Letter from a Hunter to a World of Farmers
From lofty pedestals, you tell me that I’m sick, abnormal. You say my mind’s distorted with disorder, with disease. You sneer that I’m a weirdo, you complain my brain cells dawdle, you moan, “Why won’t you swing and somersault on Life’s trapeze?”...
The Field
The field is lying empty as it calls to me. It’s waiting. I sit and gaze across the screaming void. The javelin quivers in my hand with partially-employed impatience, action-primed, anticipating...
The National Dish
Doner
kebab! O doner kebab! Often, when I recline beside you, how I wonder
what’s inside you. Cloven hooves and mad-cow beef, bits of a bouncer’s
blown-out brain, a suicide-bomber’s fingers and teeth, an aborted foetus
from the high-school lane...
My ex-girlfriend’s parents explained the world to me. “No, humans do not have to co-operate, stop trying to speak to us, you stalker.” I’ve always preferred going behind, not in front. Especially women with high heels...
Western Society is Going to Collapse
The overdraft is plummeting to trillions and trillions. Satanic banks are bloating into ruby-crowned leviathans who clamp their clenching, flexing, metal-knuckled, hairy tentacles around Democracy’s contracting, fast-retreating testicles. Murder-merchants, cardboard cut-outs, billionaire Don Juans grace the White House. Up ahead glint grinning petroyuans...
Squirrel Quarrel, North Hackney
A pair of squirrels quarrel in the elms above the garden. Clive and Lenny. At it again hammer and tongs, like George Bush and Osama bin Laden...
O Schönes Städtchen Baden-Baden
O schönes städtchen Baden-Baden, wo die knospen überblühen. Wir baden gern in Baden-Baden wo gesunde tröpfchen sprühen...
Powwow
This is London, love...
Ironic
Mister Antifascist, dressed blacker than a goth, covers up his features with a bit of cloth. The patriots’ conference is a lamp to a left-winged moth and he smashes it to pieces in a blitzkrieg of wrath. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?...
Discussion about Tommy Robinson with some Liberal Leftists
Muslims are a race! You fascist nipple-face! They can’t be criticised! Screw your racist lies! Freedom? Go to hell! White men rape as well! Why don’t you scream your bile at pale-faced paedophiles? It’s just because you frown on those whose flesh is brown! Because you just can’t wait to spew your brainless hate!...
The Road to 1688
(Zigzag Doppelflagofk Sonnet): The popinjays in parliament are fat from lack of effort as foreign gentlemen who’ve strangled children in a desert, invited by a German witch, come waltzing with their four-inch excited camel-prodders oozing heatstruck lust for more minge...
Behave
Behave! you told me or do you have a bee in your bonnet a wasp in your boot a hive of hornets behind your flies or what watch out, you warned or the fuzz’ll be here buzzing let’s be having you...
Well
well, the man who mends the well means well...
All of my Opinions
Just
look at all these privileged white male proletarian imbeciles who can’t
use grammar properly! Just listen to their simple squeals about how
they don’t want their daughters ravished by a grooming gang! Reactionary
as the King of Auschwitz or the Kuomintang! They disregard the gender
wage gap! Nobody can stop them from whinging about terrorism like it’s a
real problem!...
Phimosis, aged Nineteen
My loins, my loins are roaring, they rage for lack of whoring and hurry me towards a wench who treads the boards in my bawdy theatre group. She’d grinned at my swift swoop like it was grotty cabaret arranged by François Rabelais, but rubber goes to waste...
Circumcision, aged Twenty
(Rotfockel): Goodbye, good riddance, there’ll be no reminiscence of our coexistence as you kept me distant from my pump and piston teenage ambition, thwarting all my exertion with your inertia, striving like a researcher or a tough-nurtured street urchin to keep me a virgin. Rot in hell! Or a surgeon’s pickle jar...
Festival Moment
(Ballad): Miles of polystyrene beakers carpet a cow-smelling field. Kangaroo meat’s up for grabs in tubs that are clumsily sealed...
When Candles of Wax my Room do Light
When candles of wax my room do light, I down sit and some poetry write, and though the centuries late have got, I the verb at the end of each sentence put...
The Cave
Goodbye, sweet cave, my black-walled, slanted-ceilinged cubist teenage refuge, old dartboard ringed with misfired aims. Sweet shelter from the deluge of corporate greed, the blizzards of unfeeling, those blustering, windy moral claims!...
College Reunion
Harriet is now a Jehovah’s Witness. Ranjit deejays at a folk music nightclub. His parents are proud...
Canute
My pet newt, Canute, is far too minute to hold back the tide on its moon-inspired route...
Bud Bud Ding Ding
(Kyrielle): Where is all the bloody tea? The bloody tea I cannot see. This bloody tea, it taste like mud. Bud bud ding ding, bud bud bud...
Apathy in the UK
What’s so bloody marvellous about “democracy”? Just because we don’t all drop off joblessly with leprosy and dropsy, we think it spotlessly grand and lofty like some pompous opera, see, but poverty still hovers over Britain ominously, we wander disoccidented, our hopes all lost at sea...
Some Women Walk Briskly
Some women walk briskly with their arms folded. Is this to prevent excess bouncing, I wonder?...
Exvermination
My hat’s far from doffed at the rats in my loft, they screech and they fight and they breed from nine until two, when I’m trying to do boring and gay things like read...
59,000% Say Keep Smoking
This no-smoking bill will bring about the death of the public house!...
Exhaling
Bristling with the waft of honeysuckle or whatever it is I climb in the downhill breath of the wind to a glade that peeps over London, a fat expanse of London...
An ‘Neunzehn Vierundachtzig’
Du warst das erste buch das ich las auf Deutsch, fast das erste buch das ich las auf Englisch. Das erste in meinem herzen. Ich las dich erwartend raumschiffe oder ähnliches, prä-geschlechtsverkehr, post-Kalter Krieg, und so begannen die schmerzen...
Cento in D-minor
(Cento): I now detect an alien vibration here as Beautiful Zelda from Galaxy Four, the kind of eyes that hypnotise me through, lips of venomous poison, poison running through my veins, suddenly walks through my door. Time falls wanking to the floor...
Imagine This Scenario
Imagine this scenario. For centuries, millennia, your ancestors have ploughed the fields of Britain, milking many a moocow, pulling many a lever, scrabbling at many a coalface, been frogmarched off with bayonet, rifle, sword, to stop the whole place from caving in, as they were told by those who owned the silos, who fattened up the empires, whipped the natives, shot the rhinos. Your ancestors were Irish slaves, Welsh miners, English shepherds, they laid the pipes, they pumped the sewage, dug the roads, were peppered with German bullets, choked on mustard gas, built ships and lorries, stoked engines, mixed cement, fought off a million mortal worries, fought typhoid, smallpox, polio, Napoleonic trouble, kept calm and carried on while Hitler smashed their homes to rubble. Your father drives a minicab. Your mother feeds machinery. Twenty-storey tower blocks make up the local scenery...
Terrish: A World Language
Ower Baaba, hu is in Shammu, kaddosh is yor vardas, yor vasilio datang, yor zhelanye be fard, on Terra as in Shammu. Datch us vandaag ower daagly chingwa...
Abigail
(Abercrombies): Onstage I bellowed verses to the sky beside a bunting-woven campsite. “I’d never seen an aura glow so high!” you chirped, in my front garden. A fox-cub stared at us perched on a dustbin. Beneath the glare of orange lamplight and puppy, I unleashed my trapped combustion and kissed you like a Spartan...
The Ofs and Ofnots
I should of went and ran and hid. Whom would of knew I had of did?...
I’m Not Interested
(Skeltonics): I’m not interested in how you’ve learned to endow pockets of webblifrabe with auto-chiffliswabe and made the director go “wow” so that now you’ve earned enough thimbles of bottom-fluff to eat the best beef stroganoff in downtown Saratov...
Julian and I
It was a lizard’s tongue-flick after England One Germany Four in the World Cup when armies of churlish chair-hurling Anglo-Saxons who apparently aren’t Germanic in any way mid-stanza stopped caterwauling about two world wars and nineteen sixty-six AD or BC (no-one remembers), and as a thousand thousand flags of Saint George snuggled up to banana skins again...
Racist
(Ghazal): I can make you feel small, racist. So that you’ll have to crawl, racist...
Brave New World
Welcome to our brave new world, like Nineteen Eighty-Four but a few years later, a safe space reserved for Feminists, terrorists, vicarious intellects, beta-males, no haters. We, we, we decide the rules, you must learn them ad verbatim. You’ll be safe and sound if you obey them...
Fireworks in the Afternoon
(Pantoum): If only there was more than this, this rusting dented old spittoon lined with a dahlia festoon, this bucket of what looks like piss. This rusting dented old spittoon is all we have to count for bliss...
Ketamine Trip with Chas and Dave on the Stereo
What sort of person snorts a porky line of ravers’ smack, then plays the greatest hits of Chas and Dave? You’re looking at him lying flat out on his back, his third eye peeking through perception’s bars. I’m bouncing round a Cockney universe where pearly angel-kings are beckoning beyond the grave. They wink at me beside the Pearly Gates and then disperse in a trillion stars...
Dissociative Love
Such hair, such springy marmalade hair, such arctic skin, such North Sea eyes...
Bridget’s Hat
I’d been drowning for years in an ocean of people who simply pretend that they fight and defend, an ocean unruffled by wave or by ripple, as blasts of hot air blew me nowhere...
I Battle to Register that I'm Alive
(Belarusian stanzas): Drama’s ensconced in each look and each meeting, each quarrel belongs in a history book. Films should be made of the way my heart’s beating, drama’s ensconced in each look!...
Lichtenberg
Here I hang, kicking around the concrete communist cubes (block sechs, block acht) garnished with greens and grinning crimsons to inject Lichtenberg with cheery richness...
Canute, Part Two
My pet newt, the minute Canute, was hatched on a mossy islet...
Note to a German Geezerbird
hey dude dudette düdin look that one up in Duden you dindu nuffin with that dildo, man!...
Die Merkel
Sie ist die Merkel, sie sieht nicht gut aus. Sie lädt viele terroristen ein nach haus. Sie wirkt so gerecht, an sie kommt niemand ran. Für die Globalisten macht sie was sie kann...
Morning Star Horoscopes Page, with Karl Marx
Aries the Sheep-Farmer. You’ve had a tough time lately making ends meet, but all your money worries will soon be over! A socialist windfall is on the way as the downtrodden masses rise up when the moon is in the house of Capricorn...
My Girlfriend Cheated on me, so I Cut her Tits Off
(Sidneyan sonnet): My girlfriend cheated on me, so I cut her tits off. Then I threw them in a lake where maybe a voracious water-snake will eat them. Or a peckish halibut...
To my Unborn Son
(Abercrombie sonnet): My unborn son, I drill down through the wires that thread my battered brain and ask, “What kind of world will drag you through the fires of earthy human passion?”...
Over
I’m over women. I’m over sex. I’m over beauty. I’m over youth...
Clerihews 3
Adolf Hitler was peeved that Germany was littler than Russia, but Luxembourg was the littlest. And it was on his hit list...
Bored Again
I’m bored again, dear God, you big beardy bodyguard parked on your cumulus, captain and protector of the planet (so the Pope keeps typing onto his computer), so why catapult catastrophe...
The Stasi are Redecorating my House
The Stasi are redecorating my house, they’re giving the stairs a good polish...
Reading Lucy’s Old Poetry
It was three and a half inexperienced years before the first time I would ever see your pale and puzzled face, call you by name or absorb your surprise-laden, whirlpooling words. Tita the Peruvian clairvoyant, her mascara garnishing her scrunched-up eyes, gripping crystals over tarot cards like an extra-terrestrial gripping a spaceship steering wheel, proclaimed...
Behind the Curtain
(Ryuka): What sort of playwright writes about the right of right-wing radicals to Christian rites, right in my face? Good Stalin, that’s not right!...
The Ensemble of Simpletons
Below the belt, below my level, blathering free, the ensemble of simpletons are slandering me...
Still No Apology
We don’t have to apologise or admit being wrong because we are never wrong, even when we are, even when our wrongness is fluttering from the church roof, is blaring from loudspeakers on the high street, is wafting out of every sewer, we are still not wrong...
Fuck the Liberal Left
I used to think that you were there to lift the working classes, but now I see your heads jammed up your own self-serving arses. You see the world in black and white, through dogma-curtained glasses, so certain what the past is, puking moral catharsis...
118 Hampton Road, Bristol (Deutsche Version)
Es schoss meine nase hinauf wie ein zitronensaftgetauchter besenstiel und während ich nach wasser hustete und nach der toilette donnerte, glitt der gedanke durch mein gehirn dass ich niemals drogen mit nummern im namen vertrauen sollte...
Starting Point
Kayak-splashed mosquito-bitten primrose-hosing afternoon, Polish-German border. On one side of the kayaks bustling churches, angels draped across their ceilings, freckly-chested bottle blondes on painted tiptoe...
Prague
(Yiddish sonnet): Up on the shoulders of the shapely city, tucked inside the rock, beneath a huge forever-ticking metronome...
Men are from Minsk, Women are from Vilnius
Yuri. Round face. Cropped black hair. Red nose. He roars, “What can I do? Vodka naidu!” The tumblers drip. “Drink, Alfie! To the last man who can save the West! To Donald Trump!”...
Bedtime Attire
I explained, “It’s to regulate temperature!” But she ranted and whinged like an emperor, as though wearing a hat could be kinky...
Polish Afternoon
It was over uncleaned kitchens and unpaid zlotys, I think. Not sure. I only understood “kurwa”. The argument between you and those two bottom-jockeys, your flatmates, roared like a furnace...
Koumpounophobia
I’ve always hated buttons...
Conversation with my Teenage Self
I need to find a girl who reads. But girls round here don’t read, old boy. They’re far too busy watering seeds and ploughing along in a tractor. Then university’s the place! For thought, discovery and joy! The student girl’s an empty space. The only boys who attract her...
Last Train to Bydgoszcz
A frosty shaft invades the station, chilling scarfless necks. A flush-cheeked whistler coughs, connects his shiny jacket, checks his watch, a banjo-shouldering gypsy scans the schedule and scratches his paintbrush chin as Krzysiek takes an oafish chance and snatches a kiss off skintight-skirted cherry-lipsticked Katarzyna...
Wiara
Teraźniejszość, przeszłość i przyszłość zawsze wciera sól i pieprz w cięcie...
Soundwaves
Under the glow of the spotty-faced moon, a plough, a small bear and an orangey Venus, ascends the percussion of wheels on a track as grasshoppers fiddle away on their wings...
Tim’s Cat
(Limericks): I once knew a baker called Timothy whose cat was a lardy behemoth, he scoffed rats till he threw up. I forget where Tim grew up, his accent was Cornish or Plymouthy...
Ukrainian Flatmate
Three short raps on the door and the receptionist sweeps him into the kitchen, a blizzard of sibilants and affricates, his late-adolescent head a whirlwind of facts and nonsense...
Jogging Round a Polish Park
And off we go, along the lane, the roses bleeding, gushing red across the left side of my brain as terriers chase tennis balls into a crashing, rippling pond. What’s that? Some kind of avant-garde distorted Easter Island statue. I wonder what inspired that. Some pine trees with their trunks all knobbly. Two girls, one pink, one mauve, on scooters. Kneepad-clad, zigzagging skaters. “Dobry.” Zigzag. Skate. “Dzien Dobry.” Grey concrete drowns in orange, green, cyan, maroon, magenta, yellow. Hopscotch. Triple-scooped ice-cream with flake. Two llamas. Alien spacecraft. Signed Milena and Joana...
Christmas in Auschwitz
(Haiku): Christmas in Auschwitz...
Ukrainian Flatmate, Part Two
they granted us a broom and a brush no dustpan...
The Path Meanders
The path meanders through the night. The trees on every side all tower to a moon-obscuring height, bamboozling with their outstretched power. No destination is in sight, no flickering of a promised land, and no-one’s here to flash some light when all I need’s a helping hand...
Roman
(Ballad): Morbid expectation shivers through the fusty air as every bottom shifts and shuffles on its creaking chair. The medium, his eyes wide shut, is fumbling for a lead and plugs himself at last into the supernatural grid...
The sun was high in the sky, the mechanics were welding, the binmen were clattering, my landlord was chopping wood when I woke up, head hammering with brittle futures and crumbling economies, head hammering with syringes, with Satanic corporations and conspiracies, with visions of commands in microchips in humanity in chains, with marks of the beast, with the two-decade-long ambulance siren of loneliness in my stomach reaching its deafening, workless, cashless...
The Zigzag Doppelflagofk Sonnet, Rotfockel and Abercrombie sonnet are all poetic forms devised by the author.
