Somebody is shooting at something in our town --
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
Who are the shooting at?

It is you the knives are out for
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The **** of Elba on your short back,
And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery
Mass after mass, saying Shh!

Shh! These are chess people you play with,
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off

In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds.
So the swarm ***** and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.

It thinks they are the voice of God
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.

The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high!
Russia, Poland and Germany!
The mild hills, the same old magenta
Fields shrunk to a penny
Spun into a river, the river crossed.

The bees argue, in their black ball,
A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb
Of their dream, the hived station
Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,

Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
Pom! Pom! They fall
Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
A red tatter, Napoleon!

The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
Worming themselves into niches.

How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The man with gray hands smiles --
The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
Pom! Pom! 'They would have killed me.'

Stings big as drawing pins!
It seems bees have a notion of honor,
A black intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.
O Europe! O ton of honey!

the proust edition of la recherche i had, which i gave away to a charity shop; if you could stitch or strap the edition to my hands clenched into a fist (it was, after all a cheap 2 vol. edition), i could have knocked you out. no, i didn't read it, which is why many people never bother to use the dictionary, because it's always a one volume edition.

it became so haunting to have sang with david
with the lyre the lyrics:

             i'm happy, hope you're happy too...
             ashes to ashes, funk to funky
             we know major tom's a *****
             strung out in heaven's high
             hitting an all time low

it was so eerie i felt goose bump hoofs on my
cheeks adding for extra five o'clock shadow
that i never knew i had.

that's the thing about having european editors,
the ****** day, the whole theatrical approach,
it's just a ****** book of poetry,
it's not exactly an atom bomb,
but they sent the draft which i'm hoping to add
to with my *hoc erat in votis to armenia,
Armenia, yes, once an incorporation of
the soviet rather than tsar's empire:
so jui-seph shtalin involved himself with the russians
from georgia, and my first idea sparklers will
come from armenia - good place to ask napoleon
to escape elba, i say, ol' chap.

and after the teenage girl hype period of an artist,
ziggy, you know what i'm talking about,
you get a process where an artist matures,
becomes prone to criticism, has no hype factor,
has no real monetary appeal to the less
hyped-up juice-of-genitalia army,
has to become a sensible economist -
there! catch him! that's where an artist
translates to other mediums his actual worth,
i feel privileged to have lived at a time
when david bowie released his heathen album,
one critic pointed that it was his best album
since the 1980 release of scary monsters,
so then i bought scary monsters...
i worked backwards...
i didn't feed the ziggy & space spiders from mars
gimmick / egoism, or even the rebel, rebel choir
of cult followers, and you know what?

              i'm happy, hope you're happy too...

it worked, now i can listen to the music like a distraction
tool, refrigerator buzz, ambiance, the freelance
artistry of it all, less care for kids, more care for
the insolent kids that aged and donned their employment
qualifications as 'art critics.'

but what i listen to isn't exactly what i write with,
it would plagiarise the thought process
so much that it would destroy it - the moment's gone,
the ingrained concept of time has allowed
for the same space of the origin of the narrative
to look different, even though nothing was moved.

so with this anglo renaissance circa 1950s -
1990s (nietzsche was critical of the reformation
when martin luther attacked the renaissance creativity,
no great composer in the counter-reformation,
just ignatius layola and the jesuits),
with the beat generation poets (preceding them,
the spirit of influence that was ezra pound
and no other i dare to admit, a seal-off point,
built a hydroelectric dam in nevada f. d. r. did)
you then had the explosion, and i mean it,
the EXPLOSION! 1960s psychedelia,
1970s ******* infused black sabbath etc.,
depressive 1980s with depeche mode iconoclasm
and the cure's slit your lips if not wrists,
the great digging of ***** duran duran,
scandinavian love hopes of a-ha, etc.,
then the shift back to the geographic place of origin,
seattle, grunge, rekindling of thinking man's
rock amiss the ******* fuel of the decade
with prog rock bands, i.e. tool;
and then of course the brit pop decade
(oasis, blur, the stone roses, the la's among many,
bands that still invoked a sing-along even
in such odd places like taizé in burgundy
for the wonderwall chorus)
and then... the death of it all...
artists getting rich, flamboyant, eccentric,
and the people seeing how they were "duped"
deciding enough was enough...
came napster, came pirate - ye har me mateys! -
and the death of the anglo renaissance
with kareoke culture - indeed if
the germans never conquered england,
and that book man in the high castle
by philip k. **** isn't true...
why did we allow the japanese to conquer
our culture? huh?!

p.s. when you realise all those 5.5K reads,
all those so called morale boosters... on websites
such as these, don't have a £ / $ in front of them;
and as i learned, after being reported to a website
similar to this accused of being a troll
for simply asking the long-ago standard
a.s.l. (age, ***, location) but only sticking to location,
losing some of the haul i'd liked to keep,
i realised i can lose that, no problem,
i rather lose that than lose what i have inside of me.

what am i to say?
when your tears are his,
his dreams are dark,
and i am, here, exiled.

the songbird tells of strife,
but sweet harmonies through the bars,
entrance the ear and heart,
almost forgotten now, the woe.

the stars, of course, point backwards,
sacrificing holy rules and codes
merely to get their fix,
before returning to their stations.

sit. silent. feel it. definitely.
i can tell there's something missing,
but as for what? what matters?
and as for how? why bother?

drift, eternal drift, so cruel,
that drags you from the top,
and gags and binds you with every word,
how empowered he must feel.

still, no way out,
but the slow, benign hand,
ticking lonely seconds,
sinister, and dripping with time.