Are you listening to the whispers? are you feeling scandalised?
Harbouring ***** little feelings that you wanna sanitise?
Walk through the swinging doors of a catholic franchise
Ask em for that sailors knot a black-n-white man-ties

To the pairs of prying eyes his practical rebuke
Is a marital disguise and a tactical puke
Throw the garter ‘mongst the pigeons, the voluntary victims...
Whose single minds are filled with matrimonial conviction

Paired up poets pool their miseries; the price of art
Each miserable synergy - the sum of its parts
Did he swear that he’d hold you ever dear to his heart?
To love and to cherish til your knees did part?

If she wants you like her father and you want her like your mother
What the hell are you gonna do when you’re bored of one another?

There she stands on ceremony all silk and sinew
While the vow evicted from his Adam’s apple continues
To stutter as the panic builds like stifled farts
Til it splutters its devotions on her lady parts

Her eyes sentence you to sit though your neck-hairs stand
She’s the ****** ****** written in the lines on your palm
Old scores squeeze sideways through her gritted teeth
And he takes on the debt of every promise she believed

Hide the love-bites in a polo-neck, your love life in a Rolodex
When the ***** hand of happen-stance runs its evil down your keks
Cos like the indelible digits on your bathroom mirror
Love is for life until you dress it with liquor

If she wants you like her father and you want her like your mother
What the hell are you gonna do when you’re bored of one another?

We are but experiments, seven billion shades of wrong
The clever ones stay celibate, the others pass it on
That’s an easy line to settle-on in present company
Single-riders in the peloton to pick up the debris

Mother Nature is a nihilist sitting with friends
Around a poker table in the dew drop inn
Playing Nasty Canasta and the loser draws a limb
On a voodoo hangman, the cut of her kin

The high-wire committee say she’s way out of line
So they’ve sent in a crack-team of their most earnest faces
To blow 40 shades of blue, red and lime
From the very corridors our Mother paces

She croaks through the smoke “the first sons a novelty
The rest are just relics of muscles unclenched
Too smart for their own good and that doesn’t bother-me
But the reaper is hungry and hustling for rent”

Lackeys line the lawn, flunkies on fleek
To cover the crack of her chunky cheeks
“To stake lives may well seem immoral and bleak
But to play for cash prize seems horribly cheap
For a Lady of her esteem”

But the crowd spoke, she hung up the wardens trunchbull
Left the skeleton key within reach of the cells
“They’ve aired their opinions and I’ve had a ****-full
Let the hungry ******* impeach themselves
I’m sitting this one out”

“And I’ll  hide, while my dead snake wriggle persists,
On Elba with hairy pits, freckled wrists,
Openly practicing romanticists
And other hapless things that can’t exist
In these times”

Every second Sunday, the search resumes-led
By a dawn-chorus of confetti festooned-plebs
She can dance the devils limbo cos she’ll not be presumed-dead
While we’ve Holy Grail Package Holi-vows to renew-said
The green eyed usher on the door

The newsstand screams “Mother Nature was a fascist
Sher natural selection was the **** manifesto”
And they’re pedalling placebo to the shell-shocked masses
While the editor shoehorns a scotch into his amaretto

Yeah the world has been orphaned and the orphans smothered
But go easy on her sordid soul cos that’s  our mother, after all

Rapt by prognosis, sterile elocution
Acute halitosis, banal delusion
Digital notice of distant retribution
Thrombosis will move you before revolution

Brash adolescent right-side part,
Strand obsolescence, abstract art
Pinstripe filaments, two turned backs
Bowed in benevolence, borrowing slack

Hieroglyphic ruminations,
Plastered protestations.
Muscle memory incantations,
Aquifuge of patience.

Future shock, feminists ride-centaurs
Skin-tan hedonists reside-indoors
Tin-can telephone spinal chord,
Sings-an injured semitone final word

40 years since you were a punk

Too old for a visa, too young for the farm
Too straight for the army, too gay for the guards
If you’ve got no calling, no fella, no wife
Have a bunk in the hall at Cape Christ

Walk a dowry down the aisle on a leash and a promise
Hand on holster handing over the hostage
On a dotted line date with a beard-slash-bride
And need a Roman ransom? Think Christ

If you’re sick of the same ***** giving you grief
Don’t lower yourself, turn the other cheek
And if he breaks your jaw, then my advice?
Don’t come running to me, blame Christ

Give the devil on your shoulder a little nibble
Every now and again to keep things civil
And before the tread’s worn off your conscience, right...
Draw a cross in the air and call Christ

What do you sell the man who’s seen it all?
Ketamine, bath salts, Adam and Paul
If sir needle and pipes says he needs a new vice
Pull the spiritual card and play Christ

When you’ve just reconciled yourself with death
And they want a labrat for the time you’ve left
When the doctors too fond of his own **** voice
**** the medicine man, choose Christ

Have you been leading death on a wild goose chase?
Trying to buy some time to clean your slate?
Call a priest around, he’ll set things right
When you’re ready to croak it, plead Christ

The Word rattles in the chests of the last clergymen
Who drop dead like the devil overheard-ye-and
The women look willing while the men look bored
But they couldn’t trust women with the Word of the Lord

Unless the Eucharist feels like chiselling a nick
Off the philosophers stone and swigging it quick-ly
Down with a bottle of B
Then I guess it’s not for me

There’s a man off his chops selling tough for a tenner
But the mercury drops in his ugly temper
And gets lost under Victorian modesty
When faced with their war on fallopian sovereignty

Girl wears her mother’s mittens for earmuffs
Until they’re far enough upwind
“See they’re paraphrasing Jesus dear-but
I’m not so sure that’s what He meant”!

Someone’s sacred promise broke her way
An ancient conquest wrote to say
You can turn your back to the rain but not the season

So she held the wire beneath his feet,
His promises between her teeth
And doubted him when thousands would believe-him

The acrobats said name your price
And quicker than she could bleach her lies
The tension in the line
Gave way to treason

The first stone ***** its holy wings
From the hand of the first man without sin
She never could look twice at him
Now sweet revenge deceives-him

Domesticated son of the beast he hides
In the wilderness behind his eyes
The chains rattle by his side
Til the voice of his mother says sit

She hides her back with the wall and lends
Her face to the rack and pinion men
Then hovers in their silence as they wait for her to turn again

Pink clouds stretched over the dying light
Like skin on the ribs of a crying child
The rising wind pulls them apart like the big man pressing send

Seeking solace in her skull, her pupils reverse
Talk moves slow like her lips are cursed
To **** and roast each honest word
She can snare behind his prayer

Mallet drops sudden as a ****** nose
The girl must die for the life she shows
Her frightened sisters who’ve come in their droves
Death sells and *** collects the fare

Domesticated son of the beast he hides
In the wilderness behind his eyes
The chains rattle by his side
Til the voice of his mother says sit
Only he knows how close he came to it