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

the word without the unword,
the sound without a human shadow.

Life’s dying here too. Even now the house
is settling at moorings under a Somerset sky
so seized with the rubble of abuse that it tinges red,
the tiles of Vespasian, Ine’s Francisca
locked with skegox , the Norman count
of murder, bewigged assizes for the strangled
to the raucous irony of observant gulls.

I cannot come back with you
to when you sang of the Hanbali Madhab,
‘We are so few’ they say. The few are famed I say.’
Yet I can’t get out from under Sky news,
its cremation elocution at the Liberal
jangle of studio trombones, a last judgement
on the killers of the blameless, the smell
of white phosphorus firing creeds.

The bookshop’s smug perfume
of literary glue sets up this man
to brood over the Waterstone’s
Milton, a sterner monist than you,
but he is to be forgiven theocracy
his slaughtered sinners hang nicely
with a fit –up constitution.

It’s this Phantom 2000
we all I live in, the sentinel
centennial that stops us asking;
who didn’t you kill,
we haven’t killed already?
Who didn’t you curse in the name of God,
we haven’t already cursed?

There is poetry
in your death
because only poetry
shows what can never be cured.
And remember just because
we were killers
in the morning of the Age
does not excuse us now
except to speak to you
and your poor dead,
in the silent wind,
our tyrant hate
that taught you yours.

Agitpoems

1.
They jail the man and fine the woman
that steal the parking off the common,
but let the greater villain loose that steals
the Commons through some ruse.’
The Law demands that we atone
when we take things we do not own,
but leaves the celebs and MPs to dine,
who take things that are yours and mine.
Immigrants and debtors don’t escape
if they conspire the law to break;
this must be so and they endure
those who short sell to sting the poor
The law locks up the man or woman
without cash or licence with a summons
and banks will make their lending slack
until men go and steal it back.

Based on an English folk poem, circa 1764

2.
It was the law stated he should have no concerns.
It was the law stated his every need should be met.
It was the law stated he should be housed,
he should be clothed ,
he should be fed,
he should have friends,
that his illnesses be treated,
that he should drink,
that he should be buried with due rites.
Is this why he lies, shot and bleeding
at the borders of the great society,
not having the password for entrance?


3.The Man At Usher’s Bank

There lived a man in Usher’s Bank
and a wealthy man was he.
He had three billion default swaps
and convertibles oversea.

They hadna’ bin a week in trade
a week, but barely one
when emails came to Usher’s fund
that all the dosh was gone.

I wish black holes should still increase
and turmoil in securities
until my cash returns to me
from Hedge funds overseas.

It fell about Contango day
when accounts were dim with murk,
the banker’s cash came back to him
in quantity eased by a man o’th’kirk.

Blow out the Krug champagne!
and book a private jet to Macau
a bonus let my bank be paid
since my loot is back for now.

Up then crew the red, red debt
and up and crew the Nasdaq.
The people to the banker said
It’s your greed we cannot back.

Fare you well my Sterling dear
farewell to dismal swaps and debts
for I must to a classroom drear
to repent my toxic debts.


4.Fright Size

Fright Size

We’ve thrown you all our aid-
even sent some of our fleet.
We wanna make some trade.
with you crazies who have no feet.

Some day we’ll give out food.
We’ll be the heroes too.
and when we do, don’t be so crude
as to protest or look too blue.

On the aid ship, Lollipop,
it’s a sweet trip through a seismic shock.
where the makeshift stray,
on the bloody beach of Labadee Bay.

Riot police stand everywhere:
crackerjack bodies in the seething air.
And there you are
happy landing on Catastrophe Bar.

See the cardboard tootsies into ooze,
with the big, bad men of the earthquake.
If you say too much, ooh,ooh
you’ll awake with a military ache.

From hospital ship, Lollipop
its into a deep mass grave you’ll hop
on the bloody, bloody beach of Labadee Bay.


5.Athlètes Maudites

Secure at the hub of your little world
the athlete is born so bored,
her manager swears her innocence,
fit for profit, the concern of gossip.
And the architects of purity and health
look down on this Queen Bee of strength.
In bread and honey wanted for the lips
they mixed the filthy steroids of the damned.
Then came the day when they plucked
it from her guts and tossed them in a plastic box.
Dry, beautiful and banned under an angel’s aegis
not once, but twice her nobility became
not laudanum’s, but an Olympic fund’s indignity

Unelect

How the stone that seems a face
cries and beats its feet
on the tongue’s floor,
a painted latch to a private door.
Yours were the only hands allowed
up the arse of the printed page.
Ruth gleaning on the BBC Solitudes
a die thrown for an unseemly gown.
The breath-paws promises renown.
Yours was the only kiss for cash.
The soul writes on private language,
makes a lie of your lay, a liturgy of permits.
A rape of the bar, a Carribean Caricatwalk .
How it says this – to your rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric
to your heeled and mealed, how it whines without conscious
kicking the downed, dialling the ready-fingered,
poetry, poetry, poetry.

Tale of a Tiger, or Survival of the Fitup


I am the tiger and my skin survives.
I fasten on the famous
and make poems of their lives.
First it is the Soho leopard
on which this tiger dives.
Now I’m digging into Darwin
and have my wordy knives
already flashing for
a fabled host that thrives
in Post-Colonial gloom.
I slip into the myth he hives
and send out a smear
that hatches and connives
to settle in the skin,
where metonym thrives
until his ethics pulls him back.
Fat cats pounce that Oxon shrives
my literary guile and guilt
and then the public strives
to seek me out and pour on
fame that infamy derives
from murk, seeking further
hosts in poets who led bad lives:
Eliot, so nasty to the Jews,
Ted Hughes who killed his wives,
Verlaine and Villon for all their arts
just useful, poor, dead farts. 
Two ILO Limericks

There once was a President, Obama
who hated a man called Osama.
He said, “If I can”
I’ll get this man,
or I stand to lose Alabama.”

There was a young man called Hadad
who tried very hard to be bad.
The closer he got
he found he had not
the gift Ahmadinejad had.

2009

Bye-Bye-Election
From the analects of K’Ung Fu Tse

The servant wanted an explanation
of good authority. The Master answered
“You must invest in Tory funds.
You must keep the Labour watchdog
and make sure the LibDems have
the confidence of the people.”
“And if one of these three had to be let go?”
“Then let the Tories go.” “And out of the two?”
“Then let the Labour watchdog go.”
“and what about the LibDems?”
“The confidence of the people
is not the authority’s to dispose.”


Health cuts

I have cut the scabs from law-words
Which the strong shaped from wounds
they inflicted on the weak, who made them strong.
The grammar of blood flows downwards
With the gravity of pain seeking nature
To witness the silence all people observe.
I have torn off the bandages wrapped round
The language of losing, of the homeless,
Huddled under plastic signs of banknotes
That gave the rich, the profit of their loss.
The tears of want flow downwards
Into the whitewashed page that witnesses all.

Essays on the Big Theory

Of Person

Of course the word is adhesive. It flaps
Onto a pig for example survives its last breath
Bubbling with careful death, or onto
Something human with the same sense ending.
To collect in a common grave of language
Heaving down the walls between
objects and persons and loosing the powerful verbs
that govern composition and decomposition.

Of Freedom

To raise the question of freedom is to witness a beating
Or a humiliation and say nothing
because others say nothing, knowing once it is over
the victim is free to go, or gone to freedom.
It all has to do with the how powerfully
The masters take their aim. To be born free
Is no more than a hypothesis given to chance,
Who does not know the rules of the human game.
The authority begins with a list of those who fought
Too hard for freedom and need rules to tell them
The limits of hope in the language of bandages,
Hardening sores and the hypodermic kindness
That re-brands the shape of humans into strangers.

Of Ownership

Not everyone who breathes is legally entitled to do so.
Some last too long. Some do not adapt to revised techniques.
Others are too young to release the oppressed
As their carers cannot tell whether their charges
would need them in future, or face a future of need,
or need a future at all as “either” has a way of vanishing
from the language of possibility, once the speaker
has got a grip on enough reality such as not to let go.
Besides what can the law do with the heart cut loose
From its consumer conduits and measured circulation?
The secret is never to use words for ownership inexpertly.
The authority does not own, dreams, fantasies, tickles. faiths and
Metaphysical visions out of copyright. The need for consent
On shared stimulation arises from the difficult question
Of how to cost such a commodity out of barter.
The problem with simply letting everyone go free
Is that the powerful own only the freedom of others,
Being invisible and subject to the silent deduction of threat.

Out of the Sky

The students have fallen out of the sky
onto the roads without a reason why.
Of course the media multiplies its myths:
it’s the power lines, or poisoned piths.
It’s the Apocalypse, or coastal spills,
or varieties of ecological ills,
lightning, snowstorms, or fault-lines,
mid-air collisions, or unexploded mines.
Be reassured, the explanation’s clear.
It’s just an ongoing mortality, dear.
Some people complained and we had to fix it.
for boozing youths were taking the biscuit.
It seems they collide with elite course fees
and maintenance grants. It’s just a tease
we’ll send yours home in a vocational box
so long as you pay for his darned socks.

Of Power

Some people end up in the hands of others.
To be silent, terrified, weak, or wearied
Is to give up rights to another.
As there are not enough rights to go round
Such dependency is highly economic
and saves the cost of a form to fill in.
Owners have the right to recycle their goods,