JESUS FREAKS
Jesus on the streets
Satan under the sheets
Why do the heathens rage
When we don’t keep sinners in a cage?
He that sits in the heavens shall laugh
When he speaks to them in his wrath
Hear me when I call, ye sons of men
How long before ye turn glory into shame again?
Stand ye in awe and sin not one time more
For your pillow will be a hard rock
And your bed a fiery brimstone floor.
THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEIGH
The end of the world is neigh
Said the sandwich-board vendor
The word is ‘nigh’ my friend, I replied
And anyway it’s not due until next November.
We’re all cowboys on this burnt out lump in space
Searching for a spark in the dying embers
The world has already ended many times
The latest one was in the dog days of last December.
WORMWOOD
Wormwood isn’t here
The sign said, rather waspishly.
It wasn’t the Wormwood I remembered;
Scrubs Lane on a wet Sunday
The outback in West London
No buses, no cars, no people
Just limp grass, acres of the stuff
And, oh yes, the finest redbrick edifice
Victoria’s henchmen could construct.
No rotting bodies in here, my friend.
Not Newgate, not by a long shot
Though debts must still be paid
And some may still get laid
Lord Alfred Douglas lay here,
As did Charles Bronson,
Keith Richards, Leslie Grantham.
And George Blake
Scurrying along in his traitor’s gait
Till the day he pole-vaulted to freedom
More or less
Before waving goodbye
To his English life,
His liberty and his wife
And all those Wormwood scrubbers
THE CAFETIERS
Oh yes, the cafetiers;
They sit here day after day
Sipping their lives away
Out in the open air
In historic Hastings town square
Good sides to the sun
Contemplating another sticky bun
Watching the girls parade past
Leaning like mannequins at half-mast
WITNESS
If I bear witness of myself
That witness is not true
There is another who bears witness
And that witness is you.
You are a burning and shining light
My only reason to rejoice
You gave me hope where there was none
You brought sanity to my voice.
If now you should wish to leave me
Where is there another who will believe me?
When I shout out to the heavens up above
That what saved me then, and will do so again
Is nothing other than unconditional love.
GWYNETH STEAM-CLEANS IT
Gwyneth steam-cleans it
A powerful internal cleanse
That balances the hormonal levels.
This boil-in-the-bag kind of technology,
Brought by your Guru to you,
Where you sit on some kind of apparatus
And absorb a combination
Of infrared and mugwort,
Is all the rage
In this gadget-filled age.
Methinks this vaginal steaming
Gives ‘getting all steamed up ‘
A rather eye-watering meaning!
DEFRAGGING THE SCANDISK
All this talk about the mathematical concept of infinity
As if it was a numbers game
Real numbers, that is
Not those sets of integers
Or Cardinalities
Favoured by the current crop of God-botherers
Lemniscate my arse
Stop going on and on and on
Infinity is not a number
When you’re gone, you’re fucking gone
WRITING, DRINKING, WANKING
You can either buy me a drink or fuck off
Were the first words Patrick Kavanagh said to me.
He was hunched over an empty glass in the corner of McDaids,
Gobbing and spitting into the embers of the open fire
I arrived here nearly thirty years ago,
Having spent two days traipsing the road from Monaghan,
But I wanted to be in Dublin, y’know?
Where I thought the real writers were.
Real writers me arse!
They spend all their time drinking and talking about writing
And none of it doing any
He nearly took my hand off grabbing the drink I had got him,
Writing should be like wanking –
Best done in the privacy of your own room
OBSERVATIONS
Our lives are not our own
Our cards are marked from womb to tomb
Jealousy is the art of counting
Someone else’s blessings and not your own
You will never grow big by thinking small
The life you leave behind is no big deal at all
Be strong, be brave
But most of all don’t be a slave
To fashions, to politics, or whatever is the craze
Don’t run if you’re not able
And never expect happiness to come
With a glossy buy-me-now label.
THE MEANING OF LIFE
At the forefront of knowledge
Is the edge of uncertainty
Where reality is really
Only a projection of information
At the rim of the universe.
There, black holes loiter with intent.
They seek to break the sacred laws of physics
Which, as everyone knows, state
That information cannot be destroyed.
This is the point of no return.
All the information that ever existed is here
And black holes are held at bay – for now
What is inside is not inside
And what is outside is not outside.
We are merely holographic projections
Rendered flesh at this event horizon.
Asimov, of course, knew this
Way back when computers
Were not ten-a-penny.
He knew the truth, or guessed
That the universe is one vast computer itself
And we are merely its slavish programmers.
Though not living out purposeless existences,
As some believe,
But proving that life does have some meaning:
We are the way for the universe to know itself
My Writing Life 