lucas plan

Factories in Willesden and Birmingham,

Not where you’d go unless you got paid,

To build parts for bombers and tanks,

For this is where these were made;

And those who made those weapons knew,

What the things that they made could do,

To men and women like them.

But then again,

You must sell what you can sell,

To pay for food and a roof as well.

The system that sets a worker’s price

Isn’t ever kind or nice,

And in the case of Lucas Aerospace

Compassion had no place

In such calculations

So redundancies were the fix

Applied in nineteen seventy-six.

The workers’ unions would not comply,

 ‘We can still work’, they said, and they asked why

They couldn’t now make machines

Not intended to kill and burn

‘We could design the blades that turn

With the wind to make clean power

Devise car engines that make fewer fumes

We could be building kidney machines,

Be saving lives not taking’.

And none of this was just wild dreams

Because they built the prototypes

Of socially useful technology.

But Management refused to see

And only words and sympathy

Came from Labour and the TUC.

So, it all amounted to a might have been,

But one that some still remember

To remind us that we could have seen,

Instead of planetary destruction driven by greed,

A world where workers control their work

And produce for human need.

ODE TO A SUMMER COLD

My nose is running so fluently,

Discharging a tsunami of snot,

Words cannot describe it,

Except for the words that I’ve got.

It’s a deluge of slimy mucus,

A tidal bore of nasal scum,

And there’s gallons more to come.

It is an unprecedented nostril event,

And I find it very strange,

Perhaps I am a victim,

Of internal climate change.

Could it be that my brain is melting,

From the heat of my poetic inspiration,

I’ve had writer’s block for weeks,

So it ends my bardic constipation,

Now it’s all come out in a flood

That I’ve put down on paper;

But when I come back later,

There’ll be a serious issue

Because instead of a majestic masterpiece,

I’ll just have heaps of wet tissue.

Total Gardening

If you have the money,

Why not spend it creating

Your very own miniature totalitarian state,

In your very own garden?

Surround and secure your territory

With hedges, trimmed into regular

Rectangular configurations.

Install wrought iron gates to control all migration.

Only allow grass to grow in designated lawns,

And nowhere else;

Ensure each blade of grass is exactly cut

To a uniform length;

And that every one is of the same

Species and colour.

Astroturf is not an acceptable substitute,

Because it would not involve

Making living things submit to your will.

Arrange other selected pure-bred plants

At precisely equal intervals in borders

That are made in accurate geometrical shapes

Only squares, paralellograms and triangles will do.

Use fire, iron, chemical and biological means

To eradicate all intrusive plants, insects,

Invertebrates and other creatures

Install automatic security lights and video

To enhance surveillance.

The sky may still be unruly,

And the weather unpredictable,

But just ignore them and gloat,

Over your New Horticultural Order.

POSH GAMMON

I like to lie in bath of luke warm water,

Reading The Spectator.

It’s so well written, it’s so right wing,

It wants the empire back,

It’s for people who own things.

And when the mad Russians come,

And The Spectator says they will.

And drop their naughty bomb,

I’m going to die in my bath,

Reading the Truth,

When the fireball rolls,

I’m going to boil like bacon,

Charred paper in my hand,

The last leisured remnant

Of a dead civilisation.

AUTOBIOGODRIVEL

I started to write my autobiography, then,

I sneezed, and sneezed, and sneezed again.

I blew out onto the page words and memories,

And, probably, tiny particles of my brain.

So, I have assembled this miscellany,

From the stains that remained.

I am an unpleasant peasant pedant,

And an excited observer of ants,

A wiper of damp patches;

I miss the taste of postage stamps.

Once I had a god-given omen,

An eagle’s feather floating down from a clear sky,

It fell at my feet silently,

And I just walked on by.

I stack volumes on shelves,

Suck up dust with a machine.

My only traditional is breakfast,

But I am averse to beans.

And not one word of this matters,

Or means very much at all,

As I’m an atom in an atom in an atom,

On a cosmic billiard ball.

GENETIC DETERMINISM

Sitting on the shitter,

Wrestling in my bowels

And in my brain,

With constipation

And existential exasperation:

I seek enlightenment from the pages

Of a scientific publication

And the words inscribed

In this in slim tome

Seek to educate its readers

About the human genome.

Why are we bipedal?

Why aren’t we hirsute?

How can we make tools?

From where did we migrate?

And why do we uniquely,

Unlike our cousin apes,

Make this thing called language,

With which to communicate?

And the scientists say,

As scientists tend to do,

That it’s all down to a gene,

One they call Fox P2.

So I go out into the garden,

To digest this information,

In a suburban situation;

When a urban fox passes by,

It gives me a foxy look,

With its foxy eye

And as if the give the science

A feral peer review

And show that the research was accurate,

This canine decides to micturate

So it was then that I knew,

That the genetics were all true

This confirmed,

When the fox peed too.

RAIN, RAIN-RAIN, RAIN, RAIN-RAIN-RAIN,

RAIN, RAIN-RAIN, RAIN, RAIN-RAIN-RAIN,

It fell all day yesterday,

It’s falling again today;

Filling the ditches and dykes in February,

Filling canals, rills, rivers and becks;

Turning puddles into ponds,

Turning ponds into lakes;

Eating away at shorelines,

As it causes waters to rise,

like ants eating into a cake.

It washes streams out of polar icecaps,

Setting glaciers free

Breaks through coastal defences

And ever expands the sea.

RAIN, RAIN-RAIN, RAIN, RAIN-RAIN-RAIN,

It drips, it leaks, it drizzles, it lashes it pours.

It takes land and makes mud,

it takes mud and makes swamp,

It takes hilltops and makes islands,

It makes landscapes into seascapes

And it will make a planet for all the whales,

From the planet of the apes.