The tarnishing of our jewel-in-space

I recently heard the phrase 'blue shit' meaning the foul activity of the Tories. Here I explore what 'blue' should be and what they have done to it.

Blue Shit

Blue should be the colour of clear skies,
of water-scattered light,
but you pollute it,
plunder and abuse it,
floating factories stripping the seas
of life, dirtying the aquamarine
with greed and the last gasps
of those tossed aside,
world overboard,
ignore the cries,
focus on your dividend size.

Blue should be the colour
of a tropical lagoon,
a pure mountain tarn,
or ancient ice,
but you put a price on it,
asset-strip-mine it
for a fragment of hedge-fund,
an extra week of winter sun,
or to treat your aspirations
to a reupholstered urban-tractor 4X4
where you primly sit when you drive off
to get your arsehole bleached,
singing "me-me-me"
from your perfect peach.

Blue should be the colour of depth,
profundity and wonder,
but your arbeit macht frei,
consume-or-die
vision of the world
pulls it under, turns everything into
plastic landfill's methane hiss
and the fake nappy-ad piss
drunk en masse
by WKD lads' shagging-shirt hordes,
tears condensing on the chilled steel
of empty wards
where the poor ones kneel,
no hope, so beg for the rope,
for you refuse to feel
the ripped-away smiles
and cold dead lips
of your ideology's vampire kiss.

Of feathers beneath the moon

When I'm not a poet, I'm an ecologist, and can be found surveying and/or writing about wildlife - usually insects, but sometimes larger creatures. This poem is about working on the Arne Penninsula in Dorset.

Mapping nightjars

Daytime apes
out of time and place,
we walk the dark heather
beyond terse ‘No public access’ signs
on every gate and fifty feet of fence,
skirting regimented blocks of pines,
shuffling through sand and lichen
to listen for the chirr of males,
triangulating with ears and eyes and GPS.
Between calls, we pencil
rough boundaries by torchlight,
scrambling colonialists
interpreting territorial extent
from snapshots and soundbites
of reproductive intent.
A few make flapping silhouettes
against the last glimmer
or perch to survey us in turn
while silent females drop to the ground,
invisible, rising strident when we pass
too near a hidden nest,
wing-flashes circling low overhead
drawing us away from precious eggs.
Our allocated square kilometre complete,
we depart and night reclaims the space.

All aboard

After several weeks of writing on some fairly heavy topics (WW1 & macroeconomics in particular), here's a little bit of dirty doggerel about the introduction of a bus run on biogas from human waste and thrown-away food, a short and silly piece about the value of waste which I used as light relief to finish last night's Show Me The Money exhibition-related set.

Poo bus

Humanure and dustbinned food,
fermented dung replacing crude,
unwanted BOGOF don’t just bin it,
join the waste race, better, win it.

Come passengers, roll up investors,
see the new bio-digester,
fed with passed organic crap,
pumps out methane, sewage gas.

Let lorries, coaches, vans and cars,
even speedboats run on farts,
CH₄ in every vehicle,
Fuel of the people, faecal,

Our motions give its motive power,
use the rest to grow rose-flowers,
be proud to flush a well-formed do,
and hop aboard the Number Two.

Stupid George

It's National Poetry Day, so two posts today. This one is a brief response to the T*ry budget and its corporate friendly, let's-suck-up-every-last-drop-of-oil message, delivered with maybe just a whiff of E J Thribb and 'bad poetry' stylings...

Stupid George

Greasy gormless Osborne,
fossil-fuellers’ budget friend,
trying to get us out of the red
by soaking everything in black –
if you want to drill
for gas and oil,
let the North Sea be,
just tap Eric Pickles like a rubber tree –
not only save the poor pork pie,
but get your latex
from a man who needs Playtex,
take his empty pelt and reinflate
to create
a lifeboat for the rising tide.
You can stay outside.

Photo: Greenpeace

Tell me a story, frackanory

At the weekend I was invited to perform at a wonderful all-day benefit gig for the Frack Free Solent campaign group. This happened about the same time that residents around Fernhurst in Sussex had effectively surrounded a fracking project with 'No Fracking' pledges despite creepy C*meron's attempts to lie, bribe, lie, cajole and lie about the pros (there aren't any) and cons. So, a good example of NGO and grassroots campaign groups working well together - and an excuse for me to write a poem especially for the event. Enjoy!


Frackanory

Oil-and-gas executives,
mosquitos in dengue-fever pinstriped suits
seek to pierce the earth,
to suck out its lifeblood
through a mechanical proboscis –
like malaria
they cause tremors
and make bad air,
pissing their toxins into the water
to create
an ungreen,
unpleasant land.

Hiding behind their
first-past-the-post parapets
and waving frackers’ flags,
politicians are Neros,
fiddling while our home burns,
spouting their free-market rhetoric
of selfishness and greed,
spilling lies about fuel bills,
land rights,
pollution,
climate change –
dinosaur minds
and tunnel-vision eyes
that can’t see
beyond the next
share-dividend report,
fossil fools whose fingers-in-the-ears
la-la-la-it’s-not-happening
means they can’t hear
the approaching roar
of the people –
we are their doomsday meteor,
and it’s time the Cuadrillasaurus went extinct.

Shifting Dizraeli gears

I saw MC Dizraeli live on Saturday - I was inspired to put out a bit of autobiography. Audio version here.

The right to annoy

After the gig I’m still buzzing,
sitting on the last bus home,
writing words inspired by tales of
Iranian parties
 curtained off from an unforgiving world,
backpacking angst
 felt by the middle-classes
  finding themselves too subcontinental,
and the nastier acts
 perpetrated by Ayatollahs’ bully-boys.

Here, as there,
gagging is ordered
by the homogenisers
to stifle noise and reduce choice –
though on our little island,
it’s not so much theocracy as
the incestuous edicts
of a dysfunctional Wal-Mart fa-mi-ly,
[insert theme tune here]
the Big Brother of Asda
where I’d been courting ASBOs
by stickering produce seditiously,
 highlighting the ocean plunder
  of industrial overfishing
and loggers’ jungle devastation
 adding orang utans to the
  lengthening homeless list.

In-store security drones
dressed in wannabe-FBI black puffa-jackets
and second-tier Magnum-boots
ask me to
“come to the manager’s office please” –
I decline
and politely remind them that
in fact
they have no legal right
to enforce that particular request,
though I’ll happily leave the store
at their behest.

Finding this inexplicably annoying,
they scowl impotently
as they follow me out,
stroking groinal Maglite bulges –
oh, compensating much?

A week later I find myself
sweet-talking a legal secretary into
telling me who owns a particular
piece of not-quite London
real estate,
and through which
hidden offshore trust its money flows.
As a result,
the small field behind a pub
becomes a plot
to block the builders
and the small local town
is not being bulldozed
to line cronies’ pockets with something
folding and crinkly.

The carbon budget breathes a sigh of relief.

But vested interests are predatory
and do try to bite back –
two spooks from maybe-Special Branch
(it’s hard to say when they’ve got no ID)
turn up on the doorstep at 3am,
rat-a-tatting the brass
and bellowing their ‘open up’
with unveiled threats including
“we know where your Mum lives”
while whukka-whukka-whukka low overhead,
a helicopter spotlights and videos.

I laugh hard in their faces,
photograph them back
and tell them to fuck off –
they’ve not met my Mum.

Frackanory

Whatever the reality of local concerns about earth tremors and disruption due to drilling operations/vehicles, fracking leads to more fossil fuel use and hence carbon emissions when we should be shifting to renewables, not to mention the associated water pollution. Meanwhile the 'Government' says it's safe, tries to circumvent individuals' land rights, and lies about its potential to lower fuel bills. Do they have shares in fracking companies I wonder? It's all one big Frackanory (poem now here in slightly amended form).

Tackling intimidation, saving the Arctic

On Wednesday 18th September, 30 Greenpeace activitists took the Arctic Sunrise to campaign peacefully against Arctic oil drilling. The Russian authorities illegally seized the ship at gunpoint and have put all the activists in custody for 2 months without trial. This is supposedly to look into possible piracy charges, though of course the piracy was in the Russians' breaking of international maritime law by taking a vessel in international waters. It seems like a blatant threat to intimidate anyone else hoping to protest at Arctic oil exploration.

This is my personal blog, not a Greenpeace one, but I feel very strongly about this issue (as you may have gathered), so if you'd like to help, please write to the Russian Ambassador in London here, urging Russia to release the activists. If you'd like to share the link on Twitter, the hashtag is the title of the poem...

#freethearctic30

Small shoal,
thirty strong,
peaceful but determined
makes waves in Arctic waters
to save them from the sticky-black greed
of oil barons and boyars,
Gazprom’s oligarchic puppeteers
pulling whose strings
to toss aside the law of the sea,
summoning coastguards like mercenaries –
no pravda with these privateers –
to steal a ship at gun-and-knifepoint
then spill barrels of slick hypocrisy
as trumped-up piracy claims,
netting their catch to store
for months in cages without trial –
but these fish don’t just jerk on hooks,
they are the alumni of a worldwide school,
an academy of defiance
with voices (4 million and more)
unfettered by incarceration –
and they will be heard.

On the polar parade

A giant mechanical polar bear - part of the Greenpeace #savethearctic campaign, as was the #iceclimb.

Arctic uproar

Aurora londonensis,
bigger than a double-decker,
solid-state roar
rumbles tarmac underpaw,
windblown,
rainswept,
driven by siege puppeteers
hauling like fjordsmen
overland to Byzantium,
she fears no melting floe
nor seal-blubber famine –
ice to the core,
her will is steel.
First Nations sing of lands lost
to oil-thirst,
crude greed,
pipelines drawn in the snow
to spill black bile,
bringing melancholy to the North,
fragmenting the white
for nothing more than
fatter spreadsheet totals
and dividends-in-suits.

A thousand years after the Vikings...

The Havarmal, sometimes called 'The Book of Viking Wisdom' or similar, is part of the Elder or Poetic Edda and is a collection of how-to-live-your-life sayings attributed to Odin. Stanza 75 is one of the most famous sections and translates along the lines of:

"Cattle die and kinsmen die,
all men are mortal.
Words of praise
will never perish,
nor a noble name."

So, Odin tells us we will be remembered by our good deeds, long after we have died. Sounds OK to me...

A Modern Havarmal

Few now own cattle, fewer spears
Or speak of ‘kinsmen’
But still, ‘tis good to live a tale worth telling,
To waken new each day while still unwaked,
Live well
And in doing so
Free the Earth and Man from bonds
Of wanton avarice,
Of small-mindedness
And unenlightened dumb self-interest –
Repay at least a little
Of what we can not help but take,
Oppose by witness borne,
By passive lock and shackle,
Or carefully placed cyber-sabot –
Bring down the bad,
Let them take their shots;
Publish and be culture-jammed –
Fear not
The fear-mongers and the haters,
The sorrow-leeches feeding on
A dead man’s grief –
No words will hail them
In their dishonour,
But rain down hard
The mockery of tear-streaked clowns,
Of drummers, singers,
Lovers, dancers,
Readers, writers, learners,
Players and creators,
Gentle citizens and warriors
Steal the wheels from their bandwagon
By acts of mindful, kind dissent –
That’s time well-spent
When all is said and cited,
There is no life in spite,
And revenge is best kept off the menu
To avoid a world gone blind.