Prayers for Rain

From a collection entitled: Semantic Dissonance; or The Echelon Rink


Recently disused words and phrases, like modem, rude health and shambolic, get six feet undered

The tomb of the obsolete noun

More archaic anomalies are grouped in with misplaced punctuation and go up in smoke

The comma-torium

Crypt of the bulboid sect

Beseech, countermand, minion and vale are thus torched and cindered

Burned and urned

Parched and chimneyed

Pyre fodder reeks of dead tongues

Unfavourable contemporaries loiter a while in the lumber room splendour of preserved upper class estates

Newly wrapped in the silky denoue of the landed gentry their stars get reborn and shine

Oh baby the stars shine bright

You know; redacted, alas and fleet of foot

Whilst of the same ilk yet somewhat less palatable tools;

P*ki, third class and homosexual, receive gagging orders enveloped in super injunctions

They tried throwing these bad boys off the end of Margate Pier but they just washed back up at Chatham, re-routed through South London and morphed into a more virulent darker strain

Lingua e-coli

Superbugs for sharp shooters patronising infamous haunts that we called the nineteen eighties

Never again

Abbreviates don't die

They just squeal-screech out or nimbly wheel on by

Bus, pram, fax

Poets don't mind

We aggregate and discharge into a fluent contented meter

The fruits of our work glimmer, glare and peter

Slang, euphemisms and MTV street talk gather and rumble like late night summer storms, ensconced in a vacuum of culture and media brown nose conditioning

Orwellian with an irrepressible grasp

Sometimes here for the duration

Always steeped in controversy, they hit below the intellect and get learnt by imitation

The sleepwalking masses always fall at the first 

The best thing about rain

It washes everything clean

For God's sake do something

Best take your chance

Church goers pray for it

Atheists dance

Pen-names

Two storey buildings stare back at me

Their upper level windows are eyes

I always knew it yet only recently learnt to articulate 

The autistic drone drudgery of inanimate objects


Street facades are risible

Eaves, domes, arches, balustrades, gargoyles

Crude un-belongings

A paltry one dimensional effort to impress

Which ends as you take a side street and see the lie


Like books by authors with pen-names you know for what they are

Brutal insecurities

Broken down car

Sandbrook

Lake light flickers off the unskimmed pavement-rimmed pond 

Back to the back and beyond

Hundreds of lives collide - all potential for what that might mean dulled by the office life dull routine

With a few exceptions

Secrets and misconceptions

Bounce and arc off the atrium walls

And come to rest where Grace and Diana take calls

And the heat grows and the light swings from east to west

Green chairs get moved and I think I know best

So I call clients, smile and email and joke and sing and pick up and put down things designed not to be loved but moved around

There are two ways of looking at this and in any case even a circus is an organism

Down on the Manchester Ship Canal

(from the Spit Mancunia collection)

Where Heron's wade and tyres splayed and bob and old graffiti's fade

We crossed through gates and slowly made our way to where the waters bade

And felt the ghosts of men who made a kingdom from the cotton trade

And almost heard again the dins of hulls awash with fears allayed

Salfordian men and women paid

A million tonnes of fresh Canadian wools and grains and riches

All laid out

Oh how Mancunians played  

The coming of the age relayed yet here I stand on wharfs decayed

Weeds trampled where wild dogs have strayed

Pollution slicks, a litter glade where mills once stood

Where things got made

Now, lock and swing bridge unobeyed

All left to die and sink and fade

A silent water palace

Like an empty church where once they prayed

A massive man-made icon left unburied

Did a midnight raid rob life and limb from all displayed ?

I walked home with a heavy heart

On promenades of moss-strewn jade

A member of a race in shame

A race that didn't make the grade

Under These Skies; SW19

No talent was ever God-given here

Hard work, my son, litters your long road

Devils and demons, hardened by all their past victories over you

Inhabit every roadside bush

Every hillside shadow


Your chances are chained to the limits of your own belief

Which itself got moulded in near misses

Yet must today leap out of itself 

And climb new heights at the eleventh hour


Don't dream or think

Just make your own luck or sink

In the build up and somehow even during the fight

Summon the courage to look inward 


For born of self-value is a notion of worthiness

That can serve you proud now

Pulling you up into the blue

Bending reality's path to you


Roof on or off

It makes no difference

Because no favours were ever sewn nor mercy shown

Under these skies 

Lost

Lost


The finite nature of plenitude 

Beckons me to the temporal shades where happiness reflects off the Everglades

Now, all voices, trembling and leaf-shaky

Anchored in fear

Ground out of grown doubt

Lost to the faith of memory

Declare a state of lack and thereafter a despair for lack's continuity

Haunting and returning in the ricochet of echo

As the chords of the trumpeters Last Post salute sit bolt upright yet at once start dying

Through these eyes, pity even the good times

That soon, any day now, will be gone forever into sightless pitch, fashioned to a claim that what i saw never existed

Like the flicker-flared, crestfallen last spark of fireworks in descent

The Aetiology of Genocide

the aetiology of genocide

from the "Cry Me A River" collection

a bonfire of living screaming children

bundled up in rope and burnt alive

whose screams are louder ?

the mothers, forced to watch having earlier left their kids to be "looked after"

just edge it for pitch and volume


girls as young as ten raped pregnant

Kurds buy the best looking Christian teenagers from the Turks

virgins cost ten-fold the price of the had


two year-olds picked up by the legs and smashed cricket bat style

head first into a pile of bricks where the family home once stood

by who?

by soldiers under official state order


whole families ring fenced in wire

pushed off the banks of the Euphrates into the wash

a bullet to just one floating head

the dead sinks the living and turns them dead

it's economical see!


mighty rivers, the Tigris and Khabur too

are forced to change course

tens of thousands of corpses divert the rapids

the new water course stands true today


hundreds herded into desert caves

fires light up and block the entrances

smoked alive

the original gas chambers


it's 1915

out here in the Syrian sands

and there are Westerners too

busily laying track for a new Berlin to Baghdad link


from the Med to the Black sea dozens of railway lines got here first

transporting human cattle to the end of days


the Allies are fully aware

British and US journalists see with their own eyes

women half human half dead

stripped naked and forced to negotiate the sands alone 

three months back

wide eyed and hagged

the lucky ones


Churchill, Lloyd George, The Times, The Foreign Office

all denounce the atrocities


then, and here's the thing, we turn a blind eye

and walls of silence descend

why ?

to fight the Nazis we need Turkey as a friend


think of all those new German recruits down in Asia Minor in 1915

watching and learning

not just how to mass produce murder but with Britain looking the other way, how to make off 

"unseen"


Britain - that most diplomatic of empires

exonerating river fillers, cave burning serial killers

between one Christian and another what's a little denial between friends ?

who cares if the means are justified by the ends ?


one and a half million deleted

yet not one ounce of acknowledgement let alone guilt secreted


by 1930 baby-faced railway navvie turns SS leader oh so savvy

hear Hitler's cries re: his final solving dream;

"No one will remember the Poles. Who remembers the Armenians of 1915 ?"


yes Auschwitz and Dachau make me speechless and cold 

did any soul really survive such living hell ?

but there's a lie in the story

on top of all the above 

a lie aswell 

is there no end to Imperial guilt ?

no absolution ever came from pulling the wool

evil will compound until they look me in the eye and tell


the Holocaust that you know was a reaction

not the starting bell

Hitler was a hangover

his night-before cocktail ?

a spiky little number

some call it "Death on the Beach"

others "The First Holocaust"

take one shot of Versailles and mix it well

with Asia Minor in 1915 and British defeat at Dardanelles


Israelis run and hide

this is the real aetiology of genocide


GK

(copyright)

Stone Wall

(An epitaph to the Stone Wall Riots. 28/06/1969)

From "Another Man's Shoes"


Ever get the feeling that you're not welcome here ?

Ever get the feeling you're alone ?

Too many people judging and condemning me

When is it time to go home ?


Your solid sense of worth and value

And putting all your skills to good use

Some of us grew up in a world away from that

Some of us could never hang loose 


Pride and power

Now nothing's stopping us

How does that make it alright ?

Am I to forget what you said and thought of me

When I was black, now I'm white ?


Let's kick the ball on a level playing field

Discrimination ceased

Everybody wonders where we get the energy

Y'ever see a bird, released ?


Never get fooled by my new found happiness

You're not why I walk tall

My glass house was smashed remorselessly

How do you like my stone wall ?