The Satires by Duncan McGibbon (free ebook reader TXT) 📕

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Closedown


The reporters and starlets fade out,
bounced from their photon glare.
They can't beat what the show's all about,
live on the scene of nowhere.


1991


Chorus of Politically Apathetic Poets
A country bored with democracy
is a dangerous place
for Tory control freaks.
Though life is easy enough
for what is left to the superstitious.
Tabloid star-charts substitute for
the dangers of repression.
There the only revolution is in the stars.
Yet the real ones,
those nebular creations,
change every day, like safe houses
for political agitators.
Like women, the stars
photograph badly,
for they were created to move,
not be fixed in the Ptolomaic grid
as Cleopatra in a still from
the Tragedie of Liz n’ Richard
Take Canis, Pope’s dog
barking mad, sick or dead.
Whatever breaks
out of that giant inside
is only a thin pencil of light.
Inside is such a Rilkean giant,
competing with a mass of angry light
from warehouses, flood-lit goods yards,
runways and security beams
that light the furnace of the liberal market.
That makes it difficult to go on
without sins against profit.
We do not survive our goodness:
the hourly stress of unambition:
the desperate refusal of suicide,
of drug-related common sense,
stress-induced generosity,
depressive courage,
the breakdown against despair,
the burnout that forbids aggression.
and other plagues of human nature
caving in on the sheer callousness
of equilibrium.
Injustice often has the better poets.
Yevtoshenko wrote better for the K. G. B.
Pound was better than Pudney,
Pendercki than Panufnic.
Listen it’s about talent,
not goodness.
Or the Keats’s Main Sequence
love-flare, that drifting, stellar,
peeping- Tom corpse.
Plath and Sexton died of worse tyranny
than Tsvetayeva, or Mandelstam.
Death is not a style, but a rhetoric
when freedom turns despot.

We do not struggle with words.
We struggle with love
and words fail only our lies.
Meanwhile the smoke rises
from a little warmth
fanned into profit
and it is a question,
Left or Right,
of reaching the window first.

1995

Chorus of Blakean Currency Speculators

Then came the clerks of treachery,
the solicitors of betrayal
with slobbering jaws
and grey, restless eyes
to sell the British graveyards
to the Erms of time.
Heseltine in fetters grown
from his own heart,
knows they will reverse
the judgement on the dead.
Thatcher, daughter of the light,
would not attend him.
She had sensed his dark spirit
and weak resolve.
Enraged, he had sought her in the
places of illumination
which cast his vile shadow
on the ground of purity.
Thatcher sat, her face to the sun.
Her body glowed white
with a fierce flare, which
Heseltine could not reach,
nor could he see her beauty
lest his eyes burned to the core.
He wass delayed in his workshop
and would not sign over the Westland
dead to the managers of the aeons.
He had a final grave dug deep
by Thatcher’s curbed
and broken brothers.
Open, dark and still, it would
support the endless sleep,
of the Sons of Disraeli away from
the Erms’ mandibles of greed
and the armour of their avarice.
Yet he hungers to kill her light
by which the raiders navigate.
Heseltine waits by the places
of desolation, the theatres
of death and captivity.
Now, Major, with a radiant
smile and happiness in his eyes
announces the mercy of the elders
at the exchange rate of being.
The Erms have a right
to ravage time, as it was they
invested in the cosmological
ravines where time’s flow reversed.

Enraged, Heseltine, speeds in flames
to the final horizon and meets
with the elders, as evil has a say
in universal destiny.
The evil-one takes out the Book
of Neo Liberal Conscience
to show how all will stand
condemned among its pages. Only the
extinction of the poor will cancel it.
The entity of guilt itself
will destroy the frame of vision.
All elementals face the void.
His massive brow is wrinkled.
His hair, dire and furrowed.
Thatcher must die for impiety and justly,
or Heseltine will expose the illusion
of being and bring down the universe.
Both protagonists are confined in the
temple vaults that darken being.
The elders know that even the raiders
are illumined in Thatcher constant light.
Is Major a traitor with the clerks?
The elders debate with lesser entities,
While in the hangar of darkness
lewd shapes celebrate their malice,
And Heseltine observes them, debased
with dread, having seen the last grave filled
with ash and clinker and having heard
the howls of steel feet moving in
to claim the victory in a harsh new wilderness.
Yet as the last vile demon sleeps
the fire of right has not gone out.
Major, taking Thatcher’s ashes, shoots away
with a new and powerful aura,
which Heseltine sees and curses
his gentle light by which the Erms
already ravage the sleep of human dead.

Chorus of Cataloguing Librarians


The ‘A’ bombs mushroomed at his birth.
B sixty twos brought him down to earth.
C.S. gas brought friends suffocation.
but Wilson’s ‘D’ notice barred publication.
News of the ‘E’ Wings caused him no concern,
The Ascent of F6 another text to learn,
pin-up girls in G-strings his only newsread.
To injustice in ‘H’ blocks he paid no heed
His IQ by teachers was judged fit to serve.
He invented the J cloth, despite his reserve.
He read only Kafka and saw himself as K.
and the L shaped room taught him to lay
He took the M4 daily in a Fiat saloon
with an N registration not a day too soon,
while his O level children swatted Auden by pat,
then a P 60 thudded dull down on the mat.
Belief in hope was blocked by Bultmann’s Q
Dad’s photo of R101, summated his view.
The ‘S’ bend flushed away life’s joy.
At the ‘T’ junction he injured a boy
and made a ‘U’ turn hit and run.
The trauma of Mum’s V bomb left him undone.
as did the ‘W’ formation of fighters in Burma,
An X- ray showed up a hostile murmur.
His Y fronts hid the scar, or so he said,
for later he died on his own Z bed.

1994-5

 
Epitaphium, F.Hayek

The falling shadow of an autumn leaf
joins the precision of its shape
to its yellowed original and lies beneath
as it touches an unlit landscape.
The death of a dreaming, sceptical man,
joins with the voices in another room,
repeating history as only historians can
to make a fixed pattern of his loom.


The Mossbawn Man


That puzzled frown, preserved for all...
You can guess his profession from
the noun-hoard they found in his imagery;
a dated meal in a leathery crop.

Its features, as if filled up
with lore, giving the lustre of life
to a thing so dead , Homer was a child...
Ink stains tell he is of the O - Level folk.

His hooded eyes conceal the loyalty
he brooded on to the mythic Empson
and the possibly - forged White Goddess
to be found in Graves as far as Majorca.

Canticle for a Peacemaker

The white world on the blue
is beginning to fade on my helmet.
The incident that started it all
took place yesterday.
I read your faxed memorandum
That the forces insist
the town surrenders.

Then the shelling started
a day after we told them
the people had laid down their arms.
The town was full of refugees
and yet I remember
it was a clear, sunny day
and hundreds were dead or dying
as the explosions struck the school.
A surgeon stayed thirty six hours
operating in a church hall.
He told me of a blinded boy
whose eyes he could not save.
Then we were told
to declare the town safe.
We arranged for the withdrawal
and made no protest
when the shells began to fall
on the football ground.
No trial was arranged.
No guilt assigned
As I said I am considering
resignation, or a transfer,
unless you can answer a question

We arrested one person
from the town, whom
the forces accused of
concealing arms.
He had that awesome,
passive quietness
you once said fools use
to make them brave.

The forces claimed
we had supplied him weapons
but we had to say
even in the strange heat
of blood fresh on concrete
we refused him them.
as you said they might
provoke attacks

They shot him for
provoking the whole attack,
though he was not in the town
when the shells began to fall.

You told me not to resist
as it might provoke attacks

As his cronies were putting his
bloodied copse into a body bag,
you told me you measured a tremor
on the Richter Scale,
but not to tell them
as it might provoke attacks.

I received a delegation
asking for custody of the body.

When we got back to the hotel
I found it safe. Next door
you could see through the floors
they dead lay carefully in their beds
and the living were extracting
anything with a human look.

We took away
someone’s mother who was
having visions of history
and did not explain
whose side she was on.

I include this in my report
as everything is now back to normal.
I would like you to answer my question,
every time I ask, you just laugh
and change the subject.

You say the actions of both people
are morally equivalent,
yet we have no definitions here,
like a new truth
you haven’t issued me yet.

What is the truth? 1996


Candlemas, 1998
i.m. Karla Faye Tucker

In West London,
the wakening
whirr of a traffic
helicopter,
winnows
the harvest
of the clouds.

It is morning
in the Texan,
cycle of silent revenge,
while I sleep
through midnight’s
and whatever dew falls
will never dry.


The Flight

The State grows well. The forces grow subtle.
And yet they doubt the matter of our calm.
Stories of immigrant philosophers
and not state-aided moral education
led to our inclusion on the social list.
The services of power broke the fluids
and defective genes were found inside.
We left that morning. Now we stay away.
Some innocents may yet stand a chance.
The surface of our tickets for return
are scuffed, now, frayed and torn.
And yet we keep them safe.

1999

A Sorite for Jane.

The train so late and slow, the thirsty hours that go,
the chaos of the untended house, the cat I refuse to know,
the work so crass, the pleasure brief, the sleep so quick to come
the neighbours loud, the traffic crazed, the street kids dumb,
the weekends stressed, the pub depressed, the phone so dead
the TV vile, the Sunday Papers dense, the wine like lead,
the party shrill, the kiss no thrill, the way home cold and dank,
the key mislaid, the bills unpaid, the cleaner slow to thank,
the gardener thick, the evening cold, the visitor without charm,
the Church so long, the sermon trite, the parish so uncalm,
the relative fussed, the last fresh crust, the houseplants turned to dust,
the radio pompous, the gossip stale, the bank you