Poetry Returns

Death Of A Queen

Time passes doesn’t it?
All the power and the glory
That once were yours
Now lie on and in a wooden box
Such a long time
For you to reign as the saying goes
You, with your face on our coins
A voice from the past
Preaching traditional values
As few others can
Managing parliament as you do
And yet forbidden entry
Giving your name to chosen institutions
To imply virtue and status
In a so-called manner royal, or as an icon
Leading people in world-wide religious activity
But what does all this tell us?
Where are the lessons
That endorse your validity?
Perhaps they are written down somewhere
In the archives of your sacred family
Unfurled in the flags flying today at half mast
Or possibly reflected
In the medals shining all around your corpse
Whatever the answers to these questions
One thing stands as stone
You were bound by a duty thrust upon you
To breathe justice on the world
If you did
And only if you did will I say
The Queen is dead; long live the King

11 November 1975

Dismissal
How dare you dismiss our leader
What do you think you are?
An omnipotent monarch’s serf?
Well of course in effect you are, aren’t you?
And the representative of the Queen
Who did the damage
Praised by the Prince of Wales
As a courageous act
Yes our Prime Minister was sacked
So democracy died
The Speaker of the House became an impotent icon
As the people’s voice sanctified by history
Is nothing but an impotent whisper
And what of the reports in the Press
Those chariots of ire
The PR tools of the Devil
The primrose press: primula vulgaris
Polluting the air with those calculated lies?
All’s well that bends well they say
As they apply obsequious approval
Of a deed that echoes in the halls of infamy
But hear me now:
We must analyse this crime for future generations
And curse it down the ages
I dishonour my God
I rebuke my Queen
I reject my flag
All hail
To whoever throws light on this villainy
Here endeth the lesson

Biomass

Away with carbonised plant matter
The profitable igneous mined stuff
Burn trees instead
Even the ancient Joshua Tree
Found thriving in desert terrain
Can be killed in this cause
Biomass instead of coal
But hear the liars
Green energy pretenders
Describing what is not there
Machines are being made by industrial civilisation
To save us
From industrial civilisation
Solar arrays
Need coal
And steel
And graphite
And sulphur
And copper
And silicon
And cobalt
And nickel
And CO2 in vast quantities
Total sun and wind power today
Without supplement does not exist
But the cunning fraudsters
Create the illusion that it does
So the planet writhes
Into an ugly, tumultuous death

Comes A Time

It happens to us all
There comes a time when life
Loses its authenticity
Its value
In a sick and sorry world
And an earth emerges
Where love is eventually discarded
Or replaced by self interest
Where people suffer
Alone
And are ignored
By those whom they hold dear
So it is
It happens eventually
To everyone
The end to your own pathetic era
Then you lose heart
And give up the struggle
And fade away
Like laughter at a wake
Hey there!
Now it’s happening to me
I’m sick of everything
Demoralised
By dreams that never come true
Not mollified but horrified
By the narcissism that surrounds me
The grandiose enterprises
That belittle human emotions
They
Leave me faltering on chasms of regret
So what shall I do?
Give up and end it all
Or keep looking for someone who loves me
Enough to steer me away from utter despair
Ah! There she is…

Cowboys And Indians

The ground on which we stand is sacred ground.
It is the blood of our ancestors.
– Chief Plenty Coups (Crow)

When I was a whining schoolboy
I was very brave
I killed lots of Indians with my six-shooter cap gun
Just the way they did in all those movies
Especially the Apaches
But also the Cherokees, Cheyennes and Sioux
For they were fearsome creatures
Always in the wrong
Dangerous to us noble whites
They fired blazing arrows into wagon trains
And scalped innocent travellers…
In the Wild West that my mind created
I killed Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Cochise
As well as
Countless other figments of my imagination
Until age
Taught me the folly of my ways
As the years passed
I learnt the army and not cowboys
Killed those Indians
To clear the way for white settlement
I learnt more indeed
For cowboys
Such as Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and Jesse James
Preoccupied with crime
Were in fact a danger to themselves not Indians
So I have mended my ways
Guns are no longer my toys
I have learnt of the depth of Indian despair
And the ruthless replacement of their homelands
With alien reservations
How wrong I was
So involved in the fables at the bottom of my garden

royciebaby