Theresa DisMay

It's happened, since that fabled day - finally steeped into mad disarray.
Great job UK, one fell swoop and we're landed with Theresa May.
A new, centrist, righter than Reich
To delve us into turbid plight
As the opposition bifurcates in spite.

Not content with demolishing the poor, or spiting the disabled,
Failed plans to curb a deficit has clearly been enabled
By these immigrants, who give us life,
An NHS thus locked in strife,
Without whom the scalpel might well be a blunted knife.

These foreign workers, workers, still - blamed for taking benefits,
Despite the working title the English disaffected
Will blame it on them,
It's not our fault it's them,
It's not our fault, the 88%, of course it's not, it's them.

Well, not all of them, it's okay for some - we'll cheer on Mo Farah crossing the line
The Greatest British Olympian of all time,
Lauded, truly, one of a kind
Of Somalian birth,
When then do we mind?

Clearly, if you were born here, the rest are of no worth,
The ones who fill the jobs we need for which we have a dearth.
A register of foreign birth,
As Amber reaches from the hearth
The scolded words of a time gone by and a more unsavoury world.

Yes Theresa, forward we go, back to an insular land.
A global country open for business, as long as you understand -
You can't stay here, you can't work here,
A world citizen is of nowhere.
Well fine then Theresa, I'd rather be anywhere but here.

Seven days of scarlet nights

Right in the thick of it, I’m sick of it,

Seven days of scarlet nights,

Mornings pasted into white,

As days pass in a flash of spite

And spitting rage at morning’s light.

But painted on a face of joy,

Not more a man than once a boy

And perilously seeking still

A momentary respite.

---

Sullen eyes of red concede

A faded victory crudely torn

From sight ahead while shadows steep

On daisy-scattered un-mowed lawns.

Where streaks of green seem stunted yet,

Their hearts are cold and minds are set

To care for one and all for none,

Lest those out of sight beget.

Let those of sound mind not forget.

HSSCDRV – Donald Trump and the Human Society-Suppressing Care-Deficient Retrovirus

You look like a constipated lemon

That’s fading round the edges

Like the crusty volumes in Whitehall

Reneging on their pledges.

Your mouth spouts such spurious shit

Your rectum is redundant,

You could fertilise a thousand fields

With the vitriol your drainpipe spits.

But despite your abhorrence,

Like dung beetles, your scat-deprived audience

Savours, rolls and feasts the manure

Dripping from your every putrid utterance.

It’s you who exudes the stench

But they who make my stomach rile

My liver spit out bitter green bile,

My gut wrench against vacant lack of sense.

But it’s not just hillbilly cotton-eye Joe

It’s the vile velleity of apathy in-tow, Cameron and co.

Disputing your madness yet passing through

Deceit and ideals that make your callous words seem true.

It’s not a man’s world it’s a bigot’s playground.

While all around your promise of a wall gets slighted,

They’re shutting the borders to the plighted

To satiate blighted Middle England’s unsighted.

Yes, you’re two horns short of Balthasar

But are you any worse

Than Bush, Cruz, or any of the tools

Who pander to this mass of disdainful fools?

These crass, self-serving reprobates

Who populate the upper and middle classes

Turn out to vote in an elitist right

Who smugly smite down from up high with spite.

In spite of these, the “extreme” left wing

Suggesting such outlandish things

As equal rights and prosperity for plenty

A deranged ideal for the dung beetle gentry.

A deranged ideal for these vacuous vectors

Of a society-supressing care-deficient retrovirus

Supplanting genes of reprehensibility –

And splicing through the NHS with glee.

HSSCDRV

That’s the virus, it’s the only way to explain

The disconnected hatred that seeps through the veins

Of a society genetically manipulated to feel no shame.

Like a naked mole rat lacks pain receptors,

These infected, contagious guinea-pig sheep

Are rendered impervious to suffering and need,

Empathy epigenetically concealed.

Empathy switched off by the virulent press,

Promoting an apathetic, selfish plaque;

The Alzheimer’s strangles the prefrontal cortex

As we descend, confused, to a hatred-fuelled past.

I wish you were a constipated lemon,

Then at least your bitterness would be good for something,

I could slice you into pieces and sip you with my gin,

But it looks like you actually might win.

A pointy stick

Ideas flow in a maelstrom
But they seem to pop
Without a big pointy stick.

What ought to be

What ought to be, on the word of a whispering lark
that flutters over dew-soaked fields, masked
by the sun's bright, blinding reflection.

Refracted rays deflect the bird's flight
as my ears strain to make out his faded song.
Lost, my eyes scour the tips of the sparkling leaves

But the drips, with each minute, evaporate to clouds
as with them the lark's whisper wanes to a hush,
and still I contemplate what ought to be.

What are we to do?

What is the want of any one of us?
Get schooled, get work, get paid.

Get paid, pay it back, and frittered away,
Always into the same few pockets.

It jingles loudly, it grows and balloons,
The gold sits in vaults while interest accrues.

And each year it swells as the workers dwell
On their meagre pay that'll end there as well.

We need to stop, to stop the rot
We work, we play, we pay, we pay.

No shame the greedy billionaires bliss
Top down? Bugger off, this never was witnessed.

It's been bottom up since day one, and again,
The top one percent piss all over us.

The bastards burn, the bastards abuse,
The bastards rape, they take us for fools.

But what on earth is a fool to do?

A week since John fell off his chair

It's a week since John fell off his chair,
a week has gone and I wish I was there.
Karaoke sung 'til the early hours
with Britney, Whitney and a fiberglass cow.

We gathered together to uproot assumptions,
growing together in a lush Swiss jungle.
We thought, we built, we made and played,
expanding horizons in a post-it haze.

We dreamed of cauliflower with a better taste,
kithe chali hai gobi da phul banke,
a world that truly appreciates its brocolli,
mustard seeds, turnips, Brassicas and bees.

We scoured the cardboard mushroom maze
designed in famous Oupas! style
for pineapples amongst the swathes
of a feel-good, caffeine-fuelled, morning rave.

The comedown bites from each event
'til next year's family comes in search
of more ideas and space to grow
with positive minds, no room for no.

For sure, next year, more untapped minds
are bound to pitch and wine and dine,
as still the movement marches forth
and yet more ideas are born.

I await with glee to see Kulisha
sustainably feeding the Tilapia farms
as Biteback nourish our shelves with oil
and fight against the raging palms.

While Frooticycle fly from fields
delivering veg to market stalls
and yoghurt enriched by Peer-to-Peer
provides a fix to nourish us all.

It's a week since John fell off his chair,
I've never yet had such a laughter-ridden spree.
Four days, three nights, we giggled in delight
And my stomach aches for next year's glee.

25 hours in London

Friday night and sirens blare,
I try not to stare but look
As throngs of feet drip past
And there sit two fire trucks.

They pull a dubious u-turn
And almost collide head-on,
The bustle is confusing
For anyone straddling these streets.

The firemen watch me,
fag in hand, they think -
It's them that burn the houses
Down, whiskey bottle in hand.

Back inside the city hotel
I catch a chat at the bar
Practising my French for a while,
I've almost forgotten where I am.

I fancy a jar to clear my mind,
Addled by the constant buzz -
Normally I'd step outside
To think, but here it's unnatural

Unless, you're an ant.  This
Swarm of perpetual foot fall
Pounds in my ears and rings
Like I've developed tinitis.

I give up, back to the bar,
A double whiskey, a bit more French
And unprepared I head to bed,
My saturated mind to settle.

Down twelve quid only eight hours later,
A taxi drives aimlessly round
Pretending the pitiful length
Of the journey warrants a tip.

And now I'm in a post-capitalist
Wasteland, wondering how
Much it'll cost to buy outright
A measley one bed studio flat

Where the nearest decent shop
Is a DLR stop down the line,
Inflating the price of a pint
Of milk at five hundred percent.

And finally it's time to leave
This desolate, throbbing jungle
As my carriage sweeps through vast,
Crumbling, concrete estates.

Then the descent into the black
Of a train-sized manhole, packed
Until the doors slide open
And I join the wilderbeast

Which stampede toward the central line
And cram me to the wall as I
Attempt to stem the incessant flow
In vain to try and read the map.

Back in the throng, a bottleneck,
Of a fattening queue blocks
The steps of a perfectly decent
But overwhelmingly underused set of stairs.

I skirt the laziness and beat
The escalator, and narrowly
Avoid being knocked to the ground
As the wilderbeast peg it

To the gate, which slams
So suddenly shut that my bag
Was hardly accommodated,
Heaved through and over, before

I realise it's mid-October,
Umpteen feet under the ground
And I'm sweltering, wearing
Only a t-shirt and a Harrington,

Accentuated as I step inside
A burning hot tin of humans
Pressed against doors and squashed
Together, no-one catching an eye.

I ponder the words of Alan
Partridge, who said of London
That you can go there but
You'll either be mugged or unappreciated.

I've never been mugged but
I feel like a muggle, lost
In a mysterious metropolis
I'll never fully understand.

I eventually reach platform six
Of Liverpool Street Station,
Coffee in hand and I sigh...
Thank fuck I live in Norwich!

2016-2050: An odyssey for Thought for Food

Part 1:  A painful picture

It paints a painful picture,
A technicolour world rendered greyscale.
Coral reefs bleached and deceased,
algae, pickled, under battery acid seas.

A fickle audience consumes
Organic vegetables in a plastic bag.
And in the stomachs of seabirds exhumed -
plastic bits of plastic shit in plastic fish of plastic doom.

Plastic thread on plastic looms,
As if the wool of two or three billion sheep
Is somehow a luxurious commodity.
2016 - a batshit insane odyssey, through scorching fields and burning rain.

This swarm of seven billion sprawls,
Slashing trees and spitting fire.
Orangutans toasted in napalm pyres
For palm oil, so we can eat Nutella.

Part 2:  Venereal disease

It's like watching Fern Gully on repeat -
A self-perpetuating cycle of folly
In which we go to the cinema, guzzle down 24 ounces of crap
From buttered popcorn to Coca-Cola,
Repeating the same mistake over and over.

We're living a real-life Avatar,
Paving the forest with bitumen tar,
Trucks penetrating far inside
Lasciviously as Rasputin pleasured the Russian court
With a mangled crown of genital warts.

This pestilence we spread,
Like venereal disease through a harem
But in the form of soybean.
It's like super-gonorrhoea, no antibiotic, we can't stop it -
I've got to have my steak.

No round of applause
But just like the clap
Doing the rounds between young ones unstrapped,
The drugs we pump into fat-laden cattle
Will leave us last in our bacterial battle.

Part 3:  The chicken-cow-shellfish-human caterpillar

SARS, swine flu, bovine TB,
Do we really need to vaccinate against all of these,
Or should we just eat less bacon?
Maybe that's the mistake we're making.
Seven billion hungry mouths parasitizing a world of fat-laden sows.

It's not that we eat meat, it's the way we farm it.
To put on mass, cows used to eat grass.
Alas, now one third of our total grain gets farted out as methane
From the arses of cattle
And lashes back down as nitric acid rain.

Soybean, maize - all goes to feed chickens, caged.
Chickens, writhing in mounds of piss and shit.
Piss and shit, scooped up and pelleted,
Then fed to cows to produce more shit.  We feed chicken shit to cows!
We eat meat that eats shit because we can hardly produce enough food for us never mind it.

100 000 metric tonnes of shit produced each minute
In the USA alone.
Flows straight into the Gulf of Mexico...
A six and a half thousand square mile deadzone,
Expanding each year, forget BP oil - there's a Mississippi sized sewer.

Excrement starves our seas of life,
Amidst ocean acidification and temperature rise
We've got eutrophication and toxic red tides.
The algae back to bite us,
Despite us.

The irony is,
That toxic algae make toxic shellfish.
So the shit we feed to cows,
Which shit into the seas,
Comes back to haunt our own evacuating bowels.

Part 4:  Enough doom and gloom

But, enough of algal blooms, doom and gloom -
Let's look at the positives.

A room full of food-curious social entrepreneurs,
Wanting to change this status-quo we're all unwilling to accept.

I thank the forward-thinking farmers I've met,
Who advocate change for the future.

A future which combines and conserves our ecosystems,
which preserves our soils and nutrient cycles.

A future which woos and rewards our farmers,

EcoNoodle, Ag For Hire, FarmAField and FrootiCycle.

A future of recycling our waste with simple Oxmosis

And fortifying our meals with Peer-to-Peer Probiotics.

An Agro-Smart future with robots in fields
Could double our forecasts of once-plateaued yields.

A future with BeeBox and portable data analysis,
Of pathogen detection to withstand disease.
Of sequencing soil, and water, and air
To banish the blights and the fungi once there.

A future of next generation genome sequencing,
When once we saw traits we can re-balance our fate,
With knowledge from variants of long lost wild relatives
Of the crops we've inbred to put food on our plates.

Of CRISPR and iGEM and untrammelled minds,
Of biohacking a future of homemade design.

'Cause, soon our soils will be sailing in salinity,
Our crops will be wilting and yields diminishing
Yet conventional breeding is nowhere near achieving
Salt tolerance in the crops on which we rely.

So, bollocks to this organic nonsense,
It's synthetic biology's time.

A future of vertical farming and entomophagy,

With Biteback and Kulisha, more sustainable feed.

Part 5:  Thought for Food

Thought for Food, you have enabled me,
I never thought I'd live out of bins, please forgive me -
Though I might be arrested -
This should not go uncontested.

Outside the box we pondered,
How to feed a world where fields turn to rocks, wells run dry, lives asunder.
One billion starving,
The facts are alarming.

Eat locusts, the economics show us
That for each kilogram of grain
We get the same back in meat stuff,
Which is better than feeding a field full of cows
With food from the poor, starving and needing.

Thanks Crissy Spice,
For this chance to form a plan
That might suffice to solve the global food crisis.
TFF cannot be bested,
I just hope the world cares what we've invested.

In three months we had late nights,
We drank more beer than might start a fight some late night
In Manchester.
And if you visit, don't mind the weather, and remember -
That we'll pursue Thought for Food
Forever.