A Masculine Rhyme
Positive charges
And negative spin,
Strong verbs and weak verbs
With preference baked-in.
Group B and Group 2
Subconsciously mocked –
Pejorative adjectives,
Loaded and cocked.
We’re judging the diff’rence
From concept to mouth,
And neutral assessment
Is all heading South.
Armchair Philosophy
My thoughts on love and politics
Have authored pamphlets by the score –
I’ve told them twice and thrice and six,
Since days of teenage yore.
I’ve made my case and made it strong,
I’ve preached and pleaded with the throng,
From Tory-shires to Bolsheviks
I’ve met them all and all before.
I’ve set the world to rights so long,
And still the world continues wrong –
There’s no point labouring a fix
We both know you’ll ignore.
It’s time to sing a diff’rent song,
It’s time to bang a diff’rent gong –
Or else I’m dreaming just for kicks,
And dreaming should be something more…
The Bogeyman
Please give me someone to hate –
A politician to despise,
To slander and dehumanise
And make a monster in my eyes.
Please come and stoke-up my hate –
Give me a minister to stone,
Legitimise my constant moan,
And whistle in an undertone.
Please let me bask in my hate
To justify my diva tears –
I’m longing to believe the smears,
I’m relishing exquisite fears.
Please let me trumpet my hate,
And wear my spite with friendly pride,
And close my ears to the other side,
And let no compromise abide.
Or else, let me calm my head,
And tell myself its only politics,
And tell myself its only bate and click,
And tell myself I’ve fallen for the Devil’s oldest trick:
For the greatest lie he ever told
Was telling us that he existed –
Yet his realm is deathly cold,
And human nature always twisted.
What I’ve learned is true,
From the playground to Big Ben
Is that the evil that men do, is done by men.
(And these days, women too.)
So show me a politician
And I’ll shake them by the hand
As I tell them of my mission
To frustrate their wonderland –
And if I lose, I hope that I
Can choose to walk away before I lie
And cheat for the greater good,
And lose my common brotherhood.
For ev’ry politician is a person,
Not the enemy –
For even as we fight them, we must love them,
Show them dignity,
Or we shall never understand their motives,
Why they’re voted in,
If we’re convinced they’re purley evil
And their public steeped in sin.
We must, we must be better than this,
Resist the overwrought and thunderous –
If we believe in demons, then we fall to the abyss
Where the only savage monsters will be us.
On His Majesty’s Service
The spy cried as he killed her,
But the job had to be done.
A shame, but the nation’s guardians
Must sometimes use the gun.
She wasn’t an enemy agent,
Just an unintended friend –
Precisely the kind of citizen
He’d promsed to defend.
A bystander who stood in the wrong place,
Open eyes in a pretty face,
A mouth that might just blow the case.
He wept for her at the end.
No True Scotsmen
When the news is full of more beheadings,
Bombs on busses, boots on deserts, holy war,
And drones attacking family weddings
From Benghazi to Lahore,
I turn to Senator and Mullah both,
And ask them, have they any peace to barter ?
Is there any hope for growth
From Casablanca to Jakarta ?
But each calls the other a shirker:
Says the Senator “Ye see that Ayrab ?
He’s nae Rab, he’s a dirty Sassenach.”
The Mullah snorts in his tartan Burqa:
“That Yank’s nocht but a flithy Irish !
Aye, aw pish, an’ a plastic Mac.
Now, I am a Jackobite rightly through,
As ginger as the white-on-blue,
From Samarkand to Timbuktoo !”
At this, the Senator gives laldy:
“Listen, pal, I may be black,
But I still can gie ya heid a crack,
And I’ll see youse, Yaqub, if ye’s lookin’ a’ me !”
James Somersett
“Granville Sharp the abolitionist and Lord Mansfield of the King’s Bench are well known, but the eponymous defendant is more of a mystery.”
The Sunday Items
He ran from the court
To the door of his champion,
Slaved no more,
And he knocked on the door of his champion
To show he was free –
He ran from the court and he ran from our history.
Did James and Granville then
Shake hands like proper gentlemen ?
Did they embrace, perhaps,
In a quite un-English way ?
We cannot say,
For James is never heard agen.
Did he and Granville,
As they bid goodbye,
Look in one-another’s eye
And share a smile and knowing nod
That seemed to subtly imply
“We’ve started something here, by God !”
Maybe he died that very day,
Or lived another three long score,
Maybe rich, maybe poor –
He went about his way.
The last we see of James
Is at that door.
Ununoctium
Hurray for element one-one-eight !
For the briefest of fractions of briefest of seconds
A handful of atoms held just enough protons –
And lo !, the Nobels and the Naming Rights beckoned.
By why stop the searching, oh lab-mates ?
The legend’ry Isles of Stability lay
Just over the Period Bound’ry, they say,
Where fusion-forged atoms don’t wilt and decay !
So on with colliding, oh lab-mates !
We’ll find a few more, by-and-by,
And if they’re as fleeting, we’ll keep on repeating –
We’ll keep chucking atoms till funding runs dry !
Huzzah for element one-one-eight !
But will she prove to be our last ?,
With the Table so neat and the budgets so tight…
Fun while it lasted, though – truly a blast !
But don’t stop the searching, oh lab-mates !
Learning is never a wasted adventure !
So rustle up bursary, grant and debenture,
For Wisdom’s our master, and Knowledge our quencher !
So on with the atoms, oh lab-mates !
Let’s boost their ephemeral hearts
For better we sink all the budget on trinkets
Than letting the generals split ’em apart.
Element Uuo has since been named as Oganesson (a far less interesting name) when it was proved that a handful of atoms were forced into being for an instant before decaying away with a half-life of 0.89 millisecond. Can I just point out that much like energy, public finances for scientific research is a zero-sum game…
Strange Bedfellows
I know the temptation – any stick to diss them,
Any ally welcome, any grudge a friend –
Any note of caution is abject criticism,
Any mediation is weakness to the trend.
But surely we are judged by the company we keep,
Regardless why we keep such clientele –
The rival of my enemy might sometimes be a creep
Who should really be my enemy as well.
Real politic with an opportune autocracy
Is just another way to say hypocrisy.
Threefold Commandments
Hear me now, for this is wisdom,
Handed down the generations:
This is where the rule is from
That founds all laws and inspirations.
Thrice they spake a noble precept,
Thus salvation’s road is three-stepped.
Firsly: be a better neighbour
Loving all the world as brothers.
Second: we must welcome labour –
Work is virtue like no others.
Thirdly comes a code most shapely
(Though just what, I own, escapes me.)
Therefore, speak unto all fellows
Honest words – no slanders mutter.
Never shirk to work the bellows,
Turn the earth, or churn the butter.
And that other thing: pursue it –
(What it says to do . . . well, do it.)
So behold: three schemes for living –
Three the ways to languor foil.
First there’s love, respect, forgiving –
Next there’s graft, provision, toil.
Third comes…what ? Oh, saints preserve me !
(But I’m sure it’s mighty worthy.)
The Providence Plot
Do not hunt out conspiracies, my friends –
There’s no-one out to get us,
For we do not greatly matter.
There’s no-one’s jailed for heresies, my friends –
Though they sometimes read our letters,
They will find there only chatter.
Yes, corruption still exists,
We can be sure,
And lord, its presence in our midst
Is not a thing we should ignore –
But none of it is organised
By an elite beneath a gorgan
(Or a lizard), plotting dooms
In panelled dark and smoky rooms.
My friends, I know ! It feels so wrong
To only shrug and move along –
What answer is coincidence ?
It makes no sense
To pattern-seeking minds.
If there is any agency (of either kind)
Within the noise of daily life,
We’d barely know amidst the strife
Of multiple false-positives.
I urge, there’s nothing causative
In most of what we’d swear is true –
I know, because I’d swear it too.
But do not hunt conspiracies, my friends –
When cock-ups happen all the time,
And secrets are so rarely kept.
The thing about most tyrannies, my friends,
Is just how public is their crime –
To rule by fear, your subjects must be prepped.
Their heavy-handed propaganda
Never gets mistook for candour,
And their unofficial action is their very public policy.
See, evolution gifted us
An urge to talk and share, and thus
The covert are the daily news, and secrets know no modesty.
For ev’ry extra spy who lurks behind the scenes
Is just another pair of lips to spill the beans.
My friends – beware conspiracies.
Beware their never-sated thirst –
For surely it is better yet to hope the best than fear the worst.
And if sometimes we’re taken in,
At least we don’t let fear win !
And be prepared to be surprised
By happenstance in patterned guise –
The tin-foil cannot block it,
Nor computers plot its dance –
So keep your Occam in your pocket
For the vagaries of chance.
Rhyming Couplets 