Friday 10 September 2010

Poem: Gluing Together Burnt Toast Crumbs For A New World

Ladies and gentlemen!
Roll up roll up!
The world as we know it is
ending
crashing
crumbling
crumpling
bleeding
like a car wreck engineered by retarded geniuses.

Ladies and gentlemen!
Welcome to the UK!
The spanking, sparkling
uber-liberal, CCTV-ridden,
apathetic, workaholic,
racist, immigrant-dependent,
calm, ordered, collectively psychopathological
state of now!

Ladies and gentlemen!
I implore you!
Observe your streets! Observe the rot and decay of your streets!

Over there -
A minor celebrity, twice forgotten
crouching in a skip
mobile aloft
happy slapping herself through strings of ragged, twisted blonde hair
whilst chewing exotic animal genitals for scraps of attention!

And witness, witness if you will!
The obese family
being forcefully and rectally examed by fitness and anti-fat fascists
with Golden Arches
that have been melted and reconsituted endoscopes
The crowd gather round and cackle, laugh, guffaw
at the poor family who don't the floating empty time
to luxurise their eating, reading and thinking habits!
And the obese siblings and parents cry, cry, cry
their tears of molten toffee!

And gander, gander, yonder!
Genetically modified gibbons selling slathering human gimps
from the back of a truck.
And every time one of the gimps vainly struggles
to rid itself of its shackling chains
the guard gibbon grabs a binlid
and, with suprising precision ferocity,
smashes the poor leatherbound creature over the face,
who in turn, cowers into a ball, muffling foetal shrieks and weeps.
The police station barricades slowly split
as the pus-dripping undead
(their wounds still fresh from gunshots and truncheon batterings,
their blank eyes maced puffy)
swagger, moan and hammer against the doors.
Finally, they break through
and, mindlessly staggering, disappear into the building.
Gunshots
endless violent plumes of black smoke
scatterings
shrieks
screams
gurgles
skin tears
limb hack
split heads
bloody, scampered footprints
and, finally, the twitching of soaked socks
and dull black shoes
are all assumed to have happened.

Pre-robbed televisions stacked showing
the same image folded over and over -
duct tape being ripped off the singer/songwriter's boyish, fleshy lips
as he begs the television screens through tears for his release
from the vigilante mob of studded leather punks who hold
shards of shattered Crass records to his tight, pulsing throat.

The Reverend grips a petrol-dipped crucifix.
In one quick match stroke, the cross is aflame
and spinning towards the television screens...

Cut to:

Freeze frame on the crucifix's impact, shattered glass fingernails hang still in the air. The Reverend's face complete red rage.

Professional, fashionable, mastabatory opinions primed to spray forth. The Presenter turns to his three faceless guests in the claustrophobically minimal studio.

PRESENTER: So, Francesca, your thoughts?

FRANCESCA: This is clearly a metaphor for religion's insidious power. Look at the ferocity with which he throws the crucifix – it perfectly reflects the aggression of religion as it eclipses people's natural rationality -

TIM (Cutting in): - Francesca, I have to disagree with you. The fact the crucifix is burning is clearly important. The burning crucifix, of course, is a classic symbol of the Ku Klux Klan and therefore The Reverend is in fact making a statement about the racism that is endemic in our society and in Christianity. Jesus' somewhat magical transformation into a white man, for example -

PRESENTER: Jane, what do you think?

JANE: Well, I think The Reverend is basically -

PRESENTER: Well, that's great. We're all agreed?

FRANCESCA: We agree in some aspects, but not in others.

PRESENTER: Fantastic stuff. Good night!

Fade out

Cue abrasive, self-aggrandising theme tune.

Cut to black.

Over the black...

Right wing tabloids shriek:

THE END IS NIGH DUE TO UNEMPLOYABLE PREGNANT TEENAGE LESBIANS WEARING SHOES MADE SOLELY OUT OF ORGANIC YOGHURT

Left wing tabloids shriek:

THE END IS NIGH DUE TO THE RIGHT WING TABLOIDS SHRIEKING ABOUT THE END BEING NIGH DUE TO UNEMPLOYABLE PREGNANT TEENAGE LESBIANS WEARING SHOES MADE SOLELY OUT OF ORGANIC YOGHURT

The government shrieks:

THE END IS DEFINITELY NOT NIGH, WE HAVE A PLAN IN PLACE, IT'S ALL BEING SORTED OUT: THE PREGNANT TEENAGE LESBIANS WEARING SHOES MADE SOLELY OUT OF ORGANIC YOGHURT ARE BEING REPLACED BY TALL GOODLOOKING WHITE MEN WITH JOBS SO KEEP VOTING, PAYING TAXES, SHUT UP AND STOP WORRYING YOU GORMLESS GAGGLE OF CLUELESS CRETINS

History, culture, politics
(known in professional circles as hiscultics)
all reaching their epochs...
Burn the clocks and burn the books for fire.
Every pocket slowly repeating itself
Molding, folding, refolding
Holding on to nothing
but a fuzzy, static ejaculation of futile gestures and
empty shimmers.

There's anger in retention!
Opposing thesis and anithesis
creating tension
unaware they are, in fact,
trapped in the same wheel of Being
and they completely depend on each other's rage
for their subjective ideas of Progress
but the wheel is slowly rusting
but somehow spinning faster and faster.
The sparks are flying,
the doors have split off,
the steering wheel's melted,
the engine's exploded,
each seat is aflame,
The Driver's bailed,
the passengers clasp their hands together
and scream muffled mutterings to the sky.
No one above answers the call

but below, plates shifting, creak, rub...

The streets break.
Slowly first.
Cracks appear.
Dogs' heads crane
feeling the soft burblings underneath.
The burblings become rumbles.
Doors shake.
Windows shiver and collapse.
The cracks get wider and wider and wider and wider
as the streets split with the angriest grin
as if ripped apart by the maddest hands in the world.
People try to run
but everyone fails, falls
eventually tumbling in
some crying
some silently accepting
the anti-nothing swallowing everyone and everything.

When everything is gone
the rumbling subsides.

And then there is quiet.

For hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, maybe even centuries...
there's no one around to tell, and the clocks have been burnt.

Then, one bright afternoon,
a hand reaches up over the edge.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And another.
A million, a billion hands hauling bodies up to the surface.
Dirty, thirsty, tattered, dripping with cold lava:
the people rise.

The skies, like a fever breaking,
swell, then spit, then drip, then scatter, then torrent
cool rain over the people
washing their skins of recent non-history.
Newborn fresh eyes seeing a kalaeidescope
of new times, new dimensions, new splits in the road.

Fractured, battered,

we step forward regardless
into the inevitable, unstopped future.

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