Life and War with Mikey Fatboy Delgado

Our Bog is Dood       —    Stevie Smith

Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
They lisped in accents mild,
But when I asked them to explain
They grew a little wild.
How do you know your Bog is dood
My darling little child?

We know because we wish it so
This is enough, they cried,
And straight within each infant eye
Stood up the flame of pride,
And if you do not think it so
You shall be crucified.

Then tell me, darling little ones,
What’s dood, suppose Bog is?
Just what we think, the answer came,
Just what we think it is.
They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
And we are wholly his.

But when they raised them up again
They had forgotten me
Each one upon each other glared
In pride and misery
For what was dood, and what their Bog
They never could agree.

Oh sweet it was to leave them then,
And sweeter not to see,
And sweetest of all to walk alone
Beside the encroaching sea,
The sea that soon should drown them all,
That never yet drowned me.

———————————

On The Critical Attitude   -   Bertolt Brecht

The critical attitude
Strikes many people as unfruitful
That is because they find the state
Impervious to their criticism
But what in this case is an unfruitful attitude
Is merely a feeble attitude. Give criticism arms
And states can be demolished by it.

Canalising a river
Grafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art.

——

People close up and stars at a distance

People close up and stars at a distance
are misjudged, their natures and origins
swept away by fanciful formulas
and suppositions. A choking culture
limps with certainty of correctitude;
fools masquerade as a concerned monkhood,
and the rest of us sipping  expensive
coffee, reading our propaganda sheets,
are doing the bidding of torturers.
Our trains grind to a halt across the land
in front of jumpers from station platforms
and overbridges (our pay is then docked
for late arrival). The news is fabricated
in layers of shiny absurdity
and in the train carriage everyone wants
their heart back and no one knows where it is
kept. The earliest of the daffodils
are slaughtered in the furious north wind.
Important things are happening, poison
is drunk, madmen are revered and listened
to. All the rich rebels live quietly.

—-

I’m


I’m arguing with Yevtushenko,
I’m justifying all my lies to my child,
I’m watching filthy black clouds floating
towards a full and beautiful white moon,
I’m zipping my jacket against the cold,
I want to be poetic about the moon,
I ‘m saying that the light grey wisps
across its beautiful whiteness has made me think
of a snow leopard alone in the night.
I’m afraid for her to know what Lorca knows.

—-

You’re

You know how these things happen,
you’re a writer, a leaper from stone to stone,
a noticer of the grass blurring beneath you,
a noticer of the whiteness
of coffee cups, of the stream of loveliness
that flows through the coffeeshop doors
to meet their loves. You’re here,
not meeting your love, you’re there,
on the hill, leaping
from rocks, the same hill, different rocks,
different blades of grass blurring,
descending from the summit to the riverbed,
thinking of the insistent wind, thinking
of our children and the terrible truths
waiting for them.

Miranda’s pale arms remind me most




Miranda’s pale arms remind me most
of the marshalling-yard at Temple Mills;
her veins and scars are the criss-crossed rails,
and the blue abscess between her elbow
and her heart is the slope of the hump-shunt hill.
Her blood flows slowly like the crippled wagons
we chase down the hill with our brakemen’s sticks.

Miranda’s arms are raw with her temper,
as sore as the yardmen who lose their wage
in the shanty to cardsharps on payday.
They are a razored calendar of rage,
voodoo dolls of the mother who deserted,
a diary of overthrown princes,
a litany of gougings and despair.

—-