I know the toothless women
Who crumple on the streets
The rain bleeds through their cardboard,
The cold drips through their feet

I know the dying children
With anaesthetic arms
The angels crowd around them
With time that burns their palms

I've hugged the brainwashed gangsters
With money drenched in blood
I've heard their broken weeping
While digging up the mud

I've seen the starving faces
Of the tired girls at home
The broken, hectic psyches
That eat them to the bone

I know the burning poets
With a desperate thirst for life
The need for finding soulmates
That pierces like a knife

There's weary public servants
Who risk their lives for good
And prove compassion every day
Yet stay misunderstood

Human love is buried
Beneath the plastic weight
Of angry allegations
And a world that feeds off hate

These people may be messy,
But they're beautiful and real
With hidden dreams and secrets
And ability to feel

We have a place to run to
With lights of peach and gold
Where all the weight is lifted
And all our tales are told

We live in total freedom
So safe beneath the moon
And though it seems ambitious
Our dreams will save us soon

That crude-spoken Sovereign commands a big stick,
runs the world into ruins, once our bailiwick.
Questioned why, He grins grimly, pale lips slightly pursed:
"Vindication? Straightforward: It's Me and Me First".

(To mesmerise people He’s conjured His spells
with the pride and the power that Lucifer sells –
using tricks of the trade, evil voodoos well-versed
well engendered His mojo: "It's Me and Me First").

His friends (not His foes) form the skeletal men
along trails of dead ends (for they're armed once again)
and they're counting the bones of the bodies dispersed
by His bombastic lyrics: "It's Me and Me First".

The crater walls crumble, the dust drapes and smothers,
as drummers drown screams in the dreams of the others –
while beating and throbbing, like red veins aburst,
bleating echoes redouble: "It's Me and Me First".

A warrior departed to fight for His flag
and returned as a body brought back in a bag;
alas, such are the stories of soldiers coerced
by the Devil's damnation: "It's Me and Me First".

Beneath His thick thumb, the deprived do and die,
when subjected to whims, promised pie in the sky –
yes, His heavy hand rules, and the weaklings be cursed
for accepting His sermon: "It's Me and Me First".

He's minding our business by forging fake fears
and He'll serve and protect as the bogeyman nears
by ensuring our fantasies' phantoms are nursed,
smirking: "why should you worry, It's Me and Me First".

The media moguls flash news so fantastic –
their hearsay on Honcho's forever elastic
with doctrine and hogwash and hype interspersed
'twixt the dictums of hell and of "Me and Me First".

The masses partake in His royal cavalcades
giving chase to the hearses in midnight parades
through the catacomb caves where we're falling headfirst
down the bottomless pit of "It's Me and Me First".

The children in ghettos, like slave mutineers,
vainly venture to flee before youth disappears
but their ship's on an ocean that can't be traversed
for their sails line the abyss of "Me and Me First".

While His Highness drives oxen, He's sipping champagne
thinking "each shares a trough so that none need complain",
but the water hole's drying, we're dying of thirst,
so says "sorry you guys but It's Me and Me First".

A drifter once hinted behind weary tears
"overall the world's dying or so it appears";
He replied with a flash and a sudden outburst:
"yes, but who really cares when It’s Me and Me First"?

In Great Again moments we get the DT's
from His paranoid penchants, quite like a disease,
one which spots us, then rots us, then worse comes to worst
when He utters "just Trust Me: It's Me and Me First".

When profits are plunging (approaching the pits)
He won't give up the ghost or start calling it quits,
instead purges our pockets; again reimbursed,
says (re-groping His kitty): "It's Me and Me First".

The King condescends to a sharing charade
by dispensing desserts at the penny arcade –    
yet while crawling for crumpets, the crowds are dispersed
being slogged by the slogan: "It's Me and Me First".

When faced with the facts, He's the Greatest denier
that global abuse means all life may expire –
He scoffs at the thought that it can't be reversed,
says "it's not about you, no: It's Me and Me First".

With profits performing, He smiles, misinforming  
- of weather that's warming (whilst whirlwinds twist, storming),
- of jungles conforming to nature deforming,
- of bees no more swarming, thawed glaciers transforming
bold mountains to molehills on sand bars submersed –
can the earth persevere when: "It's Me and Me First"?

                        EPILOG
If you're feeling unsettled, there's no need to fret
for it's all a delusion, and lest we forget
He repeats His old mojo (a line well-rehearsed):
"just like almighty Yahweh: It's Me and Me First".

                      EPITAPH
The remains of the deserts and wasteland lie here
where the vacuum implodes and the silence is sere
when retelling the tales of the sagas immersed
in the mythos and legends of "Me and Me First".

The stone statuettes (swapping vain epithets)
consigned rational threats (those that wisdom begets)
to their nothingness nets spread in dank oubliettes,
losing aberrant bets with no real regrets
(scorning pale silhouettes that the conscience besets).

Nonetheless, when the cosmos and chaos conversed
they but hee-hawed the hubris of "Me and Me First”.

Awaking blithe each morning,
with eyes upon the World,
I wonder, are we mourning
with ebon flags unfurled –
or are they but a warning,
some draped like snakes and curled,
stray stars and stripes adorning,
sent from the netherworld.

I wander through the garden
with nothing on my mind
and say 'I beg your pardon'
alarmed at what I find
as winds begin to harden
and fate begins to grind.

Confused, I watch my neighbours,
they're wide-eyed, unafraid
to halt all useful labours
and join the death brigade;
the ritters rattle sabres,
the frail and fragile fade,
morticians tap on tabors,
the potentates parade.

The military blesses
(in tunics somewhat browned)
its crimson-stained successes,
hell bent and heaven bound.
Such scenes no more distress us:
a ****** battleground,
dissevered heads with tresses
and arms and legs abound;
the fourth estate suppresses
the heaps of bodies  found
(collateral excesses
discarded in a mound).

Society regresses,
now living by the sword,
with torture and its stresses
upon a waterboard;
a captive kid confesses,
his innocence ignored -
fallacious facts and guesses,
the guts of justice gored!

With canting vindication
a big brass bully brags
(with pearls of perspiration
and swollen tongue that gags)
of third world  subjugation
for gelt and oily swags,
of human rights' castration,
and on and on it drags.

The manifold migration
of refugees in rags
while searching for salvation
soon finds compassion lags;
uprooted populations
are fleeing from their flags
else dying of starvation
as naked hunger nags.

With trump cards politicking,
two little hands (all thumbs)
may send the Mad Dog siccing.
Insane! All sense succumbs.

Atomic timepiece ticking
until the Reaper comes
as Geiger counters clicking
drown out the droning drums.

Cast out for not conforming,
I wander day by day
to find the earth deforming
as nature wastes away,
with bees no longer swarming
(expunged with garden spray)
and ocean depths transforming
(neath plastic overlay).

With CO2 performing
the climate's led astray,
the atmosphere's been warming,
the grasses ashen gray,
eternal tempest storming
while permafrosts decay,
and ozone holes are forming
in deadly disarray.

The people profiteering
descend a slip'ry *****
destroying, never fearing        
of running out of rope;
instead they sit back sneering
“our wealth’s your only hope”.

Yes, Armageddon's nearing,
it's doubtful that we'll cope,
for Evolution's jeering,
she's scanned our horoscope:
we'll soon be disappearing
with whale and antelope.


           Epitaph

The multitudes were jumbled,
some milling ’round the mall,
while politicians bumbled
when bracing for the brawl.

The World around us rumbled,
our backs against the wall,
as bombs were tossed and tumbled
across our broken ball.

My kneecaps creaked and crumbled
but I, too proud to crawl,
took but a step and stumbled  
yet found no place to fall.

And no one heard me grumble
although I tried to call,
or maybe I just mumbled,
as strength began to pall.

Well now the World’s been humbled
I seek an urban sprawl,
but since the feuds were fumbled
there’s nothing left at all.

While waiting at the river Styx, in twisted time untaught,
from branches of the gallows tree, in recollections wrought,
your soul, a beggar’s blanket, hangs in crazy quilted knots,
with dangling pearls and diamond studs in dripping crimson clots,
midst gaping wounds and bulging eyes like fouling apricots,
for wrapped like rope around your throat’s the Reaper’s grim garrote.

Galactic curls in spirals swirl, entwining twisted mystery,
where time unrolls in blackened holes, no longer bright and blistery,
but writ like runes on starry dunes enclosed in cosmic history

Galactic dust, from novas' gusts, congesting empty spaces
once fatefully flung beyond the tongue of burnt out astral traces,
may recompress and coalesce in distant times and places

Galactic dwarves, like ancient wharves with silent planets mooring  
yet still in spin though long done in, hide flares no longer soaring -
magnetic webs of eons ebb, in thermal fusion roaring

Galactic tides warp space divides, call forth sublime creation
while bending clocks in rippled shocks, unfolding time dilation
that seems to crown the flowing gown of pulsars' pulsed gyration

Galactic stew, a seething brew, midst background noise and chatter
like Chaos reigns, the sole remains of missing antimatter,
with just a trace to form a space-time, curved or somewhat flatter

Galactic glue holds something new: dark energy and matter
that interacts and counteracts the ancient Big Bang splatter:
a cosmic soup of strings and loops, a universal batter

Galactic life's replete and rife 'neath lactic milky wafer,
though solar gales leave unseen trails of cosmic rays, the strafer;
but nonetheless, one must confess, it seems there's nowhere safer