A Message from the Other Side

novus ordo seclorum

The Fate of Franklin

The Disobedience of the Imagination

for Mair

The Queen of all our Hearts

Another cynical, manipulative right-wing demagogue killed  in a drunken speeding incident.

"Lady Di was our Jörg Haider," wept neo-Nazis as they polished their mourning jackboots. One elderly lady, clutching a teddy bear, blamed it on the darkies, and called for a memorial Anschluss of Kensington Palace. A spokesman said "She touched everyone's heart, usually when she pinned a star identifying their ethnic and political orientation on their left breast."

If I Laugh

Now I have been trained

Bring back the goggles and the gloves.

I will not ignite the elderly as they bring to me their harmless spectres,

Their long-lost dead,

But I make no promises about disappearing in the night

Into their tangled wings.

I was waiting at the robot house when the cream seller arrived.

She said "Acetylene gas, for me, is a big risk"

And I heard them droning and drooling strong coffee into their woollen beards

As I climbed up, room by room,

Towards the dinner party,

Finding it harder and harder to drag my wheelchair

Over sofas and window-ledges

The shrouded dead do not sit idly by

He rubbed sow's milk into his eyes so that he could see the wind

Riders of the Purple Sage

Quick! The fictitious capital's been rustled, and somebody's going to have to pay!

The Cave of the Sibyl

In a tiled room underground I saw the heat rise into the fan-blades. I had said nothing about the death of a friend of mine twelve months and a day previously. A woman with a name like mine sang. Unprompted she sang 'The Unquiet Grave', which talks of grief twelve months and a day after the death of the beloved. I knew then that she was a Sibyl, but said nothing to anybody else in the room. When I returned two weeks later an acolyte pressed into my hand a recording he had made that night, again unbidden. I was forced to admit her strength.

Since then, her Sibylline power over me has increased. Days after I finished writing on cannibal songs she sang 'The Ship in Distress', and I saw the ship bear down like the sun a-glittering on the boy about to be eaten. Barely half an hour after I had been talking about 'The Silver Dagger' with someone else out of her earshot, she sang that song. And my father is a handsome devil, so I await her next song with nervous feverishness.