They **** us up, the kids we bear,
A Gordian knot cut through and through
But it’s a blame we have to share
A penalty that’s overdue.

And they’ll be ****** up in their turn
By kids who simply do not care;
Who half the time show no concern
And half are scrabbling in your hair.

The child is father of the man
So how on earth can we complain
When they indulge cruel Nature's plan
And put us through it all again?

[Therefore when you meet the unbelievers,
smite them at their necks.
Thus does Allah test you,
and, according to Qu’uran,
those that are slain in Allah’s way,
will never have their deeds forgotten.]

They called him Jihadi John.
It was not his name.
Mohammed Emwazi was how he was really known.
Born in Kuwait;
brought up in Britain.
How are such monsters made?
They have special classes
associated with the mosque.
How to slay
in the name of Allah.
The mosque does not encourage them,
but the mosque is a useful hub
for recruitment
and good camouflage
for activities denounced by
the majority of the congregation.

We really cannot blame
the parents,
we, who have spawned our own share
of mad dogs.
“He was always such a good boy”,
we hear them cry.
“Charlie’s such a good boy, a good boy”
runs the Dia Frampton lyrics
“so compliant, quiet as a stepping stone”.
“You’re such an easy target,”Dia says,
“without a rebel bone”.

[Do you hear what I’m saying?]

But this is in the West,
where tolerance is synonymous with weakness.
Pinpointed as terrorists
by the enforcers of public order,
(perhaps better defined as errorists)
so hesitant to deny these miscreants
their legal rights,
these sickening abominations
(undeserving of the name of Man)
are able to perpetrate their outrages
and continue to abuse the State
that has nourished them.
All in the name of
political correctness.

An equal tolerance
has never yet been granted
to one suspected of a similar
disregard for the traditions
and beliefs and loyalties
prized within their own
Islamic State.

We also have to ask ourselves:
would Russia tolerate this situation?
And furthermore
why is that immense country
so free, apparently, from Jihadism
when it has been responsible
for far more Muslim slaying
than any other Western nation?
Is it perhaps that very fact:
that absence of such toleration
has rendered it immune
from such attacks?

[Do you hear what I’m saying?]


So if you really want to take a hostage
and satisfy your primitive desire
to lop off a head,
the road to take is spread out there
before you.
You need to move to
freedom-loving nations of the West.
Pronounce your aims
in non-equivocating terms
and tie them very closely
to doctrinal belief.
No matter how outrageous
they may seem.

Indeed, the more absurdly
barbarous and primitive
the ideology that you spout,
the more your hosts
will backward bend
and shower upon you all the
benefits of a beloved friend.
Indeed, in bending backward
they are making a symbolic
gesture:
baring and presenting you
a throat.

[Now do you hear what I’m saying?]

I do not walk in measured tread,
I cannot spare the time;
And steady pace is better suited to the dead
Or projects more sublime.

I see them dressed in garb of green
As best befits the land
That harbours jihadist and others more obscene
And not their native sand.

They bear allegiance to no state
That may have sheltered them,
But spread instead their ugly message born of hate
And anxious to condemn.

It would be easy to cast blame
On perpetrators of
The outrage that most freshly has induced our shame
And dissipates our love.

But this would be to hide our guilt
At similar events
That other so-called freedom fighters have but built
And empty rage foments.

The question that we must address
Is why these souls should choose
Defection from their lives of love, and thus aggress?
Why do they not refuse?

What is there that holds them in thrall
And draws them to a place
That their forefathers chose to leave for freedom’s call?
Is it a search for grace?

Is it the hope of paradise
Should they in jihad die?
Seventy-two-virgins is perhaps the promise
On which they then rely?

They claim that Allah is their lord,
that Islam is their life.
They spurn the pen; relying solely on the sword.
The Quran is a knife

with which to cut the Gordian knot
that engirdles their guide.
The jihad route to paradise, the unbeliever’s lot.
But we are mystified.

What must we then on our side do      
that hold freedom dearly?
I just demand the freedom that I give to you
Car moi, je suis Charlie.

He may not have had all the answers
but he helped me address some good questions,
such as how you can locate a cat in the dark
when that feline itself is pitch black,
and has hidden itself in a cellar
otherwise termed a black hole.

But if I should chance to confront him,
I could ask for his personal view
of the answer to Hamlet’s sage
question of whether we are or we aren’t,
or which of the two we prefer.
And how can we learn to distinguish
a quasar from a hole in the head?

I might even ask what he thought of the cat
that Schrodinger placed in a casket
with poison and deadly material
that’s radioactively based.
Does he think it might leak radiation?
Does he think particles might escape?  
Or suspect it could simply explode?

And what might become of the cat?
Was it dead or alive, or just gone?
Let’s leave then with neither a whimper
nor even the biggest of bangs
It seems that it’s time to conclude this,
Now we’ve somehow returned to the cat.

I recall myself growing
inside her,
moving and reaching and
sliding, slithering,
straining against
any explosion of feeling.

I remember the sharing
of tumescent desire;
the transition from
connection
of mouth and breast
to thigh and ****.

I remember, I recall . . .
and that is all that’s left;
the memory,
the recollection,
the evocation
of joys long gone.

Alas
the sands run out.
Nothing now remains
but odium,
loathsome,
vile.

I’d had my way
back in the day,
but this, oh this
it must be said:
I’d left her
in a loveless bed.

I was a pimply-faced youngster,
fresh from the soot and grime
of London’s East End.
Removed unexpectedly
from the bomb and blast and buzz-bomb
of wartime London
and deposited precipitately
in the midst of South Wales
in the heart of rugby-playing country.
And I a soccer-playing kid from grubby back streets.
What could I know of scrums and back-passes and blindsides?

But I did my best, while ashamed to admit to my ignorance.
We put our heads together.
I thought it was a team consultation.
(They told me later it was a scrum.)
Someone shouted “heel”.
I thought he was being abusive
and the ball was so elusive,
and I turned too sharply,
and the upper part of my boot
detached itself from the lower.
(Our budget didn’t run to decent boots!)
And the team coach came over to me and said
“Didn’t you hear me say ‘heel’?”
And I, on the top of my form, replied:
“What shall it profit a man to win the whole game, but lose his sole?”

Some days I look in the mirror
and my father looks back at me.

So long as I can see his reflection,
sometimes sombre, sometimes sad,
occasionally smiling;
for that length of time, at least, I know
that he is not dead,
but lives on in me.

Thus do we survive.

Some day, perhaps, my son will look in a mirror
and I will look back at him.