Carnival

Viscous
As the sweet cast off of slavery's crop
Streets bloom
To the tap of taught skins
Traditions
Of summer's end. The flotsam
Of irregular masses
Jam through bottlenecks
Stone and brick
Set by empire's architects
Sun high and rich in sweat.

Amidst a deluge, rivulets push
Hard as roots
The crush, flesh dripping
Reverberates, knots and dissipates
To star-shaped, can-handed
Dancers at the break
Of Portobello, where peppered
Fluorescent yellow jackets
Are placed in shade
By rackets
And fountains of feathers
Lazarus winged,
Every colour of rainbows
And all those dug from the earth.

The grand terrace's embrace
Sprouts bromeliads of bass, apes
“Where's Anna” swing
From every fissure
With flags beyond three colours
“Portugeas?” The breeze
Howls of happiness
“Every year I” wafts
Of sweet bud, flourishing melody
“Going next door” caramelised
Meat, percussion and spice
Scale whitewash
Darwinian.

From the passage between
The Groves
Teeming like Victoria
Grow great, twice transplanted boughs
Towering Teaks, Ziggurats and Baobabs
Old as Saxon, proud
Keystones of a lively sea, glittering
And painted. An Amazon

Then shadows wake on rooftops.
Beats have blended bars into hours
Sychronised strangers to friends
Pots bubble thick and
The prowling yellow coated pride
Amongst anonymous affection
Begins to stalk.
Keystones creak and stutter
Each stillness
Shows the undergrowth of voices
Naked. The skittish herd paws tarmac
From confusion
To purpose with each rebirth
Pitched. Horns ask questions
Rally whistles, the glowering cats
Pause, lick lips and slink 
As they summon to dare, pushing
The revelling West, the herd
And the rest into musical chairs.

Berimbao
Coagulates. Day blurs and lights
Make up the throng
Scraping steaming pots
Of song. Echoes in silhouette
Sway long after Elephants
Have drifted, one leg after the other,
The final leg back.
Jetsam of polystyrene, blue plastic
Spent rounds
Paper, fluorescent jackets rest in blind
Roads. Incandescents hum
Under canopies
Still standing. The shilling, curried secrets
Barrels cradled, somewhere
In the triangle, retread, hollowing
Till the last drop
Desert sand returns, faces from the night, arid stones. Shrinking
Springs succour Bedouin, long through blackness to daylight.

The streets will wake, forgetful and washed
Plus no one got killed in West London I hear
This year was a good year.

Looking back

Across the dale the woollen hills
Are ambered from the sinking sun
Sky, peach sweet and summer ripe
Pours a blush upon all that's done.

I trod this morn, the trail I watch
The spun hill soft with dusk
The loud cavalcade to supper settled
A life away from long day's rush.

The trail's trials, the slaver sun
The noisome cage of knotted oak
Are drenched and glassy distant now
All errors seem a joke.

The sweat stung scratch that branches cut
The scorched cast chest and threats of flies
Leave seasoned, loosened skin
Downy limbs and lidded sighs.

The boot that caught the twisted root
The kilns of fire beaten feet
Yawn lace agape in yard soaked gold
Like two hounds lying sound asleep.

Spent, the echo of curse and cry
Now lies in feathered forest
As sediment with songthrush calls
Below the breezy crest

For all the struggle along the track
The rasp as treads rake spitting dust,
The path dry, treacherous is in relief
An undulating bed of hush

A loosened thread, minor yarn
Sub-plot in a play of light
Shadow-steeping, the dyer's hand
Folds land slow till left to sight
Are keeping scenes mind kens worthy
In the shallows of the night.

What if they hadn't shot King?*

"In the end the struggle is not between people at all, but a tension between justice and injustice. Nonviolent resistance is aimed not against oppressors but against oppression"
Stride Toward Freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King

What if the dark depths of prejudice
Hadn't spat a bullet, bloodstained
The single garment of destiny.

What had Dr.King lived
Counselor to schizophrenic America
Great beacon light of hope
Through ominous clouds of inferiority
Through the deep fog of misunderstanding
Moving towards the goal of justice
with calm reasonableness and wise restraint.

What if King still led
Veterans of creative suffering
Still encouraged the disinherited children of God
to sit at lunch counters
Unafraid of the word "tension"
Make bridal suites of jail cells
And love the perpetrators of the unjust system
Deluging "I-it" relationships
In his mighty stream.

Would he succumb to the tranquilising drug of gradualism,
Acquiesce and thus become as evil as the oppressor
His legacy an endless reign of meaningless chaos
A desolate night of bitterness.

Would he be a victim of interposition and nullification
In the storms of persecution
And flames of withering injustice
Such that his cup of endurance could not overflow.

What would he dramatise that it can no longer be ignored
What just and unjust laws
How long the conscience of the oppressor sleep deprived
By the legitimate and unavoidable impatience
Of non-violent gadflies,
Roused with not threats, but facts of history,
This indescribably important destiny.

To what noble heights
Could he have risen, an American Solon
With the natural medicines of air and light
Moving men from mental ruts
Unshackling brothers smothering in the airtight cage of poverty
Opening funtown to coloured children
This extremist 
Working as if it were a possibility next morning
To lift the inescapable network of mutuality
To the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood

And in winning freedom
so appeal to your heart and conscience
that he won you in the process.

"Possibly the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremeists"Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King

*The words in italics are those of Dr. Martin Luther King

Carcino-colonialism

Guns, germs and steel
And missionary zeal
Once raised our flag
In foreign fields.

Then the baton passed to banks,
Then MTV,
Now they tell people
That they can be free.

The new game in town,
The brand new vision,
Dupe people into thinking
They make the decisions.

No need to fox them
With broadcast Television,
Sow seeds in the feeds
And reap the fruits of division.

Studied terror and chaos,
Now cold cowards envision
A new type of conquest,
Carcino-colonialism.

II.

A complex recipe

Take a culture
And bombard it with free radicals
Till they corrupt the machinery
Connect the cells and feed them energy
Nourish with blood, till the host society
Multiplies tumour cells indefinitely.

Start with the lethargic,
Sclerotically corrupt
Despot the world forgot.
Mix fictitious avatars, amateur journalists
Food prices, camera phones
And a call to resist.
Inflate.
Serve on web space, backed by hackers
Fuel hate
Till there are visible cracks
Add special ops, sanctions and air drops,
A consensus course
For diplomats to plot.
Level the playing field
Wait,
Till flavours of global hegemony permeate.
Garnish with a representation of Democracy
Reserve a complicit military
For reasons of economy
Slake the thirst of your company
With tap broke state.

III.

Carcino-colonialism.

A virulent mutation of the imperial dream
Bastard offspring of Howard Dein's method
And Donald Rumsfeld's schemes.
So there's a Twitter account
For every thirty Tunisians
And US Air Force veterans
Blog as arrested
Damascus lesbians.
Masked men in Misrata
Are still going out after
Dark for closed courts
While NATO pumps Chinese investments
In East Libyan ports.

Now we're told of Friday Prayers in Homs
Played the thud of heavy guns
Told to worry about Iran
Not where free Syrian arms come from
Not who's connecting the comms.
As wrong, as it is murky
Slice the pie for the strong
And they might not find four and twenty
Thanks giving Turkeys.

IV.

The end of Bo Xilai days
Were always going to play
Out in public one way
Or the other.
Now it couldn't be easier
To circumvent state media
Once you've got a police chief,
Debriefed about the beef in the fiefdom
Put the facts in bytes
To they release or do you leak them.

There's a new game in Town
I hope everyone's listened
Don't go missing the tricks
Of Carcino-colonialism.

Canada Geese

The streets are heaped with grey snow
Some days ago
It settled in a shower of innocent smiles
And childhood passtimes
Delicate, joyful and soft.
That snow is lost.
A few walk the rocks
Swaddled in slow nervousness,
Beneath the Gull's screech,
Life is on hold
In brown scaffolds
And frozen ground.

Months ago
When the flames came to the trees
And nights turned from steam to wind
I watched the geese circle
A flotilla of foghorns
Bellow beating the air
Tugging to adventure
Far, more bracing climes.

Face upturned and feet earthbound
I watched them flock and go
And as the grey sets in the snow
I would that I had followed.

Speak not of roses

Speak not of roses when you talk of my love
For she is kinder than a flower of thorns
She carries no barbs to wound in your hug
Nor sits as winter sticks forlorn.

My love ne'er spites with clapsed closed buds
Her petals proud and face forever blooms
Her wise roots tap not the blood rich mud
Evercoloured beyond one sweated June

There is no sickly scent to suffocate
A curious close pressed nose
She lies not idle in staid estates
Oh name her not a common rose.

Gather all the flowers upon this earth
They make not half of my love's worth.

Valentine for A

Heron,
My summer lover
And memory of youth
Sing me a second's harmony
From your tuned strings
Resonate
For just a slowed half step
A shutter snap remembrance
Lest we forget
The romance,
The wind from the thoroughfare
Lifting your hair
An embrace by
Empire's memorial gates
The high August skies
And the cliffs of brick we fled
For the Queen's gardens
Which you lit
Like some piece of fallen heaven
As we rolled woll bail bodies
Through short fused freedom.

Democratise Taxation, the short web version

There is a crisis, a crisis in the way politicians spend our taxes. A crisis made from making the super-rich richer and waging war for US interests.

Our government misleads us, Mr Blair over Iraq, Mr Cameron over the NHS.

One simple reform could address this, participatory budgeting, the involvement of citizens in spending decisions. We all pay tax, and if we pay tax we should have a say in spending.

We have the means to restrain our government from Trojan horse policies and using legislation and subsidies to pay back political donations - a democratisation of taxation.

We already have the tools to enact this reform. The internet.

For each to be sure their taxes are spent in line with their values and the views of all voters count; election manifestos should contain budgets and voters should have the right to adjust their share of the budget that goes to each policy.

We can mandate individual policies through participatory budgeting. We can democratically fund policies and end the incitement to profligacy in the civil service that stems from having to spend or hand back a budget within the year.

We can make public services more responsive and efficienct by using information from the consumers of those services, from voters.

Consent for taxation is the most ancient cornerstone of British Democracy. It is a right signed into the Magna Carta in 1215.

It is time to replace our spluttering, steam driven democracy with a more responsive, finely tuned, digital democracy.

We now have inexpensive ways to get consent from taxpayers directly. We do not have to be “represented” by politicians, or accept their manifestoes a la carte, or tolerate their broken promises. We should call out “no taxation without allocation”

We should write a modern Magna Carta, for 800th anniversary of the original, use particpatory budgeting to make our government more true to the title ‘Democracy’.

And stop politicians squandering our taxes on wars and bankers.

A democratisation of taxation

EXTRACTS

In 1215 the British Crown signed the Magna Carta and committed that taxes would not be raised for war without the consent of those who pay. In the last ten years the nation has been led into war on a fictional pretence and there is a crisis in the direction of our collective resources.

800 years on we need to reapply the principles of democracy in the context of a profound change in information processing and distribution so that we can refocus our politicians on the interests of citizens, rather than the demands of the global elite.

We can do this through participatory budgeting, through involving citizens in the spending decisions of government, and with this reap the benefits of incorporating the local knowledge, expertise and values of citizens to make government more responsive and efficient.

We can remake the Magna Carta for the wider group of citizens in modern, digital society and unleash a new age of progress.
..................................

With all the possibilities to inform, include and interact with citizens, is it right the government enforces compulsory taxation in exchange for the this pallid pretence at representation. Are we not being sold short. If there is some social contract with the people, is it not about time we revisited the wording; examined whether the state was making good its obligations given the possibilities of today.

When tax was collected in metal and Hansard a work of arcane glyphs the government could be forgiven not consulting every voice, not making plain its business across the whole nation. But today, is publishing Hansard on the internet a sufficient response to the opportunities presented by the digital age. Could we not do more to use these now ubiquitous technologies to reshape government of and for the people.

Just as the Barons of the realm understood the natural belligerence of power hungry and with the Magna Carta forced King John to consult when raising taxes for war, and just as the Americans called no taxation without representation, asking whether they should pay for English sons to drink blood on foreign soil, we are faced again with a Crown that misleads the nation into war and coddles vested interests. We are again forced to question whether the state is abusing it’s tax raising powers. Whether some are whispering seductions in the ears of our leaders and causing them to exploit their subjects.

But thanks to the efforts of our forefathers we are citizens not subjects. And when we as citizens ask these questions and faced with the evidence, look for remedies; we can see decisive new tools unavailable to the Barons of King John. The people of those times understood that the way to rein in a state galloping towards despotism is through control of resources and now in our time we can refashion the bit and bridle not with paper and steel, but with copper, coltan and silicon.
.........
~Illegal wars on fictional pretences require our taxes to wage, the orangeries of moral hazard in which we house finance require that trillions are burnt to maintain their climate. And I ask, would our governments have behaved differently if we had a say in the spending. Would the war in Iraq have been fought if, rather than shifting around pots of cash in the black box of the Treasury, Mr Blair actually had to ask those who pay taxes to fund it? Quite possibly not. This is what the Barons knew when they forced King John to sit at the table with quill and ink and sign the Magna Carta.

Now almost eight hundred years on we need a modern Magna Carta. For wars are fought without the consent of those who pay for them and this is a violation of the most ancient element of British Democracy. A right signed onto paper in 1215. The time has come to free these rights from paper, from their prison in the archives, find them again where they have been mislaid in the corners of our mind. Each of us should call upon this right again, so that we can remake our government. Replace the rusting mechanics of our spluttering steam driven democracy with a more responsive, digitally controlled, budgetary democracy. Make a Magna Carta fit for the digital age, for mass society and economy. That states, just as the original, that if government seeks to wage war it must first have the consent of those who pay.
........




VII.

And all this can be bought about with some simple changes. Just by publishing the government’s budget on the HMRC website and adding an interface with a way to toggle allocations up and down. But while the technical changes are straightforward, the political changes are complex. For those who lust for power are seldom motivated to give away their prize once they have consummated their lust. Rather they would, if left alone seek an ever greater grip on power. And this of course, is why we periodically refresh our leadership before they become absolutely corrupted.

But now we are faced with the task of rebalancing the distribution of power, a task in which we must be successful or our children’s children will walk bent backed under the enduring weight of the greed of the current elite. Thankfully, participatory budgeting is a transparent reform. An obvious measure to anyone who appreciates the possibilities of the web. A change in step with the zeitgeist. But it is likely that those in power will be horrified, see the change as a threat and do their best to remain as blind to the possibilities; talk as turkeys do in November.

But we should shine the spotlight on participatory budgeting. Give it centre stage in the twenty first century enlightenment. Emblazon it’s successes across all areas of public debate. Make obvious its affinity with the ancient principles of our democracy, with the Magna Carta, with universal suffrage and with the efficiency of consumer led resource allocation.

We should demand participatory budgeting as an obvious natural right. We should appeal to the straightforward common sense of every man and woman that they pay tax, so they should have a say in spending. Make the obvious point that consent for taxation has been the cornerstone our democracy since its foundation and that we now have straightforward and inexpensive ways to get this consent directly. We should demand that we are not forced to live with nineteenth century governance in twenty-first century society. Demand the spirit of the Magna Carta is applied and our democratic rights recognized in a modern context. And make good these demands in the reorganisation of our government.

And the prize would be a step change in the deployment of our collective resources comparable to the original restraint of monarchies. The prize would be a government for the people, a government where our leaders must show competence and integrity in their endeavors, and are restrained from showering their courtiers with favours. A government in which all voices are heard and weighed equally. And we have the tools to make such a government at hand, and it is necessary that we use them.

For there is an enormous crisis in the direction of our collective resources, in the imperial agrandisement of foreign powers and the enrichment of the super-rich. And the current means we have of controlling our collective resources have quite clearly been inadequate. There are few alternatives within our democracy, and it is structured in a way that makes our representatives more accessible to lobbyists than the people who vote for them. So while we need to make changes in response to our new economy and society, the changes that are made favour the few, the precious few. And rather than the great majority benefiting from the huge increases in productivity and accessibility brought about by the information revolution, the gains are falling to a global elite that have captured the minds and levers of power.

But we have some ancient principles to guide us forward. We have principles that the state should be beholden unto its citizens and that there should be consent for taxation. We have an understanding of the effect of power upon those who wield it. And we have new means with which to apply these principles and understandings.

We have the means to gather local knowledge, distributed expertise, individual preference and use these in combination to more efficiently direct our collective resources. The means to re-enfranchise all those whose loosing votes are cast away. The means to curtail misrepresentation, Trojan horse policies and use to the state to pay back political donors; to make state spending a better reflection of our individual wills in combination, to make our government more true to its title of Democracy.

This could be done through participatory budgeting, through a recognition of the natural rights of citizens in a modern context. It could be done on the HMRC website, in time for the next general election, in 2015, on the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta. Let us make a such a modern Magna Carta, fit for a new millennium, so that our children’s children, rather than cursing our greed, will laud our wisdom, just as we today laud the Barons of King John, the course that their actions set in motion and all that it has done for us. Let us not leave as our legacy the decaying relics of once great nations, buried empires, a derelict democracy, sclerotic and spluttering, fit only for enrichment of private and foreign powers.

Let us instead reawaken the principles led us first to enable the capabilities of all our citizens and seize our taxes from the greed of monarchies and mercantilists. Let us reawaken the genius of western governance that is our inheritance, let us apply this genius afresh with modern tools, with computer, the internet, with video and data-warehousing. Evolve our governance so that it is fit for our times, for the pace of change, for the integrated world.

And I can see no better measure. No change so simple and accessible and yet so profound. Nothing so straightforward that would make the state more efficient and responsive. No measure that reflects the principles of democratic government in a digital age better than a democratisation of taxation, better than online participatory budgeting. And if you agree, then let us take our voices to the halls of power and make them ring with a remade cry, no taxation without allocation, those that pay should have a say, and make a modern Magna Carta fit for our age.

My Books

Valentines and Romantic verse - Buy this book, or look inside on Amazon

Political verse - This has some genuinely original material in. Buy it on Amazon

Why I'm going to St.Paul's

There are times in the life of all us, normally in childhood, when we come to realise that the myths that we’ve been raised on, the narratives and convenient fictions; Father Christmas, the Tooth Faerie, the Stork, are false. Moments when we realise that what we held magical is nothing more than the actions of people more powerful than us, working in a world that we must grow to understand. This is how I feel about money.

For a long time I thought money was “stuff”, a pre-existing thing, a commodity. And as we all chugged up the hill of last decade’s debt bubble I begrudgingly bought the arguments that the denizens of the Square Mile’s glass plated towers were a special breed, an energetic intelligentsia working a great alchemy on the world’s resources.

Then, bubble full, we crested the hill and as it burst and the capital markets dropped precipitously away, the landscape became clear. No longer is money a thing, something dug from the ground as gold or sterling silver, something hard won from the bowels of the earth, it transcended metal long ago and now has transcended paper. Now money is just magnetic patterns captured on cobalt and ferrous oxides, patterns created and altered with a keystroke in particular institutions, producing IOUs to which we all adhere.

For me, the magic of money evaporated with each round of conjuring. Each spectacle of waist-coated, grey-haired men presenting from behind polished tables, each new round of tricks pulling more billions out of the hat. So that now the creation of money seems more like a circus act, a conjuring trick. Even a material notion of money exposed as chimerical.

It has become clear that money is a convention. A convention in which each unit of currency originally represented a promise. Promises which persist and can be passed among us. And if we investigate the origin of these promises, we can trace relatively few back to workings of government and central banks. The printing presses of nations provide little more than the snow cap on the mountain, little more than the icing on the cake which we seek a better way of dividing.

At the birth of these promises we find bank debt. We find mortgages, credit cards and loans. Promises of private institutions, made good because somewhere they have more money than each particular loan taken separately. But they make these promises again and again on the understanding or gamble, that no more than a few percent of their clients will call on their promise at once. A gamble so bold and profitable that 97% to 99% of the money in circulation originates from private banks in the form of debt. Money created not by miners, manufacturers or sage men in waistcoats, but by private bureaucrats, bank managers and financiers. The great mountain of currency created through contractual bondage at the touch of a button.

If you were to take the same idea onto Dragon’s Den: take one person’s cash for safekeeping and then assign the same deposit to ten or twenty people as debt, on the gamble that all the creditors won’t come calling at once, you would be arrested for fraud. But in bygone days the Crown bestowed banking licences on a few select institutions and these institutions have been conjuring currency at a stroke every since.

When we examine how these institutions use this extraordinary privilege we may not be surprised, but most are appalled, because we find that half of all the money they create, fifty percent of their turnover, is paid out as wages to their staff and the bulk of that to a small portion of professional gamblers and big contract salesmen. Something approaching fifty percent of the world’s money supply going to not more than a small town’s worth of people, all from the privilege of the trust we place in their keyboards.

And while some of this vast wealth was putatively trickling down, it seemed the politics of envy to challenge the mountainous accumulations. Just jealousy of an occupation we did not understand. But now the very same institutions that claimed they were rational and beneficent have come to the general taxpayer, and even to pensioners and the unemployed, to guarantee their very existence and guarantee with it the luxurious living of a handful of their staff. The great money factories have come saying that it is rational for us to sacrifice a generation, to dismantle the extra market services in education and health that have paved the road to the prosperity of so many, to serve the continued gluttony of so few. Rational on what premises and for what purpose I ask.

For when one person’s gains place no burden on another it is envy to call for them to be curtailed. But when a person guilty of mistakes calls for others, less rich, to bear the burden of these mistakes so that they can maintain vast disparities of privilege, it becomes an injustice and a natural affront to humans, however you conceive them.

The current arrangements are pouring so much of general taxation into the hands of private institutions, private institutions that dismiss talk of social purpose as irrational and hand the fruit of taxation to the already rich; and all as a cost of saving these same institutions from bankruptcy. Such arrangements raise questions not from miserly or base emotion. Questions arise from concern that the costs of grand misjudgments are falling not on those who made them, but on the innocent and the innocent children of the innocent. Such that to question the position of the cooks, let alone how the cake is divided, can no loner be fended away as the politics of envy because it is so clearly the politics of justice.

I ask, if there are institutions that have the power to create money and give it to whom they please, is it right that they are all in private hands, working for private purpose? Would some diversity in their ownership and purpose provide a new tool to resource socially useful activities and address some destructive patterns in current resource allocation? Can we create decentralized institutions that allocate resources, which are directed by a broader set of values than simple greed?

I am not alone in asking these questions, many others within our democratic societies ask the same question, but the elite seem to be of a single mind, united around the historically rather unoriginal idea, that the 99% should sacrifice for opulence of the 1.
And while the agents of finance were swift to grasp the implications of the information revolution, and civil society were too, governments and offices of power act as if world still runs on paper. Governments have been slow to create channels for citizens to pose, even less get serious answers to questions. They have been slow embrace the democratic possibilities of the information revolution.

There have been some window dressing initiatives, but the substance of policy, they make plain, must serve the markets. But markets represent little more than the concerns of the rich and the greedy, and when I last looked, they did not have a vote in our constitution. Yet finance has bought seats at the table of power through providing 45% of Conservative party funding, and now those who should be our representatives stand up and claim to represent the market.

And that is why I’m going to St.Paul’s

When the light returns

And when at last my light returns
What will I have learnt?
What twit, to who
Will I tell
This so pissed it's worth apologies?
What will I have learnt?
Not grace, but elegies
Not arias or dance or any arts
Worth students.
It will return,
At least the rudiments
A spark,
For fuel some foolish passion
Like dry grass.
But what of setting oak from dark.
Just a spark,
A spark
All that it can light is grass.
What passion could be gas
Or peat or coal,
Renew my soul,
Just sparks flying
And all so cold.
Where before a fire burned
I tire and I hurt
And if my light returns
What will I have learnt?

Have I declared my love

Have I declared my love of late
With trumpets, gongs and a genocide of roses
Have I sworn I have no heart
Save the heart I gave to you

Have I proclaimed in boldest song
There is no love upon this earth
That could show itself as true,
That could claim such title,
Beside the love I have for you.

If not, shall I leave it alone
Suggest that cupid rest
And turn the ochestra of cherubs home
Now that once again you've come
And could be close enough to hold.

Those who should be dead

Blessed are those undead
Who walk the icy limbo
Above our supplicant mass.
We sacrifice,
Our young
Give up to hungry wraiths,
To those who should be dead.

Oh unholy,
Those who should be dead
But through our sacrifice
Live on.
They haunt the great mountains,
The looming, bleeding fires
The ghoulish chorus
Of their legions deafens

“Pay double, pay again
For the imperfections of your worship
For the excess of incense and censers
You have lavished
So that we may dance
The precipice
And not slip to timely death
So calamitous.

Pay double, pay again
Carve the haunches
Of your bellowing, sacred cattle
And offer up unto us.
Satisfy us with sacrifice
So that we might again suckle
On rich saturated life.”

Profligate in our offerings
They curse
Penance must be paid
For we have witnessed the sins
Of these ghosts,
We know sin,
And in our penitent worship must become
More as imitations of them
Grey, bonded and thin
And sacrifice our young
So these gods might live again.

For the Atlantic

She had turned straw to silver
Made her own crown
And strode a field of buttercups
In a scarlet velvet gown.
I fell for her then
Without recognising
I was falling again.

She was full time at play
A sensitive vocation
Pointed the way
Over the style by the side of road
Into nature's creation.

She sipped at me
Delicate and careful
Not to leave her lips a gloss,
We talked of who she was
How I might be
I thought of how things lost
Are found
Looking over the valley
I know I'm older now.

When our words first danced
To the crescendo of young ideals
I was spoilt and cavalier
My words neon, indiscrete
And without ears
Our sentences, insensitive
Squashed each other's feet.
If I tripped then
I never called it falling.

So when we met again
Somewhere in my valleys
She didn't know me
So she claimed
Hid in innocence
Of ignorance, played
A merry game
And blamed semantics
Had some man
But for the Atlantic,
Her eyes
Charming even the sofa
I wouldn't know her
As one
Who I had fallen for
For days.

Long after I realised
We met amid hills
That rolled together as lovers
On over the horizon
I didn't recognise
Her who I once stumbled on
Not from the door
Where I admired
How she orchestrated harmonies
Made musicians
And called two tribes to unison.
Crowned, she shared
Then I knew her name.

When the games began
We played the wind
Between our bodies
Like an instrument
The Atlantic,
Her eyes explained
So we refused memory
To make instances of melody
And harmony with wind.

In the morning
We knew each other
High on the hills
Looked at the horizon together
As far as the Atlantic,
Her eyes saw
I knew she would never
Choose one who falls in love
As a lover,
It would create distance
As she would only rise
As a lover
And that when we meet again
We'll both pretend
We never recognised each other.

Blossom on the wind

It had been a season
When light is colour
Drained, life
Adjusted to stretches of darkness
And cold become engrained.

A time of lunar streets
When all I hear
Is the great grey mouth
Of the Northern sky
Screaming within my ears
And looking forward
Brings gusts of icy vengeful teeth
That score the face with tears.

When you can pull the clouds near
And the city seems pressed flat
The next storm never far away
And days repeat from grey to black

But when it's below the freezing point of sound
When even crystal clear air weeps
We celebrate lovers
And from ground so hard
That it would blind an axe
Comes blossom on the wind.

When I still feel the need to shield
Myself in hibernation
Closeted behind stone walls
She calls
And though fearful I yield
To curiosities temptation
Where before I stalled.

Now all seems more familiar
As colour in timid buds begin
I trust the sun to touch me now
Because of blossom on the wind.

She leadeth me
Back to once bowed skeletons
Made scaffolds for hope
Aching in the naked pain of change
Every fibre striving
Tearing to grow again
Upwards.

She alludes to sunshine
Kaleidoscopes, hours of light
And times when the skin is free
She makes the wind her friend.
She leadeth me.

Risk reward

We've got ideas selling guesses
Ideas constituted
By special pieces of paper
Selling guesses about the total
Of other guesses in the future.

Its rational as proved
Through symbols accessible
To those schooled in the scripture
As if in the seminary
And they take everybody's money
And talk of risk reward.

Now if rather than using the bridge
I choose to run across the motorway
Which is a greater risk
In terms of time, my total pay
Is something I won't miss

And if now and then
Rather than the usual pool
I choose to swim
Across the Thames
Only some errant fool
Could try contend
I wouldn't be in better trim.
But for how long?

I suppose with PR and photography
I could earn a sponsor's fee
But that all sounds like work to me
And threatens no more jeopardy
No, risk reward it has to be
So I can't see the point really.

He said its funny biz
But risk is where the money is
He was bright as a laser beam
Fresh out of his teens
Creaming over a Chinese dream
That imports steam
Made by teams
Of pristine seamstresses
Fed on beans
Its a winner.
More spins of the fruit machine
Than you've had hot dinners.
He had a one kilo watch
Shoes of patent leather
A barber to keep him warm and dry
In any kind of weather.
Did I mention,
He was in charge of my pension.

So if there's two ways to make a profit
Gambling and exploitation
The great financial innovation
Is gambling on exploitation
All wrapped up in queer equations
But what the symbols don't depict
Is that gambling makes addicts.

And gamblers talk nonsense
Like “On this course in this condition
This horse is a certain proposition
The odds might seem a little long
But this jockey can't do wrong”.

Nonsense.
Or like “In a perfect market
Populated by rational, far sighted
And boringly single minded bigots
The maths works.”
Nonsense on a hydraulic jack.

Because the map
Don't fit the territory
There's errors in the theory
And some brokers should be very sorry.

Sad as it is tragic
When they've pissed away the pot
Like any other addict
They'll come asking for another lot

“Just another Trill'
We'll double up
You'll get your cut
Sure you will
Some if and buts
And maybe not
But give us some more fifties still
You know it's risk reward”

The fact is it's a cultural cancer
What happened to hard work
And dirty words like labour
Skill, co-operation, effort, thrift
I guess the Emperor's Tailor
Has been on the stitch up
For a new Tux
Made from more hot air
But when its all laid bare
It looks like a racket
Stacked with gambling addicts
Creaming a packet
And talking of risk reward.

Did they sit down and talk about it

Did they sit down and talk about it
Or was it a nudge and a wink
Did their eyes meet across the office
What do you think?

Did one think of it first
And tell the other the plan
Or did they just look at each other
And both understand?

And when they went into action
Did they go separate ways
Or plot moves over bourbon
At the end of the day?

What I’m saying is
Did Bush take his kid and play pimp
Or did Cheney say “I’m fucking your son”
What do you think
Which way did it run?

Bush was grand spook
An eminence in professional grey
If you’re off to the Whitehouse
You’ll meet his dogs on the way.

So did Bush say to Cheney
“Here’s my sons strings
Play with this puppet
And we can be kings”?

Did they come out in dimples
Over jesting with Jeb
Or was there frisson and tension
And so much unsaid?

Afterall, who shot Cheney?
What was it for
Was it just about the Constitution
Or was there more?

Did Cheney say “the kid’s simple
I can get in his head
Put Halliburton to work
And soon fleece the Fed”.

Was the whole thing an accident
That Bush never intended
Was he fighting a rearguard action
Against what Cheney then did?

Or was it a joint venture
Right from the start
Two men bent on power
With very cold hearts.

But then how far back does it go?
To Sixties and Nixon
An attempt to privatise power
Without any restriction?

Did they sit down and talk about it
Way back then
Saying those pesky kids got us this time
But we’ll come again.

Did they say we’ll copy the Kennedys
Once they’re out the way
Or are they enemies now
At the end of day?

Did they say we need a war
So we’ll turn a blind eye
We can do Orwell’s 84
If we let those planes fly?

Did Bush go to Cheney
Or Cheney to Bush
Did they meet in the middle
Was there a pull or a push?

Did they sit and and talk about it
Or was it nudge and a wink
Did they play together or each other
What do you think?

Would you let me woo you

Would you let me woo you with words of love,
My spring
And make pillows from the petals
Of the flowers that I bring

Each day afresh

Could I utter some caress
Some noun to hold the mirror right
So you feel that you're the best?

Would you let me shower you with compliments
And scrub you down with praise
And not think that I'm impertinent
To say forever and always

And would you let me sing loves settled silence
In your presence, for words can sometimes fail
And of all love's words there are none so precious
As those that pass in Braille.

No taxation without allocation

THE TOOLKIT IS BROKEN

The solution is not about centralisation
Or the reinvention of a priest caste
It's not about de-mechanisation,
Or a middle-class
That rides out of the dawn to save us
On white chargers
Armed with clipboards and Bics
And backed by battery
Of heavy filing cabinets.

It is not about re-hashing ancient debates
About how shift the deck chairs
Every four years
To better mandate our mis-representatives
On false prospectuses
Named nostalgically
Manifestos.
The will of the people defenestrated
The moment those Misrepresenting Perjurers
Take their seats.

It's not about invisible hands, or hand outs
Or charity band aids or sipping trickle down
From dammed up redoubts of exploitation.
It's about the mechanisms of wealth allocation
As well as wealth creation.

But its not about claiming
That there's a benefit to poverty
Or looking for bottom fishing equality
From bureaucratic monopolies.

Or a misguided faith
That a multitude of misapprehended self-interests
Will keep us safe from the cliffs
Of our Armageddon myths.

That there's a perfection in price,
That the tender dance of supply and demand
Will forever be time.
You'll find
That lovers fall out.



THE EVOLUTION ON AN IDEOLOGY

PART I. UP

It seems that some small sample sizes
Short time frames
And incomparable, incomplete data-sets
Swapped DNA, that's to say,
Had sex with some abstract concepts
About the discipline, long-term perception
And self-knowledge of this particular primate.

Incubated in the hubris of the end of history
The resultant virulent virus
First escaped in the region of the US great lakes.
Isolated outbreaks infected
Polemics from academics
Till economics was riddled
With a mimetic epidemic
That migrated to politics
And popular scholarship
To become a pathogenic
Epistemic pandemic.

Endemic among a group thinking global elite
The symptoms:
An astronomic misperception
That markets can be free
And that they are equilibrium systems.

PART II. DOWN

I think we can see that markets are chaotic
In the demotic
Even the idiotic can make a profit
If all it takes is watching the clock tick
When the money is free
And we underwrite the losses.

The king of statistics declares himself shocked
That will of the shareholders
Does not manifest
In the commercial collective
That the body corporate
Has an incoherent perspective
Of its own self interest

Using the bottom rung of the ladder
To build more room at the top
They thought it was a straight path up the hill
Till the flip-flop
And the credit fled
And they found out they were walking
On a river bed.

Steady states are great for pattern seeking apes
But change the parameters and the fortune-tellers
Get undressed as amateur.

THE REVOLUTION IS NOW

It is about eco-systems of innovation
About networks of distributed collaboration
It is about information as the primary commodity
And communication the enabling key.

It is about a new mode of production.

And they can store all our
Phone calls, emails and DNA
But the pretence is
It takes six months to publish their expenses.

It is about a new architecture of power.

Now times are tight
They'll say the state is forced
Into outsourcing the civil service,
But why take such a hapless course
When ways exist to open source
The entire edifice.

It is about progressing collective rights,
Because without solidarity
They'll take individuals by night.

And I'm thinking if you can buy to let
Man United and EMI
Then why didn't my MP
Do that for me?
What is the cost of equity?

It is about new forms of ownership.

And if the west can spend two trillion on banks
To keep the champagne flutes full
And kill foreign civilians with tanks
To get petrol,

Then are we directing our resources
The way the sum of society's choices
Would choose
If with all of our foresight
We apportioned our forces
And all of our voices were valued?

Clearly there is work to do.

There are new battle lines in the old confrontation
The tool-kit redesigned now we can move information
There can be no relaxation on the ramifications
I'm calling no taxation without rights over allocation.