False is the voice you hear

Sharing on your radio

False is the sight, the cheer,

On your favourite TV show

A passion to try to convince you

Listen

A passion not for your good nor

for Christian mission

As the gods are false we worship; armageddon,

Their ending, smoulders in each and every tout

Getting you true to buying, coming-over, make a good salute

False calls the actors make by making friendly calls

Buddying-up commercial offers to unscrew your eyes

Actors whose wage is worked into the profit

Factors of phrase and naked propaganda

Bought to convince without a faith behind them

You too are taught to be bought by warmth indecently

All that’s heard in casual words through all of life

Even found now and then in wheedlings of a wife

But everywhere; the hoardings; papers; TV; online; radio

A barrage firing friendly fire at you, and everywhere you go

Stare notices that tiptoe making personal advances

Calling your pocket soft names, serenades on shopping baskets

Or else command; once subtly; once an order slammed

Do this; do that; or a butter-knife blackmail

It slices nicely at you using what-ifs, asks, respites,

All sorts of caustic altruistic string-me-ons

Always to have their ways by selling pheromones

Or aspirations tainted by a lottery

Or sad compassions: ‘get thee to a nunnery’

Nor nothing (but the truth) of value, worth the having

To give the time of day to, yet such noise is always

Grabbing

It takes the day from week to week from hour to hour

Our baleful lives – a haul all falsehood

I sit here in my tower – like Yeats or Milton did-

I isolate myself

And see it all – Tiresias-like – it is a vision

Perverting every way that social life can go

From dawning day to darkling dust we tow

An awful fallacy

And what have I; what is there living true

Which meets, sustains replete, a quality of life

Amongst the Philistines, like Samson – near half-blind

But ardent stubborn for the true red-letter Word

I know that my Redeemer liveth – that His name is called

Antithesis and contrary to falsehood

He is the air, the light, the sustenance, the One and All

Who always new, renews all things; pristine, forgiving

The One who holds command - even the jailer of our prison

A slave, obeys Him, trembling enemy; may he be shriven

Someday, if such a heresy is acceptable to Heaven

And one thing more, one small, beside Love’s greatness

But serves to comfort me; this small shaft of his light

Is music. Music cannot play out falsely

Without betraying its false self

Music is a soul’s whose feelings caught up clinging

Passing to strings; percussion; brass; woodwind; the band

Hazarding there exposure to this world – it calls hello!

And listeners’ souls enrols to rouse, emerge, to meet

The music of that soul revealed composed so sweet

These Orpheans are the local Journeymen of God

All other things are falsehood, all of it ..... it is not any good