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.

Google it

Google it

The diminishing drought drains 

knowledge at my finger’s tip;

I once cherished the unpredictable rains,

held out my tongue to catch each drip,

wondered at the taste.

I can feel those flavours slip

past parched roots in streams of waste;

They leach into polluted pools,

rotten reservoirs on tap to haste,

and fill the brains of fools.

Vaccines (or what happens without them)

 Vaccines (or what happens without them)

The drizzle sits as bleakly suspended mist

on a backdrop of grim skies and damp, grey stones

where forgotten names begin to erode;

memories reduced to blank slate and rust.

The howling wind echoes the wailing ghosts

of mothers who mournfully trace each etched word

and sorrowfully watch as the wretched world

so quickly forgets the many children lost:

consumed and taken, snatched in a fleeting youth,

so commonly before what now is so rare.

To succumb, after all that, so unfair

to the victim who deserved, merely, the truth.