An extract from Book 3 of The Wokeiad

There chances to be, in the queue behind,

A woke phalangist, pompous and unkind,

An uptight pharisee with syringed ears

Who likes to take offence at what he hears.

Just as the shark, when orca wounds his friend,

Does not to mutuality pretend, 1120

Nor scruple entertains about a feast,

But will partake of pancreas at least;

Or much like Saturn eating his own son

- Sliced buttock flash-fried with a wholegrain bun -

The revolution shall devour its own.

Farewell Robespierre, and goodbye O___ J____.

Unleash the mob! Let Twitter grapevine jive!

Let false friends fall away, and frauds connive.

Now J____ emerges furtive from the store,

full bag of groceries hung from each claw. 1130

At once the cry goes up, the view halloo,

As when Antifa’s blackshirts hunt the Jew.

They chase J____ out of Camden and Chalk Farm,

And all Stoke Newington is up in arms.

West Hampstead and Swiss Cottage bar their gates

While Islington acidly deprecates.

There’s nothing in North London for young J____,

And nobody is answering their phones.

To keep Renard from Kilburn and Cheshunt

They delegate the chase to the Woke Hunt: 1140

Gimpsuited Maenads in their bright pink coats

In chariots pulled by “ponies” fed on oats;

Watch as old man with jowls of giant toad

Is forced to canter up the Edgware Road,

The bridle forcing down his forking tongue

As reaching Maida Vale he busts a lung.

And here the fugitive is run to ground

No Cheyne Walk for him, nor Square of Lowndes.

Instead a nasty dirty little box

Smelling of other people’s farts and socks. 1150

They force him out, the huntsmen with their whips,

By yanking on his hipster bugger’s grips.

They shave his hair off with their razors blunt,

Excoriate him as a Tory cunt.

They set a cardboard dunce cap on his skull,

His social credit and his fame annul.

Now ropes to each of his thin limbs are tied,

Attached to “ponies” harnessed for a ride.

Whipped by the jockeys in their gimpsuits gowned,

The old men, blinkered, neigh and paw the ground. 1160

The Master of the Hunt bids them to start

Pulling the Laureate of Woke apart.

Excerpt from The Wokeiad to celebrate the completion of Bk2

Dalek’s dumbstruck, Abottom stands amazed.

Both sing of the Woke Alphabet the praise.

“Who could with good integrity compete

Against an eructation quite so neat?”

So for a third time J____ on dais stands,

An ending happy with relief of hands,

Wokeness approaches bearing bogroll crown,

Skulking abjectly with her ugly frown, 760

And in conclave with her chief hypocrites,

Opinion-formers, sophists, and halfwits,

Crowns J____ the Champion of the Woke Games.

Rejoice, non-binaries! Exult, ye BAME’s!

Now hoist upon your shoulders Squealer J____

Bear him in triumph to his awful throne.

And when he’s finished with the thunderbox,

Vaccinate him against the Wuhan Pox.

They celebrate the Games with a woke feast.

Abundant kale and artificial yeast. 770

Macrobiotic yoghurt, Quorn, wheatgerm,

The fruit fly larvae and the writhing worm.

Surplus of rhubarb wine not sold to Krupp,

Warmed for an epoch in a plastic cup;

Vomit-resembling orange lentil dal,

The virtue-signalling beyond banal,

Rye loaf convincing as a concrete slab,

Halloumi gibbeted on its kebab,

Ice cream of hippies boycotting Israel,

All gluten-free is the organic ale. 780

Dropsical hour arrives for keynote speech

When Hitler L__________ stands up to preach,

Casual anti-semite of hard left,

Of ill repute but still some cult’ral heft,

Cringeworthy egotist who drones for hours,

Raising remorselessly his Babel Towers,

Tsunami of concocted stats, bald lies

Confident nasal tones and shifty eyes.

And as he preaches all the sniv’ling creeps

And Antifa phalangists go to sleep. 790

And as they slumber still the windbag drones

And even vanquishes our hero J____.

No more unto the victor cede the field,

Now victor doth to filibuster yield,

Until that sour late hour when boringness

Subsumes the boor in his own puddled mess.

And as the horloge tolls, the senses numb,

The blue-haired termagents are all struck dumb.

For all except the odd degenerate,

The gurgle and the snore predominate. 800

My pronouns

 Today marks International Pronouns Day. In recognition of this pivotal moment in the history of hupersonkind, I take this opportunity to share my pronouns:-

Notfuck/Ingwoke

Extract from The Wokeiad, my ongoing heroic couplet satire of the toxic ideology underlying identity politics and cancel culture

This time the demon’s course is Eastward set,

Faster than snail but not as quick as jet,

O’er snow-capped mount, o’er desert vast and numb,

O’er palace, project, piggery and slum:

Terra incognita between the coasts

His ignorance of which the wokist boasts.

Wokeness now glides over Miami beach

Where wellness gurus pseudoscience preach

To geriatric dentists and their wives,

Those wan asthmatic martyrs to the hives.

As whale road supercedes the prairie fields,

The nimbus builds and vanquished Helios yields.

Aeolus loosens now his knotted bag,

And the Anemoi from their prison drags.

Mild Zephyr cedes to Boreas the stage,

And Auster vies with Eurus in his rage.

Zeus flings his bolts and furiously raves,

And Lord Poseidon’s trident moils the waves.

Wokeness remorselessly through wind and rain

Grinds o’er first Lusitania then Spain,

Where Helios in triumph late restored

Is by his sky-clad acolytes adored,

Then left at Benidorm and up the coast.

Where basting nudists on the playas roast.

Over the Pyrrenees to soaked Camargue,

The hinterland of France’s nouvelle vague.

Then Paris, pantheon to po-mo spells,

A shrine to Foucault and to Foucault else:

The Tunis Gary Glitter, Humbert of

Bedouin boy, undergrad’s Nabokov;

White polo-neck, bald head, smug pervert grin;

A penis peeping from its peeled foreskin.

Publication of Helix Folt the Conservative

 I am absolutely delighted to announce the publication in paperback and Kindle format of my fifth novel, Helix Folt the Conservative, available on Amazon as of this morning. Helix Folt is a satire of woke left wing antisemitism set in Bristol. Like my other Bristolian novels Amoeba Dick, Pretty Poli, and Odour Issues, it's very obviously a parody of a literary classic, viz. George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical, and features many of the same characters as the other three novels.

Here's a link to the Amazon site. Keep a bucket handy.

Solipsistic reflections on my own formalism, or lack thereof

I'm accustomed to thinking of my verse as formalist. The Montpeliad [Bristol 24/7 c2016] is 620 lines of heroic couplet, and I don't think there are more than three or four deviations into e.g. Alexandrine. The same goes for my ongoing heroic couplet mock epic, The Modern Hudibras. Things are admittedly quite a bit more lax in my Jacobean revenge tragedy, The Senseless Counterfeit, but then again Shakespeare isn't wall-to-wall iambic pentameter. I also experiment with free-verse in The Wasted which however, like the great work of which it is a blatant and egregious parody, reverts back to iambic pentameter and often heroic couplet.

I'm particularly accustomed to thinking of my sonnets in particular as rigidly formalist. That's not to say that I don't experiment with rhyme schemes. On the contrary, although the majority of my sonnets are Shakespearean [i.e. ababcdcdefefgg], I reckon I've written more sonnets with experimental rhyme schemes than Petrarchan and Spenserian sonnets. When I describe my sonnets as formalist, what I'm saying is only  that each sonnet I write consists in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. And what I mean by rigidly formalist is that rhymes are perfect.

So it comes as something of a surprise to discover that I'm not exactly the formalist sonneteer of my imaginings. Consider XXVIII, which is from my Odes, Epigrams, & Further Sonnets - another ongoing accumulation - and is the final item of the nine sonnets published by The Hypertexts last week. To put it in context, it's about a mattress I encountered a year or two ago propped up against a wall in St Pauls, on which somebody had written "nothing mattress anymore".

XXVIII

A Sapphire in the Mud
Inscribed Mattress, Ashley Road, St Pauls, Bristol

Behold the “nothing mattress anymore”
mattress—king-sized, warped, stained, propped up against
damp brick. Beguiling like an unlocked door,
the truth thus written is, without pretence:
this mattress, having lost its function must
no longer as something mattress exist.
Instead, a canvas for a wit’s mot juste,
the mattress bears the koanistic gist
of its own annihilation. Just this once,
one countenances some conceptual art
as something not shat out by blue-haired cunts
with attitude who hold themselves apart.
This thy Upanishad, thy Torah, Tao.
Away to the recycling centre now.

"Must" and "just" are assonant. And "once" and "cunts" takes a certain liberty with the concept of rhyme, which "against" and "pretence" arguably abuse.

It may seem that I'm disparaging my own verse. I'm not. I'm very happy with this sonnet - the vulgarity in line 11 notwithstanding - and am grateful to Mike Burch at the Hypertexts for publishing it. In the present context, regard "abusing the concept of rhyme" as a technical notion without pejorative connotations. I'm just pedantically acknowledging that my deviations from perfect rhyme mean that I'm not as formalist as I thought I was.