Don al d'Uq-04

Don al d'Uq - page 4

XXXIII
But while they may have been distinctly cryptic
About that hit, the better to save face,
On t'other, they were quite apocalyptic,
And rabidly outraged: you'd think no place
Had ever in the past been levelled flat,
Nor had a head gone missing from its hat,
Belonging to some blameless passer by,
Picked out, as by a roulette wheel, to die.

XXXIV
So this is what it means to be at war,
Declared or not, it means the loss of life
To those with no idea what it's 'for',
Since it's for nothing. Though the air be rife
With hyperbolic slogans about freedom,
Those citizens reduced to smoke don't need 'em,
Their death en masse, just like a hill of beans,
Is pointless and absurd: that's what it means.

XXXV
That's how it feels to gaze into a crater
Left by some passing stranger, as though Death
Itself were their employer, who might later
Swing by to stop your own unsettled breath.
Now you're the butt of that great cosmic joker,
That gunman, knife man, poisoner and choker,
Whose one great rule we always strive to bend,
But levels all and sundry by the end.

XXXVI
That Death had been unfaithful was the worst,
Most painful of the awful revelations,
To those who, till that date, were always first
To summon down its wrath on other nations.
Who cleared the prairies, fires the electric chair,
Strews cluster bombs and napalm from the air,
Had now put half Manhattan down the shitter:
No cheated spouse was ever half so bitter.

XXXVII
The way it happened too was so ... obscene,
Such barbarism surely just ... can't be.
Did anything so flagrantly unclean
Ever contaminate prime time TV?
The whole world had imprinted on its brain
The fateful langour of that second plane;
(For weeks and weeks, until the thing was retro,
It played here on TV screens down the Metro.)

XXXVIII
'See how the bitch has treated me!' - the cry
Of outraged husbands wounded in their pride.
The world may sympathise, but yet its sly
And less untruthful self exults inside.
A cuckold's fate, however much it hurts
Is ever - we suppose - his just deserts:
Loud though we may console him for his loss,
The plain truth is we couldn't give a toss.

XXXIX
Which fact does not mean there is not a fair
Old horde of bleeding hearts who'll gather round,
Disaster junkie spinsters such as Blair,
In panting haste to play the faithful hound,
And 'Freedom' Macca: (can that flabby spiv
Not see the outsourced slaves on whom we live,
Or did his notion of what freedom's for
Get stuck, like some squashed bug, in '64?)

XL
The focal point of all this sycophancy,
And razzmatazz and Yankee Doodle Doom,
The 'President' (due to some pretty fancy
Mathematics) thought it proper to assume
Heroic poses on a pile of rubble,
Which - if you think about this - gave a double
Whammy to whoever'd done the deed,
This 'Man on Rubbish', like a human weed.

XLI
We knew who he was (even I knew that),
We'd seen that flag before too, once or twice,
We also recognised a white hard hat,
The new thing in the picture ... (whose advice,
One wonders, had he taken? ) ... what was new
Was all the rubble. What would you
Say was the message of that shot?
'This man is President of Not a Lot.'

XLII
How very different was the PR flair
Shown by the perps in how they planned events,
The shrewd performance artist's savoir faire,
The adman's logo literate promo sense.
Their barbarism being quite the worst,
This, of itself, promoted them to first
In everybody's book of demons. Next,
They didn't shed a single word of text

XLIII
In statements of intent and suchlike waste
Of time and breath and everybody's brain,
Secure that their own murderous bad taste
Would argue for itself, which in the main
It did. Did any of you suckers
Encounter, ever, such bad motherfuckers?
(And who was it, until the 10th September,
Would boast they were? Does anyone remember?)

XLIV
Their biggest coup of all, it seems to me,
Compounding all the shock out of the blue,
Was all the air time that they got for free,
Well knowing that some video freak would do
Just what they did. Was ever such a feast
Spread for a Roman mob, as when those beasts
First staggered, and then howled, and then fell dead?
Which (disregarding was was merely said

XLV
About the thing) was how the brand
Gained instant prominence - the sight,
Repeated, of that plane, so smoothly panned:
(We even saw it flying left to right,
Which - any propagandist knows - means: 'Me,
Or us, advancing.') - this could be
Some Lichtenstein one framer, cool as ice:
'I dipped my wingtips. Next stop Paradise.'

Canto the Seventh

I
'The Romans knew there's no avoiding war,'
Says Machiavelli. 'It can only be
'Postponed to disadvantage.' Furthermore,
(Say I), in time, one's enemy
Will learn this self same thing, (touche,
Niccolo), then will dawn the day
He starts to rumble all your little moves,
At which the game less to your vantage proves,

II
And more to his. The reason's very plain:
Stand for a moment in his worn out shoes -
You'll see that he's got everything to gain,
Since you have left him nothing more to lose,
Which gives him the advantage. You may dread
The crashing of your world about your head,
He doesn't give a monkey's: now the bell
Tolls principally for you, and tolls from hell.

Canto the Eighth

I
Could they not see what kind of a riposte
Such an attack would bring upon the heads
Of hundreds - thousands - who would pay the cost
Of one fell blow by dying in their beds
(Or out of them)? On balance, I would guess
The harsh and simple truth of it is - yes:
You don't smash windows in the polis station
Expecting a nice public commendation.

II
Enraged policemen, broadly speaking, don't
Take kindly to attacks of any sort,
And, driven past the limit, surely won't
Enjoy one night's good rest until they've caught
The filthy hooligan what done the crime,
And all his mates, and buried them in lime,
And even then we can't be sure they'll stop:
They'll go, in short, a bit over the top.

III
It brings, of course, much gleeful satisfaction
To watch dumb coppers trip over their banner,
Tucked up all safe and sound after the action,
The while they grope and rage around the manor.
It's good to watch them blunder on dead ends,
And, even when they beat up on our friends,
We know what side our friends are on: such trouble
Will only make them hate the coppers double.

IV
Nor will it generate the least surprise
To see them planting evidence (where needed):
When they no longer know the truth from lies,
They've lost the plot. Whoever, having heeded
Once their lurid fantasies of doom,
Will subsequently give a lot less room
To anything they claim to bring to light,
Not wishing, twice, to buy a bag of shite.

V
This kind of stuff is grist unto the mill
Of anyone intent on grinding small
The prestige of the king up on the hill,
But yet assumes he isn't going to fall;
Mere raillery, however violent, will,
By highlighting its object, always pall
One one hand 'neath its wrath, on t'other hand, a
Huge tidal wave of counter propaganda.

VI
Though you might kill one giant with a stone,
It doesn't do your cause a lot of good
If, hydra like, a dozen more have grown
To menace you, where once he only stood.
It really is a mug's game to provoke
The fury of the kind of mob who'll choke
Whoever even seems opposed, nor buys
Its outraged virtue (or its freedom fries).

VII
Unless, of course ... what if the cops decide
To nail their man no matter what the cost
In life and limb, that, never mind mere pride,
Their very raison d'etre would be lost
Should they not bring him in? It would be grim
If, far from ever getting close to him,
Bum steers, red herrings, wild geese filled their sights,
On one long, blind quest through an endless night.

VIII
What if the king's a paranoid old loon
Who, lured without Versailles, feels maladjusted,
Disoriented, fucked? Though it's High Noon,
His compass and his watch alike are busted.
His courtiers, of course, still gather round,
(It's what they're for) the better to confound
All foes beneath the shadow of his hat,
But what about those lurking beyond that?

IX
And what of giants who, en masse, might rage
Against us? How long can they last
Outside the homely confines of their cage,
Lost, gauche, expensive to maintain, held fast
By their own limitations? What,
To keep it burning, has a mad mob got,
Compared to that slow, steady fire of hate
That smoulders in those camped outside the gate?

X
'Intelligent Self Interest' might caution
'Gainst taking on a foe that seems so strong
That there's an overwhelming disproportion
Between their strength and ours. It would be wrong
Not to expect such enemies to wreak
A long and frightful vengeance on the weak,
But, after all such vengeance might entail,
Who, in the end, d'you think will best prevail?

XI
In taking on that other incarnation
Of global evil, the You Ess Ess Are,
America drew strength from the inflation
Of Marxist dreams, which kept on falling far
Below the proferred promise of Utopia,
While dull repression, rhetotric, myopia
Held down its people, and the giddy arms race
Proved too much for the poor collective farms' pace.

XII
Or in short, much as the vocal competition
For hearts and minds played loud upon the air,
Each side damning the other to perdition
For practise that was morally unfair,
The fight was fixed by money (ain't that odd?),
Since the USSR, in ditching God,
Was hostage to results: once these were thwarted,
Its argument too (for now) was thus aborted.

XIII
The game today looks quite distinctly changed:
There's no one sitting in with half a chance
To outbid Mr Big, whose chips are ranged
So high that all are daunted (even France),
Except for one lone nutter, who sits dead
Across from Mr Big with lowered head.
Each holds an Ace - indomitable card! -
The one's called Allah, and the other's, Gaad.

XIV
Gaad, at first glance, would seem to have it all,
His minions standing by on every hand,
A bit obsessed by hygiene, but on call
To act on every detail of his plans
For domination. On the other hand, your
Allah's a god of spaciousness and grandeur,
Whose Faithful don't presume to know His will,
Save only that they might be let fulfill

XV
It. Which of these two gents
Would you put money on to last the course,
And beat the other to the final fence?
A God (you might protest) is not a horse.
Well, history says otherwise. Just look
In any kind of halfway decent book -
Defeated gods, too numerous to compute,
Each, once immortal, now a busted flute.

XVI
Demeter, Diana, Priapus, Pan,
Thor, Dionysius, Athene, Mars,
Their fates entangled with the world of man,
Who gave them breath and took it back at last.
There's thousands more (though duplication's rife):
All needed humans to sustain their life.
There's Hindu, Inca, Aztec gods as well,
The names of which I can't pronounce or spell.

XVII
Now - did all these dead gods just lose their flock,
In massacres, or plagues, or fires, or floods
Or other kinds of war or natural shock,
That drowned them in a sea of their own blood?
No. Decimation, true, might play a part
In causing congregations to lose heart,
But far more lethal to its sacred word
Is that which makes a deity absurd.

XVIII
It's vital then that none of them lose face,
(Or too many adherents at one go).
They're really not unlike the human race,
And most are quite like somebody we know.
Their magic can be made to look outmoded,
They're very often prone to being goaded
By sceptics and philosophers and such,
Who don't like anyone's religion much.

XIX
There's some strew blessings with a great largesse,
And others who are stingy to a fault:
The former fail when things are in a mess,
The latter when they don't grind to a halt.
There's sad gods, fat gods, merry gods and lean,
And others whose behaviour is obscene,
There's sober gods and gods severely wrecked:
All wax and thrive - until they lose respect.

XX
For there's a tide in the affairs of gods
Which takes their leaders out and floods their glory,
And makes nice normal things feel very odd,
Since they've been swallowed by another's story,
As happened to the Tribes of Israel,
And no doubt many other tribes as well,
But Israel, in sticking to its native
God while held in bondage, was creative.

XXI
The span of this creative leap they made
Helped them endure what merely had occurred:
Their empire was in bits around them laid,
But this mean Jehovah's Holy Word
Had thereby been rescinded? Not a bit.
It rather meant the fact that life was shit
Must be His doing, by which twist He rose,
A bastard, sure, but stronger than His foes.

XXII
He also had carte blanche now, being free
From any need to give back what He took:
He'd power but no responsibility -
When things were bad, folk thought themselves forsook,
When good, it proved that He was great:
The only useful topic of debate
Remaining to such convoluted thinking
Concerned the metamumbojumbo linking

XXIII
Divine with human will. You know the rest:
In fifteen centuries or so, a version
Of this strange Unigod withstood the test
Of Rome's decline and fall, and the aspersions
Of sodomitic fiddlers such as Nero,
Which made this Jesus quite a people's hero;
What little of his mission yet survives
Makes bearable unmanageable lives.

XXIV
Which is your unigod's great raison d'etre,
And secret of its strange resilience
In face of what would cause a better
(Although pagan) god to lose its brilliance.
In being thus impervious to change
Your monotheic god's Top of the Range!
It only takes for somebody to flaunt one
For every social climbing git to want one.

XXV
And so it proved. First Islam struck out solus,
Impatient with the baubles and the beads,
And figurative arts which so console us,
But which to them were rampant naughty weeds.
About a round four figures after that,
Young Martin Luther set fire to his hat -
(Or else his bull?) - at any rate, felt chuffed
To beg the Pope to kindly go get stuffed.

XXVI
And so on, and etcetera - it's not
My purpose here to cobble an inventory,
Or strive to follow all the bleeding lot
Of all the cults which, by the Twennyfirs' Century,
Would fill, with all their meeting halls and rectories,
A dozen fair sized telephone directories,
(Not counting the demented little cliques
Which mushroom up in Wales every week.)

XXVII
All have in common that their God's the One,
The others being ... (what? I don't know quite),
Or that their way of calling Him's the Done
Thing, and the only one that's right -
As though a dozen neighbours owned one dog,
And, being jealous, set about to hog
All his affections: from these dozen sinners
The dog gets every day a dozen dinners.

XXVIII
All's very well (mind you, the dog gets fat)
So long as all the owners stay indoors,
Though there be mutterings, and tit for tat
Exchange of poison mail, this doesn't cause
Too many punchups 'cross the garden fence,
Or other such disgraceful incidents,
But you'd be well advised to call the Heat,
Should two of them foregather in the street.

XXIX
All of a sudden there's a lot less room
Than - to a sane observer - might appear,
A good deal more of: 'Puncho, ergo sum',
And screams of rage and paranoic fear.
The accusations range from: 'Give it back!'
To: 'My dog's getting ready to attack
Your little mutt.' - 'Your dog bit mine!'
(Or me, or someone else) - 'My dog's Divine.'

XXX
And further such, ad nauseam. In few,
It cannot end till one capitulates.
Since neither will, there's nothing else to do
But build a coffin with a blank name plate.
Once paranoia's logic takes a hold,
No words of peace will either one be told,
(Including that the dog might love them both,
Which, speaking for myself, I would be loth

XXXI
( To try. How many dogs do they think
There are? If one, then why's this bugger got it?
Or if they see another dog - through drink
Perhaps - it's high time someone shot it. )
It's really high time someone shed some light
On their compulsive need to start a fight,
Solutions to which tend to be elusive
Since unigods are mutually exclusive.

XXXII
Alright then! Anyhow - the USA
Elected to invade Iraq (again).
We all know this - there's nothing much to say,
Save spitting our contempt out now and then.
It's clear as well that their respective gods
Must play their part in figuring the odds:
In terms of (see above) my analogue -
Which neighbour's going to end up with the dog?

XXXIII
Iraq's a part of something old and vast,
Experienced in cunning, art and pain:
The Yanks got here the Tuesday before last
With bottled tan that comes off in the rain.
In future years, whose god will be here yet?
(Each thinks the other Satan, don't forget) -
I'd say the breeder's test of true Divinity's
How gracefully a God occupies Infinity.

XXXIV
For Infinity ... is infinite. This is
The true experience of Semitic shamen,
Not just some kind of dull, abstractual quiz,
To which dull narrow Puritans say: 'Amen',
Whose god of Quantity (its limit nil)
Must keep on swelling up to try and fill
Its role. One infinite's a different affair,
Beyond all swelling, since already there.

Canto the Ninth

I
That's all, folks! Did you really think this rhyme
Was going to pose some erudite solution,
An ecumenical bromide for our time,
To ponder during matinal ablutions?
We'd better leave to the United Nations
Such orotund and fatuous orations:
Exactly what is happening, or may,
Is neither yours to ask nor mine to say.

II
I'd put it that things don't look very good,
But then I don't remember when they did.
I really think I've done the best I could
To speak the truth (while earning a few quid):
Though there may be some finer points I've missed,
You'll please allow I've given you the gist -
(Oh, I said I'd tell you what role in the plot
Al d'Uq played. Well I'm sorry, I forgot.)

III
It does appear that things have reached a pass,
With menace crowding in on every hand:
When giants look like falling on their arse,
The question is, exactly where they'll land.
America (I'm going to close on this)
Has taken that step into the abyss,
Like Wile E Coyote, who takes a beat
To clock the air that looms below his feet.

IV
And so Farewell, New World! It's been a kind of
Fresh experience to have you round,
Which puts me, more than anything, in mind of
Long rambles with some eager, bumptious hound
Who thinks you're his dog - I must reach a
Final word - it's better left to Nietzsche:
'Power makes stupid.' (though he did not add:
'Stupidity is power', which is too bad.)