Posted

We want to be heard –
us mutterers – we discontents
who can mussitate

I told you so –
because our righteousness
is so bloody close to Godliness

But we do not carry confidences
in such overbearing entities
and we would rather

leave prayers to those humbled
souls who kneel before altars
with their bare-faced soles

We malcontents will feed
in fast flowing streams
until they run with our blood –

torrents drip-drip-dripped
from our nail-hammered
word-wrung hands

Pinned up and posted –
just another Jesus Christ
expletive – re-fucking-tweeted

Alt-cues

1.
Ill-faced white people settle
and preen in that afterglow
off their stoked shit-storms
as fools refuel on Facebook
2.
Deceivers take to easy airwaves
with urgency and loud spittle
as puppet-fisted politicians
unroll scrolls of lies on cue
3.
Carriers of an alt-right litany
cannot sleep soundly until
their prayers have been spread
For them – fear must be shared
4
We do not mute screaming
hit-buffeted streams
of spitting alt-voices
found by lost innocents
5
Your drawn eyes must rise
from teleprompters that blind
to see over such tilting screens
and to read between their lines

The Scent of People

Larner feared removal
of the scent of people
in crowded wiki articles

Dumb grazing animals
hardly move from hoof to hoof
with their heads down

At this bar
three men sit
before chemical beer
misdirected and under-lit

Tommy Robinson spits
as poor aims are raised
by squaddies at politicians

and three men take turns
to buy another Peroni
without exchanging words

We know everything
by what we read and watch
whilst bent to scent-free pastures

The Word for ‘Search’

This abstruse epoch of endless information
is a virulent strew of ingrowing metadata –
It is thrown wide like blindly hurled seeds

We have set the volume to unheard of levels
and whine about the pain as the cooled servers
draw enough kilojoules to run a billion light bulbs

This is our second flood – set to lift much higher –
an oily risen tide upon remote isles – floating nodes
litter the no longer habitable low lying atolls –

those last places wired into free knowledge –
they are being removed by our unedifying worship
of the lords of the clouds – those five fat silos

And when we have drawn the last of the gold –
the silica – the bauxite and life from this place
we will no longer have any word for ‘search’

Being Eighteen

Being eighteen in 1982
was easier than in 2018 –
we had less stuff to plug in –
sniping critics were blocked
by the turn of a front door key
and loud parents muted by
the stereo being set to ten

Our whole past was aligned
spine out – but not in public –
on the overhead shelves –
bound in worn LP sleeves
to which we returned on those
solemn dead-end Sundays –
before it was switched on