1. To Whom are we to Go?

Loftiness of high authority

Loveliness of meek humility

An iron fortitude

A gentle servitude

Objective, set, insistent

Discursive, easy instrument

Acknowledged Lord of all

Submissive lowly leal

Tough unto rigor

Soft unto melting

Abused humiliated

Approved authenticated

Love in each breath

True even to death

2. Spoiler

For some fit crime

Clay vessels here are dangling

Swung independently together

In a vacuum cloud of blether

And Justice Time

Presides, interrogates, instructs,

A hidden jury set at work

Deliberating

Their janitor’s continuum correction

In life, in lives, like surgeons’ knives

Dissect

Construe

The appropriate operation to make good and true

Infarcted hearts

Vascular flows constricted in our tenderest parts

Staked cunning, coining money, issuing lading bills,

Exhorting, importing, collating frail behaviours

Impelling, extolling, grateful callow labours

Calling at various carious stations on the way

So as that some alight and some time takes away

And nothing done, nothing entered; all is desuetude

Imperious nature gathering all, nous testifies is true -

So slowly towards being lowly we begin to stagger

The offices of Time do weather each one onwards southerly

Coursing us in our youth; thereafter in our prime

Maintaining in the chase pell-mell; eventual eld compels

Our last small angel wrestle on the bottom tread

On trains, on boats and planes each turning’s learning

Each stopover or destination enters cost

Each term, semester, furlough passed for good and ill

A meet proportion sacrificed to cavalier freewill

Peeps, futures, redolent on sighted eyes

Hear strictures derelict to tutored ears

A zone for fruit of resolution introduces

A plainsong tone - sings salad day’s missed graces

Again to atone for our own Janus faces

A strain before the passing places well appear

You find

And then’s: “The next one right in here please”

“Now move along”

Synthetic mourners shuffling out from a quite small affair

Stifled by stuffy sombrenesses, gasping seek for air

Bursts automatedly a vast rude chattering

Sudden and loudly bustling to affirm them; flattering

Fake wheezes, blind designs, to outsmart easeful death

Whose stink one moment lingering on their wearied breath

Mortality

True time’s a teacher breaches ramparts mothers cannot breach

Beyond all pale selections of the shallow conscious dream

Denote it as the sword of God; two-edged, dividing all

Making of goats to sheep by blanching white their fleeces

And mayhap you think so – or think this folly?

And bank indeed this life it is most jolly

Then think you what you know – who greens the holly?

Bazaars the stars, and interfaces matter,

Enjoins with spirit, capitulating sin

Washes our souls in times of troubling

Awakening us His slow catechumen

These then The Spoils of Time – our homeworks handed-in

3. Post-post-Prosperity

Tired, and has no relevance; a onetime dream-team bus

Belonging nowhere now nor nowhere now to go

Crackpot idea; its cred in deep arrears

And loaning

Last season’s module’s broken life-support

Buyers in shopping aisles declare their ordinal mean streak

Of animal facility, wear pheromones of musk

Corsairs a-cruising

Running up and down raiding commodities

Obey carnalities

Clasped: a last pepperoni

The mustard, camomile, are grabbed

Lunges of broad intent forage on what’s been tagged

In treacle mines behind the eyes where rarebits rainbows’

Tasting redoubtably consolidate slow thought

Declared upon the next man, the next woman: “repel boarders’

Then executes an emulation of the natural order

Assuming adaptation, an empathic notion chunters

In minds, comparatives on Neolithic hunters:

An oaty bar!

A flick, a sudden tick, of wrist, of eye

Her trolley rumbles agonistes swiftly by

And gone, consumed, hand-amputated pelfs

Robbed of confections, the ravaged hijacked shelves

Now in the bag; another shopper idly by

Awaiting, contemplating, body-shunted clean away

Decision for collision triumphs; attrition wins the day!

Morsel manners munching feast on delicacy drowned

Actors and ethics disengage, dispute on salted loin,

Incisors carve up overbought onlookers

Assever hastily – a twitch disturbs broad blethers

And in the trolley on the money goodies scrumped,

Hit panic’s handle, shuffle, bag up tasty rump

Here for your tears no hiding place materialises

Only unholy insurrections done in different guises

All forerunner idols, ideals, broken down, divested

Passed through the fire and no-noes deemed as carbon dated,

And abject disaffection swells the common forms

A consummate defection rings; the question hangs

Remarking Michaelmass and Calends of the Church

(Excepting some confusions shouting such: “Bring back the birch!”)

Associates with godliness and living truth

An iron rigor and no Virgin birth forsooth

Rod ironclad for others only; let the privy wolf

Cry not upon himself; cry on only other wolf

Homely sat holiness time-was, proposed a model

Forefingers licked flicked holy pages; not foreseeing

This flecked appliqué of promenade apostasy

An evil time

Our sewn-up grown-up social nursery rhymes

Eclectic burial games

And selfish movie hero instantiations

On bloodline Christs, on dumb generic cult aspersions

Even Socrates made bum

Who had he lived a Python had become

Rock star to huckster we are all indited

We are the champions: Manchester benighted!

Who in the world needs manners? Manners maketh man

We’re in a woman’s world; freed from the frying pan

Be we fragmented, atomised, largely unfussed

Happily grumblers one and all, our egotisms thrust

Power the finest hour, lamb ensoused the favourite Hirst

Ours is an art of hustling, with a temperament for brass

Oligarchy our worship; inclination all our fun

What a compound of such persons? Never since the world began!