The National Fabric
Flags are funny things, really –
Waving from the stands,
Or draping over coffins,
Or the jackets of mod bands.
Flags are flown for diplomats,
And flown when armies fight,
And seized-on by protestors,
Tearing-down to set alight.
They’re simple, you see,
And classic designs.
That’s their key –
As branding with bold, bright lines.
They’re loved and hated equally,
As diagnostic style
By the virtue-waving hypocrites
On both sides of the aisle.
Alteration of the Generations
Flowering plants give birth to their grandkids,
Two generations on.
Between them, a haploid stage in birthed,
And breeds, and dies in a matter of hours.
It’s evolution at play, and history,
Old ways still acting upon –
The hidden generation,
That is lurking deep within the bowers.
The parent cells, barely ten in total,
Died at the point of conception –
But isn’t the same as true in animals ?
Well, yes…and no.
The thing is, they have further stripped their gametes down
To uni-perfection –
No longer build a multicellular form,
They have no need to grow.
But mosses and ferns, they still do it old school –
Separate independent stages –
And algae can even be free-living –
Single, double, single, double…
So botanists have marvelled,
And have filled their textbook pages –
But have drawn the line at animals,
To spare them family trouble.
Yet I suppose there’s one more diff’rence –
If the egg and sperm that made me
Were my parents…well, that means,
My parents are within me to this day –
They gave their lives, and gave their haploid matter
To upgrade me –
So my generation has it easy,
Born with twice the DNA.
Botanists like to point out how the ancestral condition of alternating between haploid (one set of chromosomes) and diploid (two sets) each generation still exists in flowering plants, but in a very reduced form. And it is true that pollen contains two-to-three cells, and the ovule seven, making them both technically multicellular.
And yet zoologists never seem to mention that the same is true for animals, only here the haploid generation has been reduced even further – now both gametes are single-celled, and their entire mass is consumed by the emergent zygote rather than withering away like all of the haploid plant material bar the two nucleuses. I guess they’ve got to draw the arbitrary line somewhere…
Snoozeville
I wouldn’t spend so long a-bed
If my dreams didn’t bore me so –
But I wake-up with a weary head,
As I sense their dullness go.
What trite is my mind assembling
In its gaudy world of fake ?,
That is clear not worth remem’bring,
’Cept for a disappointing ache.
Free-Market Free-Fall
When I first heard
That we were living
In the throes of
‘Late-stage capitalism’,
Well, I was cheered-up
At the vibes this was giving –
That the end was in sight,
Be it progress or schism.
I mean, just how late
Can a ‘late-stage’ be
Before it collapses
To Marx or to Keynes ?
But no, it seems
That it still staggers free,
Like a zombie economy
Sucking our brains.
And meanwhile, it looks like
The environmental
Cannot hang around
For the axe to come down
And the final blow-out
Will not be gentle,
Salting the earth
And polluting the town.
The cancer is terminal,
Now we all know –
So just topple already,
Accept your fate !
But for most of us,
Still the car crash is slow –
And the late-stage’s ending
Is far too late.
Epic Names
Back when Zeus ruled ancient Greece,
He was the only Zeus around –
No mere mortals dared to name their children
So profound.
At best, they’d add a suffix,
To become an adjective instead –
So Martins are collectively “of Mars”,
And careful how they tread.
We also have Demetrius
To celebrate Demeter –
But not, we note, to claim to be the goddess,
To unseat her.
Now heroes, these were fairer game –
From Jason through to Herekles,
By way of Helen and Cassandra –
Citizens were fine with these…
But it took until the Renaissance
For the coming of Daphne, Phoebe, and Chloe –
And Diana, of course, though she’s Roman, not Greek –
But all were equally showy.
And here in the Twenty-First Century,
Our mythical children thrive –
As Athena, Apollo, Aurora, and Atlas
Are keeping the gods alive !
Perish by the Sword
Malchus was a servantman
Of Caiaphas the Sadducee,
Who tried to capture Jesus
In a garden at Gethsemane –
But Simon Peter drew his sword
And leapt into a fray,
And before the verse had ended,
Peter smote an ear away.
That ear belonged to Malchus,
On the right side of his battered head,
Though nobody appeared to care
As Malchus simply stood and bled.
And no-one apprehended Peter,
All seemed to ignore –
And Jesus even healed it for him –
(Well, one time in four…)
And once the casual violence
Had fulfilled an ancient prophecy –
The incident was never raised again,
And no apology.
Perhaps there was a metaphor
About ‘too deaf to hear’ ?
But still, the Bible soon forgets
Poor Malchus and his ear…
In-Jokes & Out-Jokes
There’s something fishy going on,
I don’t know what it is,
But it’s going on – some dodgy con,
Some secret funny-biz.
There’s a smirk-and-giggle marathon
That long has lost its fizz.
Someone wants to put one over,
Someone in the know –
But they never let me in on it,
Whatever is their latest bit –
I guess they fear exposure,
When the gaff’s about to blow –
Or they think me far too sober,
And in want of waggish wit.
But there’s something fishy going on,
And I’m the one who’s got.
The denouement must have been and gone,
Though who can say for what ?
Yet if I’m the chump they prey upon,
Their diddly’s full of squat.
So someone wants to crack an egg,
And let a punchline slip –
Or…am I getting paranoid,
Convinced it’s me who’s getting toyed ?
If jokers want to pull my leg,
They need to get a grip –
But if the butt’s no powder keg,
Best grin into the void.
Motorway Dreamer
That ain’t a Dodge !
What’s a Dodge ?
Something Yankee.
Just trying to bodge with some Hollywood chic.
But this was the Eighties,
Capris and Mercedes –
American cars were all tanks, they weren’t sleek !
For no British kid ever did
Know a Dodge –
And no stodgy old hodgepodge
Could juice-up your toy.
So out with your Rambo,
And give him a Lambo,
For coast-to-coast pure post-apocalypse joy.
The image above is from Fighting Fantasy book 13 – Freeway Fighter (1985).
Mind the Gap
There’s a new Poem on the Underground,
Right next to the ad for the dating app –
Looks like there’s another one, further down,
On the other end of the network map.
But the train’s too full to shuffle along,
So I’ve just this one to read today –
On my morning commute with the weary throng,
Through another week of beige and grey.
So let’s see what it has to say:
As the carriage rattles and brake-shoes feud,
The poem prattles on solitude –
As my neighbours crush me, jolt and seethe,
It says don’t touch me, let me breathe –
As the battered shrubs and brownfields pass,
Its country clubs are a joy of grass –
In a world of stressed anomalies
It offers endless homilies.
I must confess, I’d rather comedies…
Timid Tectons
Britain sits at the heart of its plate,
So far from the faultlines, far from volcanoes.
Though Arthur’s Seat and the Giant’s Causeway celebrate
How we once had those
Britain sits where the crusts are thick,
Though they used to bend, as the Great Glen shows.
And Lincoln lost its cathedral spire, when a final kick
Gave some glancing blows.
Rhyming Couplets 