CATEGORY: Rhyming POLEMICS
Three Score and Ten
The early years
When I was born in 1954, fresh from my warm-womb foetal purity
The white supremacists still ruled the roost, still lynching with impunity
And Senator McCarthy was still at his trade, strutting with senatorial immunity
But in Brown versus Board, the Supreme Court ruled, against a racially segregated community
And Billie Holiday released her ‘Strange Fruit’ lament, a tragically haunting ingenuity
Meanwhile, the French got a whipping from Ho Chi Minh, in a battle for Vietnamese unity
But I was in London, screaming at the top of my voice, with my new-born insecurity.
In 1955 when I was one year old and experimenting with some pre-ambulation
Rosa Parks was heroically taking her stand, against Southern racial segregation
And Martin Luther King was coming to the fore, with some serious civil rights agitation
But Uncle Sam crept into Vietnam with some typically nasty aggravation.
And Albert Einstein had reached the point in his life where he would make his very last calculation
Meanwhile I was furiously fighting tooth and nail, to get my fair share of parental adulation
Alphabet Soup
Welcome to the letter A, an ambitious letter that makes new links
I think of ‘Apeman’ by the incorrigible Kinks
And ‘Abbey Road’, a Beatles classic that rarely shrinks
Or ‘Alien 3’, Sigorney dodging every Xenomorphic bite
And ‘Angel Heart’ to give all souls a devilish fright
Or Steven Spielberg’s ‘Amistad’ for a heroic anti-slavery fight
Then ‘Annie Hall’, for something frothy, something light.
Or ‘Apocalypse Now’ could be darkly next
Followed by the chilling ‘American History X’
Then Ayan Rand’s, ‘Atlas Shrugged’, an idealistic and highly controversial text.
Of course, I loved ‘The Americans’, TV at its Cold War best
And ‘Armchair Theatre’ from the ITV, always seems to pass the test
Or ‘Apache’ from 1954, with Burt Lancaster on an indigenous quest
Not forgetting ‘Americanah’ for some real Adichie Nigerian zest.
‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, Enrich Remarque’s wartime thriller
And ‘All My Sons’, from Arthur Miller
And ‘All About My Mother’, from Almodovar
Or Mike Leigh’s, ‘Abigail’s Party’, to bowl you over.
Then ‘All Things Must Pass’ has George Harrison swimming in musical clover
Then there’s ‘Amnesia’ from Australia’s Peter Carey
And Kormakur’s ‘Adrift’ is pretty scary
And ‘Amadeus’ paints Mozart as quite contrary
Whilst Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ should make us very wary.
Jack Palance in ‘Attack’ makes a great wartime adversary
And of course, McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ should be in every library
‘Amour’ from France shows true love is never temporary
And A is for ‘Akala’ is a top rate rapper with a radical commentary
History Lesson
In the beginning, at the dawn of time, all energy exploded into matter
And the silence of nothing was spectacularly disturbed
With a splish and a splosh and a splatter
Though this miracle has probably happened a million times before
Where perfect stillness becomes a noisy cosmic chatter.
We like to imagine we are singularly unique
All the better, our fragile egos for to flatter.
Furthermore, there may well be an infinite series of universes
Some bigger, some smaller, some fatter
But I would humbly suggest, at this point in our journey
That these speculative questions of cosmological theory,
Absolutely and definitively don’t matter.
Lockdown
Ever since I can remember
And probably much like everybody else
I’ve been doing things of grand importance
Or so I tried to convince everybody,
Everybody including myself.
Doing things of great and worldly significance
Things that would enhance the very fate of mankind
But I was like a rat on the proverbial treadmill
Barely pausing to reflect or unwind.
Plague Days
A time of plague – no time to play
When busy men and women stop their lives and say;
Will it be me? Will I be next? Why me, I hear them pray.
These are the burning questions of the day.
It’s on all our lips.
Princes and peasants and political bigwigs.
And children too.
And their parents and their parent’s parents.
All seeking to know the fake from the true.
FIFA’s Russian Roulette
Shoot the stray dogs and lock up the gays
We’re playing FIFA’s Russian Roulette.
Vilify those who dare criticise
It’s the World Cup we’ll never forget.
Brexit Blues
Brexit, Brexit from May to December
Brexit scheming is all I remember
Productivity rising, trade flat-lining
A time for cheering a time for crying.
Shooting in the US of A
I’m shooting from the hip
I’m shooting with red hot lead
I’m shooting at the passers-by
I’m shooting till they’re dead.
Monument for Margaret Thatcher
They’ve been talking about a statue for Mrs Thatcher
Remember her they called her both the Iron Lady and the school milk snatcher
Remember her she said this lady isn’t for turning
Hold on a moment, is that the sickening smell of something burning?
Ping Philosophy
Pick up a bat if you see it
Have a quick game if you feel it
Take on the world if you dare it
If the ball comes your way then just ping it
Ping Philosophy
Pick up a bat if you see it
Have a quick game if you feel it
Take on the world if you dare it
If the ball comes your way then just ping it
Algorithms
I’ve been reading Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus – every line
And it’s got me thinking and a fretting about the future of mankind
I’ve been thinking that maybe we humans have truly passed our prime
And that Artificial intelligence is going to leave us humans far behind.
The New Enlightenment
We’re living through a second brutal dark age
With renewed bigotry, superstition and terror.
And if you thought we’re on a preordained, exponential path of progress
Then I suspect you might be making a fundamental error.
Jeremy Corbyn The Criminal
Blair and Bush led the West to an illegal war against Iraq
And a quarter of a million Iraqis directly perished in the inferno.
Yet Jeremy Corbyn is deemed to be the criminal
And their attacks on him continue, both direct and subliminal. Read More…