Pretenders

With their gilt letterheads
And their bunting-clad dreams,
Where the serfs are so happy
Beneath their regimes –
But history swept them
From palace and pomp,
When young turks and comrades
Have drained the old swamp.

With a God save the king
From the Mayan to Ming –
So soon shall the peasants
Once more kiss our ring.

Yet now they must sit out
And mingle with riffraff
In Kensington squalor
And only three staff.
They’re blind to the passage
Of fortune and time,
Like grand dukes and dames
In a lost pantomime.

With a title and crest
And a well-feathered nest
And a son and successor
Exquisitely dressed.

Their ancestors ruled
With the richest of tastes,
Those kings lived like kings –
But they now must be chaste.
Where once their great splendour
Was cheered by the proles,
Now their Swiss bank accounts
Are all filling with holes.

With a hip hip hurray
To the misty-eyed day
When the jumped-up and bourgeois
Are all swept away.

These make-believe monarchs
In exile, alone,
With their cronies uncrowned
And their thrones overthrown –
They long to return
To their castles and knights
Where the realms was unsullied
By voters and rights.

With a curtsey and bow
And a greater-than-thou,
Oh, we’ll soon send these yokels
Right back to the plough.

The Sins of the Fathers

It wasn’t our hands
Which pressed the button, pulled the lever,
Signed the warrant, wrung the neck,
Or delivered the commands.

It wasn’t our hands
Which pointed the gun, swung the cleaver,
Stiffled a yawn, cleaned the fleck
Of bloodstain off our bands.

No, those were our fathers,
Our monsters, whose surnames we bare –
Names that echo everywhere,
Our shameful brands.

But we are not our fathers,
Despite all that we share.
We carry still their genes, their glands –
But not their hands.

If we had been where they were,
Would we have acted the same ?
Do they run deeper than their name,
Through our hinterlands ?

We’ll never know, though we prefer
To think that we would not have killed.
But we are here, our future in our hands –
Let’s use them now to build.

The Inner Demon

Think right, say right,
Keep it careful, keep it kind –
Keep a clean and healthy mind
That wants no truck with spite.
And yet, that inner voice
Who always loves its little games,
Who always knows the nasty names,
Will whisper up its choice.
It knows they’re wrong, and that’s the point,
It’s daring us to shout them out
Because they’re wrong and still have clout
Because they’re out-of-joint.
It’s bating us to say the word –
It wants to make us take the blame
For ev’ry hurtful hateful name
We’ve ever heard.
But these are not our whole –
These shall not define or break us,
Just stray thoughts and troublemakers –
Yet we are in control.
It only loathes itself, infact,
But we can still refuse to sink –
Let’s judge us not in what we think,
But how we act.