In what seemed a time interminable
This is how the world ‘beginned’.
Let it describe it –
Had the start and no sin.
If you stumble around darkness,
It can be quite harmless.
In tints of Eden, sketches,
We was completely liquid.
Shadows but happier
Completely innocent. We was.
We hadn’t learnt to spell or think.
To be precise we ‘knowed’ nothing.
Hadn’t put pen to ink
Or even tried to.
Space, collision
Me and Me in conversation.
A big bang,
Quite a picnic.
And what of the budded stem? Gravity?
All things to all them.
Until the sun cames up
And everything was bright.
Even the restroom but not quite, not quite.
And all the loving I could ever have
In one night
Came from the California light.
1.
Your ears, your face,
all soon will be blessed with giant squid.
A vampire in sucking cup,
eight arms and tentacles full of blood.
About being mounted on a stalk,
the suctions, when they get you, almost talk.
In circumference lined with hellish teeth,
the mouth strange parrot-like, something of a leech.
2.
Guard your home against this tick,
It does not share your bread for all to benefit.
A big sponge in the deep,
our squid communes with government
to tell us what to think.
Not from a Cove or Ovid
There came the news from Cornwall,
But infernal Covid
That life was almost normal
Travelling in shadow
with message ready
to unleash
the chaos of hell: a battlefield.
Every word explosive,
all sides tremble.
Man, you wouldn’t believe it,
we jumped off, super tourist,
(staying seated naturally)
with a switch to
voices of
“Incoming!”
How friendly.
With noise intimate,
A hissing song
a tremble
of text.
A bloody snap of paper
(Attention! Postcard!)
As butcher bird appears
directed
With something
much more personal.
“Contact” –
licked clean, perfect
by the blast.
A pause.
Execution perfect
in the high altitude of killing
only the “wish you were here” missing.
At the harvest fellowship,
We believe in one vision, a holy, most almighty, GIVER OF THINGS.
FOR AN EXTRA TWENTY WE BELIEVE IN ANYTHING
IT’S OUR KIND OF THING
BEING A Maker of money,
Our kind of salvation by the power of television. Hallelujah.
So make money.
I guess this preacher JUST got blessed and became famous. AMEN. HALLELUJAH.
And our kingdom shall have no end.
Did I tell you about the profits we’re making?
You gotta believe but keep it tight with the insurance.
I shall probably get crucified but that adds to the premium.
And my kingdom shall have no end.
Believe in me as the giver of heaven
Who CAN pull them in.
I believe NOW I HAVE SPOKEN YOU CAN KILL YOUR NEIGHBOUR.
Observe the enthusiastic dead.
Observe them.
A carriage of them we will make
and fill their steady, boys, steady,
with steady state.
The bodies we will make.
We tend to speculate
on what they might have said
about their rotting.
Neither will the bugle wake them
As the rotting sun is set.