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

famine.

Man starves
and woman starves.
Child starves
and land starves
in the great
Continent of wrong,
the wronged Asian field,
the pasture wronged,
wronged
in Africa,
the houses of Islam,
wronged ,
the periurban
islands
and the New World
landmass,
an ash-choked
cistern,
while our planes
purr overhead
like swarming
mosquitoes,
farting
carbon ash;
we slope
on iniquity's
biotope;
on the
ecosystem
of mass-murder.

And yet they walk
like the dust
that grows seed.
Those families
of the earth
past the observation-posts
of our evil archipelago
and its
humanism of slaughter.
As the wheels
of our crisis-flight
unfold
to scream
on runways
of open hate.
Ours will be
the only level,
the only midden
searches will find
that made
possessing life
in the wrong place
itself a crime,
on the abdominal borders,
in the barbed wire wombs.

8.

The voices of dry
language
cough from
the bookshops,
ascending and descending
the doh re me
stories
of precious
futility,
the squawk
of a civilisation
that found death
and left
addicted to it.


9.

They have found
the dead,
and left them
dressed in Cavalli,
in those nervy,
curvy lines
in a saucy wrap-around
shroud,
in a Marni silhouette.
Dress them in Gucci,
the dead, skin and leather,
those ectomorphic
hauntings;
bold as a bubble-gum
balloon;
cocking a half-worn
calf,
pink as candy.
Lifeless as the
new-born calf
for a Giannini bag.

10

We sang for you
in Babylon alone
and stranger, you didn't eat.
We sent soldiers
to free you
and, stranger, you didn't cheer.

“I was too far away
to hear your songs.

I was too busy
burying my children to hear.

I was on your borders
being declared a criminal
on your bastard earth.”


‘Big Brother’ Site, Almere
It was late autumn.
Casually-dressed
men, women ,
with a few belongings,
walked into a disused
factory

outside a small
Low Country
town, whose name
they did not
know.

A small wind,
cold, yet fresh,
had ruffled their
hair, their clothes.

There was a
smell of rust,
oil, a hum of traffic,
distant.

It was late autumn,
when someone
did not follow them in,
closed the door.

They will come
out
in some early
winter,

as silent
as thirty
million
eyes.

The level
land will
put them
in their place,


these
people
turned
into waves.

The odours
of oil
and rust
stronger,


they will
come out
to walk away
from
the question
of existence.

The Invisible Man Catches the Geneva to Paris Express

This made it easier for the train from
Geneva he was always catching
always at the same time, eight twenty five.
In formal terms, it was always
the same, now. Though significantly
the locomotive shifted from
a two six two steam engine and mutated
to an electric Krokodil before his empty eyes.
The carriages changed constantly,
boiled into wooden third-class benches,
then into padded first-class lounges.
Two point five million bottles,
writhed around him, like maggots,
as he sat systematically unseen.
Two million tin cans squirmed and flashed,
three thousand six hundred tonnes
of paper and magazines thrashed about
in a seething tide of grey-matter print.
The hoards of passengers were only seen
as history-less, combining with
and substituting for each other
in a torrent of manners, dress and lore,
as a farmer, putting his hand in his pocket
would force everyone else to change
until his travelling companions were
reduced to their least distinctive usefulness,
such as a headless boy, a rich idiot,
a sexless atheist and a pure corpse.
This was necessary in order to
carry out essential repairs
in the way God read the world.

.

Post-Modernist Contract

The poet (hereinafter the “signified”)
agrees with the media provider
(hereafter “the signifier”)
that he will care for the premises
(hereby “the mind”)
in which, allowing for wear and tear,
both have been deposited.
the poet will pay the landlord
(hereof the “meta-narrator”)
a monthly rent of encoded myths
minus the content-tax
into an account
(heretofore “ a shared
universal structure.”)
controlling his hereupon mind.
The signified will disagree
with the signifier
as often as circulation allows.
This includes the text
of this contract,
which could be considered
null and void,
were it not.

Myanmar, A Ballade of the Outrage.

The countless dead can only grow.
Agents and Generals keep their own
from aid that workers thought too low.
Many entities are carved in stone,
yet to leave emails and the phone
to pause and polish pilot’s wings,
to poll, although the storm was known,
I cannot believe the reality of such things.
Sun-glassed, human, even so
to keep the envoys out who’d flown,
for miles and still they did not know
if the survivors died alone,
while sunlight stiffened life to bone.
Perhaps a General showers, sings.
The water hits as if on stone…
I cannot believe the reality of such things.
What will they do when out they go
to death and grief, stay in alone?
Turn up in military row?
Generations rot in flyblown
holes and poisoned rain peals down
on the sick, deprived of livings.
A cold iniquity has shown,
I cannot believe the reality of such things.
Junta, the faults were not your own.
A grim force held you by the strings.
The devil sat upon your throne
and could not believe the reality of such things.


Crunch

It was all predictable,
but the money was stacked too high
for the dealer to reach with his winning
hand.
To break the bank turned out to be a real
job for somebody.


The Fourth Book of Satires:


In Time of War


In Time of War

1.
The smell of violence,
cordite, sweat
rises across the state.
When actors visit morgues
For real effects,
It is the smell
They cannot take;
The figures don’t smell
and the dead ?
Like that joke
someone told
about a dead actor,
If he’s acting now,
he’s bloody good.
Only the bloody dead
can’t be an act.

2.
The pressure
on words
grows;
thin grounds
pile up convictions
before the storm.
Then heavy silence;
the tongueless,
who got into it
and the
dumbfounded,
who get away
with it.

3.
Ex-squaddies end up
doing time.
There’s no room
for traders of death
traded out
to a country
where murder
is always
a trade.


4.
The butcher’s bill
blows across a dusty highway
through a parched valley.

It blows under the camp bed
of the man in his tent,
after a warm shower,
playing war-games
on his laptop.

His mind punctuated
By the sudden profanity
of unseen destruction
left by smiling, local
friends.
Death’s bill
had to be personal here,
drawn only
on an enemy with a gun.

And then he was asked
to treat
the wounded Taliban,
who blasted
his colleague to ashes:
the butcher’s bill paid.


Casualty

1
He walks out
of the barracks
in the shuffle
of a man who
has taken sadness
aside as a companion,
or a difficult brother.
He does not notice
how people see them,
with a different compact
on existence.

2.
He has spoken
on the page of fear,
where words
fail after speech.
The blank prints
a silence
where those
who loved him
gaze because
they cannot
hear him now.


3.
The men in business suits
and women, wearing black
bring him to the pavement
where he lies,
as if he has his hands
in the pockets of his life
and no longer
marks his own position.

Shamir

1. 17, May,2006

A Midrash on Tadeusz Borowski’s The Sun of Auschwitz

“Villagers of Artas depend on agriculture and its related sub sectors (tending livestock) for their living. The confiscation of Lands of Artas will severely affect their living as the lands most suitable for cultivation will be confiscated and/ or isolated behind the Segregation Wall, which will seriously affect the amount of agricultural produce of the village.”

The Segregation Wall threatens the lands of Artas Village, Southwest Bethlehem City
Palestininan Agricultural Exchange:17 May, 2006


You recollect the sun,
when the Lord led them.
We will walk this green valley
of the nothing that is want.
We will walk this valley
they cannot walk.
To exorcise fear, to balk,
its order, its sweet forgetfulness.
Be woeful of distant valleys, to get,
through. Let leaves tremble, don’t regret.
They will walk this valley,
their world, that cannot flood
for sewage and mud.
We will forge
what was foretold.
We will urge, be getting old.
The ordinal follows us
At threescore and five
we’re very much alive.
What we heard,
we will survive.

2. March 18, 2008

A Midrash on Celan’s Welchen der Steine

Dalia Itzik of the ruling Kadima party, Speaker of the Knesset and acting president while Shimon Peres is overseas, called for the demolition of the mourning tent for the killer (of the Mercaz-HaRav students) and the demolition of his family's home. Tuesday March 18, 2008 Adar 2 12, 5768 Ha’aretz

1.
The Caterpillar crushed stone walls that were
a temple, once,
to prise open the hardened shelters of
the naked dead.
The iron rang on the unwitnessed house.
Rats sped down drains.
At civil twilight, stones were nodded through,
and turned to hills.
Beneath a lens of glass, the nestling-young
claimed their hunger
and the hoopoe on the unstruck stamp
dropped its poison.

2.
The orchard trees trembled to pile up like beds,
open as books.
The poets traced their feeble words on brows
grown hard with cold,
waited to breathe life on a stilled Eden
and hollow breastplates.
Yet their nibs punctured the quiet, naked rocks
with rules of law.
Under the body armour, young limbs lay stiff
for the worm-word
in the beak of the bird that found in paradise,
a death-shamed grub.

3.
We thank those who wove the soft, woolen cloth
that wraps the dead.
We thank those who built the box of lead
that hides their glance.
We thank those who harvested the corn
that soaks their blood.
We thank the pure who cannot smell the stench
that stains them real.
We thank the loafers who forgot their prayers
and kept them cold.
And yet we give no thanks the silent wind
can split love’s rock.


3. January 1st 2009.
A Midrash on Mandelstam, January 1, 1924
Nizar Rayan i.m.

The Year hit you from its
stone sky that screamed
with the Phantom Two Thousand
and two hundred pounds
of ripened fire that fed your family
with the scattered anger of fruits.

Who wrapped the bloodied sheet around you?
where you lay on the death-grime in the street?
Lemons from your grove fell on a Byzantine floor
that stirred the letter and the sound of God.
An old man from an old era folded the law
over your face, making no analogy,
and spoke