Belmarsh

They wouldn’t let me use the toilet
It was all I needed to do
I’m not avoiding any conversations
I just need the loo

They’re saying I used it a second a go
In actual fact it’s more like two
They’re trying to rob me of the last thing I have left
Is that OK with you?

Dans le derrière (reprint)

God damn!
Why don’t you give yourself a break?
It’s such a difficult mistake to make
Too little hope came far too late

How -
Did they leave you in such a state?
How did they ever get you so sedate?
Big long now we be mates
Big difference now this makes

And I will see it again

They’re just building dams
You won’t overflow: you’ll stay a puddle; you’ll stagnate
And that’s just the kind of crap we’ll take
You keep stepping on the same old rakes
They’re in lab coats, lining the sides of the lake

They’re watching for your breathing rate
As if something from this world might lift that weight
When you’re not here
And now they want you to back-track
Fuck that
You’d get more out of Rorshack

And I will see it again

Back to the blackboard, back to the basics!
Freud and his clinical crew have got no cures
But decent tricks

We’ve got your dreams and your drugs and your dick
We know what makes you tick
In the Phd placard we’ve got space for you: we’ve got ’sick’
In the cabinet there’s a space for you under ’sick’

A voice comes up from below and tells me that God wants money
I look at my shoes, my shirt and my watch and realise I can’t argue
much

Fucking like it (reprint)

Cream marshmallows syrup
Blood sweat & hard grinding toil
Can’t have slave labour in South America
We want it all on good clean British soil
Fruit juice for kiddies, tea for old biddies
It’s so hard to see them part with their hard-earned pennies
But there’s nothing that can’t be bequeathed
we’ll settle for their teeth

Christ, you take it so well
Knowing the shit they force-fed you is the same that you sell
And you’re loving it

But don’t think that you’re losing it; no – fair is fair
You run this small-to-medium-sized business using no skin, bones or hair
Just meat

Biomass is currency

Each race, faith, rank equal when you get to hell
Run screaming back home with black tales to tell
Mark my words well
You never kill, you’ll never sell

Do unto civilians as you would have yourself
Side by side on display in your refrigerated shelf

Christ, you take it so well
Knowing the shit they force-fed you is the same that you sell
And you’re loving it

But don’t think that you’re losing it; no – fair is fair
You run this small-to-medium-sized business using no skin, bones or hair
Just meat

Biomass is currency

Idiots

If that was humour they’d be laughing by now
It’s all in English, you’d've worked it out
somehow
Things get less funny the closer you get to me

Your ex is sleeping in the arms of Edward Lear
Charles Dodgson’s epitaph’s somewhere around here
The signs are everywhere
far and near
Things aren’t getting any more clear

It’s your primordial instinct to hate the absurd
Your imagination’s screams are so well written but never heard
You’ve got to trust the figures
got to trust the herd
Got to get more lemon curd

Any foetus can stand twenty minutes of Freud
It’s right before you but you can’t imagine an android
Who’d laugh proud and out loud
At British Steel and mongoloids

They’re all idiots
Perfectly reasonable idiots

Dracunculiasis all round

Don’t call them all liars
for pretending they’re the ones who start fires
Don’t blame society or the children of men

for confusing biscuits with safety match boxes
for confusing breakfast and Barretta and which word of the two might be better
for confusing
might as well with choosing

They’re forever waking up on the wrong side of dead
They should just listen to less music instead
They believe that black + white = red
They believe in Gods and guns to the head

He’s talking crazy he wants more polution
Putting red lines through all of our resolutions
And scribbling all around
the ordered lists of our problems

But if we all felt that tiny bit worse
We might learn to stop loving the curse

Ms Austen’s screams come up from sulphurous cracks

Last night I found myself with someone who made me think
Some time a week ago another made me dream

Knifes to guts, listening and me and history

Some night you’ll meet a somebody who’ll make you money
Some time later a someone who’ll make you babies

Whatever it is you might be looking for
I hope you find it under your gaze on the floor

To make up for the way you’re so sure
It’s not worth making any effort for

Every split second is completely compromised and worthless
It contains nothing special
It will be repeated intermittently, and maybe
We’ll reflect on it then

We’ll think

“That was perhaps one of the best”

Knowledge doesn’t add to the situation.

Everything’s turned to dust and glue and generic useful proteins, and been appropriately reconfigured into a slightly different landscape.
The Higher Being’s made itself known by its evident creations. We can dismiss it out of hand for the only serious option, which is examining them:

A man and a woman.
I’ve already stereotyped them.
If I was involved I’d do absolutely nothing.

Celery

The whole atmosphere reeks of shared experiences
Because the little puppy doesn’t know the words for incurable differences

And now my children have turned to worms
A stream of cannibal, obese, egg-blind sperm
A precocious abuse of terms

The half-digested half-truth squirms
Because there’s nothing that’ll make the puppy learn
Why nobody wants its sticks

Misery is a mosquito

Unbelievably depressed dead animals are my special friends

The characters inside your stereo
Don’t often hear the word ‘no’
Outside the brutish beasts of flesh & filth & bone
Fumble with their roles

They can’t conceive of Australia
They climb on stage each time you take them to the theater
They’re still confusing scripts & souls
They haven’t found the controls

When they put me in the TV
It all became clear to me

Some of us are right & natural
The rest are coated in pyrex and are digging us all a hole

Poor young Trading Company Marquez!

Trading Company Marquez was twelve years old when, for not prefixing with “Sire”, he was ceremonially ambushed and immobilised by stacked lorry tires. In receiving a dousing, a Zippo struck his attire. Now – never one for insight, suss, or banding with liars – he cannot distance himself from perpetrators, each of whom he admires.

Trading Company still makes no friends, not by virtue of pathos nor ire, but because for ever since that day he has not once caught off fire.

Magnanimous brothers

Oh-oh!

The horrors of history, casual cruelty; the reek of rot, flayed flesh; Pol-Pot, military mesh; trails of torture, roads to ruin, absent Aladdin and soft-core sin.

They fly from the papers off of the Earth’s face and coagulate in the coldness of space, leaving no trace save for middle-eastern mothers and magnanimous brothers.

Blame it on the meat

I tried to seduce my sister-in-law with a black pearl the size of a fist
and then when that failed I went to the black market on eBay
They wouldn’t haven’t it, wouldn’t broach even curiosity’s risks

We can’t be having this!
The last three meals were all proteins and spices!
Give us back our carbohydrates and sugars and fat!

You can’t tell children to give things a try
with just a history book in one arm and a glint in your eye

You can’t proscribe paintballing to scribes
You can’t proscribe party tricks to warring tribes

You’ve been here before outside of the current tour
Then with fear
And now a painted-on tear

***

When telling children to give things a try
Act dejected swear defeat and wrap it all in a sigh

Now take your sigh and Sunday roast and wrap these two in a lie

не понимаю / matrimony

The words “you’re beautiful” rarely come, much less in print or from gold teeth bleached with cum and mint. So get your face in! The soul hero’s selling me mobile phones, and other carriers for communicative barriers. My soul’s hero’s telling me I lack cortisone and pheromones.

Here’s looking away

Next time you bake a cake
Send me a postcard and save me a slice
Good luck with your life

On our second anniversary
I’m still underwater
My looks & hands & jokes can’t break the ice
So good luck with your life

He’s tearing his hair out
He can’t be touched(!)!
He can’t see any lice
But good luck with your life

I’ve got my own

I think they see it
But can’t express it
I’m with my seven sisters grazing greener alien pastures

***

There’s a fire in the planet
And you can only save technology or me
Which will it be?

We were crawling around on our knees

You’ve had us dragged here a million times
and if you cared, you’d be interested in why
There’s no hard feelings for the state of the world anyway
so why not give trial a try,
whereby

I won’t ask questions and I will say sorry
and promise not to make the kids cry
But we’ve been here so many times
we’ve sucked their eye sockets dry

A G(F)(fb) “Release The Audience!”

Some Gods’d better had to pay me
I read your diary in the loudest place in your world

God reads the papers
and record covers
It tells the man to tell the tv
to tell us it loves us

[The] Age is showing
our eyes have knowing
The tv’s glowing
It’s teeth are glowing

&c. &c. &c.

Happy birthday MSG
Happy birthday gizzard

Ahmadi, get me a coffee!

At the bottom of your list
there’s a memo SMS
about a mincing of words
And now your loved ones have all turned to turds

Ahmadi, get me a coffee

The tourists are too busy
with the sound of birds
And the headgear of marginalized Kurds

Ahmadi, hurry, more sweet black coffee

Magazine Dreams

We all want to run our own magazines
you want to put yourself on all the front covers
Write our shitty columns be our own putrid crowds
own perfect lovers
My mixtapes and amateur porn and home movies
and MySpace pics don’t cut it

I want to stage my nipple slip and hear the clamour of a hundred hungry dicks
Can’t fuck these Gucci hips
Can’t read these Photoshopped lips

I want to stage my nipple slip and hear the clamour of a hundred hungry dicks
Can’t hear my LFA mix
Can’t feel the glossy public licks

I want to stage my nipple slip and hear the clamour of a hundred hungry dicks

Magazine Dreams

Wash Your Face

It starts in the thick of a criminal case
and you get your fill of families and guns and mace
No-one tells the greyhounds they’re part of any race
You’ll be a Good Jew, save your money, smile, wear your brace
stay chaste

Generate your genealogy, cut and paste
Suck up all the seeds and slime, make no waste
make haste

Baby’s got no blue blood, wrap him in lace
The country holds few heros, send them to space
in good grace

Running round in circles
trading quips with Goebels
Baby knows his place

Repined Bastards! (In Dust We Trust)

We’re going to let a supermarket rule our nation
Can’t warn my kids but for an issue of trust
If not for ourselves, for the next generation
Customer service … is a must

I’ve got to shout to spite you to coerce your attention
& give the monkeys opportunities to vent their disgust
Don’t bother to think of any word for any more than a second
You’ve heard it all … I’ve had my fun

What hurts me most is the communal elation
Surefire cement misunderstanding twixt us
A supposedly successful operation
You can’t differentiate caked blood and rust

I take the map’s legend and replace ‘civilization’
With the honest artist’s impression of dust
In dust we trust

Platotectonics

This world is nothing but arbitrary calculations
Angels hold the keys, computers, equations
Might be you say something to me like “Look, Barney, it’s OK”
Believe you me too, me too, I hear this kind of shit every day
in every word you say
in every impossible way

But you’re too quick to underestimate
the subliminal ancient art
Of taking one man and his dog
and making them fall apart

And as he sat there unravelling
he watched the process from the start
Amongst Original Sin and dark matter
he never saw a heart

Of Dictators And Drummers

Different girls
different rates
Different boys
different baits
Different harams & hells
different hates
Different faiths, fears, different futures
different fates

It is the role of men to
below and shout
Obscenities that worms would
well do without
Place the blame on banal ancient
bastard Krauts
And avoid the shame that drips from gushing
Sin-semen spout

And I know we won’t work this out
Without the lives of millions to argue about
Nor politicians to pay to shout but
You will hear me out

I am Thatcher
I am Keith Moon
I am Bonaparte’s boyfriend

…

He cut his chidrens’ hands off
nobody noticed
I know you’re so keen to point out that
now we all know this and I
Know he was a monster but that
monster meant something to me
I know he was a monster but that
monster meant something to me

Overthrow the humans
Overthrow the humans
Over – Copy – Their day is done

Formaldehyding

Face down in a puddle of mud
come certainties of leather boots and rainclouds above
But the sun hits the back of his sensitive head
and coaxes Jackie-boy out of his unmade bed
With promises of eye contact and shared experiences

*

Back in Babylon no more hope
just reminiscing, rape and rope

Back in the basement nothing grows
no more warnings no more woes

Back in the bottle where nothing heals
we found the solution to all our ills

Bad

Baby don’t you know at night
I cut out your face
To dress the heads in magazines
you thought you’d replace
And if you held your nose
you could avoid the taste
And close your mouth and lick your lips
and leave no trace

Dirty secrets
feel so bad
Unspoken broken promises
feel so bad
Abusing known stupidity
is even worse
I cite misunderstanding
the girls just cry, just curse
…

Dawning realisation
always comes too late
When they work out the perverted tastes
they’re meant to sate
Rafsanjani’s got just
so much on his plate
Wrecking lives and drinking late
and just so hard to hate

Dirty secrets
feel so bad
Now you’ve made everyone
feel so bad
What does the honest public get out of this
on a good day juicy gossip at worst a kiss
Always always
feeling so bad

Just a little girl

When I was just a little boy
my aunties said of me
“Isn’t he pretty”
The politics were none
it could be said by anyone
Without sounding silly

***

But that was twenty years ago
and since I’ve filled the space below
With spite, lust & envy
And it’s so difficult to try
and when you do passers-by sigh
And mutter ‘crazy’

Get out get out get out
your nest
Where only those birds with breasts
and the chicks ever wear
the dress
Look!
through the camera
There! look!
in deepest Africa
a safari? no! a party? yes!
ABCDE none of the above
F
Birth-hole, second arse
bloody mess
how sure can we be that more is less?

…
Now he’s covering his crotch
he’s painting on his face
Transvestite? travesty? me?
If I was just a little girl
I’d save that space below
For blood, fingers, babies

I deserve children & they deserve me

Shake my hand and
Welcome to my party
My demands are
Far from extraordi-
Nary boys just
Keep down the noise and
Bring your own toys since
You know it just annoys when you
…
Touch my shit

Play your song just
Try to keep it simple
Make the throng at least
Believe you’ve got a single
Ounce of sense it
Doesn’t sound like you’ve got any
Experience you don’t even
Mention the past
…
Tense

Shake your head
This isn’t what you wanted
Taste is dead
Engraved and re-cemented
In my face
Which it leaves with no trace
Along with my race
And your perceived disgrace

2 sets of lyrics

Setting the scene

In his bed white chief lies dreaming
Gonna build himself a wall
…
He could hear in advance their screaming
And got himself thick padded walls
And even then the rats were teeming
& to cover ‘em up gotta chains psycho pains gotta Rolls
Of unsubstantiated fat
“Aren’t they gonna question that?”
“We’ll shut their heads & answer back
With unsubstantiated fact!”

God save the Queen!
They’re gonna make a scene!
Girls lean back think of England
We’ll handle the drama, hire choreographers
We’re just setting the scene

In the sky metal eyes careening
Down below prophets cringe and crawl
…
There’s a man ain’t read our script stage left
Gonna make him fall
In act 1 & acts 2 3 4 5 6 7 well…
We can’t plan them all
At this point the crowd gets restless
But our craftsmen know their tools
We’ll have buffets & rosés no smoking for your comfort
& audience participation – it’ll be a ball!

God save the Queen!
They’re gonna make a scene!
We shall never be slaves
There’s a stage in Darfur where they don’t know what they’re dying for
But we’re setting out scene!

God save the Queen!
They’re gonna make a scene!
Britannia rules the world
The middle of the east’ll be the middle of our feast but not just yet
We’re setting out scene!

Describing a Tiger to your Grandchildren

You might’ve seen the Disney screen
Showing you pictures of a Tigger
You can take that idea & you’re already pretty near
When you consider these were 5 times bigger

2′n’a half metres long – here’s a postcard
Although the book’ll say 3 yards
And they’d have your guts for dinner
But this only ever happened to niggers

And what are those you ask?
People – almost
We fought a war
And we ended up the winners

“Describe the violence”
No
“Describe the tragedy”
What tragedies?
“Describe the corpses”
I have never seen a corpse
“Describe the animals”
Well…

When I was a lad we had all these things
That you just don’t have now
They said we’d remember suffering and war
But I ask them, how?

When all my memory
Is full of things relevant to me?
We didn’t have the internet – we had picture books
Imagine imagery

Covered in stripes & black & white
No, not a zebra
These ones had paws & claws & jaws
& happened to live in Siberia

They had the shape of giant cats
& moved with the speed and look of fire
Your Granny’ll say I exagerate
Your Grandpa’s many things but he ain’t no liar