The Right to Offend
Moses is a psycho,
And Jesus is a wimp,
Buddha is a lardarse,
Ganesh is more a gimp,
Mohammed is a pedo,
While Mary is a prude,
Yahweh is a rapist,
And Paul is just unglued.
Onan is an onanist
Who loves to bash the bish,
Zeus a sexual preditor,
Cthulu cold as fish,
Ra just gives us side-eye,
While Odin squints when viewed,
And Allah must remain unseen
Because he’s in the nude.
So sue me, dude.
To Niccolò
See all of your princes who grasp at our lives
With their handshakes and greased palms and fists wrapped in cotton –
They claw for a kingdom where sleight-of-hand thrives,
But their fingers are crossed and their nails are all rotten.
You keep all your holdings tight under your thumb
As your signet-wrapped digits are stroking your beard –
But grips can be prised as the years render numb,
And the light-fingered upstarts are squeezing you plum,
And there’s no-one to catch you when ’last you succumb –
Your talons are chipped and too weak, in the end, to be feared.
Revolution of the Seasons
May Day – the start of the long, late Spring,
When early promise at last bears shoots,
And the frigid world of the Winter King
Is losing, day-by-day, its sting,
As underground, our creeping roots
Are undermining everything.
The dawns are dawning early,
And the dark is in retreat –
A wind of change is blowing,
And to some it’s blowing sweet.
The world is waking, waking,
To the march of springing feet.
Labor Day, when the Summer turns cold,
And all that promise, though showy, is fruitless –
Or just as our efforts are harvesting gold,
So they all dry up and lose their hold –
As footings, once secure, prove rootless,
Infiltrated by bugs and mould.
The dusk is gaining daily,
And the storms are in the skies,
While the chill is on the breeze
And the breeze is on the rise,
And the world is sleeping, sleeping,
As the hoar-frosts crystallise.
Real Ladies Prefer Cubic Zirconium
Diamond – as hard as the universe –
A nebula trapped under ice.
Forged in the heart of a supernova,
Polished by continents tumble‘ing over.
Diamond – as hard as a warlord’s curse –
Each sparkle a bullet, the price.
Landscapes are pillaged for so little won –
Carbon for carbon, a thousand to one.
I suppose the pecksniffs will insist that zirconium can only refer to the elemental metal, and that the crystaline form of the dioxide should be referred to as cubic zirconia – but since I never listen to pecksniffs I can’t be sure.
Sunday Best
Just what is it with trilbies and churches ?
Men must remove theirs, but women’s stay put.
Indeed, why does Paul say that women must cover ?
Is God so upset by each bare-headed mother ?
Men, shed your turbans ! Your masking besmirches !
At least He allows still a shoe on each foot !
(Though women are free from such moaning and wails
To sport wedding bonnets and funeral veils.)
Just what is it with stetsons and churches ?
We might as well dress-down in sackcloth and soots
Than decked-out in finery, mumbling our prayers,
While tutting at any bloke hiding his hairs.
Men, lose your skull-caps ! Such hattery lurches
To thinking you’re working upon your kibbutz –
For men who wear hats are not resters, but grafters –
So the Lord wants your locks flowing free to the rafters.
Just what is it with bowlers and churches ?
Men’s heads are open, but women’s are shut.
How much of an insult is headgear undoffed ?
Does God rage in Heaven at brims left aloft ?
Men, ditch your toupees ! Our scriptural researches
Show bald-pate Elisha is nobody’s butt !
Or do we use ‘etiquette’ as a hypocrisy ?
That doesn’t sound like good manners to me !
I hope the hatted women in church also keep silent throughout, just as 1st Cor 14:34 says to.
Horseguards
Come on down to Whitehall,
To visit England’s pride –
Fine-dressed guards on horseback stand
Sentry either side.
Come on down to Whitehall,
These soldiers trained to kill
With milit’ry precision sit
Absolutely still.
Come on down to Whitehall,
At eleventh hour
Watch crack troops all moving at
The rate of one horse-power.
Come on down to Whitehall,
They don’t do things by halves –
Our household guards can both stand guard
And pose for photographs.
The Noble Art of Treachery
To defeat one’s mortal enemy,
Approach him as a friend
And speak the honeyed words of peace
And fawn and twist and bend.
In time, once his guard is down
And slower to defend,
Then draw him even closer still
With bridges on the mend.
Confuse with favoured trading rights,
And treaties by the tome,
And offer cunning compromise
Beneath his pleasure dome
By breaking bread instead of bones,
And quoting “when in Rome…”,
And beating ploughshares from your swords
To bring his harvest home.
And waiting for the trap to spring,
He will not understand
You sprung it years ago, back when
You shook him by the hand –
And now he’s caged by friendship
With no anger to command,
As your lovers take his city
And your children work his land.
But best of all, he cannot strike you back,
He is too late –
For now his precious kin are settled
All throughout your state –
For he has also conquered
When he opened up his gate,
And now can only sit and watch
His people grow-up great.
Free-Zoning
We don’t need Miscavige, see,
To run our audits, rig our fates –
We’re moving up the bridge all by ourselves.
We needn’t wait till OT3
To learn of Xenu’s DC-8s,
Now Teegeeack’s escaped your secret shelves.
We’re the methadone to their crack,
The thirteenth sign to their zodiac,
With a finger-wag to psychiatry,
And a less-homophobic piety –
We’re still in the zone, but at least the zone is free.
We’ve shed your cult, we’ve sunk your navy,
Quit your billion-years a slave,
Although we all think LRH is swell.
Yet still the core is true, unbeaten –
Still believe in body thetans,
Just like Quakers still believe in Hell.
With solar-powered e-psych probes,
We’re the white-shirt face to their cult-black robes,
Lightly tutting at SPs,
But never disconnection, please !
We’re an altogether healthier paranoia, with no fees.
The High Cost of Living
Diesel-hungry four-by-fours,
Draft-dodgers dodging wars,
Betting on the football scores –
Well, that’s the price of freedom.
Christmas Cards on sale in June,
TV news all afternoon,
And folks who claim we faked the Moon –
Cos that’s the price of freedom.
Despots have it easy,
They can do away with clutter –
But me, I’ll take the messiness
Of ev’ry geek and nutter.
So tune them in or tune them out,
But never for a second doubt
That we can ever do without.
Sticky kids on talent shows,
Tattooed arm and studded nose,
Neighbours’ hedges come to blows,
And that’s the price of freedom.
Metric units here and there,
And lots of artificial hair –
It isn’t always right and fair,
But that’s the price of freedom.
Dreamers have it easy,
They can make the world anew –
But me, I’ll take the old one
Cos it’s here and now and true.
So make it sweat or make it blink,
But never for a second think
That freedom is just pen and ink.
The Uncarved Block
Ancient wisdom always seems
To favour pure and nat’ral artefacts,
The stuff of philosophic dreams
Of unmined hills and untapped cataracts –
Yet crying for such simple ways
From modern lives of iron, wells and mills,
They lounge and think away their days,
While harder-working peers must hone their skills
To hew and dig and chop and grind,
And turn the world into a workshop floor –
To build the surplus so a mind
Has food enough to ponder nat’ral lore.
Rhyming Couplets 