TO ENGLISH POETS IN OUR TIMES OF CRISIS
Strophe
Where are ye now, Lord Byron, where is hope?
Thy pen is needed, Alexander Pope!
Come Maggie Cavendish to readdress
Society & all this strange excess,
The youth yet craves Sid Vicious to affront
The BBC & call the Queen a c**t –
It’s terrible, so terrible, these days,
As candles drain to wicklight in the maze
Of mind & all its inserenity,
Integrating darkness with vanity,
The satirists to aether dissipate,
So out it turns I’ll step up to the plate
& educate the land of moral right
Exposing all these dirtbags – as I write
Karma waves the flags of British empire,
Drags slaves of nations into Bill Gates’ mire
Condemn’d by Heaven as a friend of Sin
His poison swampbeast bubbling underskin
Ready to reset Humans back to apes
Unless the spirit of the World escapes
The media’s coercing, where it seems
Good branded evil as true evil schemes,
Britannia, tho’, disgusted at the turn
Of her beloved island, leaves the fern
& thistle beds to climb the barren glen,
& calls for honour thro’ the rolls of men –
For her, for truth, for law, for justice feel my pen!
Antistrophe
While the world yieldeth to wolves & vandals
Up in their seminars – socks & sandals –
Auld Gaelic Senachies, young trainee Bards
Among the Ogham letters mark the yards
That part two foes opposing, & in flux,
Eco-Albanic heroes versus crooks,
Who’ll try & launch an Ossianic age
Gone madly messianic in their rage,
Willing a metamorphosis on all
To scotch the sketch of destinies befall
Shove fat fattori into government
Who’ll do mezzadri bidding backwards bent
Dangling the dogs oer abyssal despair
The Earl of Chatham hiss’d his wont down there
A cry that echoed flowing oer the rocks
“Remember Boston’s folkstand at the docks
Who held an armageddon to men’s dreams
I tried to toss the stamp act in the streams!”
Now hear Unready Ethelred’s ain voice
“Like Georgian London I too had a choice
But chose my course upon St Brice’s Day
Filling St Fideswide’s church with Danes to slay
& burnt them all, young weanlings thro t’old men
My throne soon conquer’d by forkbearded Swen,
So to my song of reason, understand
No man can grasp a human soul by hand
When it, thro’ Common Laws, united with its land.
Epode
When leaders turn insane let us annoy,
Gadfly style, every Komodoumenoi
With words of honest logic, turns of phrase
To stamp on slugs & vermin, jail the Krays,
For masks have slipp’d upon a Kristallnacht
The very truth in nature is attack’d,
Dust down the ramparts, unweb the cannon
Rise up, rouse thy heart for Ras Makonnen
Shoshone sheepeaters turn from the hills
Don’t march on London, Luddites, burn the mills !
We are no Dynamitards Fenian
Nor Blatherskites across the Carrion
No, we are children of our blessed earth
Bound by umbilical lingams at birth
Let freedom ring thro’ lands of liberty
Flood over Smokies deep in Tennessee,
British Apennines, Gwynedd’s hoary heaps,
Te Mata, where chief Waimarama sleeps,
Oer New York Catskills, Arkansas’ Ozarks,
Wave, Bards, the Manifesto of Karl Marx
Down absinthe, Earl Grey, roll a thousand joints,
& sing its finest universal points
In verses well befitting this fair creed
Sing, English Poets, in Our Time of Need,
Attend to all the dark arts needing light
Upend snake-charming market carts with might
& with thy subtle roars we’ll set the laws aright!