Tug Dumbly - 16 Pretty Unrelated Bits

Spaghetti Western:

How the Left was Won.

Democracy’s a beautiful thing

till it’s not.

My country, wrong and wronger.

It’s getting hot.

Holocene

Anthropocene

Trumpocene.

Can you dig the seam?

Horses, hunting

foreign flings

when kings make sport

that’s the death of things. 

Rapture Bookie

takes odds on Apocalypse.

who will collect?

Humanity’s a Blooper Reel

of God’s funniest home videos,

like cold calling Christ on the cross. 

I run a canned laughter factory

with a sideline in applause tracks.

But I’m laying off today.   

Take the fight to the man:

change your name to Totes Yolo,

start a band called Pop Smear.

So much toxic masculinity

in Simon & Garfunkle –

The Boxer, I am a Rock …

Scar bro, there.

Siam, Persia,

Formosa, Cathay,
Bohemia, Burma, Bombay …

I like their old stuff better.      

Melanstalgia:

a sticky-sweet addiction

to melancholy and nostalgia.

I reconstruct you

like an anthropologist

smoothing clay to a face

of an ancient skull.

‘Oh Man’, said Manuel,

as he read the Manual

on Manual labour,

‘this langwidge is Manglish’

John Berryman reads

like a parody of himself.

The cat steams in

like the Flying Scotsman. 

Today I piss streams

of tiny brightly coloured tropical fish

into the gutters.