Down at the market every stall’s been stricken –
Withered tomatoes, warty pomegranates,
Dud wine, black milk and a two-headed chicken.
Shall we cheer ourselves up with a stroll by the river?
But the pebbles are undergoing classification,
The waterfall’s levelled, the green banks paved over.
He loved his food, the people and the alphabet.
But now Chile, his bride, is under interrogation.
The electrodes have been placed. The sun has set.
Briefing
He may be fanatical, he may have a madness.
Either way, move carefully.
He must be surrounded, but he’s contagious.
One of you will befriend his family.
One male and one female will love the subject
Until he loves you back. Gradually
Our team will abstract and collect
His mail, nail-clippings, garbage, friends, words, schemes,
Graphs of his fears, scars, sex and intellect.
Steam open his heart. Tap his dreams.
Learn him inside and inside out.
When he laughs, laugh. Scream when he screams.
He will scream. ‘Innocent!’ He’ll shout
Until his mouth is broken with stones.
We use stones. We take him out
To a valley full of stones.
He stands against a shed. He stands on stones
Naked. The initial stones
Shower the iron shed. Those stones
Outline the subject. When he cries for stones
The clanging ceases. Then we give him stones,
Filling his universe with stones.
Stones – his atoms turn to stones
And he becomes a stone buried in stones.
A final tip. Then you may go.
Note the half-hearted stoners and watch how
Your own arm throws. And watch how I throw.
Ballade of Beans
Nightmare. A silver butcher’s truck
Hurtles around my brain and chop
Goes the neck-chopper. Wake. I suck
Pus from my gums, then slowly prop
Bones till they stand upright. I slop
Water which last night rinsed our greens
Over my face. My coiled guts hop –
The sink is clogged with dead beans.
Truth will lie, panting, for a buck.
Philosophy’s a lollipop.
Who heeds Religion’s biddy cluck
Or cares when Justice goes flip-flop?
So U.N.O.’s a headless mop,
Peace never reached her early teens,
Terror’s capsuled in each raindrop –
The sink is clogged with dead beans.
Switzerland’s had a lot of luck,
But Cuba slugged a wealthy cop
And Europe stands where lightning struck
Twice lately. Berlin. Will it drop?
Will the earth’s ice-protected top
Flip off to show dead submarines?
The world, the grubby old death shop,
The sink is clogged with dead beans.
Wilson, we’re both about to stop
England tots up as England gleans
The grains of your crapulous crop –
The sink is clogged with dead beans.
From Rich Uneasy America to My Friend Christopher Logue
‘Never again that sick feeling when the toilet overflows.’
ADVERTISEMENT: THE IOWA CITY PRESS-CITIZEN
Jim Hall’s guitar walking around
As if the Half Note’s wooden floor
Grew blue flowers and each flower
Drank from affluent meadow ground.
The lush in the corner dropped his sorrowing
When he noticed his hands and elbows dancing.
Long silver trucks made lightning past the window.
A two-foot hunter watch hung from the ceiling.
Then you prowled in. The guitar splintered,
The lush held hands with himself, trucks concertinaed.
The watch-hands shook between Too Late and Now.
As I sit easy in the centre
Of the U.S. of America,
Seduced by cheeseburgers, feeling strong
When bourbon licks my lips and tongue,
Ears stopped with jazz or both my eyes
Full of Mid-Western butterflies,
You drive out of a supermarket
With petrol bombs in a family packet
And broadcast down your sickened nose:
‘It overflows. By Christ, it overflows.’
Official Announcement
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That seven unidentified flying objects are zooming towards the earth.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That they look like angels except that their skins and their wings are as raw as afterbirth.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That our military computers wrote a billion-word message explaining why they all chose suicide
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That here come the angels, and each of the angels has a jar with an oceanful of plague inside.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the first angel has poured out his jar and that British nationals and others who have the mark of the beast or have at some time in the past worshipped the image of the beast are being afflicted with sores so noisome and grievous that their bodies are flashing like pinball machines.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the second angel has poured out his jar and that the sea has become as the blood of a dead man and that everything in the sea is dying including Her Majesty’s submarines.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the third angel has poured out his jar and that the Thames has become an enormous and open and pulsing jugular vein.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the fourth angel has poured out his jar and that the heat of the sun has become amplified but a spokesman for Civil Defence advises John Bull to stick his head in a sandbag full of ice in order to postpone or avert the frying of his brain.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the fifth angel has de-jarred and that – It’s all gone dark, we can’t see – and all citizens who do not bear an official seal of redemption are gnawing their tongues in pain.
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the sixth angel – Frog Devils! Unclean! Frog-Beast Armageddon!
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret
That the seventh angel – IT IS DONE – voices thunder lightnings great earthquake such as such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great and every island including us every island is flying away and regretfully the mountains cannot be found and a great hail is falling with steel rain and fire that is wet.
All of which things, although we understand the provocation under which heaven is acting and take this opportunity of reaffirming our unshaken trust in the general principles and policies of heaven, and in the firm belief that all possible steps have been taken to ensure minimal civilian casualties and compassionate underkill –
Her Majesty’s Government has noted with regret.
Let Me Tell You the Third World War Is Going to Separate the Men from the Boys
SON: Make sure the black blind fits the window,
Don’t let the light fly out.
Where is the war tonight?
FATHER: No, this is peacetime.
You are safely tucked up in England.
Sleep tight, happy dreams.
SON: Listen, Daddy, are they ours or theirs?
FATHER: They are owls, they are nobody�
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Responsibility. This is peace.
SON: Today I lost a battle.
I feel like mud.
FATHER: Snuggle down, snuggle down,
Tomorrow you will win two battles.
SON: Yes, and I will feel like mud.
FATHER: Grow up, this is self-pitying hyper-bollocks.
Nobody is really, actually trying to
Literally kill us.
SON: Yes they are, Daddy,
Yes they are
Programme for an Emergency
The world’s population statistically,
Could stand together on the Isle of Wight
Shoulder to shoulder to shoulder.
There they could stand and watch the sea,
Sleeping in shifts by day and night,
Gracelessly growing older.
But Holland’s son would rape Ireland’s daughter
Or China’s grandfather fall in the water.
Ozone would mingle with the scent of slaughter.
Still, England seems the most suitable site,
For here we are proud not to laugh or weep
And one gulp of the air will freeze the strongest man in sleep.
Naming the Dead
And now the super-powers, who have been cheerfully doubling their money by flogging arms wherever the price is right, put on their Sunday cassocks and preach peace to the Middle East. From their lips the word sounds like a fart. On Twenty-Four Hours the other night, Kenneth Allsop interviewed a British arms merchant who has been selling to both Egypt and Israel. Admitting that he was having some doubts about his trade (he is now on the verge of an ill-earned retirement) he said that nevertheless the real question was: Am I my brother’s keeper? and that the answer was No. The question was of course first put by Cain, whose flag flies high over most of the major cities of the world.
The more abstract war is made to seem, the more attractive it becomes. The advance of an army as represented by dynamic arrows swooping across the map can raise the same thrill as a child gets from playing draughts. Dubious score-sheets which say how many planes the government would have liked to have shot down only add to the game-like quality of news – you tot up the columns and kid yourself that someone is winning.
Wartime governments sometimes allow this process to be taken a step nearer reality by issuing photographs of one atrociously wounded soldier (our side) being lovingly nursed by his comrades, and another picture of dozens of prisoners (their side) being handed cups of water (see under Sir Philip Sidney, gallantry of ). Such poses represent a caricature of war’s effect on human beings.
What have Arabs been doing? Killing Jews.
What have the Jews been doing? Killing Arabs.
Even that doesn’t get us far in the direction of reality. To add statistics saying how many were killed takes us only an inch nearer.
Who is killed? What were they like? I would like to see every government in the world held accountable to the United Nations for every human being it kills, either in war or in peace. I don’t just mean a statistic published in a secret report. I mean that all the newspapers of the country responsible should carry the name of the person killed, his photograph, address, number of his dependants and the reason why he was killed. (We often do as much for the victims of plane crashes.)
This would mean that in some countries the press would be swamped with death reports and even mammoth death supplements. (Well, what about the advertisers?) But I want more.
I would like every death inflicted by any government to be the subject of a book published at the state’s expense. Each book would give an exhaustive biography of the corpse and would be illustrated by photographs from his family album if any, pictures he painted as a child and film stills of his last hours. In the back cover would be a long-playing disc of the victim talking to his friends, singing, talking to his wife and children and interviewed by the men who killed him.
The text would examine his life, his tastes and interests, faults and virtues, without trying to make him any more, villainous or heroic than he was. It would be prepared by a team of writers appointed by the United Nations. The final chapter would record the explanations of the government which killed him and a detailed account of the manner of his death, the amount of bleeding, the extent of burns, the decibel count of screams, the amount of time it took to die and the names of the men who killed him.
One book for every killing. I realise that this would take some planning. Each soldier would have to be accompanied by an interviewing, camera and research team in order to record the details of any necessary victim.
Most factories would turn out printing presses, most graduates would automatically become biographers of the dead. Bombing could only take place after individual examination of every person to be bombed. The cost of killing would be raised to such a pitch that the smallest war would lead to bankruptcy and only the most merciful revolution could be afforded. Hit squarely in the exchequer – the only place where they feel emotion – chauvinist governments might be able to imagine for the first time, the true magnitude of the obscenity which they mass-produce.
This is no bloody whimsy. I want a real reason for every killing.
Fifteen Million Plastic Bags
I was walking in a government warehouse
Where the daylight never goes.
I saw fifteen million plastic bags
Hanging in a thousand rows.
Five million bags were six feet long
Five million were five foot five
Five million were stamped with Mickey Mouse
And they came in a smaller size.
Were they for guns or uniforms
Or a dirty kind of party game?
Then I saw each bag had a number
And every bag bore a name.
And five million bags were six feet long
Five million were five foot five
Five million were stamped with Mickey Mouse
And they came in a smaller size
So I’ve taken my bag from the hanger
And I’ve pulled it over my head
And I’ll wait for the priest to zip it
So the radiation won’t spread
Now five million bags are six feet long
Five million are five foot five
Five million are stamped with Mickey Mouse
And they come in a smaller size.
Order Me a Transparent Coffin and Dig My Crazy Grave
After the next war…and the sky
Heaves with contaminated rain.
End to end our bodies lie
Round the world and back again.
Now from their concrete suites below
Statesmen demurely emanate,
And down the line of millions go
To see the people lie in state.
Nikita Ikes, Franco de Gaulles,
Officiate and dig the holes.
Mao tse-Sheks, Macadenauers,
Toting artificial flowers.
As they pay tribute each one wishes
The rain was less like tears, less hot, less thick.
They mutter, wise as blind white fishes,
Occasionally they are sick.
But I drily grin from my perspex coffin
As they trudge till they melt into the wet,
And I say: Keep on walking, keep on walking,
You bastards, you’ve got a hell of a way to walk yet.
A Child Is Singing
A child is singing
And nobody listening
But the child who is singing:
Bulldozers grab the earth and shower it.
The house is on fire.
Gardeners wet the earth and flower it.
The house is on fire,
The houses are on fire.
Fetch the fire engine, the fire engine’s on fire.
We will have to hide in a hole.
We will burn slow like coal.
All the people are on fire.
And a child is singing
And nobody listening
But the child who is singing.
The Dust
Singing, as she always must,
Like the kitten-drowner with a howling sack,
Open-eyed through the shallow dust
Goes the dust-coloured girl with a child on her back.
A schoolgirl in a flowered dress,
Swayed by the swaying of a tree
And the sun’s grin, in front of her family
One day became a prophetess.
Like a singer who forgets her song
She awkwardly leant from the graceful chair,
Balanced her fists in the drawing-room air
And said that everyone was wrong, that she was wrong.
Shocked by this infantile mistake
Her uncles and aunts were sad to find
This ugly girl with an ugly mind
In a house as rich as birthday cake.
When the bombs fell, she was sitting with her man,
Straight and white in the family pew.
While in her the bud of a child grew
The city crumbled, the deaths began.
Now, singing as she always must,
A refugee from a love burned black,
Open-eyed through the rising dust
Come on Everybody Page 15