Post-truth.
Post-satire.
Monsters celebrated as saviours.
Wide-open, screaming ******
committed during every ad break.
A dynamic new plan to power the national grid
using snake oil.
Hosts of remote-controlled, cybernetic angels
raining down weapons-grade holy fire.
Eternal peace declared
between Eurasia and Eastasia.
The trenches full up with
poetic corpses.
*** doll mouths breaking
bad news to the bereaved.
The orgiastic scarification
of our own democracies.
Blood sacrifices to the Black Friday Gods.
The enactment of nursery rhyme into law.
The Disneyfication of the human heart.
Love only as legislated.
Hate as currency and
everyone a broker.
Strange, reptile creatures
ballroom dancing through
the sludge-filled annals of imminent history.
Endless war
between Eastasia and Eurasia.
A thousand candles
lit in memory
to all the moths that
burnt to death.

There are no right answers.
The sky rejects the birds, turns them
over to gravity,
embedding them in the concrete and dirt.
The grit refuses to become a pearl,
just as the wound refuses to heal
and the flesh eats itself.
The market sees a sudden spike in
sales of Champagne and cyanide.
Coordinated efforts seek and fail
to curtail the rising tide of violence
in the nation's dreaming.
You realise that this crude, barbaric language
that you can't understand
is your own.
Beauty glitches and pixelates.
Frightened, furtive confessions of love
are unheard over proud, visceral
proclamations of hate.
Tongues divorce mouths.
Every now and then, a voice
inside your head says,
'Thud.'
The measures of sanity become
more quantifiable and
totally arbitrary.
The horizon
tightens
like
a noose.

It doesn't matter if this is wrong.
There are no right answers.

The desperate scramble to
rationalise; the burning need
to make sense of the
nonsensical, this
all-too-earnest search for
answers, for some guidestone
that will help us decipher
the craziness scrawled on the walls,
a key that might unlock that door
which currently bars the path to
sanity and reason.
We put polls in the field,
conduct surveys, devise
better, more probing questionnaires,
consult eminent
psychologists, sociologists, economists,
go blind on data
tabulated into every conceivable form,
cite studies, historical precedent,
strive for any, any answers
that will explain to us
how we came to
this.

And maybe the reason is
less complex.
Maybe
we got what we
deserved.

Hard frost and treacherous footing.
Nobody wanting to admit
that the new year
tastes an awful lot
like the old year.

None of our heroes
have been supernaturally resurrected.
There's the same
rank toxicity to our fears.
The jaunty carnival of ****** and maiming
continues unabated.
Death remains as senseless.
The corridors of power
are still slippery with slug trails and viscera,
and all the janitors have been
indefinitely furloughed.
It's cold, and
the bus is late again.

Still we persist in believing that
today will be different to yesterday,
that all those wrongs will be righted,
that the proper order - as we each individually, as
thin-skinned gods of our own personal
nuclear universes, perceive it -
will be perennially restored,
the buses will all
run on time,
and no one good
will ever die again.

But the truth is, this year
tastes an awful lot like
the old year.
I could be wrong, I guess.
Maybe everything will
turn out
fine.

President ****
A massive old grump
Talks like a garbage dump.
Throws the country into a slump.

Has no heart to go thump.
Gave racism a big jump.
Gathered fascists into a clump.
Now we all have to ****.

He should be inconsequential
As he has no credentials.
Nothing presidential.
Statesmanship? Purely residential.

He’s mostly pestilential.
No morals evidential.
Facts ruled non-essential
To mindless millennials.

Suddenly he has at hand
The highest office in the land.
Confetti and a brass band.
No ceremony is too grand.

The laws he doesn’t understand
With money ostentatiously fanned
He showed he had the winning hand
But still can’t spell words like ampersand.

Now we’ve made him king of all
Among villains he will stand tall.
We should give Ghostbusters a call.
This **** has us against a wall.

A wall to be built that will surely fall
But for now he is having a ball
With American bigots in full thrall,
Their white God has heard their call.