Kontakt

Games designers pick up tips
and GoPro's staff, they wonder how
to monetise four million views
of Syria's T-72s

In the comments people say
that there's no place for tanks today
in crowded city streets
dual-warhead RPGs and TOWs defeat
the dazzle and the Kontakt ERA

The footage is in full HD, ten-eighty-p,
and you can see the tank man's torn-off leg
and splintered shin as he attempts
to crawl. And as he tries I urge him on
as if I could project myself
beyond the glass, into the past.

What's done is done, and he is done
the wider world just carries on
the past is like a waking dream
you cannot intervene
the missile hits, the tank ignites
the chopper spins and augers in
the bullets find their mark;
the bodies look like piles of clothes.

Spiders

Silently and one by one
the spiders slip
into the waiting spider ship

the images from Pluto show
their home
from long ago

Generation Yet

The baby boomers broke their toys
and threw them to the ground, and as they shuffle off
to homes of careless care, in
respite homes the spit will flow

Like whales they beach and roll and loll;
they lived their lives beneath the sun
that dries their skin
and fat, well-fed and all the hate within
and you and I, dear reader, we will live
and learn to put the knife in

The elderly, our enemy
at zero hour the zero hours
will look into their eyes and gaze into a past
of care-free lives, of holidays
and pension pots and buy-to-let and
hope you rot;

In careless homes of careless care
the baby boomers make their stand
and contemplate the God they killed
the authors that they killed, how smart they were;
they dodged the bullets but there was
one bullet that they could not dodge

Time has a trajectory
ballistics of its own; and as their fingers weaken
they grow sick and lose their grip
and we will take the whip
and flay their skin
and strip away the armour plate
and stab and put the knife in

our children, they will do
the same to me and you
and thus the rats consume their young
for fear they will be next;
they grew fat on burning flesh
and there will be a bonfire

The Satellites

(after Oscar Wilde, Les Silhouettes + Laurie Anderson, O Superman + Betjeman, Slough)

~

Etched against the dark of night
the engines glow in infrared
a thermal bloom, and filters
in the drones outline
the cars and trucks and technicals
like silhouettes against the sky.

The darkness did not mask the heat
their doom was pre-ordained;
three thousand miles away
the pilots count the kills
that they have not yet made.

Stupid kids and smarter kids
- but none as smart as bombs -
proceed along the road of death;
the wiser men remained at home
their pre-paid phones and radios
will doom them too, but not just yet.

Overhead the kestrels fly
and over them the satellites
that send the traffic that controls
the drones and telephones;
they do not need the sun to see
their eyes are not eclipsed
by rain or fog or snow.

And in our cribs the satellites
watch over us, and in the dreaded dead of night
our mums and dads send fire across the sky.

They see at night and always know
and never leave, and tell the drones
to drop the friendly bombs;
and underneath our beds the monsters howl
as blood is boiled from molten bone.

Machines of loving grace,
that skip across the edge of space;
wings over the world, like hawks
they pounce and take
their pound of flesh;
the watchers leave behind
a thousand scars that never fade
and all the world is built on scars,
tectonic plates of misery,
strata laid by satellites.

Brompton Cemetery

Holga 120N

Kodak TMAX 400 (exp 02/1994)

Off to Brompton Cemetery, which has a population of over two hundred thousand people and some dogs, all of them dead. It's very popular with filmmakers and photographers, because it's easy to get to, it's quite secluded, and it looks awesome. And it's full of dead people.

Including top late photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, who shot several iconic images at Brompton Cemetery, including this one, which was used on the cover of The Damned's Phantasmagoria, and this one, which wasn't. Clarke loved the place so much he was buried there. With a camera? I don't know. Perhaps he wasn't really dead, and right now he's tunnelling under the ground, photographing the caskets from below.

Here lies Louis Campbell-Johnston, who was fingered by God until he died. I hate old-fashioned Victorian-style poetry. They thought they were masters of the future, those Victorians. But it's impossible to imagine the idea of God's finger touching someone without laughing. God's finger would be massive; it would crush a human being like a bug. Not send him to sleep. I can think of few things less likely to send me to sleep than being touched by God's finger.

I Hate Victorian Poetry
by
Ashley Pomeroy,
who is neither posh nor rich nor dead (yet)
-
You rhyme
so awkwardly
with your thine and thou and seem'd
and clutch'd and I find it hard
to take you seriously;
especially given
your aggressive obsession
with breasts;
noble breasts,
labouring breasts,
silent breasts, woolly breasts
etcetera breasts

It rhymes with west and nest
and best and lest,
test, rest, unrest, harvest
exprest, which would explain
but not dull
the pain
of reading your poems
out at school
and having to say
breast
whilst keeping a straight face.

Perhaps you meant it,
really felt it
but sticking to a rigid style
you had to compromise,
to squeeze your beating heart
into a smaller hole;
smooth it, mould it, cut it off
and present it dead and cold
polished and frozen.
A stuffed native,
spear in one hand,
skin stretched over straw,
another dead thing to admire.

The silver arrows you set loose
into the future fell
into the long grass;
bored children were compelled
on pain of pain
to study the ballistics
of your infertile projectiles
their payload
a skeleton, with a screaming skull
his suit torn
his air hose cut.

Long years have passed and
the line between McGonagall
and genius
becomes more fine
"It's all stupid", they will say

"Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay
drew downward: but all else of heaven was pure
the storm fiend did loudly bray, up to the Sun
and may,
from verge to verge,
on the last Sabbath day of 1879
Make thine heart ready with thine eyes: the time
fill’d all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made the heavens between their fairy fleeces pale.

Shall I cease here? Is this enough to say
I must now conclude my lay"

Has Brompton Cemetary changed since the hands of Bob Carlos Clarke's camera's lens set foot on its hallow'd ground? Back in the mysterious 1980s? I have no idea. The place is half-overgrown, half-undergrown, and most of the tombstones date from before I was born, but perhaps they had more death then. Long ago it was quite a way from London, but London has grown to surround it, like an airbag. It's apparently popular as a cruising ground for gay men, perhaps because of all the dead people. There's something sexy about dead people; they're so vulnerable, and they no longer have nostril hair.

"Therefore, ye sons of great Britain, come join with me,
and welcome in our noble Queen’s Jubilee;
Because she has been a faithful Queen, ye must confess,
There hasn’t been her equal since the days of Queen Bess."