The Chinese call him “baizuo”.
Englishmen call him a cuck.
Texans call him a libtard
or when polite, a lame duck.
The Japanese say “kangan”.
I call him a clueless fuck.
Germans call him “sitzpinkler”.
Jihadists call him good luck.
Friday, 23 August 2019
The Day After Bataclan
The lakes of Parisian teenagers’ blood
were still being mopped from the concert-hall floor
and corpses levered out of their wheelchairs
and stretchered, blanketed, out of the door
when the cry came over the Internet
in full-throttle hipster smarm
from George Soros’s quisling squadron,
“This is nothing to do with Islam!”
The passports of newly-besotted young lovers
with hearts full of bullets, were still being checked,
when across the Guardianista grapevine
screeched the politically always-correct,
“You morons! You bigots! It’s all about racism,
scandalous shoe-eating immigrant poverty,
famines of job opportunity
and the evil white man’s foreign policy!”
The mothers and fathers had only just started
weeping tsunamis of Level Nine grief
that will never subside, that will never be still,
that will never wash back with a moment’s relief,
when Generation Rainbow-Straitjacket
began their moral origami.
In a flapping great chorus of preening duckspeak
the establishment’s anti-establishment army
all quacked, “These rightpops are doubleplusracist!”,
soaking up praise for how well they’ve conformed,
patting themselves on their middle-class backs
for being so right and so well-informed.
And as blobs of French brain are washed from the wall,
I wonder which one gives me more cause to puke,
the atrocity in the concert-hall
or the snivelling traitor’s self-serving rebuke.
were still being mopped from the concert-hall floor
and corpses levered out of their wheelchairs
and stretchered, blanketed, out of the door
when the cry came over the Internet
in full-throttle hipster smarm
from George Soros’s quisling squadron,
“This is nothing to do with Islam!”
The passports of newly-besotted young lovers
with hearts full of bullets, were still being checked,
when across the Guardianista grapevine
screeched the politically always-correct,
“You morons! You bigots! It’s all about racism,
scandalous shoe-eating immigrant poverty,
famines of job opportunity
and the evil white man’s foreign policy!”
The mothers and fathers had only just started
weeping tsunamis of Level Nine grief
that will never subside, that will never be still,
that will never wash back with a moment’s relief,
when Generation Rainbow-Straitjacket
began their moral origami.
In a flapping great chorus of preening duckspeak
the establishment’s anti-establishment army
all quacked, “These rightpops are doubleplusracist!”,
soaking up praise for how well they’ve conformed,
patting themselves on their middle-class backs
for being so right and so well-informed.
And as blobs of French brain are washed from the wall,
I wonder which one gives me more cause to puke,
the atrocity in the concert-hall
or the snivelling traitor’s self-serving rebuke.
Berlin, October 2015
Gesundbrunnen. Healthy spring, well well.
But there pukes across the chemist’s wall
in sick letters, “Germany must die!”
The streets itch with doubts. Perhaps it will.
Train carriages buzz like psychiatric wards.
A locust-plagued Bible-load of forecasts fly by.
Ich reade den paper. Die hälfte der words
are English, a swamp through which a German heart wades.
From here I spy, splashed over a roof,
the mental diarrhoea that is rife:
“Always betray your country!” it dribbles
like petrol into a coral reef.
Now the last slice of the Mauer slithers past,
where Trabants crash through concrete and Honecker nibbles
on Brezhnev. But the future is satellite-paced.
A hotel will soon replace this historical pest.
Stunner Berlin, ill, urban, nuts!
Your stone-tough wall now land-law footnotes.
But who’s this behind a fence outside the station,
flapping like mackerel fresh out of their nets?
Young men born under a hotter sun.
Young men looking for a destination,
and all they have to do is sign.
Young men. No women or kids to be seen.
But there pukes across the chemist’s wall
in sick letters, “Germany must die!”
The streets itch with doubts. Perhaps it will.
Train carriages buzz like psychiatric wards.
A locust-plagued Bible-load of forecasts fly by.
Ich reade den paper. Die hälfte der words
are English, a swamp through which a German heart wades.
From here I spy, splashed over a roof,
the mental diarrhoea that is rife:
“Always betray your country!” it dribbles
like petrol into a coral reef.
Now the last slice of the Mauer slithers past,
where Trabants crash through concrete and Honecker nibbles
on Brezhnev. But the future is satellite-paced.
A hotel will soon replace this historical pest.
Stunner Berlin, ill, urban, nuts!
Your stone-tough wall now land-law footnotes.
But who’s this behind a fence outside the station,
flapping like mackerel fresh out of their nets?
Young men born under a hotter sun.
Young men looking for a destination,
and all they have to do is sign.
Young men. No women or kids to be seen.
In Memoriam: Frank Tröger
I landed in Berlin with a bag of furry mushrooms
and a tube of Russian haemorrhoid cream.
You said, “My uncle Frank, he needs a bit of company,
a comradely ear as his life floats downstream.”
And there he flopped, bald head over paintbrush beard
over hairy nipples over a boulder of flesh
over bruised legs over brandy and milk bottles, plates,
punk records and crutches in an ash-coated mesh.
I waved at him through the gas-chamber air
as he beamed, “Optipessmus, mein Freund! Man muss immer
Optipessmus haben!” and the multiple sclerosis
chained him like a wall had once chained the aging sinner
when he slumped on a slop-bucket in the three-barred light
and the hammer-compassed robot with the sugary grin
sneered, “Good morning, young upstart, my angry but sick beauty!
Spy for us and you can have your insulin.”
He’d smashed his little Wurlitzer while barking through its squeals
about the Schweinehund state, the Maschinenrepublik,
with some hoodlums named “die Firma”, that is to say, “die Stasi”,
who made the punks behind the curtain bounce and thrash and shriek.
When fantasy-dead workers and Soviet incompetence
blew that snaky garden-fence and history to bits,
Mitterrand said, “Frank, come and pogo in my palace,
come, decorate our portraits of King Louis in spit.”
Erika, my dear, you last-droplet-of-a-culture,
with your lollipop memories of a sudden-ending tramline,
your uncle took his final bow, his comrades defected
to the flame-hurling, dildo-waving metal sailors Rammstein,
and there he wilted, telling me his heart was red and star-shaped
but the red star was a flower which had never ever bloomed.
Though God was a cartoon that he would never kill or die for,
God rest him, Socialism, Punk, and all else who are doomed.
and a tube of Russian haemorrhoid cream.
You said, “My uncle Frank, he needs a bit of company,
a comradely ear as his life floats downstream.”
And there he flopped, bald head over paintbrush beard
over hairy nipples over a boulder of flesh
over bruised legs over brandy and milk bottles, plates,
punk records and crutches in an ash-coated mesh.
I waved at him through the gas-chamber air
as he beamed, “Optipessmus, mein Freund! Man muss immer
Optipessmus haben!” and the multiple sclerosis
chained him like a wall had once chained the aging sinner
when he slumped on a slop-bucket in the three-barred light
and the hammer-compassed robot with the sugary grin
sneered, “Good morning, young upstart, my angry but sick beauty!
Spy for us and you can have your insulin.”
He’d smashed his little Wurlitzer while barking through its squeals
about the Schweinehund state, the Maschinenrepublik,
with some hoodlums named “die Firma”, that is to say, “die Stasi”,
who made the punks behind the curtain bounce and thrash and shriek.
When fantasy-dead workers and Soviet incompetence
blew that snaky garden-fence and history to bits,
Mitterrand said, “Frank, come and pogo in my palace,
come, decorate our portraits of King Louis in spit.”
Erika, my dear, you last-droplet-of-a-culture,
with your lollipop memories of a sudden-ending tramline,
your uncle took his final bow, his comrades defected
to the flame-hurling, dildo-waving metal sailors Rammstein,
and there he wilted, telling me his heart was red and star-shaped
but the red star was a flower which had never ever bloomed.
Though God was a cartoon that he would never kill or die for,
God rest him, Socialism, Punk, and all else who are doomed.
Feminazi
Don’t try to prohibit me from saying ‘whore’ or ‘slut’
if you can toss ‘tosser’ at any man you wish to cut
and hurl ‘wanker’ like a fast-castrating boomerang
at any bloke who doesn’t eat your sour and half-baked meringue.
You can fuck as many flesh-bags as your loins desire
and I can bash my balls until I’m singing in a choir.
Remember that the former is about as big a fuss
for you and every woman, as the latter is for us.
Don’t try to brainwash me by claiming all white males have privilege,
when architects and lawyers can be found among your lineage,
while tapping on your shiny laptop on your Italian sofa,
you champagne-liberal princess with the gumption of a gopher.
What kind of “liberal” sweeps a race of humans like a floor
and judges an entire fucking gender, then implores:
“Come, join our movement! Come, support us! We do not respect you!
You are our mortal enemy, we utterly reject you!”?
You sit there on your Persian rug that plebs will never touch
and whinge that Irish road-workers and roofers have too much.
Why do you never talk of class, but just skin pigmentation?
Have you never heard of positive discrimination?
Stop bleating on that racism is something only Whitey does,
to give yourself a self-congratulating, self-rewarding buzz.
If being white is such a crime, then fuck off to the Middle East
or Africa, where sexism apparently does not exist.
Why shouldn’t Europeans dominate their own continent?
You think the world’s a rainbow outside the evil Occident?
Why don’t you go to China or Japan, you loud-mouthed silly bitch,
and lecture Orientals about “Yellow Male Privilege”?
Don’t parrot gormless theories based on gobshite and not science,
that sexism is all one-way just like domestic violence,
ignoring how a judge will always pass divorce-wracked offspring
to their mother, even one whose heart could balance on a moth’s wing.
If any scrap of truth lies in your screeching, bawling rages
that bosses get away with paying women lower wages,
why would they clothe one single bloke in company white collars
if they could hire a swarm of chicks instead, and save their dollars?
Don’t sit there stirring two-faced rats around your frothing cauldron,
insisting that there’s far too many jockstraps in the boardroom
(but the number of perspiring men soot-blackened in a mine
or carting off your rubbish bins is absolutely fine).
Don’t tell deep-thinking women who disagree with Feminazis
that they’re imbeciles indoctrinated by a patriarchy
whose existence is as provable as that of Satan
and must embrace their victim status so they can awaken.
Some women are too strong to be a victim-complex-whiner.
How dare you claim to speak on behalf of everyone with a vagina!
How dare you tell people to be ashamed of their gender and ethnicity!
How dare you blame me for your underachieving, work-shy talent-scarcity!
Stop excusing cultures that the white man hasn’t shaped
where women wrapped in curtains are flogged for being raped,
cultures where small girls are forced to be somebody’s missus
and priests with cutlery slice off young ladies’ clitorises.
Stop defending cultures where girls remain illiterate
to prove your anti-racism, you festering great hypocrite.
Stop applauding cultures where women can’t drive cars
and would perish in a shower of boulders if they burnt their bras.
Stop telling me the white man is the source of every misery
as though you have the faintest clue about non-Western history.
Stop telling your boiler repairman that he’s standing too near the front.
Just kill yourself, Feminazi, you privileged middle-class cunt.
if you can toss ‘tosser’ at any man you wish to cut
and hurl ‘wanker’ like a fast-castrating boomerang
at any bloke who doesn’t eat your sour and half-baked meringue.
You can fuck as many flesh-bags as your loins desire
and I can bash my balls until I’m singing in a choir.
Remember that the former is about as big a fuss
for you and every woman, as the latter is for us.
Don’t try to brainwash me by claiming all white males have privilege,
when architects and lawyers can be found among your lineage,
while tapping on your shiny laptop on your Italian sofa,
you champagne-liberal princess with the gumption of a gopher.
What kind of “liberal” sweeps a race of humans like a floor
and judges an entire fucking gender, then implores:
“Come, join our movement! Come, support us! We do not respect you!
You are our mortal enemy, we utterly reject you!”?
You sit there on your Persian rug that plebs will never touch
and whinge that Irish road-workers and roofers have too much.
Why do you never talk of class, but just skin pigmentation?
Have you never heard of positive discrimination?
Stop bleating on that racism is something only Whitey does,
to give yourself a self-congratulating, self-rewarding buzz.
If being white is such a crime, then fuck off to the Middle East
or Africa, where sexism apparently does not exist.
Why shouldn’t Europeans dominate their own continent?
You think the world’s a rainbow outside the evil Occident?
Why don’t you go to China or Japan, you loud-mouthed silly bitch,
and lecture Orientals about “Yellow Male Privilege”?
Don’t parrot gormless theories based on gobshite and not science,
that sexism is all one-way just like domestic violence,
ignoring how a judge will always pass divorce-wracked offspring
to their mother, even one whose heart could balance on a moth’s wing.
If any scrap of truth lies in your screeching, bawling rages
that bosses get away with paying women lower wages,
why would they clothe one single bloke in company white collars
if they could hire a swarm of chicks instead, and save their dollars?
Don’t sit there stirring two-faced rats around your frothing cauldron,
insisting that there’s far too many jockstraps in the boardroom
(but the number of perspiring men soot-blackened in a mine
or carting off your rubbish bins is absolutely fine).
Don’t tell deep-thinking women who disagree with Feminazis
that they’re imbeciles indoctrinated by a patriarchy
whose existence is as provable as that of Satan
and must embrace their victim status so they can awaken.
Some women are too strong to be a victim-complex-whiner.
How dare you claim to speak on behalf of everyone with a vagina!
How dare you tell people to be ashamed of their gender and ethnicity!
How dare you blame me for your underachieving, work-shy talent-scarcity!
Stop excusing cultures that the white man hasn’t shaped
where women wrapped in curtains are flogged for being raped,
cultures where small girls are forced to be somebody’s missus
and priests with cutlery slice off young ladies’ clitorises.
Stop defending cultures where girls remain illiterate
to prove your anti-racism, you festering great hypocrite.
Stop applauding cultures where women can’t drive cars
and would perish in a shower of boulders if they burnt their bras.
Stop telling me the white man is the source of every misery
as though you have the faintest clue about non-Western history.
Stop telling your boiler repairman that he’s standing too near the front.
Just kill yourself, Feminazi, you privileged middle-class cunt.
ich bin berlin
so many new dead ends
as you stood there growling
back turned
unmoveable unreachable untouchable
you cut me off
from myself
as you slashed your concrete way
through my heart
silence
you took my victory arch from me
my sceptred chariot
galloping into the sunrise
outrage fire outrage
so many failed attempts
to get over
the borderline
drenched in blood
at the foot of the pitiless
wall of unreason
silence
years crawled past
freedom kissed like an oxygen mask
the shackle slipped off
a heart repaired
untroubled
empty
as you stood there growling
back turned
unmoveable unreachable untouchable
you cut me off
from myself
as you slashed your concrete way
through my heart
silence
you took my victory arch from me
my sceptred chariot
galloping into the sunrise
outrage fire outrage
so many failed attempts
to get over
the borderline
drenched in blood
at the foot of the pitiless
wall of unreason
silence
years crawled past
freedom kissed like an oxygen mask
the shackle slipped off
a heart repaired
untroubled
empty
Please Don’t Call Me Sexist!
I’ll say that compliments can hurt you
and men should all obey a curfew,
believe in nothing but my virtue,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll claim to praise the female shape
is just another form of rape,
I’ll liken Mozart to an ape,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll nod along to your complaining
that when a male remarks, “it’s raining”,
the bastard’s guilty of mansplaining,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll bow my head to every lemon-
sour, doctrine-barking woman
to whom men are as Jews to Bormann,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll poke my brain out with a chisel,
replace it with a bag of drivel,
sit down every time I piddle,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll cut my balls off with a spatula,
feed them to your pet tarantula,
die a sterile, loveless bachelor,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
and men should all obey a curfew,
believe in nothing but my virtue,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll claim to praise the female shape
is just another form of rape,
I’ll liken Mozart to an ape,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll nod along to your complaining
that when a male remarks, “it’s raining”,
the bastard’s guilty of mansplaining,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll bow my head to every lemon-
sour, doctrine-barking woman
to whom men are as Jews to Bormann,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll poke my brain out with a chisel,
replace it with a bag of drivel,
sit down every time I piddle,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
I’ll cut my balls off with a spatula,
feed them to your pet tarantula,
die a sterile, loveless bachelor,
just please, don’t call me sexist!
In Memoriam: Cousin Dez
I: March 1945
Aunt Wendy, in her second month of life,
lay cot-bound in a flood of dreamy peace
until Great-Grandma plucked her from it cooing
“what a gorgeous girl you are” and so forth,
scooping Wendy off to the back kitchen
where floral teacups gleamed with housewife’s pride
and saucers sparkled. How my auntie wailed
at being wrestled from her blissful dreams!
But one of Adolf Hitler’s V-2 rockets
pulverised that moment half the street.
The front door and hall floorboards flew upstairs,
the bedroom blackened in a blizzard of soot,
its windows crashing into scattered splinters
over carpet, sideboard, mattress, cot,
piercing through young Wendy’s tiny ears
so that they rang with tinnitus and strained
with semi-deafness all throughout her life.
II: July 1978
At last, engulfed in sweat, aching all over,
Wendy could sink back into the pillow.
Uncle Phil, his little Welsh head plump
with joy, inspired, piped up with the name Dennis.
“Eh? You want to call him what?” she panted,
her half-deaf ears still ringing. “Dennis, I said!”
Or that’s how I imagine it transpired
that my sisterless, brotherless, luckless cousin
came to be called Dez. Dez with a zed.
III: August 1992
The sun was baking London, bouncing off
the glass that peeped among Victorian brick,
filling every pollen-packed back garden
with all kinds of flying buzzing beastie,
browning my still-hairless, skinny legs
as I lay basking on a towel, above
the bones of not-forgotten, well-loved cats:
Korky, black and sweet as brambleberries;
Squeaky, undersized and tender tabby
who never learned to meow right (hence his name).
Closed-eyed, I felt a tickling, furry tail
coil around my twelve-year-old left shin.
I saw it then – a tail without a cat –
and hurtled howling back into the house.
My mother sat me down and asked in earnest
if any of the boys I knew at school
had ever offered me strange cigarettes.
IV: December 1998
Down from Suffolk you appeared that Christmas,
six foot four, a Sherman tank in boots
all cramped into a cluttered-up Ford Escort
with heavy metal slam slam slamming round it,
long black jacket, long black hair and puffing
like a nineteenth-century northern town.
“Let’s drive down to King’s Cross and find some whores!”
you boomed. And off we skidded, slam slam slam.
But all we found, a scraggly gap-toothed black girl
begging us for change, called me a “bumscrape”
or something sounding similar to that
when I refused to give her anything.
We jumped back in the jalopy and zoomed
across the city. Christ! Those poor, poor pedals.
Poor steering wheel! You stamped and swerved and burped
your way through Islington and Bishopsgate
until the clutch surrendered and collapsed
outside the Barbican Centre. There we stopped
and called for help. But it was two AM
on Christmas Eve. A ghost town loomed around us.
And so we sat there hour after hour
sniggering at the black girl’s insult, “bumscrape”,
and drawing pictures in a little notepad
of implements a bumscrape might have been,
until we fell asleep behind the dashboard.
A few nights later, clutch patched up, we bombed
back homewards from the pub down Shernhall Street.
Before I could advise you that the main road,
Lea Bridge Road, which teemed with ten-ton trucks
and double-decker buses, would be here soon,
there it was. The brake went through the chassis,
we bounced across that road and down a side-street,
jerking to a halt perhaps five inches
behind a Volvo only just vacated
by a family of stunned Somalians.
Back home, I played my Morrissey albums at you.
You wept and told me softly about Jodie,
a girl from your old school who’d sparked your heart
with a light that never would go out
but who was still, alas, against the law.
V: August 2004
“Hey, cuz! Long time no see!” your email slammed.
“I’ve bought a motorbike, and with some welly
it bombs along at nearly a hundred and eighty!
How d’you fancy zooming up to Wales
to see great-uncle Elwyn’s fabled leek farm?”
My answer was a wee bit hesitant.
VI: December 2009
“Fuck, my tinnitus won’t stop”, I thought.
“It’s like a wasp is living in my ear,
and all that I can do, the doctor says,
is switch a frigging fan on in the background.”
Perhaps it was those earphones that I’d plugged
into the rabid screams of Johnny Rotten,
the cryptic wanderings of David Bowie,
their curious hybrid lovechild, whatsisname
the singer with the Psychedelic Furs,
bony, rumbling, eerie Joy Division,
dark and slightly sordid Depeche Mode,
all at volume ten (no-one had warned me)
in order to drown out humanity’s drivel,
its boring conversations about work,
its fake concern and sneering empty pride,
its trifling, problem-glossing platitudes,
its brain-entangling, heart-impaling quests
to make itself look virtuous and right.
The drivel had now driven me to seek
the guidance of a man who claimed his talents
formed a hotline to the spirit world.
Voice like an East End gangster, grey-haired Ronnie
gripped my hand and joined me to my father
who pottered about all day in the universe’s
infinite, eternal shed. He told me,
“Someone in your family, a man
who has a very modern sort of name,
is always tinkering with cars, is always
thinking up new ways to push them faster
than they’ll go. Drives like a lunatic.
I’m worried that this man might be in danger.”
VII: June 2014
The robot wasp that nestled in my earhole
now had a family, so it would seem.
The never-pausing electronic buzz
was growing up to be a factory whistle.
But God be praised for Germans and their know-how!
Vorsprung durch Technik! In engineer-crammed,
vineyard-skirted, clean, yeast-wafting Stuttgart
I bought a tiny metal aubergine
that whispered, rushing like a waterfall,
through a pipelet into my left ear.
Without that wondrous cochlea-caressing
hissing aubergine, I would have landed
in a padded box-room, shouting “Bumscrape!”
every thirty seconds. Cash well spent.
Three days later, earhole full of heaven,
I heard the news from England. “It’s your cousin.
Cousin Dez...” and straight away I knew
that you’d been flattened by a juggernaut.
“He died this morning. No-one had suspected
he had leukaemia. That weight he’d lost
we all thought was a sign of better health,
that Jodie had been feeding him alright.”
VIII: December 2014
Ding dong, the sky was filled with angels singing,
and I was home, the tinsel snaking round
the happy family photographs, my brothers
with their buoyant offspring, me with my
uneasy smiles of forced participation,
and puddings pinging in the microwave.
My aubergine alas not waterproof,
I laid it gently on the bedside cabinet
and stood beneath the shower for four minutes.
Returning with an arse-crack full of bubbles,
my aubergine was nowhere to be found!
Naked as the day that I first wanked,
the screams of Satan whistling through my skull,
I scoured every square inch of the floor
around my bed, across the mangy rug.
I dragged the bedside cabinet from the wall,
and finally I found her – there she hung,
her whooshing pipelet hooked around the lamp-cord
that ran behind the cabinet, rocking softly
to and fro, as if to snigger at me.
How the pissing hell did it get there?
In recent months, she told me then, my Mum
had been disturbed by cups and saucers clattering
to the empty kitchen floor downstairs,
by bursts of drilling in the empty bathroom,
and by a deep and manly sort of laugh.
Your photo smirked at us across the room.
“It’s you, you cheeky bastard, isn’t it?”
I asked out loud. Your silence frothed with guilt.
Aunt Wendy told me her place, too, was noisy,
even to her rocket-deafened ears.
Doors creaked open, footsteps climbed the stairs.
The washing machine, tumble dryer, cooker,
television, every single clock,
had all stopped working. But she wasn’t spooked.
She’d long seen ghosts around the house, of cats
whose rotting bones lay underneath the garden.
They rubbed against her legs, then disappeared,
just faded into other-worldly nothing.
Aunt Wendy, in her second month of life,
lay cot-bound in a flood of dreamy peace
until Great-Grandma plucked her from it cooing
“what a gorgeous girl you are” and so forth,
scooping Wendy off to the back kitchen
where floral teacups gleamed with housewife’s pride
and saucers sparkled. How my auntie wailed
at being wrestled from her blissful dreams!
But one of Adolf Hitler’s V-2 rockets
pulverised that moment half the street.
The front door and hall floorboards flew upstairs,
the bedroom blackened in a blizzard of soot,
its windows crashing into scattered splinters
over carpet, sideboard, mattress, cot,
piercing through young Wendy’s tiny ears
so that they rang with tinnitus and strained
with semi-deafness all throughout her life.
II: July 1978
At last, engulfed in sweat, aching all over,
Wendy could sink back into the pillow.
Uncle Phil, his little Welsh head plump
with joy, inspired, piped up with the name Dennis.
“Eh? You want to call him what?” she panted,
her half-deaf ears still ringing. “Dennis, I said!”
Or that’s how I imagine it transpired
that my sisterless, brotherless, luckless cousin
came to be called Dez. Dez with a zed.
III: August 1992
The sun was baking London, bouncing off
the glass that peeped among Victorian brick,
filling every pollen-packed back garden
with all kinds of flying buzzing beastie,
browning my still-hairless, skinny legs
as I lay basking on a towel, above
the bones of not-forgotten, well-loved cats:
Korky, black and sweet as brambleberries;
Squeaky, undersized and tender tabby
who never learned to meow right (hence his name).
Closed-eyed, I felt a tickling, furry tail
coil around my twelve-year-old left shin.
I saw it then – a tail without a cat –
and hurtled howling back into the house.
My mother sat me down and asked in earnest
if any of the boys I knew at school
had ever offered me strange cigarettes.
IV: December 1998
Down from Suffolk you appeared that Christmas,
six foot four, a Sherman tank in boots
all cramped into a cluttered-up Ford Escort
with heavy metal slam slam slamming round it,
long black jacket, long black hair and puffing
like a nineteenth-century northern town.
“Let’s drive down to King’s Cross and find some whores!”
you boomed. And off we skidded, slam slam slam.
But all we found, a scraggly gap-toothed black girl
begging us for change, called me a “bumscrape”
or something sounding similar to that
when I refused to give her anything.
We jumped back in the jalopy and zoomed
across the city. Christ! Those poor, poor pedals.
Poor steering wheel! You stamped and swerved and burped
your way through Islington and Bishopsgate
until the clutch surrendered and collapsed
outside the Barbican Centre. There we stopped
and called for help. But it was two AM
on Christmas Eve. A ghost town loomed around us.
And so we sat there hour after hour
sniggering at the black girl’s insult, “bumscrape”,
and drawing pictures in a little notepad
of implements a bumscrape might have been,
until we fell asleep behind the dashboard.
A few nights later, clutch patched up, we bombed
back homewards from the pub down Shernhall Street.
Before I could advise you that the main road,
Lea Bridge Road, which teemed with ten-ton trucks
and double-decker buses, would be here soon,
there it was. The brake went through the chassis,
we bounced across that road and down a side-street,
jerking to a halt perhaps five inches
behind a Volvo only just vacated
by a family of stunned Somalians.
Back home, I played my Morrissey albums at you.
You wept and told me softly about Jodie,
a girl from your old school who’d sparked your heart
with a light that never would go out
but who was still, alas, against the law.
V: August 2004
“Hey, cuz! Long time no see!” your email slammed.
“I’ve bought a motorbike, and with some welly
it bombs along at nearly a hundred and eighty!
How d’you fancy zooming up to Wales
to see great-uncle Elwyn’s fabled leek farm?”
My answer was a wee bit hesitant.
VI: December 2009
“Fuck, my tinnitus won’t stop”, I thought.
“It’s like a wasp is living in my ear,
and all that I can do, the doctor says,
is switch a frigging fan on in the background.”
Perhaps it was those earphones that I’d plugged
into the rabid screams of Johnny Rotten,
the cryptic wanderings of David Bowie,
their curious hybrid lovechild, whatsisname
the singer with the Psychedelic Furs,
bony, rumbling, eerie Joy Division,
dark and slightly sordid Depeche Mode,
all at volume ten (no-one had warned me)
in order to drown out humanity’s drivel,
its boring conversations about work,
its fake concern and sneering empty pride,
its trifling, problem-glossing platitudes,
its brain-entangling, heart-impaling quests
to make itself look virtuous and right.
The drivel had now driven me to seek
the guidance of a man who claimed his talents
formed a hotline to the spirit world.
Voice like an East End gangster, grey-haired Ronnie
gripped my hand and joined me to my father
who pottered about all day in the universe’s
infinite, eternal shed. He told me,
“Someone in your family, a man
who has a very modern sort of name,
is always tinkering with cars, is always
thinking up new ways to push them faster
than they’ll go. Drives like a lunatic.
I’m worried that this man might be in danger.”
VII: June 2014
The robot wasp that nestled in my earhole
now had a family, so it would seem.
The never-pausing electronic buzz
was growing up to be a factory whistle.
But God be praised for Germans and their know-how!
Vorsprung durch Technik! In engineer-crammed,
vineyard-skirted, clean, yeast-wafting Stuttgart
I bought a tiny metal aubergine
that whispered, rushing like a waterfall,
through a pipelet into my left ear.
Without that wondrous cochlea-caressing
hissing aubergine, I would have landed
in a padded box-room, shouting “Bumscrape!”
every thirty seconds. Cash well spent.
Three days later, earhole full of heaven,
I heard the news from England. “It’s your cousin.
Cousin Dez...” and straight away I knew
that you’d been flattened by a juggernaut.
“He died this morning. No-one had suspected
he had leukaemia. That weight he’d lost
we all thought was a sign of better health,
that Jodie had been feeding him alright.”
VIII: December 2014
Ding dong, the sky was filled with angels singing,
and I was home, the tinsel snaking round
the happy family photographs, my brothers
with their buoyant offspring, me with my
uneasy smiles of forced participation,
and puddings pinging in the microwave.
My aubergine alas not waterproof,
I laid it gently on the bedside cabinet
and stood beneath the shower for four minutes.
Returning with an arse-crack full of bubbles,
my aubergine was nowhere to be found!
Naked as the day that I first wanked,
the screams of Satan whistling through my skull,
I scoured every square inch of the floor
around my bed, across the mangy rug.
I dragged the bedside cabinet from the wall,
and finally I found her – there she hung,
her whooshing pipelet hooked around the lamp-cord
that ran behind the cabinet, rocking softly
to and fro, as if to snigger at me.
How the pissing hell did it get there?
In recent months, she told me then, my Mum
had been disturbed by cups and saucers clattering
to the empty kitchen floor downstairs,
by bursts of drilling in the empty bathroom,
and by a deep and manly sort of laugh.
Your photo smirked at us across the room.
“It’s you, you cheeky bastard, isn’t it?”
I asked out loud. Your silence frothed with guilt.
Aunt Wendy told me her place, too, was noisy,
even to her rocket-deafened ears.
Doors creaked open, footsteps climbed the stairs.
The washing machine, tumble dryer, cooker,
television, every single clock,
had all stopped working. But she wasn’t spooked.
She’d long seen ghosts around the house, of cats
whose rotting bones lay underneath the garden.
They rubbed against her legs, then disappeared,
just faded into other-worldly nothing.
Svetlana
In Stuttgart you gave me Georg Trakl
and said, “This is how you paint with words”.
We made each other’s lonely eyes sparkle,
a sparkling that was years overdue,
but that blank canvas Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Salzburg you gave me Yevgeny Zamyatin
and said, “This is how you stare at the future”
as we hiked among hedgehog and housemartin
where Alpine April blizzards blew,
but that crystal ball Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Leningrad you gave me Jacques Brel,
who left huge toothprints in my verse,
and Serge Gainsbourg, a genius who
could build a brothel out of a hearse,
but that bruise Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Moscow you gave me Mikhail Bulgakov
and a city enfrenzied with the mark of
the devil’s pet cat, as you laughed, “It’s true,
you’re not a worker but a clown bee!”
Still, that hive Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Prague you gave me Franz Kafka,
then we sat in a taxi with brandy and wine.
The driver pointed a pistol mafia-
style at us, cursing his square face blue,
while that bullseye Berlin was beckoning me
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Checkpoint Charlie MacDonald’s, with ketchup,
you told me, “I can see your problem.
Girls don’t make your intellect stretch up,
they bore you senseless, through and through.”
But that home-from-home Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha (and motherhood) you.
and said, “This is how you paint with words”.
We made each other’s lonely eyes sparkle,
a sparkling that was years overdue,
but that blank canvas Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Salzburg you gave me Yevgeny Zamyatin
and said, “This is how you stare at the future”
as we hiked among hedgehog and housemartin
where Alpine April blizzards blew,
but that crystal ball Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Leningrad you gave me Jacques Brel,
who left huge toothprints in my verse,
and Serge Gainsbourg, a genius who
could build a brothel out of a hearse,
but that bruise Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Moscow you gave me Mikhail Bulgakov
and a city enfrenzied with the mark of
the devil’s pet cat, as you laughed, “It’s true,
you’re not a worker but a clown bee!”
Still, that hive Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Prague you gave me Franz Kafka,
then we sat in a taxi with brandy and wine.
The driver pointed a pistol mafia-
style at us, cursing his square face blue,
while that bullseye Berlin was beckoning me
and a dacha was beckoning you.
In Checkpoint Charlie MacDonald’s, with ketchup,
you told me, “I can see your problem.
Girls don’t make your intellect stretch up,
they bore you senseless, through and through.”
But that home-from-home Berlin was beckoning me,
and a dacha (and motherhood) you.
Under the Ice-Cream Onions
What in Bog’s name is this I asked,
smotting down at a shoddily razrezzed almost-square
of oven-paper. It’s a
serviette Svetlana said,
fumbling a thimbleful of moloko into her chipped chasha,
a Soviet serviette.
I burst out into a right gromky smeck,
oh my brothers,
spooging away the fat ginger koshka
that prowled the floor, as a
scarf-gullivered babooshka smotted up scowling
from her gazetta that skazatted something or other
about Edward Snowden, who leaked more
than a toilet in a Siberian hospital
and who’s hiding round here somewhere,
oh my brothers,
maybe under a hazelnut bush
or in Vladimir Putin’s wine cellar.
My devotchka-droogie shushed me
and finished her cardboard doughnut,
come on let’s itty, she skazatted
and we were off on a brisk-legged gooly
under the ice-cream onions
where Uncle Joe himself
posed smecking below his waxed moustache and above khaki
for camera-toting chellovecks in furry shlapas,
skvatting rookerfuls of roubles off ’em
(a recent development Svetlana said)
while skinheaded gold-necked gangster-nadsats
shot their greedy glazzies around the mesto,
oh my brothers,
and somersaulted backwards off bollards,
somersaulted high high high up into the heavens,
high enough to tolchock down a plane full of
Ukrainian soldiers
or Dutch doctors
or the Bolivian president
or Edward Snowden, Bog only knows,
high as the heels of the miniskirted
scarf-gullivered devoted devotchkas
who prowl into the Petropavlovsky Church with their
horrorshow bolshy groodies thrusting out
as they whisper, miming crucifixes,
at an oil-daubed shiny-framed Saint Nicholas
(who in the West is a Coca-Cola advert).
Svetlana and your humble narrator
joined a queue like one for bread under Brezhnev,
full of rucksacked chellovecks in gromky yellow shirts
and flabby-armed soomkas grabbing onto
jostling dratsing little bratties
with i-pods or i-pads or i-phones warbling i-tunes
poking out their nipple-pockets
and excited skorry-waffling Spanish malchicks
in berets, and after forty minootas or suchlike,
under the close-viddying glazzies of monument-faced chassos
with loaded pooshkas poking up from white gloves,
there he was,
all a-spatchka in starched trousers,
polished sabogs on his nogas,
trim tash below his trademark shiny gulliver
and full to the brim with wax.
A bolshy bald candle.
And as the chasso skorried us white-gloved out of the mesto,
a thought rippled through my rasoodock,
a plea really, that pled
please Mister Candle,
burst smashing out of your glass box
and serve these grazhny Washington bratchnies
a right horrorshow tolchocking for
booting their borders into your front garden,
into Pole-Czech-Slovak-land Romania Lithuania
Ukraine woop woop red alert woop woop Ukraine,
in order to ring you with hamburger republics
and plonk bolshy great fire-cocks in ’em
while brainwashing everyone into blaming you,
evil nasty vodka-swilling baby-eating old you
as they stick their grazhny stinking flag in the world
and strangle humanity with it.
smotting down at a shoddily razrezzed almost-square
of oven-paper. It’s a
serviette Svetlana said,
fumbling a thimbleful of moloko into her chipped chasha,
a Soviet serviette.
I burst out into a right gromky smeck,
oh my brothers,
spooging away the fat ginger koshka
that prowled the floor, as a
scarf-gullivered babooshka smotted up scowling
from her gazetta that skazatted something or other
about Edward Snowden, who leaked more
than a toilet in a Siberian hospital
and who’s hiding round here somewhere,
oh my brothers,
maybe under a hazelnut bush
or in Vladimir Putin’s wine cellar.
My devotchka-droogie shushed me
and finished her cardboard doughnut,
come on let’s itty, she skazatted
and we were off on a brisk-legged gooly
under the ice-cream onions
where Uncle Joe himself
posed smecking below his waxed moustache and above khaki
for camera-toting chellovecks in furry shlapas,
skvatting rookerfuls of roubles off ’em
(a recent development Svetlana said)
while skinheaded gold-necked gangster-nadsats
shot their greedy glazzies around the mesto,
oh my brothers,
and somersaulted backwards off bollards,
somersaulted high high high up into the heavens,
high enough to tolchock down a plane full of
Ukrainian soldiers
or Dutch doctors
or the Bolivian president
or Edward Snowden, Bog only knows,
high as the heels of the miniskirted
scarf-gullivered devoted devotchkas
who prowl into the Petropavlovsky Church with their
horrorshow bolshy groodies thrusting out
as they whisper, miming crucifixes,
at an oil-daubed shiny-framed Saint Nicholas
(who in the West is a Coca-Cola advert).
Svetlana and your humble narrator
joined a queue like one for bread under Brezhnev,
full of rucksacked chellovecks in gromky yellow shirts
and flabby-armed soomkas grabbing onto
jostling dratsing little bratties
with i-pods or i-pads or i-phones warbling i-tunes
poking out their nipple-pockets
and excited skorry-waffling Spanish malchicks
in berets, and after forty minootas or suchlike,
under the close-viddying glazzies of monument-faced chassos
with loaded pooshkas poking up from white gloves,
there he was,
all a-spatchka in starched trousers,
polished sabogs on his nogas,
trim tash below his trademark shiny gulliver
and full to the brim with wax.
A bolshy bald candle.
And as the chasso skorried us white-gloved out of the mesto,
a thought rippled through my rasoodock,
a plea really, that pled
please Mister Candle,
burst smashing out of your glass box
and serve these grazhny Washington bratchnies
a right horrorshow tolchocking for
booting their borders into your front garden,
into Pole-Czech-Slovak-land Romania Lithuania
Ukraine woop woop red alert woop woop Ukraine,
in order to ring you with hamburger republics
and plonk bolshy great fire-cocks in ’em
while brainwashing everyone into blaming you,
evil nasty vodka-swilling baby-eating old you
as they stick their grazhny stinking flag in the world
and strangle humanity with it.
Fifty-Nine North
Under a frolicking-cherub-ringed ceiling,
on a starless, tsarless night,
a Japanese story was shrieked with real feeling,
in the Italian tongue, as was right.
I pondered, “Thank Christ and his thirteen disciples
for that big screen with the Russian subtitles,
or I would be totally fucking confused.”
Tumbling outside with my brain cells bruised
into the mid-August near-arctic heatwave,
I sweated in the midnight sun
like a marathon-running fat nun,
then had to flop down before my feet gave
way, with the groan, “We’re still too far south!”
and shovelling ice-cream into my mouth.
on a starless, tsarless night,
a Japanese story was shrieked with real feeling,
in the Italian tongue, as was right.
I pondered, “Thank Christ and his thirteen disciples
for that big screen with the Russian subtitles,
or I would be totally fucking confused.”
Tumbling outside with my brain cells bruised
into the mid-August near-arctic heatwave,
I sweated in the midnight sun
like a marathon-running fat nun,
then had to flop down before my feet gave
way, with the groan, “We’re still too far south!”
and shovelling ice-cream into my mouth.
In the Port of Saint Petersburg
In the port of Saint Petersburg
wavy-haired mathematicians
exhale vodka and sanctions-ringed cares
and caviar and smoke-circles
and vodka, questioning
the nature of consciousness, until they lose theirs.
In the port of Saint Petersburg
nests of Greek-column-roofed
cloud-tickling fortresses where crane-drivers bask
in the sub-arctic majesty
pull mothers with hamster-sized
terriers from Tomsk, Omsk and grey Krasnoyarsk.
On the peninsula outside the city she sidles,
baseball-capped, Nike-shod, board-chested, bulb-nosed.
Cigaretteless and coughing, she rummages for roubles.
Her black eyes seek out the sleek-dressed, -groomed, -composed.
A mother pulls two flailing eczema-flecked elbows
down a bus that is really a van, then an aisle
where trout sail through air-choked then bubbling exile
as a name-tag-stamped Vladislav suppresses a smirk.
Sprung-up weeds sprayed on the ground coarsely sell clothes,
sell melons called ‘torpedoes’, sell kvass, leather boots,
English tuition and prostitutes
on the streets of the port of Saint Petersburg.
A mouse-moustached crane-driver strokes out a memory
coated in evaporated milk
and ideology, of when his rod didn’t wilt,
plump men with starched epaulettes found him his work,
pages of Pushkin were his mental armoury,
plumbers’ eyes were ignited by a Tchaikovsky flash,
his muscles were missiles in a bunker of flesh
and girls kissed him, in the port of Saint Petersburg.
On the peninsula outside the city she shuffles
with crumpled old tsars and then scurries along,
pink-tracksuited, Calvin-Klein-cropped-topped, and catches
odd kopecks by warbling a Ukrainian song.
In the port of Saint Petersburg
brides and grooms pose
along lion-faced bridges and fish-rich canals
as children with scooters
and skateboards stroke rabbits
outside palaces of Van Goghs and Chagalls.
In the port of Saint Petersburg
tanks heave down promenades,
warships hoot comfort from freshly-scrubbed chimneys
at smog-blackened screeching-wheeled
trams full of rumblings of
touchpaper inroads by rocketed enemies.
On the peninsula outside the city she slumps
in a neon-lit pathway that Pride never treads,
empty-pocketed, rosebush-obscured and unnoticed,
her throat and pink trousers both lying in shreds.
wavy-haired mathematicians
exhale vodka and sanctions-ringed cares
and caviar and smoke-circles
and vodka, questioning
the nature of consciousness, until they lose theirs.
In the port of Saint Petersburg
nests of Greek-column-roofed
cloud-tickling fortresses where crane-drivers bask
in the sub-arctic majesty
pull mothers with hamster-sized
terriers from Tomsk, Omsk and grey Krasnoyarsk.
On the peninsula outside the city she sidles,
baseball-capped, Nike-shod, board-chested, bulb-nosed.
Cigaretteless and coughing, she rummages for roubles.
Her black eyes seek out the sleek-dressed, -groomed, -composed.
A mother pulls two flailing eczema-flecked elbows
down a bus that is really a van, then an aisle
where trout sail through air-choked then bubbling exile
as a name-tag-stamped Vladislav suppresses a smirk.
Sprung-up weeds sprayed on the ground coarsely sell clothes,
sell melons called ‘torpedoes’, sell kvass, leather boots,
English tuition and prostitutes
on the streets of the port of Saint Petersburg.
A mouse-moustached crane-driver strokes out a memory
coated in evaporated milk
and ideology, of when his rod didn’t wilt,
plump men with starched epaulettes found him his work,
pages of Pushkin were his mental armoury,
plumbers’ eyes were ignited by a Tchaikovsky flash,
his muscles were missiles in a bunker of flesh
and girls kissed him, in the port of Saint Petersburg.
On the peninsula outside the city she shuffles
with crumpled old tsars and then scurries along,
pink-tracksuited, Calvin-Klein-cropped-topped, and catches
odd kopecks by warbling a Ukrainian song.
In the port of Saint Petersburg
brides and grooms pose
along lion-faced bridges and fish-rich canals
as children with scooters
and skateboards stroke rabbits
outside palaces of Van Goghs and Chagalls.
In the port of Saint Petersburg
tanks heave down promenades,
warships hoot comfort from freshly-scrubbed chimneys
at smog-blackened screeching-wheeled
trams full of rumblings of
touchpaper inroads by rocketed enemies.
On the peninsula outside the city she slumps
in a neon-lit pathway that Pride never treads,
empty-pocketed, rosebush-obscured and unnoticed,
her throat and pink trousers both lying in shreds.
Anarchy in Germany
I am an antichrist,
ich bin ein gestörter geist,
I want to cross the road
and I know how I’ll do it,
I’m going to ignore
the red Ampelmann, because
I want to be Anarchy
in Stuttgart City.
Anarchy in Germany
(or at least, a vote for the SPD).
I put banana juice in my beer
and sometimes cola, because
I don’t care
and I want to be Anarchy
with a splash of cherry.
There are too many ways
to say ‘a’ and ‘the’,
but I don’t use der-das-die,
I don’t decline adjectives
or properly conjugate infinitives because
I want to be Anarchy,
and the Eszet is silly.
Is this the CIA,
or is this the EEC,
or is this the NSA?
I thought it was Germany
or just another country,
another cushion behind the KGB.
I want to be Anarchy,
I want to be Anarchy
in Germany
und ich will auch Anarchismus sein
in Liechtenstein. Zerstör-
en Sie bitte.
ich bin ein gestörter geist,
I want to cross the road
and I know how I’ll do it,
I’m going to ignore
the red Ampelmann, because
I want to be Anarchy
in Stuttgart City.
Anarchy in Germany
(or at least, a vote for the SPD).
I put banana juice in my beer
and sometimes cola, because
I don’t care
and I want to be Anarchy
with a splash of cherry.
There are too many ways
to say ‘a’ and ‘the’,
but I don’t use der-das-die,
I don’t decline adjectives
or properly conjugate infinitives because
I want to be Anarchy,
and the Eszet is silly.
Is this the CIA,
or is this the EEC,
or is this the NSA?
I thought it was Germany
or just another country,
another cushion behind the KGB.
I want to be Anarchy,
I want to be Anarchy
in Germany
und ich will auch Anarchismus sein
in Liechtenstein. Zerstör-
en Sie bitte.
Toothache, Braunau-am-Inn, 20th of April 2014
In Salzburg they splash
their most famous son across T-shirts and hats, he
smiles boyishly from a million postcards,
they name chocolates after him and then
erect monuments to those chocolates
in the town square.
It’s not the same here. My tooth hurts.
Easter Sunday, sweetshops sweetless, beerhouses
beerless, party-shops birthday-bannerless,
pharmacies ibuprofenless, pavements
lifeless besides a foreign-looking woman photographing
a lump of stone and a chin-scratchingly
ordinary door. My teeth hurt.
A neckhair-ruffling howl of a whistle of a drone
stalks me along a green bridge
over green waves flanked by cuckoo-cradling green,
back across the invisible border.
No fences, no gates, no puzzled squints
at my fuzzy passport picture, no eagle stamped in ink,
nothing. Just horizon-to-horizon
globalism. Maybe one day there’ll be a huge poster.
Big Banker is watching you.
Neuralgia marches through my gums
and up my cheek, makes inroads
into my left eye
and occupies my left ear.
My face hurts,
as huge bikes and beards bomb past me into Bavaria,
past a shop named
“Führer”.
It sells moustache-strokingly normal windows,
roller-blinds and solar panels. “Made in Austria”,
the billboard trumpets if I translate correctly,
“Royal quality for a middle-class price!”
My brain hurts.
I find a machine and buy some chocolate.
their most famous son across T-shirts and hats, he
smiles boyishly from a million postcards,
they name chocolates after him and then
erect monuments to those chocolates
in the town square.
It’s not the same here. My tooth hurts.
Easter Sunday, sweetshops sweetless, beerhouses
beerless, party-shops birthday-bannerless,
pharmacies ibuprofenless, pavements
lifeless besides a foreign-looking woman photographing
a lump of stone and a chin-scratchingly
ordinary door. My teeth hurt.
A neckhair-ruffling howl of a whistle of a drone
stalks me along a green bridge
over green waves flanked by cuckoo-cradling green,
back across the invisible border.
No fences, no gates, no puzzled squints
at my fuzzy passport picture, no eagle stamped in ink,
nothing. Just horizon-to-horizon
globalism. Maybe one day there’ll be a huge poster.
Big Banker is watching you.
Neuralgia marches through my gums
and up my cheek, makes inroads
into my left eye
and occupies my left ear.
My face hurts,
as huge bikes and beards bomb past me into Bavaria,
past a shop named
“Führer”.
It sells moustache-strokingly normal windows,
roller-blinds and solar panels. “Made in Austria”,
the billboard trumpets if I translate correctly,
“Royal quality for a middle-class price!”
My brain hurts.
I find a machine and buy some chocolate.
Please Don’t Call Me Racist!
I’ll sneer that working-class folk smell
of mammoth’s farts and cannot spell,
while claiming I’m left-wing as hell,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll never think outside my box,
my words will all be orthodox,
I’ll suck a thousand black men’s cocks,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll hop across to Volgograd
and tell those untermenschen, Vlad
and Igor, that their views are bad,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll spit on Stephen Oppenheimer,
wash my face in chicken korma,
hug a ticking suicide bomber,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll say Mohammed is my mate,
ignore the Delhi Sultanate,
scoop out my eyes onto a plate,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll talk in fake Jamaican patois,
clap the Salman Rushdie fatwa,
shrug if Leeds becomes an abattoir,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll flay the white skin off my face,
agree that Denmark’s a disgrace,
agree that Muslims are a race,
just please, don’t call me racist!
You see, I’ll have to change my name,
I’ll shit my pants, I’ll choke with shame,
I’ll burst into a ball of flame
if someone calls me racist.
of mammoth’s farts and cannot spell,
while claiming I’m left-wing as hell,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll never think outside my box,
my words will all be orthodox,
I’ll suck a thousand black men’s cocks,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll hop across to Volgograd
and tell those untermenschen, Vlad
and Igor, that their views are bad,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll spit on Stephen Oppenheimer,
wash my face in chicken korma,
hug a ticking suicide bomber,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll say Mohammed is my mate,
ignore the Delhi Sultanate,
scoop out my eyes onto a plate,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll talk in fake Jamaican patois,
clap the Salman Rushdie fatwa,
shrug if Leeds becomes an abattoir,
just please, don’t call me racist!
I’ll flay the white skin off my face,
agree that Denmark’s a disgrace,
agree that Muslims are a race,
just please, don’t call me racist!
You see, I’ll have to change my name,
I’ll shit my pants, I’ll choke with shame,
I’ll burst into a ball of flame
if someone calls me racist.
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