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Powder in the jar

  Mickey Jagger is a Star

  S-T-A-R spells Star

  He can whistle

  He can hum

  He can wriggle his umpumbum

  Pretty little Pam

  Passed her exam

  What shall we give her?

  Doughnuts with jam

  Stupid little Sam

  Failed his exam

  What shall we give him?

  Who gives a damn?

  Staying Awake

  Monday came so I fucked off to school

  School is a big huge building

  Where you’re not supposed to get any fucking sleep

  We hung around till they counted us in a room

  With pictures of fucking owls and bats

  Then we hung around some more

  Miss Harburton ponced in and yelled about

  How her fucking bike’s gone missing who cares

  Then we all fucked off to another room

  It was Mister Collins from Outer Space

  Talked about not leaving gum stuck around

  And Queen Victoria up the Suez Canal

  And how he wouldn’t let us act out

  The Death of General Gordon again

  Not ever and no he never saw Chainsaw Massacre

  And no didn’t want to even free

  On Goodgeman’s sexy mother’s video

  And Beano Black said his mother was poorly

  And started to give us the fucking grisly details

  Saved by the bell and we hung around

  Smoking in the bog and not getting any sleep

  Then we all fucked off to another room

  And it was Mrs Grimes Environmental Studies

  So I finally got my fucking sleep.

  I stay out of trouble but in my head

  I’m bad I’m fucking bad as they come

  When I die they’ll punish me

  For the things I done in my fucking head.

  They’ll send me off to a big huge building

  And they won’t let me get any fucking sleep.

  Well that’s what I reckon

  Death is like fucking off

  To another fucking school.

  Bring Out Your Nonsense

  A detective-sergeant walks into the police station

  A woman with a floor at home inspects the carpet store

  A train stops at the platform after deceleration

  Librarians enter the library through the library door

  Telephonists at the switchboard are answering telephones

  A Telegraph reader buys the Telegraph from the paper shop

  Cars drive, pedestrians walk and my heart groans

  As out of the Billericay copshop steps a cop

  But I’m wrong – the cop debags himself to give birth to a phoenix

  Which zips down the High Street with Dizzy Gillespian squeals

  And the silver and gold melts in all the jewellers’ windows

  And the town is crotch-deep in whirlpools of syrup

  And you sail over the horizon in a pea-blue schooner

  Bearing the wild good news you sail bearing the good wild food

  Over the horizon with a ton of friends playing magical banjoes

  And the people of Billericay dance in delirious dozens

  Give It to Me Ghostly

  give it to me ghostly

  close-up and long-distance

  i’ve an open policy

  of misty non-resistance

  so give it to me ghostly

  shudder up and lisp a

  bogey-woman promise

  to your will o’ the whisper

  give it to me ghostly

  spook it to me somehow

  haunt me haunt me haunt me

  oooo thanks i’ve come now

  Bury My Bones with an Eddy Merckx

  live people don’t often

  have eyes for the overhead stars

  but gloom down roads

  in microwave cars

  they dunno how the rippling

  of the wild air feels

  frowning round town

  in tombs on wheels

  but ghosts ride bikes

  free-wheeling mostly

  singing songs like

  Give It To Me Ghostly

  ghosts got no rooty-tooty

  duty to be done

  cars are for bloody business

  bikes for fun

  Remember Red Lion Square?

  I haven’t heard any Moderates lately

  Mention the name of Kevin Gateley,

  The student who, so the Coroner said,

  Died from ‘a moderate blow to the head’.

  Ode to Her

  You so draggy Ms Maggie

  The way you drag us down

  The way you shake your finger

  Way you frown your frown

  But a day’s soon dawning

  When all the world will shout

  We’re gonna catch yer Ms Thatcher

  You’ll be dragged out

  You so draggy Ms Maggie

  You tore this land apart

  With your smile like a laser

  And your iceberg heart

  You teach the old and jobless

  What poverty means

  You send the young men killing

  The Irish and the Argentines

  You so draggy Ms Maggie

  With your million cuts

  You slashed this country

  Till it spilled its guts

  You crucified parents

  And their children too

  Nailed ’em up by the million

  Here’s what we’ll do

  You so draggy Ms Maggie

  Madonna of the Rich

  We’re gonna introduce you

  On the Anfield pitch

  Oh you can talk your meanest

  But you as good as dead

  When Yosser Hughes butts you

  With his poor old head…

  On the Beach at Cambridge

  I am assistant to the Regional Commissioner

  At Block E, Brooklands Avenue,

  Communications Centre for Region 4,

  Which used to be East Anglia.

  I published several poems as a young man

  But later found I could not meet my own high standards

  So tore up all my poems and stopped writing.

  (I stopped painting at eight and singing at five.)

  I was seconded to Block E

  From the Ministry for the Environment.

  Since there are no established poets available

  I have come out here in my MPC

  (Maximum Protective Clothing)

  To dictate some sort of poem or word-picture

  Into a miniature cassette recorder.

  When I first stepped out of Block E on to this beach

  I could not record any words at all,

  So I chewed two of the orange-flavoured pills

  They give us for morale, switched on my Sony

  And recorded this:

  I am standing on the beach at Cambridge.

  I can see a group in their MPC

  Pushing Hoover-like and Ewbank-like machines

  Through masses of black ashes.

  The taller men are soldiers or police,

  The others, scientific supervisors.

  This group moves slowly across what seems

  Like an endless car park with no cars at all.

  I think that, in one moment,

  All the books in Cambridge

  Leapt off their shelves,

  Spread their wings

  And became white flames

  And then black ash.

  And I am standing on the beach at Cambridge.

  You’re a poet, said the Regional Commissioner,

  Go out and describe that lot.

  The University Library – a little hill of brick-dust.

  King’s College Chapel – a dune of stone-dust.


  The sea is coming closer and closer.

  The clouds are edged with green,

  Sagging low under some terrible weight.

  They move more rapidly than usual.

  Some younger women with important jobs

  Were admitted to Block E

  But my wife was a teacher in her forties.

  We talked it over

  When the nature of the crisis became apparent.

  We agreed somebody had to carry on.

  That day I kissed her goodbye as I did every day

  At the door of our house in Chesterton Road.

  I kissed my son and my daughter goodbye.

  I drove to Block E beside Hobson’s Brook.

  I felt like a piece of paper

  Being torn in half.

  And I am standing on the beach at Cambridge.

  Some of the men in their MPC

  Are sitting on the ground in the black ashes.

  One is holding his head in both his hands.

  I was forty-two three weeks ago.

  My children painted me

  Bright-coloured cards with poems for my birthday.

  I stuck them with Blu-Tack on the kitchen door.

  I can remember the colours.

  But in one moment all the children in Cambridge

  Spread their wings

  And became white flames

  And then black ash.

  And the children of America, I suppose.

  And the children of Russia, I suppose.

  And I am standing on the beach at Cambridge

  And I am watching the broad black ocean tide

  Bearing on its shoulders its burden of black ashes.

  And I am listening to the last words of the sea

  As it beats its head against the dying land.

  RELIGION, ROYALTY AND THE ARTS

  The Liberal Christ Gives a Press Conference

  I would have walked on the water

  But I wasn’t fully insured.

  And the BMA sent a writ my way

  With the very first leper I cured.

  I would’ve preached a golden sermon

  But I didn’t like the look of the Mount.

  And I would’ve fed fifty thousand

  But the Press wasn’t there to count.

  And the businessmen in the temple

  Had a team of coppers on the door.

  And if I’d spent a year in the desert

  I’d have lost my pension for sure.

  I would’ve turned the water into wine

  But they weren’t giving licences.

  And I would have died and been crucified

  But like – you know how it is.

  I’m going to shave off my beard

  And cut my hair,

  Buy myself some bulletproof

  Underwear

  I’m the Liberal Christ

  And I’ve got no blood to spare.

  Miserable Sinners

  Now I know that revolutionary Catholic priests have died fighting for freedom and socialism in South America, and Quaker schools are smashing, and Donald Soper’s all right in his place, and some of the sayings of Jesus are worthy of William Blake – but to hell with organised religion.

  In Ireland, the basic human needs of liberty, equality and fraternity go to blazes while the two big local superstitions fight it out.

  If the professionals in the churches believe in Christ, why don’t they work as he did? Jesus didn’t take scholarships so he could study to become a rabbi. He didn’t ask for a temple and a vicarage and a salary and a pension scheme. He didn’t push for exclusive propaganda rights in schools.

  To Jesus, the Churches of England and Rome would have been strictly science fiction. Vast, rich propaganda machines, thriving on spiritual blackmail.

  He worked differently. He told as much of the truth as he could until they killed him – like many other good men, religious and irreligious. I’ve met many people like that, most of them members of no church, most of them completely unknown.

  If the churches cared for this world, they would extract their hooks from their people, disestablish, disperse and house the people instead of God. De-escalate organised religion and some of the most hopeless political situations in the world would become clearer, even soluble. Even Ireland. Even the Middle East.

  If you detect personal bitterness in the above, you are damn right. I will declare my interest. For a few years I attended a school where evangelism was the dominant religion. We used to go to camp in North Wales for intensive Bible readings and declarations of conversion.

  The message sank in deep, and the message was guilt. And the punishment for guilt was Hell. I was taught the ugliness and vileness of the body. I was taught terror. The Hell we were threatened with was the Hell of the sermon in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  In short, we were children with no defences, and we were violated by holy Hitchcocks. It took me about fifteen years to shake off most of that fear and disgust. I don’t know what happened to the others.

  Sure, this was an extreme case. Sure, it was way back in the nineteen-forties. But Frankenstein’s monster (alias the Church of Christ) keeps rolling along, crushing children as it rolls.

  QUESTION: But what would you put in the place of organised religion?

  ANSWER: Omnicreed.

  QUESTION: What is Omnicreed?

  ANSWER: A custom-built religion, which incorporates the most imaginative ideas of all religions and rejects the boring, terror-laden and anti-imaginative concepts.

  QUESTION: Can you give me some examples?

  ANSWER: You bet your sweet soul. The Anti-Imagination, known and rejected among Omnicreed initiates as The Brown Lump, embraces such concepts as the Sabbath, clergymen, popery, no popery and Cliff Richard in Westminster Abbey. On the other hand, Omnicreed awards its Good Church-keeping Certificate to such doctrines as The Immaculate Unction of Pope Joan, Nirvana as a Motel, the Bank of England Formation Dancing Team, Bulldozer Rallies, Calvin as the Inventor of Milk Chocolate, Nationalised Delicatessens, Zen Washing Lines and the Company of Dogs.

  QUESTION: Have you got a light?

  Sunday Poem

  (to the Christians)

  Eat this: God has a place,

  Incense-deodorised, a vaulted mouth

  Where the good dead always

  Alleluia among towers of teeth.

  Boring? In that honey of saliva?

  They tell me male sharks come for seven

  Or eight hours. Multiply forever –

  You still can’t count the heaven of Heaven.

  Eat this: God has another place,

  A gaol-hole. Walls contract and crush

  Necks on to legs, bellies into faces

  And all parts in a constipated hash

  Of cancered madmen, vomiting and skinned,

  Skewered in flames which rot, restore and rot,

  Breathing only the tear-gas of their sins –

  That’s what the bad dead get.

  Quite Apart from the Holy Ghost

  I remember God as an eccentric millionaire,

  Locked in his workshop, beard a cloud of foggy-coloured hair,

  Making the stones all different, each flower and disease,

  Pulling the Laps in Lapland, making China for the Chinese,

  Laying down the Lake of Lucerne as smooth as blue-grey lino,

  Wearily inventing the appendix and the rhino,

  Making the fine fur for the mink, fine women for the fur,

  Man’s brain a gun, his heart a bomb, his conscience – a blur.

  Christ I can see much better from here,

  And Christ upon the Cross is clear.

  Jesus is stretched like the skin of a kite

  Over the Cross, he seems in flight

  Sometimes. At times it seems more true

  That he is meat nailed up alive and pain all through.

  But it’s hard to see Christ for priests. That happens when

  A
poet engenders generations of advertising men.

  The Eggs o’ God

  Last Thursday God manifested himself as a barrage balloon with varicose veins and descended on the Vatican. I’m shrivelling, he shouted to the Pope, once I was bigger than the Universe but now I’m shrinking fast. The bulk of God lolled in St Peter’s Square, deflating soon to the size of a double-decker bus. Quick, cried God, before I vanish, one last request. When I’ve disappeared, put my eggs in a jar, keep in a cool place and run a world-wide search for a warm-hearted virgin. Let her hatch the eggs and then you’ll find –

  But by now God is a hissing football, and now he is a grapefruit, now a grape, and now the grape has exploded and nothing is left in the Square but the Eggs of God.

  Four Switzers armed with money-trowels shovelled the golden spawn into a lucent white container and bore it to the Papal fridge.

  At two in the morning a whisky cardinal staggered in, his stomach growling for a snack. Unfortunately he fancied caviar…

  The Pope has risen frae his bed

  On his twa holy legs

  And doon the marble staircase gaed

  Tae see the sacred eggs

  O wha has stolen the Eggs o’ God

  Gae seek him near and far

  O wha has stolen the Eggs o’ God