Tag: social media

Envious

My envy device knows me too well
just from the lightest of my touches –

She is engineered to conduct risings
inside my mind from sparked jealousy –

ramping up to shrill shocks of hate –
which will then swill around my unfit gut

and tease those last good microbes
into a lurching frenzy of brain cramps –

then I want to steal their smug smiles
which beam from their side of the world –

and she will be working so very well
at keeping me in her malicious circle –

and I will add fuel to her high pyre
by posting my oh-so-perfect life atop it all

*Inspired by@guardian and Moyra Sarner – thanks for the ‘envy device’

New England

They will soon take command
of the scattered pill boxes –
those red brick squatters
sat above river crossings –

built for strategic purposes –
and to fool the nescient
of a Maginot Line in England –
to withstand our invasion

There will be working parties
to restore the squat outposts –
drinking tea and sipping gin
as the last of Locarno evaporates

The new guard will take to parades
under friendly church hall beams –
taught to guide the landing parties
into concentration camps in Kent –

and you will shift the weight of anger
by reposting others’ indignant shouts
from your padded cell of social media –
which is how all of this begins

St. Catherine’s Sniff

I do not need to
Travel to California
To be struck by the low reek
From skunks,

Those striped creatures
Condemned by Jesuits as:
‘Not worthy to be the dogs of Pluto.’*

Here that crepuscular
Scavenger of the dusk
Lifts its too-proud tail
To squeeze

A malodorous attack
Upon us both:
‘The sin smelled by Saint Catherine
Must have had the same vile odor’**.

‘Hold your nose,’
I suggest to my wife,
But the foulness
Is already there,
Inside.

* **Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. (1633–1634). The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610—1791. VI. Quebec.

The Wedding Reception

Today, the re-climbed height
of another British summer,
when buffed-up cars are steered
on a weeded gravel drive,
slow on that unmade road,

to park at a once-grand house,
where wedding guests gather,
those love-hungry witnesses
at the dressed-up ceremony:

Ribbons, flowers and cloth
hide all manner of hires,
including those who serve
the seated, the laughing
and the old, and still so unsure:

The band’s equipment, that wire-fest,
has been readied for later,
for phone-captured errors,
which will be viewed across Facebook,

but not included in the bound album:
The newly-married, etiquette-dressed,
are set on display, arrayed for viewing,
itching under garter and wing collar.

Cuts

We re-loaded
the dishwashers,
as they re-loaded
the bombs,

outside
our smart homes
a covert snipping
began:

at first the truth
was subtly distorted,
and then the news
was misreported.

Coding was clipped,
hyper-links snapped,
Facebook re-liked
the on-line crap.

Let them use bombs,
sub-nuclear,
to help shift the focus
to a new fear:

Hear the bray of pigs,
this West’s old cry,
under the dropping
of lies from our sky,

then cut dictators
from negotiations,
severe all talks,
open the heavens,

let the sky weep,
flatten the earth,
another fresh harvest
of slash and burn.