England, England (draft/unfinished)

 

Class distinctions in England have always been a matter of higher feeling than national honour, the matter of a feverish but very private debate. 

Evelyn Waugh

Painted pink from pole to pole 

the oubliette Drop City 

boardroom stilts accidental vistas 

shuttering on The Boom’s last word

ideas for a footbridge abiding Glencores

greenwashing & the final Fatal Tree

is made from copper-nickel alloy

bling encased for sheer profligacy, 

enclaves glottalling Long gelded

estuary unfencibles

for king’s head 

to keep land inviolate

yobs-end natter

plant life the cubic grey

over-reach of imperium

in open lapwing wet asphalt

as it beautifies out all the quiet zones 

from faces on the job search 

for a hope bigger than a boxed in visage

you bend to gapping stars 

that rime goes opaque in

air of ruckling counterpanes 

rent-off this mortised rim the city allies

peel away under Leadenhall

antiquated think-tanks welch

a Union Jack on piled biscuit tins,  

from Cherry-Garden a last sigh of

mobbed lettings nothing much 

left now but a saturnalia bough 

as high as uninhabitable 

zoned backward 

& The London Plan where are my eyes  

rising bending the secret parts of us

faces turned grey wealed earth 

‘no-fault’ evictions under section 21  

 ‘I just want my property back’, 

 this laissez-faire bonfire night. 

An opportunity area digs 

itself rond-points; overwork death

in the royal parks surviving 

a tortured lie link by link 

jerked star-draught bewitching the 

stimulus lament, forlorn pale white ash 

around this husked perimeter mystagogy

of wework outside Aviation house 

the feeling effects of downdraught 

sprawled in office blood clobber

the horizon keysteps from this bed of 

knocks a diagram of our life  

murdered on cotched bramble heads

you are still gripping the lamina 

outside my sublet sinecures 

reading what little legal entitlement 

we have this unleavened cake

the universal system of pauperism

this panacea soliloquy, 

squeezing the plughole 

you have been forgotten 

In a One Nation Britain

washed hollow of lob

rentiers breathe over a culture of dependency 

the prime shrill

shitflickers & the phenomenon of humanisation –  

night’s fall for ambuscade

tangled in the rigging 

of it is widely flown ownership 

a stand-alone flag 

within the territory 

shielding acrid vexillum 

morphology has been made concrete

they stand forming now 

all the while my heart undoes

nap-pods in the dark vertical gardens 

remember County Hall scoured to Shrekworld 

remember countermanding last minute 

memos remember the viewing corridors 

& its rare indivisible Lightshard

bilges over capital

panorama risoed until dim flicker. 

to fade a termination of hope 

hybrid glass hill-edged,

jack-spiked in brownfields again.  

Tonight, the city id is buried 

strata of contamination 

another kind of heat

a zone within a zone; 

a cylinder of How Shall I live?

Doctor Philosophiae thorax over parish

so long fed off silk linings

& sincere mums thatch the pockmarks 

of class hatred shadows for sale

sybarite vanguards dozing in their fist-grips 

on night empty rain

dazed insurgency

down the rockery pink gravel 

& music of their promotions! 

Eddie Stobarts Class Alliance announces: 

‘London is full of people

leaving their homes’ 

a fugitive of lullabies pamphleting

to Metro clubmen 

between me & the gale 

are civil ores.

Zuirch 2016 (draft/unfinished)

 

A most insatiable covetousness, divided that among themselves with which all the rest might have been well supplied, are far from that happiness that is enjoyed among the Utopians; for the use as well as the desire of money being extinguished. 

Thomas More 

Zurich behind a rust packet 

my cacodylic eye spent 

collapsed to turbulent 

tectonics of bumps, 

kidney shaped abscesses

curling black lids fading shells

exploding firebox all screws 

& bolts dead 227 figures 

meant for Linz Entartete 

Tyrol locks Germania 

in a thousand springs 

on Bahnhofstrasse 

unconditional Basic Income

scolded Schlaraffenland 

underneath the light there is always

intervening on the ground 

under the pie-tree

so filched another rent rising 

to clear pales dapple-greys 

all but rain between the buildings & 

you settle wet wrapt’d churning 

this sodden silent aperture

on tumuli Blancpain ditch of frogs little accelerators 

for new virtues 

the waking harborage 

of masseuse chairs in Hauptbahnhof 

are actual police hidden between 

proxy codes wire to wire 

the noises it makes

living pissed out communiques

the doctrine & filigrees 

of your finest truffles 

from Kernzone buried in Heimplatz, 

guarded by probers

secrets wrapped in amice rust 

& muted song bedsporned 

this cultus of medicine 

is cruel paste trespassing 

reuptakes & so I go again 

into this suffering city. 

'The Blessings of Tony Blair' (draft/unfinished 23/11/23)

Another hone on taste,

parades red fusses 

& the monks poise

professional managerial class

is dayblue in turning trite

manifestos out logheads

we can’t read at the Ability Grouping table

remember the enfranchising

curtain to the future society 

is logscales & falling levity 

blighting all things big & bright

you can see from the fading market share

friendships that ruck

in the gelded hellscape,

rake on consignments nub

or, at best, like an estate child's

cursed leaven.

Walter Mitties in the chapbooks again

marshaled coteries a slogan

that you & I know

for the kinder noughties phishing out 

'The Blessings of Tony Blair'

hallowed light

against you & the eyes watched

broken piling the last stars paled

by an invisible hand.

The Darkening Green (draft/unfinished)

 Every direction has its attendant devil and their safaris weren't conducted on the bosses' time. For what they were hunting is certainly never tame. And, for the poor, is usually illegal. 

Thomas McGrath 

Under orbitals single rung 

London’s tourtière 

little pieces blessed Muggletonians 

found in bright reams 

crossing onto black tarmac 

& songing each tilted

for ears dispatch crowned out over 

the last jarring expansion jolt 

this peculiar English heresy 

fulminated against the law 

diamond grinding in the mulberry 

weeping for Paddingtons Speight, 

the area where a body hanged 

for six days his face pervades eaves

in my memory ornate terracotta ridges 

British Transport Police 

the buzz of the office 

& towers steep slate, 

its four-hipped from below

a straggling place 

to sit on burning metal corrugations

teeth on bars on ledges 

for a sundown leadenness 

which London Stone 

privately owned publicly rended 

you can sit on what withered 

green timber of pub yokes 

what dotty oak & thin staves 

flat hoops rolled over bluebells, 

poppies & lupins of meum & tuum 

I stand on a very narrow ledge 

of typhoon Butterfly World, 

safeguarding insects 

to commit the pogo

out of necessity under orchard boughs

falling to its dapple grey sky 

built to canalise a bad country 

When will it turn? good splendor 

when will the price of it

come down? on Old Kent Road 

not dissected to rind on our teeth 

outside broadbacked old picking 

in a circle of merged plastics.

Mark Stone/Mark Flash AKA Mark Kennedy as a School-Girl, 2022

 

35cm x 45cm

Oil on Expensive European Canvas

Mark Kennedy was an undercover police officer who used the name Mark Stone in his infiltrations of the climate protest movement and was known as 'Flash' to campaigners. He was exposed as a police officer in October 2010 and in January 2011 after wide media coverage he went public with his story in a Mail on Sunday interview.