I
I used to be a celebrity, until my spavined Pegasus kicked me off my stage,
I used to be a jester, a comedian, a performer, and now I am one of the staff, the slaves.
My pedigree is that of the coolies’, my experience that of the nihilist.


II
Pot-bellied porters slur meaningless words about the quintessenciality of bestiality
(should that be reality)?
as they place bunion-blistered feet on rain-dripped streets,
where neon lights slit the sky and souls are ripped from skeletonised beings
whose eyes ceased to see
because they no longer want to be
alive.

III
Why then all this Lamarkism, this embryology and biology, why all this geography and historiography and constant barrage of biography?
Why then all this circumnavigation, this wandering and wastreling and aviation?
Why then,
(Oi there! Not another bloody bleedin' blasphemous bloated blah bloh blah of a question)?
And the voyage is planned and the navigator hired and still the lone gondolier sails nightly
As if he might be
Someone
Who cares.

But all the rest are waiting on the boat and are excited because
Noah has blessed them.
Memories are short
people like to cavort and so in this way
thank-you for the postmen and thank-you for the friend endowed
with a relatively excessively opulent upper story
and thank-you for making me bread
because the dogs in the grave-yard like it
and so do the crows that you hate.

But after all the thanking the hand is still going
up&down up&down&up,
and the sage simply sits there sedately smiling serenely as the
Bombastic bonkable banker bellows
blue-coded words to bare breasted bodies
whilst wandering way-men whistle wordlessly with wine-whipped lips
that the lacerated Labrador-like ladies like to love so much.

But in another place you’ll find a rebellious flock of flabby bellied forms
meandering down pot-holed forgotten streets,
as Cassandra sinks down in her parachute
the rapacious retrogrades lick their anaemic lips,
crusty saliva becoming moist, slipping back into the darkness of their mouths.

These wandering wastrels in fool’s paradise unaware of their cerebral celebrity,
too obsessed with the gratification of the sublimification of the oozing sores on their weeping eyes.

But somewhere, softly somewhere there are hands genuflecting,
hyenas trotting after a herd and
stars spitting into the black cloak of night,

Like the boy adopting the guise of sleep, waiting for the tooth-fairy,
or the orchid that you thought extinct,
Notions have their potions that when spilt floods will seem like paddling pools,
Notions and potions and oceans and all these repetitive motions...

Watch the Iris, the Bucephalus, the Madonna and all the rest!
Watch the saints and the sages and the sorceress!
Watch the Catholic, the Anglican, the Moslem, the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, the “puritan”, the Jew, the deviant, the Gnostic, the Zoroastrian, the Christian, the Quaker, the Presbyterian, the Brahmin, the Agnostic, the Deist, the materialist, the nihilist.

- No! No! No! I am a heretical dyslexic anarchist who’s married to a monarchist who is a daughter of a traffic warden who fantasises about the Shaman, the hypnotist, the Merlin, and always and most ardently Aladdin and his genie.