Hi man—
OK, I’ll go. I thought I’d go in MacNeice’s rugged antiphon
with its drunk and disorderly rhymes
on the grounds that a form already halfway to broken
might be halfway adequate to the times;
besides, I certainly do not sit in one of the dives
but instead am up with the worms
watching the sunlight soften in a garden slung
between the Sidlaws and the Cairngorms,
up with the crocuses and snowdrops and celandine
that are up so early these years
we must soon change the wheel of the seasons
to align with the broken gears.
Heatwaves at the poles. The days
…Nah. I just don’t have the stomach for pastiche.
I’ll use the line I talk in in my sleep
since sleep is where I try to live these days.
Last night I dreamt the little guy again.
I was looking through his pisshole eyes and saw
my armies multiply and lands increase
and through the greasy thermoplastic windows
my towers tumesce and rise, my gold domes swell;
I saw my marble table yawn, and add
another mile of snow between my hands
and my own death, further away than ever.
Then suddenly I was down the other end
with the germs and free votes, knives and Novichok,
with the thugs and toadies, foremen and machinists
who bear the major offices of state
on the usual grounds that they’ll be shit at them.
And from there, I saw the truth. It’s parallax:
the wee man at the other end was shrinking,
his baby face all purple-black—O quick!
O bring him good news from the front! O tell him
Kyiv has fallen and his father loved him!
I saw exactly what would happen next.
Homunculus. White dwarf. Dead star. Black hole
and then the pause before he hits the button,
then with the radiance of a thousand suns—
My screaming woke up L and both the dogs.
Personally I blame it all on god
or at least the human tendency to place
whoever in the crew’s most like a god
at the centre of the office, team, class, party,
and use their psychopathic certainty
to act as we would not dare otherwise,
for the gods don’t wash away our sins
but our conscience. As order forms around them
we imagine that the gods like hierarchies,
that our hymns will win a high place at the table—
but gods like two things: everything and nothing.
So build his golden bridge, and gloriously.
Let him take the Donbas and Luhansk
and say his superb mission is complete.
The assassins will come now, given time and money.
Or not. Like I’d know. What’s your money on?
No one thinks they’ll ever take Kyiv.
I thought they’d rubblise it like Aleppo
but Russia might remember Stalingrad
and knows a year of fighting street to street
to take a city you don’t even want
will see her gold gone and her grain-bins empty
and the bodies of her young men shit for sunflowers.
Comic relief, at least, at times like this
to see ourselves up on the world stage
as bin-fire Churchill correlates the plight
of the children dead below the bombed-out theatre
in Mariupol marked CHILDREN on the roof
with Brexit, and is “desperate” to go to Ukraine
and be ruminant against its ruined skylines
in his faraway pose, his head full of his dinner,
if anything. I am collecting for his fare.
You see that tweet, him jogging on the beach?
Like a walrus won a holiday at Butlins
but had just been told his shadow was a demon.
What are you watching? I started The Bureau
finally, and a Polish horror thing
on the bike we bought in lockdown. Innocent times.
The algorithm’s tagged me for a sucker
for tales of corporate hubris and comeuppance
and keeps trying to punt me Risk about Assange.
Useful to see the cult shrunk to a snow globe:
the narcissist; the mini-me; the harem
of his doting supply; the childlike seekers;
the outer moons of useful idiots;
the goal whose moral purpose is long lost
in favour of progressively degrading
tests of one’s faith and talent for denial.
Russia always played these narcs like fiddles.
The Moscow Strings: Jools. Trump. Sleepy Cuddles.
Nige. Lebedev was in the fucking room
the night Wormtongue and Alex plumped for Brexit.
Anyway Girls5eva’s good. And Netflix
has all three seasons of Servant of the People
but since the even money’s on Zelensky
being dead by August, I can’t watch it
and I just start crying when I think of him.
I had better stop. One could go on
but in the time I took to write this thing
four outrages have come to pass such as
we used to count whole decades in between.
Being a poet, I’ll start to think it’s me.
(Bono: “Every time I click my fingers
another baby dies in Africa.”
Voice from the back: “Maybe stop doing it.”)
Even in these last four goddamn lines
Navalny has been rendered to some black site
in god knows where and is as good as dead.
But the news is all the wheels are coming off.
The Russian boys are begging food from villagers
while their crap tyres spin in the rasputitsa.
John Sweeney said they brought just three days’ food
to make room in their bags for their parade dress.
The villagers are binding the boys’ hands
for frostbite and sending them back home.
Their ration packs are five years out of date
and tins marked “prime beef” turn out to be dog food
since no good kleptocrat knows when to stop.
The boys don’t know what war is and beg gas
from Ukrainian squaddies like they were their mates
from the next town over and end up PoWs.
One brigade got slaughtered, so the kids
gave up and drove their tank over their colonel.
The boys are too tired to inter their dead.
All militarists agree this is not good.
The boys have no chemsuits, which is reassuring
until you think of Putin, and remember.
My old mum says some dude on Radio Tay
said put your valuables in the microwave.
Since I cannot fit my children in the microwave
and the iodine won’t do us any good
I’ll meet the shockwave headlong in the garden
but as the expert on the chemical life
you’ll want to know a gram of NAC
and one tab of dihydromyricetin
mostly kills the hangover. Tonight, I’ll add
a drop of food-grade hydrogen peroxide
to this middling Waitrose non-organic pinot
to turn the sulphites into sediment
because I have to work tomorrow morning
but need an eight-hour dream without him in it.
Wish me luck. Be safe. Slava Ukraini.
