from an idea by Sheila Sharpe

In the foul heat and damp and rot and stench
After dusting off 1 the bodies of dead pals
The living and the dead, the living dead
Old Boats 2 lit off a cigarette and growled

“They say this stuff’ll **** ya.”



1 Dustoff – noun.  Dust off – verb with an adverb.  A dustoff is a medical evacuation via helicopter, as in “Doc, your dustoff will be here in three.”  To dust off a patient, then, is to transport a patient, not to tidy him.  I have recently read detailed arguments about the terms dustoff, dust off, and medevac, but no one quibbled about such minutiae along the Cambodian border.  

2 Boats – a boatswain’s mate, the brains and muscle of the Navy.  Boatswain’s mates do it all and are seldom acknowledged in history or art, not even in the recent film about Dunkirk.  A boatswain’s mate is often addressed as Boats, and always with deference, even by the C.O.

Dunkirk; night
Swallow might
Losing sight
Yearning light
Hugging tight
Is your feeling right?

The underlings stare
In submissive awestruck
Subjugation in landmine-filled
Landfills, are stuck
In the trenches, the feces
The carcass-strewn muck
Where the vermin-spawn ****
As they're taught how to work
And to fend for themselves
Like the Fall of Dunkirk
As the imminent doomsday device overhead
Incapacitates them
As mere prey to a web
Of a global dominion
Ambition connection
Subconscious hive-mind
Buzzing out the objection
And phobia-spreading
Pandemic misanthropy
Greed in disguise
Subsidizing atrocity
Not for me,

I am
The justified treason
The reason the man-hunters
Close open season
The cease-fire peacekeeper
Proliferation
The water war's rising
Desertification
An MIA runaway
AWOL defector
Still haunting the tombs of detente
Like a spectre
With what I assure
Mutually in the end
When I send go-aheads
On the ICBMs
And avenge the dependent expended
Caught in
This crossfire for-profit
Arms race it has been

“Mrs. Tubb, prepare my raincoat,” he said, “I’m going under the carpet.”
His ears were steaming.
“I’ll be waiting by the hanged stag,” he said. “If it gets to six and I'm still not home, put tobacco in the telephone.”

Down there, at the foot of the stairs, Mrs Tubb’s tears fell to the flattened backwards.
In the middle of the night, whilst she was sleeping,
And without her permission,
He had changed her name to Margot St. Vincent.

“Take off that murderer’s moustache and stretch out on the infamous Chelsea Blackmail Floor.
Ask the biggest bugs to dance,
You may never get another chance.”

The quietly handsome and magnificent Millicent Milligan was feeling rather ill again.
She had been dreaming of the brittle marigolds of Saint Petersburg.
She had been dreaming of pine cones and boiling marmalade.

Her home had fallen into a hole.
It was on the evening news,
But by the following morning they had lost interest,
A mountain had struck a commercial airliner and so no one was much impressed by her Home in Hole Hell.
355 were dead,
And possibly a well known racehorse,
And a corpse in transit who, of course, was already dead, but still, it was vexing for the family.
They found a priest in a poplar tree,
And the head of a hand model at the back of a cave.
(The hands were still intact and were couriered to their agent in a special flask).

Half in, half out of her delicious stockings
Wendice Titian cuts out scissor clippings of her
Sinister yellow sister.

Overnight the years twist.

Edgar Snooker has  heard he is to play ******'s dog on the silver screen.
Edgar Snooker is not a dog.
And the screen was never silver.
And besides, it is not true.
Someone is out to destabilise him.

As posh, brainwashed sausages consult
The Punchline Advisor of Dunkirk,

As the Lord is seen on all fours on His moon
Causing daily electrical police misfortune,

As the masses embark on the clamorous, scattered and impossible journey to disappointed purity,

As her money is without temperament,

As the self-conscious guilt daughter unbuttons her plush helmet,

So the richly magnetised stars are winding down.

As candles whisper in the middle of the road,

As Margot St. Vincent revolves the nickel tap
Of the gas powered knitting plate,

So Father Flynn is inconsolable.
He found a photograph of ****** Bob on top of his wife’s hat.
She denied everything,
Including that she was there at all.
Father Flynn fell for it.
That's faith for you.