Take It Up With Them

I met a communist in the neon hall of commerce known as Sainsbury’s and we chatted about theory near the Argos outlet. 

We preened each other’s bright red wings and we postulated that what Marx did not predict was our collective commitment to self-commoditisation on social media. 

Muskrats, all of us, by committee and by choice, wack.

Don’t ask me

Take it up with him

Catch this, our oh-so-cultured United Kingdom of crumbling hope and broken faces,  in the futuristic twenty twenties.

If you’re on your own at night and you see a lone policeman, you are advised NOT to approach him – and it always is a ‘him’ – but to run away. 

Ugh, that’s not what my mum used to say, man. 

A. C. A. B.:

Take it up with them

I don’t make the rules

Take it up with them

Anyone who wants to be Prime Minister should be immediately disqualified from taking the job.

 Anyone who wants a career as a politician should first serve a two year apprenticeship on minimum wage in a slaughterhouse. 

Anyone who wants to buy a guitar should have a two-month cooling off period, like the Yanks with their cold steel guns.

They’re all unhinged

Take it up with them

When you’re already mouldering in your ruined and blasted-out shell and waiting for this horrendous farrago to end 

Track me finely, chum

Chances are it’s all done, but hey there bucko, what if you could yet groove it up with the seraphim?

Deathbed conversion’s such a beauty of a get-out clause. Cascade through my clouds and swivel your eternal hips to dear God’s disco sounds; he’s a lovely mover.

It’s Pascal’s Wager

Take it up with him

Take it up with them

Take it up with them

I don’t make the rules

Take it up with them

Oh God, Moving Fucking House Again

I’m not gonna say much but

where did all this

stuff

come from? Seriously?

A house can hold way more things than you could imagine.

Taking it all out of cupboards and whacking it in boxes makes the room shrink.

It’s ridiculous. Never move house if you can help it.

I wish I could do what they do in America and

lift the whole kaboodle up from its foundations

whack the entire house – the actual house itself -

on the back of a humungous lorry,

and drive that down the road to the new place.

Plonk it down again where we’re gonna be

And BOSH.

I suppose that you’d have to

put quite a lot of

stuff

in boxes, regardless, wouldn’t you?

Stuff breaks and then it’s not even useful stuff.

When it’s only a bit broken, like maybe a cup with a chip on the rim or a plate with a little crack, should I throw it away? Could anyone use it? I don’t think charity would take it.

Do I go to the tip with it? Doesn’t that seem wasteful?

Is it worse to wrap it up and bring it so it can sit in the new place?

Is there such a thing as emergency crockery? The stuff at the back of the cupboard.

Some of it’s been there for four houses or more.

Sitting there, waiting for its moment.

I doubt that moment will come. So we should get rid.

But what if…?

What if, nothing. I’d happily pay someone

to chuck all this

stuff

in a skip, and start again. Environmental vandal. Scandalous.

Chatbot Hallucinations

You boy

Take fast this cartel document

wait by the phone

somewhere in the multiverse a dollar will ring

I brought along a theremin

to a synth fight

Blue, I slayed in humbucker fishnets

I deliver such honey bunkum,

Oh decorous throat!

Skeletons grinning in the gameshow graveyard

Papa, oh damnation, papa

Danced through work

I wrongly thought I loved that cranky allergy

Cascade up the daybreak tracks exponential

Gasping distasteful air

It won’t remind me why we were testing this time

There’s too much artifice

in intelligence

artifice

in intelligence

Generation Why Me

Dateline: Digital

They claim sacredness is closer than you think

A date at the data centre

Frack and fumble in the wires

Our sweat short-circuiting server rows entwined ratty

My television got stolen

So now all day I place

Numerous objects in the microwave

And watch them go round and round and round and round and round and round and round

why should I fear the bell

South of the Flies

Can someone tell me where all the grown-ups went?

There used to be loads of them.

Towering, they were.

Impossibly tall and always knew what to do.

You could ask them anything and they’d have an answer.

And they bought you comics

When you were ill or sad.

Did they all shrink? Did they all go away?

I’m feeling five years old today. I always was.

If I had to get bigger

why didn’t the grown-ups grow too?

Now I don’t know anything and yet I have to do things.

That’s not true. I know lots of stuff about stuff.

How to cook a meal

Take out the bins

Even how to drive and take the cats to see the vet.

And that’s all OK in its place. I can do that.

But there are lots of things

I don’t want to have to do.

Can someone bring at least one grown-up back?

They must be all somewhere else, on an island maybe.

All drinking cups of tea

And shushing cos the news is on.

That’s where they all are, gigantic and loud and comforting.

Maybe one day I’ll get to go there, too. To that island.

They can look after me again.

They can tell me it’s OK.

I will look forward to getting to that version of Heaven.

Would You Rather: A Fun Game For All The Family

Would you rather be the cause or the effect?

Would you rather be the carrion, or the buzzard circling overhead

with claws congealed in blood and filth and rotting, stinking flesh?

Would you rather be the rush or the regret?

Would you rather be oblivious, or feel the creeping dark ahead

run straight into the walls you built, or face yourself instead?

Would you rather vote for the latest creep, or who wears their suit best?

Would you rather let a liar in cause of the cod-Latin words he’s said

and welcome in the bluster and corruption of another grabbing Eton mess?

If you’re on your own at night and you see a lone policeman, don’t approach him - run away

If you break your leg, you’ll have a ten hour wait unless you’ve cash to pay

When nurses go on strike, you know things have gone badly awry

uh-oh spaghetti Os

I met a communist in Sainsbury’s and we chatted about theory near the Argos outlet

What Marx did not predict is our collective commitment to self-commoditisation on social media

Then again, he was still on MySpace when he was writing Das Kapital

I think Tom helped

Would you rather live in fear of God, or have no faith?

Would you rather live to spurious rules, or feel the cosmic dread

of insignificance to anyone - save a few family and friends?

Would you rather play these games, or forge ahead?

Would you rather be in the multitude relying on food banks for their daily bread?

Will you take up Pascal’s Wager in the moments of your death?

Get Calibrated!

Get calibrated

stack em up

Magnesium zaps through me

gargantuan juggernaut laser burn behind my eyes

Ah, point that finger somewhere else

you’ve got no jurisdiction here

The inside of my head is mine alone

At a time of my own choosing

As I desire and to the fullest extent

I’ll decide to make things strange

It’s strange

I’ll tell you it’s strange

Experimental dosing, GABA receptors on alert

If we are the universe experiencing itself

that’s a shoddy state of affairs at best

Let’s load up. What’s your distraction today?

Gaia’s on ayahuasca anyway

And what about divinity? Could it be for you and me?

It’s all too strange

I’ll tell you how strange

Get calibrated

stack em up

Kick me once more and maybe I’ll enjoy it this time

Barging demons cackling and biting at my nervous system

Ah, let them have at it how they please

Absinth chase me down, stir some butter into my glass

Smooth the road to oblivion, liminal sweetened blur

Cause the Devil’s best work is done on Twitter these days

Synaptic friendly fire forces fate

Tank tracks in my mental mud

Assassins at the blood brain barrier

Make a psychedelic conflagration

I I I

I jumble it all up

I want to make it all strange

I’ll tell you it’s strange

It’s strange

I wanna tell you it’s strange.