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.

The HyperTexts publishes nine of my sonnets

 The Hypertexts is a very well-regarded online journal specialising in formal and formalist poetry. To be inculcated into its ranks is a real honour, and I take this opportunity to thank its primum mobile Mike Burch for seeing fit to add my name to the roll.

The nine sonnets which the Hypertexts published this morning are from two sources: Arabic numerals denote sonnets from my completed 155-strong cycle the 'Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian', whereas Roman numerals denote sonnets from the 'Odes, Epigrams, & Further Sonnets', which is an ongoing accumulation. 

Five of the selection are published for the first time, and four have been published previously.

In particular, XVII is the English translation of 141, which is my solitary French sonnet and was published about three years ago in the French Literary Review. 

Here's a link to my Hypertext page.

An extract from Helix Folt the Conservative

 Bristol’s resident Ozymandias is personified in the form of Squalor. This gentleman is theorised in some academically not unrespectable quarters as a (grossly) decadent descendant of the ur-deity Skǖǚllǚǖ, which functions as the chaotic antithesis of the organising principle Llog in the Brislington Book of the Brute. Whatever the truth of the matter, Squalor is by comparison to his peers an easygoing fellow. There is no permanent shrine to him as such, for his church is to be found wherever he is. To this purpose, enthroned on and taking his ease in a supermarket trolley, thus is he wheeled about hither and thither by his hierophants. These holy unredeemable wretches supervise the erection unto his glory of ephemeral shrines - great tottering ziggurats of mildewed cardboard and crushed cans, against which is piled all manner of liquescent and noisome trash, which like the great dunes in the desert is subject to the caprices of zephyrs, and on this account gradually changes over time, sometimes petrifying into gnarled and abhorrent shapes, at other times liquefying and flowing hither and thither in those great tsunamis of toxic sludge which are among the veritable wonders of the age.

The genius loci himself is a quotidian presence in our town, and is at all times to be espied either insensible in his trolley, or reeling about all bemerded and festooned with cans, from which he frequently drinks. This agreeable gentleman makes no objection to being propitiated if it’s rilly not too much trouble, but is not at all particular as to the precise details. Gore is perfectly welcome of course, but so equally are the several other fluids, colloids, cheeses, stools, pukes, the several modes of ethanol, micturitions, and other essences, which go into and come out of that mighty engine, man.

Most wisely and truly is it said that those upon whom Squalor visits his benediction never ultimately profit by it. And this immutable, adamantine, definitional, iron law of nature admits of no exception in the petty case of Ms. Minerva Ledwitch. This afternoon finds this irreproachable matron taking her repose in the domestic Charybdis which, ever egregiously in want of a clean, has bubbled away these numberless years in the back garden of the bungalow in Mangotsfield. Reclining with what grace she can muster amidst the mineral deposits and the algae and the slime, Ms. Minerva Ledwitch assembles and with some deftness maintains upon her head’s frontispiece the several elements of maxillo-facial muscle operation which, when correctly concatenated, convey to the observer a sublime contentment on the part of the observed subject. It scarcely bears remarking that the effect in the present case is supremely horrifying.

The bungalow’s backdoor opens now, and extrudes Mr Don Quicksotte, who commences a furtive sort of scuttling across the lawn to his shed. Drawing level with Charybdis he looks up and, in the act of assembling his own features into his signature watery smile, is turned to stone by the rictus on the Ledwitch face.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going into your shed for,” says sharply that excellent gorgon, without the least alteration to her expression, “the moment you sit down, pound to a penny Cheseham will come to the front door, and you will have to get up and go all the way back through the house.”

“I know dear,” gabbles the booster of wind, “I just thought, you know, the windmill I promised the Inhalis is at rather a critical stage in its assembly, and I rather thought, you know, just snatch a few secs to …”

“I cannot be expected,” says Ms. Minerva Ledwitch with majestic finality, “to traipse through the vestibule in the nude.”

“No dear, of course not.”

Ms. Minerva Ledwitch, not to be deterred, elaborates upon this new theme

“I do sometimes speculate,” says she, “I do sometimes speculate, Quicksotte, as to whether the explanation for your pusillanimity may not be found in Candaulism.”

“Why no indeed dear,” says Quicksotte blinking rapidly, “it is only the Inhalis’ windmill you know, I …”

“Ghastly old pervert,” thunders Ms. Minerva Ledwitch, lifting her form sufficient to expose above the turbid waters a singularly majestic bosom, “go,” saith she pointing a weed-bedecked arm, “go back within and attend by the front door.”

The Aeolus of Mangotsfield smiles then his forlorn, wretched smile and, sighing, about-faces and betakes himself back within the bungalow. This outcome appears to satisfy the Crews Hole Pegaea who, resuming her ecstatic attitude, subsides once more into the moiling turbidity, suffering the mammalian protuberances aforementioned to dance like clashing rocks.