Wednesday 29 October 2008

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Saturday 25 October 2008

Friday 24 October 2008

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."

Wednesday 22 October 2008

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

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Riders of the Purple Sage

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

Monday 6 October 2008

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.