Since posting my poem, I’ve shown it to two people both of whom thought it seemed too much like a real anti-war poem to be amusing. That really says something, I think!

He wants to spread the evils of freedomTo foreigners who simply do not need ‘em

He wants to give most everybody SARSAnd build a branch of Starbucks out on Mars

He claims that we are all apologistsJust coz we understand the “terrorists”

And he’s the one who caused that damn tsunamiWith the movements of his globalising army

If only he would do just what they sayThe militants would surely go away

So come on, everybodyIt’s time to use your noodle:Bush wants their oilHe wants their soilHe wants the whole kaboodle

He’s the one who sends our boys to dieFighting for a Presidential lie

He wants to build MacDonalds on the MoonAnd globalise Wollundry Lagoon

Who is he to try and run their lives?And tell them to be nice to all their wives?

He wants to make the world eat GM riceCoz he thinks a bunch of mutants would be nice

And it’s he who causes all the global warmingWith his fighter/bomber jet-planes all a-swarming

So come on, everybodyIt’s time to use your noodle:Bush wants their oilHe wants their soilAnd Blair is just his poodle

Why don’t you do what we tell you?
Why won’t you acknowledge our moral superiority (which is blindingly obvious)?
Why won’t you listen to the violent Iraqi minority (which is obviously blinding)?
Why do you make us furrow our brows and huff and pout and snort and tut-tut and tch-tch and roll our eyes and click our tongues and cross our arms in disapproval (a feeling mixed with a not-altogether-unpleasant sense of self-satisfaction)?
Why do you callously laugh at our papier-mache effigies of Bliar and Chimpler?
Why do you make us spend our Saturdays on useless demonstrations when we could have been shopping at Fortnum and Mason’s?
Why are we addicted to rhetorical questions?
Why do we always imagine sub-Whitmanesque verse is going to win hearts and minds?
Why do we think anaphora and parallelism are great poetic devices?
Why is a river in western England, a bit like the Tigris, except unlike the Tigris it does not pong of the dead.
Why is the second to last letter of the alphabet just before you get onto zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

We speak for all the world of Art,
We bare our breasts, our bleeding hearts,
We give our all, it’s how we live,
Bear witness as we give and give!
Though we, it’s true, have for a time
Obscure been, is it a crime
To voice all your inchoate fears?
( And maybe just boost our careers )
You common folk have not the skill,
Our vision, passion, ego, will,
To say the things that must be said
When heart is king and not the head.
From stage, from screen, from studio’s glare
Admire our courage as we dare
Proclaim what we know is the truth –
No need for us to weigh the proof,
Which anyway is not to hand,
But hidden in those far off sands,
That fractious, violent Middle East
Where our albums sell the least,
Where our books are rarely bought,
And unlike here, our plays not taught
In schools, whose pupils learn instead
The Fear of God, the tyrant’s dread.
It’s awful, but what can we say?
It is so very far away…
That’s why instead our words are hurled
At those who lead the Western World,
The boring men in boring ties,
The baby killers with their lies,
The men in suits with thinning hair,
Who are so deeply, truly square,
By whom we seem so young and fit
( Though plastic surgery helps a bit! )
Their lust for oil’s the biggest fact;
Trust me, because I sing and act..
Bravely we will oppose this war,
Protected by the rule of law
Of course, so we need have no fear
Of secret police and spending years
In some forgotten prison cell;
Thank God – we’ve CDs still to sell,
Reviews to write for one another,
Next year’s Celebrity Big Brother..
We care, that’s why we take this stance
And also for this final chance
To put behind the things we did
When our careers were on the skids;
The “Hello” wedding and of course,
The subsequent messy divorce,
The starlet with the broken heart,
The cheap motel, expensive tart,
That unlawful carnal knowledge,
Arrested in that public “cottage”,
The drunken slurring at the BAFTA,
Forgive us because from hereafter
We fight as we’re the ones that care,
Self appointed, upon the air.
It’s true, our knowledge’s rather slight,
But God! – just see those studio lights!

When I heard I bought the t’shirt
‘Cos I thought I’d have my say
Take no action save for marching
For I can see no other way

Now look I was right all along
See what you idiots did
By invading all these countries
You’ve gone and blown the lid

All these Muslim chaps they hate us now
Though all my friends and I are nice
I’m sure that if you let them be
They’d see it in a trice

I didn’t want their children killed
I disagreed with all my might
For oil and greed the only cause
So yeah, look, I’m alright

Not in my name - I distance myself
The left speak eloquently for me
If I say all these things myself
They only will ignore me

My one true voice stands clear and loud
At least inside my head
Our bombed victims correspond
To the number of Muslims dead

And so, should bombers come my way
I’d like to make it clear
The writing on the wall y’see
It says
I woz not ‘ere (honest guv, I didn’t want them to do it)

ps:
I do not like them Trot I am
I do not like this bloggers’ spam

* * *

AND WHAT DID SADDAM DO

You claim to bring democracy and social justice
but before your aluminum war owls
swooped down on our nursery schools, our hospitals
of pregancy, our sylvan fields of kite flying…
we had an election whose percent was one hundred, whilst you
had an election of very small turnout, turnout, turnout…

We had a consti(damn you)tution
you bastards of strumpet-mother crusade!

We had a socialist system sired by father Saddam
before you picked at his teeth with your steely quills
and plucked from his swirly beardhairs that which your orifices of hegemonous vision contrived to see as nitty and undesirable.

And are we, I really have to wonder,
our children, our mothers, our very souls…
little more than nits
for your too too unpigmented fingers to pick at?

For totally no reason your paint of doom
covered over our windows of peace.

And what did Saddam do, Saddam do, Saddam do…
That could have been so bad, so bad, so bad?

For what is peace to you
who eat your McDonalds, who launch your Spears of Brittany,
who must have your precious machine oils,
and then turn around and
– O foul murderous troglodytes –
bite off the heads of our serenity
and spit them
into the craven spitoons of Empire.

And, I ask the fiery wind,
What did Saddam do?
What did he do, did he do, did he, do, do, do?

Okay, I’m done. There are some convincing poems here… *shivers*

I was a child once, with dreams and a kite
Now, I am dust, blood
I live only in my mother’s cries
In time, perhaps, I too will become the oil
They so desire; that led them to vaporize
Me, civil society, hope, history

This was no eden, I confess
The hanging gardens long since faded
Into the prosaic plots of our lives
The government was stern, yet caring
They taught us of our past
And corrected our myriad faults, like
Solons of the two rivers
They cried with us, for us
It hurt them too, but it paled next to our
 Shame

My father left, to be with them -
We never spoke of it, though our hearts
Burned with pride - he was in a better place
A building in Firdos square with AC -
He probably drove a toyota, and traveled
The length of our great land, dispensing
Candy, instruction, joy at the miracle of living
He would protect us all from the northern menace
Whose souls had long since melted into hate
Who had forfeited the crescent for the star

Then, They came; an irruption of confusion
In a world of absolutes. Could they not see
Past my skin?
Past the rhetoric of their puppeteers?
I lived only for my kite, which our Dear Father
Gave to me - his face beaming,
His moustache
His hat
The spirit of an age just unfolding
I had a part to play
I was a threat

We have a hard time
Here in the West
Where people don’t like
The way we dress.
There’s Islamaphobia,
MacDonalds too,
And the folks don’t think
Like me and you.

But it’s bad to bomb London
It’s bad! It’s bad!
Because it’ll make our woes worse
And the BNP mad.

But it’s bad to bomb London,
It’s bad! It’s bad!
Though surely it’s worse
To be in Baghdad.

But it’s bad to bomb London,
It’s bad! It’s bad!
Though we know it’s unjust
When Blair’s such a cad.

So youngsters remember,
It’s bad to bomb London.

Just forget what we told you,
About where the killers come from.

You being a kaffir,
Is the only excuse I need.

Do as Osama bin Laden says
Or else you’ll get bombed
Do as Zarqawi says
Or some Irish woman will get her head chopped off
And then Michael Rosen will be able to write some doggerel saying
It’s all your fault anyway

Do as George Galloway says
Do as Seumas Milne says
Cos if you don’t
We wouldn’t dream of blowing
Men women black white christian muslims jews up on your tubes
But some well sassy international terror group will
Some group will organize some right on islamist young men
to blow them all apart
And then Michael Rosen will pretend to speak in the victims’ voices and say
It’s all your fault anyway, isn’t it?

What, we’re going to war with China now? Wish I’d got the memo…

Dear Deserving Victim

If you go into other people’s countries
and hoard all their dough
they will burn your children.
You can tell them what you like
You can ask us “If you prick us do we not bleed?”
You can whine about the ‘six million’
But the rule remains:

If you try to forestall the race war
they will murder Sharon Tate
You can tell them what you like.
You can tell us the White album was not the Beatles’ best
You can tell us we are not the messiah
But the rule remains:

If you fail to keep your Burqa closed tight
they will throw acid in your face
You can tell them what you like
You can tell us you are a decent woman
You can beg us not to rape your daughters
But the rule remains:

If you go into other people’s counties
and organize their nigras
They will firebomb your churches
You can tell them what you like
You can tell us we are all children of God
You can beg us not to hang you from the nearest tree
But the rule remains:

If you poke your nose into a mass murderer’s business
and try to make them stop
they will murder you.

O
Wet
 PETN.

The Diameter of the Bomb

By Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.

And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world of the circle.

And I won’t even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

I have a book of poems I wrote in my late teens to early twenties. I have never let them see the light of day, as I have always thought they were sub-standard rubbish. Having read Rosen’s efforts I think my poem about the Tiananmen square massacre is an undiscovered masterpiece.

I’ve read better poetry in the People’s Friend.

We have no mouths
We evaporated
You don’t see the holes in the ground where we were put
We are the unfound
We are uncounted
You don’t see the homes we made
We’re not even the small print or the bit in brackets.
You see less of us than you see of the dust
You see less of us than you see of the wind
Because we were somewhere else,
because we lived far from you,
because our minutes, hours, days and years did not last as long as yours,
because you have cameras that point the other way,
because you talk about other people…
…Of that moment when we went
you can’t even say you missed it.
Nor did you talk about us when Saddam the Indefatigable killed us.
Nor did you worry much about the Kurds then.
Nor about Marsh Arabs.
Nor do you now worry about all of those who voted.
Nor about the Unions.
Nor about the children, your friends whose friends have bombed us
have bombed and will keep on bombing.

Dear Neighbour

If you go into other people’s countries
and bomb them
they will bomb you
that is unless they live in Israel or India or Pakista
or Kuwait or New York or in Turkey
or in Egypt or Paris or Kashmir or etcetera,
in which case they definitely should not bomb you.
You can call them what you like
You can tell us that our cause is noble
You can tell us that they’re evil and we are good
But the rule remains:
If you go into other people’s countries
and bomb them
they will bomb you
in fact anyone who has vaguely heard of them will bomb you,
and not only you but your neighbours and their neighbours
and any infidel fucker who stands in the way.

You can tell us that you’ve flushed out the troublemakers
You can tell us that you’ve neutralised the flashpoints
You can tell us that you’ve sown the seeds of the future
But the rule remains:
If you go into other people’s countries
and bomb them
they will bomb you and be even more righteous in doing so,,
and not only you but any infidel fucker who stands in their way.