Monday 30 December 2013

UKRAP-rap

Following on from UKIP-mockery Chaucer-style, here's something a bit more 21st century performed for the first time at Punkmas in the Global Cafe, RISC, Reading just before Christmas, and it's recorded too for your listening pleasure...

UKRAP

UKIP, U’re KRAP, you stink like kippers,
packed in a minibus like dead day-trippers
scared of Bulgaria, the Eurozone, Romania,
purple-blazered xenophobes with Anglo-monomania,
the last idiots dancing to Enoch Powell’s tune,
scratched out on violins in a zombie ballroom,
no rivers of blood, just the trickles of piss
that run down your leg when two races kiss.

Nigel Farage, top of all the bottom-feeders,
leading an asylum-break of Daily Mail believers
and Godfrey Bloom their hate-filled preacher,
swivel-eyed loon like the house-elf Kreacher,
he says all women are sluts and all foreigners are criminal
in his tiny-minded world where intelligence is minimal,
the English Channel’s the National Moat
and anyone brown’s off the last banana-boat.

Racists, misogynists, homophobes and bigots,
you wanna get in government you’re gonna have to rig it,
obsessed with Diana and Bongo-Bongo Land,
you worship Churchill like the Pope with a tissue in your hand,
you say you’re common-sensical not wingnuts full of bile
but I’ve trod in piles of dogshit with more cunning and more guile,
so fuck off with your leaflets and your stupid rosettes
and shuffle off to Dignitas, one-way ticket to the vet.

Monday 23 December 2013

Listened to with rapped attention

I don't rap, or at least I didn't, but I'm open to trying new things and decided to attempt some light-hearted piratical pre-Yule jollity at an open mic night a few days ago. It seemed to go down well, and a few people asked to read it, so here it is complete with nods to the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Cap'n Jack Sparrow - and you can hear a recording here.

The Hip Hop Company of Privateers

We are the Hip Hop Company of Privateers,
rapscallions with hats and fuse-match beards
rhyming and stealing Spanish galleons,
sailing ‘em away through white-foam stallions,
faster ‘cross the Channel than David Walliams,
we kiss the gunner’s daughters but we never marry ‘em.

Flintlock, stock, and one smoking barrel,
we’ll keel-haul Robin Thicke and Pharrell
press-ganged in Southampton, on the run from Stonehenge,
a crew of dub-loons on the Queen Anne’s Revenge
flying the Jolly Roger McGough,
we welcome all the ladies with our tricorns doffed.

Now you’ve heard of women pirates disguised as guys,
down in the hammock-room a big surprise,
but on this ship our opps are equal,
X-chromosomes run thicker than treacle,
when we make port, when we drop anchor,
your sons will quiver like lily-livered… one, two, three, four…

Scowl and cross-words, monochromatic,
swinging on ropes we’re acrobatic,
we climb your rigging, you jump in the water,
all brown in the trousers like Luke Plank-walker,
the Navy chased us from Trinidad to Thailand,
but we’d buried all our treasure on a desert island.

Yo-ho-home is the place where the rum-cask is,
'a gottle o’ grog’ said the drunken ventriloquist,
Cadizzy rascals in the Bay of Biscay,
smoking sixty Silk Cutlass a day,
some fat, some slim, but all are shady,
give an undead monkey to the voodoo lady.

Never marooned or short of gold,
our timbers are shivered, our course is bold,
we’ve got a magic map, so pay attention,
a cross marks the spot where we hid our pensions –
three paces north and fifty west
but you’ve got to join us to hear the rest.

[Repeat] We are the…

Thursday 12 December 2013

Rooms from my oeuvre

Something I wrote based on one of my mixed media pieces.

Hotel

Taking the penthouse, a three-room suite,
homage to that pickled shark,
once YBA enfant influent,
now can’t-paint-for-shit shock-conceptuality,
all dead butterflies and money.

Over in one wing,
crumpled biro sketch for a green man
wrought in silver fretwork,
now etched and hammered, chained
and put up for sale.

Brushed to one side,
an empty blister-pack of brain-pills,
each 20 milligrams
a bitter bite of sweet chemistry,
I'm such a neuromantic.

Tiger balm and beaded lizard
whisper nothings through wood-thin walls,
varnished with intent –
grinning, a brass-balled imp
sits sly on his stack of timber.

Paper-cut bamboo forest,
trees hold onto chainsaw blades,
while triplet queens lie supine
under a celestial arch,
contemplating their paradox.

Faded letters speak of old contests
and hints of science,
print-block songbird
calls the ink down from her serinette.

Fragments of ammonites,
pebbles once shiny and gleaming-wet,
but still interesting in the dry,
unlike childhood holiday gleanings.

Bar-room in miniature
touts ‘beer’ above its rug of ribbons –
next door, ransom-note wallpaper
proclaims the anguish and ego
of the artist.

Of course,
there is a lacuna,
always one empty
among a hundred others,
ghosts of occupants unknown.

This hotel will stay my own.

Wednesday 4 December 2013

Marvelling at the mundane

Today, a brief verse about something not normally deemed poem-worthy - gravel and railway sidings...


Of heaps and hoppers

Ballast-mountains aggregate
behind hazy gravel hills,
purpling their way towards the tracks –
unsettled dust
hungry for the hi-vis shovel,
to be held wagon-safe and shunted
chute-slid to cluster under creosoted oak
and snaking steel
with its clatter-rumble
a friendly helm of sound.

Monday 2 December 2013

More Wallace but no Gromit


After my recent modernist-style musing inspired by Wallace Stevens, here's one more - maybe the last - certainly for a while...

13 ways of looking at a black biro

I

Taken for a walk,
you leave behind
a trail of art.

II

From behind the builder’s ear
or plucked out of a boffin’s
lab-coat pocket,
moving swiftly across the paper
with a fetish for dotted lines, you
release much-needed funds,
(mis)inform census-takers,
agree contracts,
waive this-and-that responsibility
and grease the wheels of officialdom.

III

The loss of your cap-point
protects those who swallow you;
that tiny hole
in the side of your barrel
means ninjas can no longer
use you as a breathing-tube
when hiding in ponds.

IV

Target of a billion petty office thefts,
found
or received as promotional giveaways,
though no-one ever buys you,
you are legion.

V

As many of you are made by a company
known for razors,
you impart the ability
to write sharp words –
is this why you are
mightier than the Wilkinson Sword?

VI

Though a thumb’s merest oily smear
may halt your progress,
like straw,
enough of you can
break even the strongest of backs.

VII

Along with marbles,
photos of the Dalai Lama,
and indeed pencils,
you are valuable currency
when wandering off the beaten track.

VIII

Architect of half this poem,
give or take,
your scratchings lie mingled
with those of blue kin.

IX

By drawing on a little moustache
and side-slicked fringe,
you can make anyone into Hitler,
and like him,
you only have one ball.

X

Your blood
is thicker than water,
thinner than
the pitch it may depict.

XI

Resetting digital timepieces and other electronic gadgetry,
manually winding obsolete music cassettes,
being used for an emergency tracheotomy (apocryphal?),
an entomologist’s probe for winkling out beetles,
one of two pins for hair-in-a-bun,
makeshift clay-modelling or bathroom sealant tool,
somewhere to store rubber bands,
a simple conjuror’s prop appearing to wobble.

XII

Vous êtes un stylo,
from ‘stylus’ –
you’ve come a long way
since wax tablets and cuneiform,
un imprimante de mots manuscrits

XIII

Write/scribe/scriven/scrawl,
rewrite/overwrite/edit/redact,
revise/annotate/complete/create,
draw/doodle/sketch/scribble,
compose/solve/compile/draft,
sign/autograph/name/label,
thank/invite/impress/entice,
poison/libel/codify/fade.