SCOTLAND FREE
Bonnie Prince Charlie tried and failed

At Culloden his protest stalled

And Cumberland his forces mauled

For him there was no other chance

He ran the gantlet back to France.

Now Scotland has its chance again

You had it once, a nation then.

Independent, free, no tyrant’s yoke

For Scotland freedom’s not a joke

Fight like a fishfag, Union be damned!

Your hills, your lochs, your lives, your land.

 

PAPA’S TRIBE

The wives and mistresses
All mealy grins and doughy skins
With their ever-wet holes
And their second-hand sins
Watching as the mirror butterflies their faces
Twinned with depthless images of themselves
Wronged women staring back in anguish
Each flopped vacuously on vacant shelves
Leftovers or left behinds
None are sure of which is which
All of them are certain of one thing though;
It’s one of the others
That is the biggest bitch.

 

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeuur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

 (Seamus Heaney)

LOOK, NO HANDS

Even if I had no hands

I would be ambidextrous

Ac-dc in a strange sort of way

Though women would still be kings

Or should that be queens?

 

Even if I had no legs

I would still walk tall

Play legless football

If the fancy took me,

Roller-skate differently, that’s all

 

Even if I had no mouth

I would still speak out

Words would continue to pour forth

I would not be silenced

I would speak from the heart

 

Even if I had no eyes

I would still see plenty

Believing would be seeing

And if only in my mind’s eye

My vision would still be twenty-twenty

 

 

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REFERENDUM ME ARSE

The wealthy sip their lattes

On Hampstead’s cobbled streets

The new Fabians still bemoaning

‘Nature’s obstinate refusal

To make the rich innately superior

To the poor they are forced to greet’.

They still care more for the moral high ground

Of progressive liberalism

Than the lives of working/non-working poor.

Those leafy lanes that once sheltered Marx and Engles

Miliband and Foot is now a Tory enclave

Forever England only in the wealth that it can wave.

American financiers in pink shorts and baseball caps

Have long since replaced the  poorer Jewish emigrant

Which once gave Hampstead its artistic liberal slant.