Let us pray for merchants and bankers –
World leaders.
For outproduction
And economic potential.
A prayer
Where greed is good:
A dream of domination.
Now there’s the rub-a-dub-dub
To be a Christian.
Where did it go wrong,
My adventurous song?
Our wings outspread like some financial Milton.
With rates at zero and losses infinity
I could have done with help earlier.
I ask, is this the prayer to prick my conscience?
As all around I see an eternal question.
One of nonsense, nought.
Cancelling these beloved mortgages.
Gone my Rock, Northern,
And happy Prince Bingley.
Where shall I turn, O Jerusalem?
Perhaps to back a different humour
The one with monetary tumour –
Boys and girls who bet the invisibles
A smile on their face without demurring,
Let us praise them.
Who stamp their feet
Staggering between alpha and beta
Giving a two minute warning
Before extinction.
In a vision, looking beyond the curtain
The price of oil doubling
While falling
A long way and back again.
What is this?
Nothing.
The stump of a tree rotting.
Inflation merry.
Iceland?
Sold for a penny.
Print and be damned,
How sweet – it’s a bail out!
For cars we do not need
Or care for.
Now there’s a man with vision.
So head’s were spinning.
Nobody (anybody) queried the query.
Knew whether we were running,
Shooting, firing
Lobbying or…
Out in rigs, steamers, living,
And everything moving –
‘Gated and booted,
You rough-riding, son of a vigilante.’
And horses with the feet of centaurs,
Salesman out west along highways
In patterns of spending obvious
Even the rich quite clever
Looking dreadful.
Enters Bernie to get
His leg-over.
Il Duce. Vittoria!
Now the screens stand watching themselves:
Floating or fixed, feelings that were mixed.
Each catcalling and prominent –
Telling of Tokyo,
The Footsie eyeballing
Or Paris falling –
As inhabitants
Walk out to a crash of symbols
Slightly militant.
Despite the sulphurous smelling/still exclaiming
“isn’t it wonderful the killing.”
Dumbed by their downfall.
Data correlated
To voice and nervous sinew
As star-crossed models.
The new swimmers,
Despite their death ‘brothers’,
All names inter-twinned: winners.
Pure velocity, surges/rallies.
Suddenly drowned,
Empty, empty,
The one lung we had perforated.
For the body, something technical:
A game of chairs,
A game of musicals.
Was glad as I walked into this house
Could not divide one mouth from another
Nor tell who was on my side
Or care or bother.
Felt only the warmth of the sun on my back
And the fires of hell around me.
To god I go –
A mispriced fool in a world of wonder.
Yes,
I shall walk in the valley of the shadow of debt
Every seed planted.
A million Armageddons flowering.
Thought I was man’s best friend
But now the lakes are burning,
All of us, no longer filled with thoughts of lust
Are wretched in state moneyless
Where dreams are turned to dust.
Let us return to Paradise, Archangel,
You and I walking under an evening sky –
What a bargain! Credit unlimited.
But, despite a discount,
Despite a god,
This sucker’s going down alright.
1
You flash thing,
You master of the cooking bling.
God, you’d be good in bed – arms, legs, skin,
Even the words unsaid. Good luck then.
2
Top pudding, number one, legless fun.
You bellied-beast,
Sometimes what’s best is least.
Who claimed you’re good Monsieur Haggis,
‘The Special One’?
3
What with the knife, Shorty?
That cuts what looks like muck.
Until a light – you realise what luck,
Gold amidst the tripe.
The oozing ‘insides’ rich, as thick as thick.
How about it?
4
And what’s the deal when you eat this meal?
A burning sensation,
The starving air, starved itself until the pricking:
Fire with energy/
Gloriously rich like all
Temptation.
A gasp, perhaps a whiff of danger
From that gangster pudding.
His face honest but thin – deadly beast.
A form of midnight porridge,
More fun but rougher on the lips.
5
Some resist.
A smile, a microwave, a menu,
Nothing genuine,
Not a word of truth amongst them.
Sauces thinly/sick.
To be this famous –
As slick and slick –
They go by the name
Of the Cognoscente.
6
Contrast –
Hair plumméd, shoulders set,
Ready to extend a hand of friendship –
The Immortal Memory.
Flame-throwing son of Caledonia –
Making vegetable into nips,
His words as succulent as chips.
The stomach ready, greedy for the saucy bits.
Transmitter on/Receive:
The power of universal union.
Tune into ‘Radio Pudding’ –
The hairy guy, silent sometimes,
Can baffle a bit.
You can’t hurry love
And you can’t hurry a haggis.
So now do you fancy me?
And can a night be spent together
Learning the meaning of all eternity?
Now eat and say your prayers.
Dream me.
I am neither asleep nor awake.
I am in parenthesis.
Watching
With love and remembrance,
I am your heated vision.
This sense beyond the furthest limit
A new language –
The stuff
Waking sleep is made of.
It makes no movement.
An unsaid moment.
Did you call me?
There is laughter in your calling.
The refrain though is mine remembered.
Notes capturing a shadowless beauty
Beside a shaded meadow,
Around the blunder/break of sleeping.
Now only the sleep/lightning
Has my echo.
What can be said? Look around.
I am alive and you must remember.
Although I stumble,
Listen –
I hear the music of the water
And dream for it to take me.
Where is this place?
It is between each birth
In a timeless tense
Injecting each repeated second.
Told in whispers before you wake.
Neither here nor there
But in reflection.
Waking, no mirror, nothing –
For engagement
To see nobody:
A moment invisible,
Travelling in shadow
With message ready
To unleash
The chaos of hell, of battlefield.
A word alien,
Each sound a miracle of atom and particle
As bodies tremble.
A second, a sign, an allegory
Until a switch to voices of
"Incoming!"
How friendly.
With noise intimate,
As butcher bird appears
With something
Much more personal.
Execution perfect
In the high altitude of killing.
Ready to avenge himself
How do you describe me?
As Bringer of War?
Or Peace?
By Jupiter,
All these things –
A regular corpse-maker.
Trained well
To see the best of all possible scenarios,
Though now it’s done
A land I neither know nor believe in.
To make sense giving thanks:
"Gloria tibi domine"
A repeated prayer, a repeated failure,
Something my orders didn’t mention.
So
I
Began to walk.
To go
beyond
"Going to the limit"
With no understanding
Except myself as limit.
What is today limit? Nothing.
No music
Just shadows,
A stump.
Reflections.
To dance the dance macabre.
The comedy finished.
I shall not wake from this magic sleep
Either as Roland or Darius,
or The Lion himself, David.
Put down instead
like the dog I followed and believed in.
I’m going up the line tonight.
Looking neither left nor right
All contracts filled
By this rotten earth
All places extinguished,
As the darkness folds
Around these words.
I vanish mocking each syllable,
My jaw fixed,
Unable to move –
The sound still,
Incomprehensible.