The creeping thistle

Creeping thistles linger long on my mind
as does filth beneath my fingernails,
requiring a rare depth of scrubbing.

This life amongst the elements rails,

in parallel with tribulating gusts,

against manufactured trials.

The roots of the creeping thistle thrust

far and wide, long and deep,

as the shovelsteel blunts and rusts.

Each stroke into the Earth merely reaps

an infinite spread of the spiny Cerberus,

no longer merely Hades’ keeper.

His mane of writhing snakes bursts from humus

goading this futile whack-a-mole con.

Yet, inch by inch, the beacon of summer

draws Herculean strength from dilated dawn.

As the world bathes in light and lettuce,

the creeping thistle has not yet won.

Election 2024: Rishi Sunak and the naughty step of inconsequence

 If I'm made to recall Rishi Sunak

    I imagine him sucking his thumb,

    one hand under his bum,

    and he's sat on the naughty step.

    The naughty step of inconsequence.

    It's not one of those from school

    with its cheap plastic tiles and rubber,

    that would be beneath these fools - 

    only in another universe, intellegis?

    No, Rishi's is carpeted, soft, plum,

    but a step's a step, he'll blubber.

    "Oh, but it's just not fair", he'll blubber.

    "Boris stole my sweeties,

    and Rwanda was his treatise."

    "Pants on fire!" Boris will scoff.

    He's just one step above and behind,

    on the naughty step of incompetence.

    He's not far to land, if he falls,

    to the soft, plum step of inconsequence.

    "Suella made me do it!"

    "ANTISEMITE!" Suella will screech

    from somewhere imperceivable,

    high on the naughty step of cruelty.

    A step so far removed it feels unreal.

    "Now now, children," will croak Keir

    from the lectern of equivalence.

    "I don't care who started it,

    what matters is I'm here to finish it."

    And with that he'll take his place,

    placidly and unconvincingly,

    on the podium of intransigence.

News porn

An Oakeshott to the face

hands on the Hancock

revenge news the new taste

lock down on lock

gargle the clickbait

hands up Hancock

an Oakeshott to the face,

revenge news, gargle ejaculate.

Border business

Pop, pop, pop

drops the copper

from another hood,

a bygone era

aye so we hoped.

Hope, hope, hope

what a whopper

aye came to blows,

chaos on the border

run to the meadows.

Sop, sop, sop

aye came a cropper

now who's in the mood

for the show stopper,

pop, pop, pop

drops another whopper.

Image first uploaded in English Wikipedia as en:Image:NIrelandDerryFreeJM.jpg by en:User:Guinnog

Derry/Londonderry, 1986

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Sturgeon

Must we really now contemplate

the passing of sturgeon to char or skate?

The sturgeon effectuates caviar,

preferable to swill-supped salmon by far

but a dying breed, its rivers dammed,

a future less than certain. Drammed

right down to the cold, hard marble,

I hear her voice in the ether warble

a melancholy reel of reason sounder

than the garbled nonsense of the southern flounder;

The sturgeon whiskered and wise,

the flounder flatly lies. 

The cuckoo's bronze egg

Today I spied a cuckoo fly

above a golden cignet's lair

and for a while she settled there.

She left a bronze-laid alloyed egg,

for the swans had blinded eyes,

and she cackled at her own audacity.

Unwittingly they nursed that egg,

tainted though it made the nest,

as when the bronze defiler hatched

he slew the chicks and flew,

where he knew best,

at one with the pigs in the sky.

Not my family

I cannot feel sad. How can I be?

I did not know her, she didn't know me.

Understandably, some mourn.

She has been an evergreen, if slowly withering presence.

But she was born into luxury. Sheer, entitled luxury.

She had dibs on all the land under my feet.

And so does he.

No-one made them serve, if that's what it is.

My taxes paid for it.

Can we leave it as it is.

An antique.

A relic.

Queen Elizabeth II,

the best, and last, of a brazen bunch who never had a right to rule over me.

Rishi rich and thick Lizzy

No chance of win if inflation sticks,

Rishi rich says, as thick Lizzy

strays down the Tory u bend

where it's hard to bleach,

never mind brush,

so deep down.

I wonder who'll clean it up?

A new election dawns,

Rishi rich plucks pennies from the pawns,

golden ducks trot through Tunbridge lawns,

quacking maniacally, guffaw,

they don't know any better, the poor.

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, and the terrible tale of power

Some say, forgive them,

that Amber Heard,

or misheard,

mutually abused

that jolly pirate rogue.

I don't buy that.

If I bought that,

I'd have to conclude that Ukraine

mutually attacked

the Russian invaders.

One must not hit back, you know.

Take it quietly.

Think of England, or Putin. Something.

Just deal with it.

But in the plays of power

that's the narrative that sustains.

Shit stains on the bed (disproven),

for some,

proof she had it coming.

Millions in Gaza displaced,

their homes taken away,

their schools and hospitals razed.

Yet mere stones and miscellaneous rockets,

against the missiles and air defences,

brand the abused the aggressors

according to the oppressors.

That's the poison of power,

this narrative that's hard to shake.

And so the the popular opinion rests

with the one they like to think

is their funny, pirate friend.

The other?

At her wits' end.

"And you dare to call me a terrorist,

while you look down your gun,

and I think of all the deeds that you have done.

You have plundered many nations,

divided many lands,

you have terrorised their people,

you ruled with an iron hand

and you brought this reign of terror

to my land."

Stuffed

Stuff everywhere, this planet,

too much stuffing stuff,

hardly room to move,

hardly time to stuff,

sake for stuffing stuff.

They stuff it in the mail,

needless paper stuff,

full of my stuffing details,

so I stuff it with more stuff,

gathering stuffing dust.

Stuff for the sake of stuffing stuff,

stuff stuff stuff stuff stuff,

get me off this planet, please,

to stuff up someone else's stuff.

The gold-laced wind

Fleeced in flaxen light,

the wind must now be golden,

my energy bills swollen,

as my fair wits face a slight

yet without recourse to fight

the injustice,

the gaslight.

Renewably,

I cannot bluster surprise

through my wool-beclouded eyes,

when there's no price paid for greed,

cronyists hoisting the lead,

unimpeded,

unabashed.

When the markets crash

once again they'll soar on gold

laced winds above the clods sold

down many a mud strewn trail,

matter churned to no avail,

bilked, diddled out

in the cold.

 

Liar Liar, House on Fire

Pro rogue was a true enough description of Johnson's rise,

throbbing whopper after throbbing whopper,

as embers from his blazing saddle set curtains alight

and he brazenly wafts an empty extinguisher.

Liar, liar! Call the opposition benches.

Too much, says Mr Speaker, take it back.

One cannot, in this parliament, declare facts,

that would be quite untoward, and without precedent.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Vagina

 Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina beguiles,

bamboozles, torments and terrifies

me in equal measure, much like the notion

of Boris preparing to mount 

one of his victims, or the British electorate. 

I'm a man of science and statistics, 

in a constant flux with deniers and sadistics. 

Graphs are as graphic as candles are explosive

in the wrong hands.

Between fanny fumes and parliamentary lies

I've been knocked right off my axis... 

... somewhere in row Z I'm floating around 

with barely a chance of hanging on to something, 

barely even a collision. 

I've essentially evaporated

and it's all your bloody fault, VagBo. 

There you go. 

A mental image for these spurious times. 

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.