Dance of the city bees

 On the farm

    they waggle a longing dance

    for that sweet floral hit

    of nourishing protein shake.

Life is hard

    out there in the barren sticks

    where workers scour the orzine beige,

    twerk to allay their distant itch.

Here in easy town

    the affluent trot like foxes,

    gliding across petal laden floors,

    a spring in each blossomed step.

In the urban jungle

    the gardens dazzle like meadows

    once upon a memory for hungry bees,

    who make honey, instead, in the city.

***

I read an article today, research showing that bees in the countryside must travel 50% farther than their city counterparts to find food, i.e. flowers. City gardens are now more varied and diverse than our so-called 'natural' landscapes.

Thanks jggrz (pixabay) for the photo.

Riddled out of Europe

An article in the news lies to me again

as I turn over once more and hit snooze,

phone in hand, head lopped to one side.

A viscous string of drool oozes onto the pillow.

I am incapacitated, not drunk,

merely struck dumb by the insinuation:

deaths in the UK, they say, are comparable.

The graph shows double, at least, to my trained eye.

A singularly stubborn nation breezes into pubs,

sneezing wantonly, coughing masklessly.

The kids are in school now, anyway.

Caution and wind approach a wheezing climax.

I feel silly yet safe, pint in hand, out in the chill,

wondering at these alien beings who laugh, indoors,

blissfully ignorant, or sanguine, I can never tell.

I think, they must have good private health insurance.

Never diminish your fire

There are those who are meek and tick by.

There are those who are weak and don't try.

There are some who always seek better, and cry,

But their fire will burn down the ivory pyre.

Ulster forsaken

Empty shelves tell their own tale of Brexit woe

in a troubled land forever forgotten,

by those with whom some choose to form a union,

cast aside by that ill considered vote.

Once it was Catholics who were second class,

civil rights marches and innocents culled

until four decades on peace was fulfilled,

only for all Ulster to now taste that bitterness.

When will the English learn never to draw lines

between lands their dominion left distraught? 

Petrol bombs mark old tensions newly fraught,

and we shudder as violence reignites. 

An ancient relic of a subjugated land

An ancient relic,
decrepit, passes away

yet the sun still shines

over the remnants

of a subjugated land,

sick with fealty.

Twelve centuries

of uninterrupted rule

makes fools of the serfs

who plough the margins,

pushed out by the royal walls,

loyal to the last.

How to get away with kidnap and torture in the UK (white privilege)

Let me shine some light through the tinted lens

of this supposedly colourblind state

by revisiting the tale of four cruel men,

one of whom would chance an untethered fate.

Chance, or institutional racism,

I will leave that down to your discretion,

member of the jury, whose sparkling prism

is undimmed, I'm sure, by predisposition.

The evidence incriminates all four men,

who bundled two victims into a car,

pistol whipped one with the back of a gun

and battered the other's toes with a hammer.

The incidents happened on separate nights,

registration plates traced to the bloodstained pile,

which CCTV showed in plain daylight

led to where the criminals would stay a while.

It was a crack den, where torturer's tools

further implicated the gang: DNA,

in hairs left by the violent young fools,

attached where the tortured had been bound by tape.

Skin from the knees of the victim linked him there,

singed onto the coiled metal of a grill,

hard to tell through his mutterings of despair

whether the aim was anything but mere thrill.

At the scene of the second kidnapping,

video showed that a cap was left behind.

That cap yielded DNA, led to a sting,

and each of the four men were held in binds.

As incontrovertible as that may seem,

though the evidence lay starkly in sight,

the sentences were six years, nine and nineteen,

for those who are black, but what of the white?

Members of the jury found him not guilty,

though video and DNA placed him there.

So much for your colourblind society,

his guilt is as plain as your bias laid bare.

Spoilsport corona haikus

#1

The R is still one,

or above. So be careful

in the Easter sun.

#2

One fifth get it long,

so think twice before joining

the jubilant throngs.

In these corrupted isles

In these corrupted isles

criminals run the ship,

charlatans at the helm,

philanderers hoist the sails.

Amidst these choppy seas

they ride the crest of a fearsome wave,

rogue as the land they have flooded

with cronyism and deceit.

In these corrupted isles

the lighthouses no longer shine,

no beacon to the forlorn,

whose hopes shatter upon treacherous reefs.

Amidst the wreckages

they prey on the castaways,

who with nothing cry for help,

and send them back to sea.

In these corrupted isles

the BBC no longer reports their ills,

through oversight or will,

as colluders and donors dictate the press.

Amidst these crumbling cliffs

waves of apathy undermine

the shaky bedrock

of our eroding society.

When loons run the asylum

Every day I love you less and less, UK,

as you obsess over the desperate,

desperate to deny them passage or rights.

The first nation to deny asylum outright

proudly flies the flag of its dominion,

mocking its subjects into praise of this hate.

I fret for the future, fear for our fate. 

"Capitalism and greed", Johnson haiku #1

Then we're all agreed.

Greed and capitalism;

Conservative creed.

Grammar haiku #1

Alice and I dined

She gave an apple to me

I ate myself sick

Haikus #1-6: Leopards and peacocks

1

The leopard skulks 'neath
this tree my banquet table

purring with delight.

2

These boughs are laden

with fruits that one day will fall

and I must follow.

3

A swarming carcass

tells of prowling predators

alert to my steps.

4

Precariously

the struggle intensifies

this desperate heat.

5

Against the dust brown

bright peacock feathers foretell

the coming monsoon.

6

The thirst to survive

quenched by thunderous downpours

of ominous clouds.

Twitter poem #1

Nuance newly found,

free of twitter's inane chains;

black and white charade.

A picture of vacuity: our guy Boris

 A picture of vacuity:

they can, apparently, do no wrong
so long the electorate fails to ponder

the ills of the blithering blunderbuss

and the lives slipped by without a fuss.

A regime of chaos, bluster and lies

can steal in front of inscrutable eyes

to brazenly benefit from a nation's demise

yet is lauded rather than rightfully chastised.

They did not invent the vaccine,

nor did they roll it out.

They butchered the machine that's there to do it,

sold it from the inside out.

They delayed and dithered for over a year,

so 130 thousand and more died.

And all of this was forgotten - why?

Because BORIS is OUR GUY.

The obituary of the megalomaniacal race

 "This doesn't bode well,"

we said. Alas,

"I told you so", they say,

is unhelpful.

Where, then, do we go from here?

Critical thought slain,

cretins at the helm

of this cartoon reality.

2016 was the year satire died

and mushrooms lost potency,

LSD the new BSc

and DMT the currency.

'A fleeting, intelligent speck,

but an unruly, ignorant mob,'

reads the obituary

of the megalomaniacal race.

What makes me

I am the product of evolution,

the sum, no more, of three billion or so parts but never whole; a mirror of seven billion faces, minds, hearts, far flung places etched as faint traces, recalled as memories but never unchanged. I hear your words, I echo your thoughts, I see your smiles, I feel your joy. I touch your skin and a calcium wave courses through my finger to my brain; forever changed. I am the product of thirty one years, the sum, no more, of forty trillion or so cells but never whole; no picture reflects my troubled soul, as with the years I age each cellular replication is fraught with decay, my telomeres decline, my chromosomes fray. I will no longer recognise myself, one day. And who am I? The longest lived of all my cells, seven years, no more. What’s left of who I was before but the epigenetic imprints? Etched as faint traces, recalled as memories but never unchanged. I am amorphous; my cells merely obey what’s written in my DNA, the stimuli that pass their way, yet my brain is soft as clay. I was never born this way. I am the smell of sizzling fat, the thrilling sound of a thunder crash, the fixation of a lightning flash, the desolation of a grave. I am every laugh, every tear, each and every triumph and fear; the manifestation of all I see and hear; forever changed. I am the sands of time, the drift of mutations, epigenetic methylations, a vessel for each revolution’s chance situations, certain only that I will one day decline but heartened to understand: that’s fine.