeding into
the great Beatlesque
transformations of identity

anarchy in the late 70s
along those stone cobbled streets
where my grandad
returned from war with
dream of starting a family

chipped, cracked
whose face is that
did they ever see this Britain, this
England coming

not just rejuvenated, but
rising from the dead
(form an
all-star dead rock band
with John and Jimmy and George
and Mary and Percy
who wrote such blistering
odes in mode
of truth to power)

but now
not a whimper of
that poetry

cannot call it
a wasteland because it’s all
too hypothetical, digital and
completely plasticated

no memory of
what went blitz as it
streaked across
the channel

what went bang and

what Guy Fawkes cracker could

remove every stone, every blade
of grass
the name of every city

those names whose esteemed truth you cling to
when theIr failures shone brighter
than the brightest searchlight

why we
need the darkness

for their
power to grow
and grow

empirically, imperially, universally,
exponentially

until the
bubble burst

so fatally
expand

IN THAT AGE

Tags

Alice in Wonderland, Britain, British, Captain NEMO, Charles Dickens, Empire, Jacob Rees-Mogg, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, Professor Moriarty, satire, Sherlock Holmes, Victorian

IN THAT AGE
(for Jacob Rees-Mogg)

In that age
I would — no
shit Sherlock! —
be Nemo, be
Moriarty

put enough poison
in your teacups
see if that
will do for
your charity what
Dickens failed to

but here he is, a British
liege lord who claims
to Sasha Baron that
aristocracy he isn’t

but he rewrites
the Victoria text

with much (for a Catholic)
evangelical Empire steam

Oh puff away, puff away
drowsy Dodgson caterpillar
this very vaunted Empire
frozen for
all time in its
missionary position

you can cart it like a statue
shape it like true steel
except

we have no steel
no ways enough for
wars of imperial envy

the philosophers of Heidelberg
now having much wider sway.

MAN-MADE

Tags

Empire, Humanity, Mathematics, poem, poetry, power, spiritual, wordplay

MAN-MADE

once upon a time
I was a star
at Mathematics

might even have devised
my own ATM

or created algorithms to
compute secret numbers,
analyze linguistic
frequencies
in the Bible

answer once
and for all
the debate on design

everything gist to the mill
of my universe-crunching algebra

but that
was then and
a road
not taken

and at
that selfsame crossroads
my incompetence at woodwork

practice most bugbear
destined for
textbook fail

couldn’t even plane a
simple plain crossbeam with

which to
construct cross good
enough
for Empire

to elevate the populace
lift feet way
up
off the ground

GOLGOTHA

Tags

Crucifixion, Empire, Golgotha, poem, poetry

GOLGOTHA

they hustled me out
of my position of vantage
these agents of Empire

telling me
to move along

“move along!”
“move along!”
“there is
absolutely nothing
to see here”

atvwhoch I smiled
an ironic smile
a smile
informed by a long view
encompassing every
single
Empire
in history

so I did not get
to see what was going down
what victim was
no doubt singled out
for treatment

when Empires fail,
founder, fall
into ruin

you cannot imagine
what strange, wonderful,
unaccountable creatures

eventually emerge
to embrace the light

CALIBAN’S ISLAND

Tags

BREXIT, Britain, CALIBAN'S, Colonialism, Empire, poem, poetry, postcolonialism, satire, Shakespeare

CALIBAN’S ISLAND

haunted by ancient Roman ghosts
first triumphant Empire, now back
to the dictator Caesar

mighty Britannia
stands alone

determined (yet scarcely able)
to resist a new dark ages of
its own making

the island
itself setting sail

ready, if needs be,
to comb the whole ocean
for trade and colonial conquest
searching for things in
their native habitat
to commandeer

paint with illusions, fictions
and shadows
dreams of

power
and glory
creatures to demonize

THE VIEW FROM MAHIKENG

Tags

BREXIT, Britain, Empire, poem, poem poetry political moral, poetry, satire, South Africa

THE VIEW FROM MAHIKENG

I’m laughing at Brexit
from Mahikeng, the town
where Empire
was almost lost

no longer the centre
of anything, pretty much now,

dust-devils in Autumn
and the stones
still lying pretty much
where they fell

sometimes you scratch around
you find an old Martini-Henry cartridge
or one from a lethal Boer rebel Mauser

how the mighty have fallen
those old Mauser rifles
until Brexit
they were the unfortunate truth
that threatened to
rewrite the book
take down the flag

LOVED JULES VERNE

Tags

Colonialism, Empire, Jules Verne, Mafeking, Mafikeng, Mahikeng, NEMO, poem, poetry, thermonuclear

LOVED JULES VERNE

I loved Jules Verne
but nothing
like as
much
as Nemo loved
his wife
before the English
killed her

and so
your submarine now
stalks their bloody
enslaved Empire

I write this
in Mahikeng, formerly
Mafeking
thousand miles
from the ocean

where Empire and
rebels fought
to a standstill

currently
at least a couple of hundred
kilometers from
the nearest obvious
target site
for a new all-
conquering Empire’s
inertially-guided
multiple-warhead
thermonuclear missile

launched from
the place where Nemo
held solitary sway, defined
a hope for a
life
unchained,
manifestly free.