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