Sonnet progress

I've so far written 52 sonnets of my projected total of 155 - Shakespeare wrote 154; see what I'm doing?

Here are a couple of relatively recent efforts. 43 seems to be some kind of attack on ivory tower relativism, and 47 ridicules the vapid raptasticness of Kate Tempest:-

Sonnet 43

Reason suborned by shallow sentiment;

old culture chloroformed, hog-tied and gagged;

facts executed, and their corpses dragged

through lecture halls of Anglia and Trent.

Truth twisted on the relativist’s rack;

philosophy traduced, and maimed, and marred;

poor questions begging in the seminar;

and beauty drowning in a lake of cack.

The march through institutions, once begun,

acquires momentum, grows unstoppable.

So logic’s murdered and is beastly dead,

and Gramsci’s parasitic worms have won.

Sleep now, brainfart, and dream of shitting bull,

for nothing else exists inside your head.

Sonnet 47

That trite millennial aerial, Tempest

channels, inevitably, Caliban.

It lies beneath her dignity to scan

her adventitious rhymes - a palimpsest,

whose artificial patois has effaced,

beneath a sediment of right-on grime

(Cultural Marxism’s squalidest crime),

high culture’s faintest unregarded trace.

Eternal shame of cringing TV pimp,

of fawning critic, slave to passing fad,

of coked-up literary copraphage!

That agency’s limp-wristed PR gimp

should lavish praise on something quite so bad

marks the degeneracy of the age.

Publication of the Twisted50 anthology, featuring my story Lolitasaurus

Chris Jones and his colleagues at Create50 have been so good as to include my short story Lolitasaurus in their inaugural Twisted50 anthology. This will be out on Kindle in the next few days, with a paperback edition to follow in a week or two. Here's a link to their website.