Historically, poets were radicals, freedom fighters and vociferous opponents of governments; they were also mostly egalitarian libertarians, and usually moral outcasts. They generally cocked a snook at religion, dissed the establishment, and heaped obloquy upon those who opposed their views. And they were invariably angry.
The West’s two most ancient poets, Homer and Hesiod, not only totally opposed each other’s beliefs and Weltanschauum: they even confronted each other in a poetry contest on Mount Helicon. Lord Byron fought the snotty establishment in Britain, later dying a martyr to Greek independence from the Ottoman Turks. Shelley, though the son of a baronet, scorned riches and threw in his lot with the underclasses. Thoreau in America spurned his Ivy League background to grow beans and a beard by a pond in a forest. Cervantes tilted at more than just windmills. Rimbaud, Pushkin and Dostoevsky were all rebels.
How times have changed. Poets today are supposed to write pretty lines about love and trees and fluffy bunnies and peaceful people living in blissful harmony in inclusive societies. They are expected to be witty, perhaps a little testy over sensitive issues; but they are not expected to use any degree of forceful language. They are also expected to shy away from complex rhyming structures (which require far too much skill), foreign words or archaisms. Why? Because, if they wish to be published, they must be politically aligned with the trending sentiments of their own society – i.e. politically correct. And they are supposed to be emotional rather than angry.
Times have changed again. Who wouldn’t be angry today? If social injustice, oligarchs’ greed, Covid pandemic and climate chaos were not enough, we now have a psychopath prosecuting a blitzkrieg against a sovereign democratic people in Europe whom he dismisses as “Nazis and drug addicts.”
So, as today is Ash Wednesday, and that psycho is turning children to ashes in Ukraine, what better time to launch AngryPoet? – who does not write about fluffy bunnies (though he does write about real ones) nor unrealistic fluffy-bunny societies. Moreover, he regularly employs satire, irony and ribald humour, complex rhyming schemes, foreign words and archaisms (as all real poets always have) – and is guaranteed never to be politically correct.
Now, where better to start than in that aforementioned suffering country, currently bleeding into all our thoughts and hearts:
​
Khay Zhyve Ukrayina!
The sky above our heads is blue;
Our corn is yellow, good and true.
We painted them upon our flag;
And ever when our spirits sag,
We look on it, and then we smile.
We can endure whatever trial
Might challenge us upon our land,
In which our culture’s roots expand.
For many years we’ve lived in peace;
Now on our heads are bombs released.
From our blue skies a tyrant sends
Rockets of death, our lives to rend.
Foreign troops roll through our streets;
They do not come with bread or treats:
They come with tanks and guns and hate.
What do they hope to propagate?
On propaganda’s wings they fly;
Seem not to care how many die.
Who brainwashed them to think we’re bad –
That crazy guy from Petrograd?
Well, he has made a great mistake.
Ukraine is not his piece of cake.
It is our land and we will fight
To our last breath for what is right.
Come join our side and fight this scourge,
Who, once he gets the killing urge,
Will surely set the world on fire –
Which even then won’t douse his ire.
Against all tyrants we unite –
The only way to win such fights.
To turn away would be unjust.
Support Ukraine – the whole world must.
Don’t Turn Your Cheek!
In Sarajevo’s gardens fair
The yells of thugs rang out;
With guns and tanks they wrought despair;
To Eden’s charms gave rout.
They would not suffer gentler eyes
To feast upon such beauty:
Like Alexander drunk, their cries
Were: “Raze and burn and booty!”
The yobs are here, the yahoos there,
Despising art as soft.
They’re nature’s bane, the gods’ despair.
Don’t turn your cheek – they’ll scoff!
On lofty peaks of Lhasa flew
The prayer-flags of a faith,
Till soldiers came and martial crews
Them viciously displaced.
That fragile ecosystem drowned
By roaring tides of Red
Army men with malice crowned.
Who filled them full of dread.
The gangs are here, the gunmen there,
Reviling life as soft.
They’re nature’s bane, the gods’ despair.
Don’t turn your cheek – they’ll scoff!
In Mogadishu’s streets stand trees
As naked as the bones
Of all her ancient families
Whom strife deprived of homes.
Along the roads of Emerald Isle
Religion with ideas got mixed,
Gave rise to something vile
Which all the hopes of children nixed.
The beasts are here, the bigots there,
Rejecting love as soft.
They’re nature’s bane, the gods’ despair.
Don’t turn your cheek – they’ll scoff!
[circa 1992]
Maya
What is this mask you clasp upon your soul? –
This garb you draw across the radiant sun
Whose naked fire has scandalised mankind since
Eve eavesdropped on the moon’s sensual secrets
In an ancient garden?
Tell me your miseries and I’ll requite them
In the weals and wrinkles of that mask:
Your harsh todays are but the false
Tomorrows you forged on hollow anvils
In that den of self-pitying yesterdays.
Cast pebbles in my pure pools and
I can’t but measure back such deeds
In equal force, distorting with fair
Symmetry the uninterrupted drama
Of your true being. Unmask! – and face
The acts and cris des coeur upon the
Scale of finely calibrated purposes.
Don’t whine to me you die each time
I hex you with enigmas, black or white.
You mystify yourself by staring out
At portals of escape from Temple Thou.
Even as I evanesce from your own
Sacred naos in the living spirit’s liquor,
I hear you moan from a parching tongue,
“I must escape to it out there – or die!”
Don’t light a torch to seek the sun;
Nor ride your horse to find your horse:
You are already where you will to be.
Be quiet, and feel within this presence,
One unique cadence in a diverse song.
Then sculpt no more chimeras in the rock.
Nor weave dull veils to hide the stars.
And draw no more the sun on water.
[October 1994]
A Quibble on a Quiddity
With curious rapidity
The wagtail scans the brook.
With furious avidity
The wren berates the rook.
With languidish liquidity
The trout snaps up the fly.
With plangentish complicity
The trees of breezes sigh.
They live in quiet affinity
With nature’s high divinity.
But when the priest, with darkest looks,
Beats his breast and then his books –
What vacuous stupidity
To quibble on a quiddity!
With dextrous quick agility
The squirrel climbs the oak.
In susurrus civility
The grass to badgers spoke.
With undulate facility
The adder crossed the heath.
With consummate humility
The dog viewed master’s wreath.
They live in whole affinity
With nature’s high divinity.
But when the priest, with darkest looks,
Beats his breast and then his books –
What vacuous stupidity
To quibble on a quiddity!
[November 1992]
Karma
Toss a pebble in a pool.
Though th’effects be minuscule,
Back to you will come those waves:
That’s how cosmic law behaves!
Archness Risible
Religions put no case to stir
My soul: contented pagan I.
They, after all, cause wars
Over who owns the same god,
Who builds the finest temples,
Wears the silliest clothes,
Or writes the thickest book
In the hardest language,
Or fires the largest rabble
With the greatest nonsense.
Are they not like so many thugs
Disputing possession of an unproven loaf,
Which will in any case go stale
Before they taste it?
Furthermore, I cannot
Comprehend a god who fights
On all fronts, under all flags,
Then banquets on the battlefield,
While near at hand, in agonies, the
The guiltless peer through prison grilles,
Homeless souls the pavements trudge,
And noble neighbours starve and die
Beneath a cold, malignant moon.
My sort of god grows roses,
Loves the grape and grain,
And sings old happy songs
With all Earth’s children
In bloodless groves under
A benign sun.
Oligarchs
​
All the little oligarchs
Stand grinning in a row;
Shiny teeth, like flashing quarks,
Reflecting media glow.
“God put us here to be your crown!”
That’s what their image says.
“Our mega-dosh will trickle down
And brighten up your day.”
But trickle’s tickle sans the ‘r’:
Like dark clouds on desert sand,
Which tickle all that rain’s not far,
‘Trickle’ clings within the hand
Of those who falsely promise much.
The plants those clouds teased put forth roots;
At healthy growth they clutched.
Betrayal withers all new shoots.
Yet still the fools stand there and grin;
They really think they’re gods.
Convinced their wooing helps them win,
They kiss the lumpen clods.
They spin and weave; they pose and crop;
“Compassionate we live to be!”
Yet in the vacuum of dop
Just sycophants believe it’s free.
Those juggernauts of industry
The oligarchs unleash –
Piled high with boons and liberty –
Draw in their wake what’s out of reach:
“Have bourgeois lifestyles every soul!”
Too late the poorest see:
The rich retain nine tenths the whole.
The poor retain – their misery.
[2016]
Sweet Lunacy
The full-faced moon glimmers on my garden.
The old year dies on the New Year’s breath.
Dormant seeds stir in their loamy matrix
With a pull which the seas must heed; and death
Seems than life less melancholy, for its tricks
Show how each is yet a phase of the other:
We die but to live and to rediscover.
Two moons glower in a face of hatred,
In the face of a gun-gulled Balkan ghost;
A half-mooned, half-man seeking nothing
But to still the seed that stirs, the boasts
Of love and hope, that shape his handsome neighbour,
Tending by night his bomb-blown backyard Eden,
Where once green peas he shelled: now lead
Peas shell him, and his beetroot blood smokes
On the lips his lover kissed just now in bed.
Now that silver crescent grins on my musing.
How like the trigger of a gun it looks!
No more of that: I am into a poem;
For the moment I’ve thrown up my books.
My love! I must lyricise your virtues;
Your beauty – outer, inner – holds me captive;
I must sing of you before I sow or sleep.
I’ll be with you on the morrow. O what sorrow
Could soil a love like ours? The very stars us keep;
Two peas in silver pods, of star-stuff made.
But,O that grin! – a gun bit? Now a sneer?
It winks a secret none may sesame.
It mimes a death-kiss from its heights of ice:
Metamorphosed mountains hide those morons.
Soiled fingers twitch upon those new-moon ‘triggers’,
And the sight-bead at the deadly end
Is like a black full moon: the two align,
The finger jerks, and down the tube malign
Zips the leaden death, a hot slug seeking prey,
And finding it in the sanguine beating heart
Born in the breath of Adam’s own dear Eve,
Who left the motley blanket pile, their bed,
To seek him on their moonlit garden plot.
Upon his corpse she falls, and breathes
The last breath blown to her this time around:
And all about them lie their unsown seeds
Which would have fed their lovers’ salad days.
Now all about me as I sit
Are piles of paper words which
Make no sense of it.
My God! My love! Might we tomorrow
See that same moon sneer on us?
That same fickle sickle scything
Through our fields of bliss –
Our sapling plans and hopes –
Such swathes of searing sorrow?
[January 1994, Balkan War]
Wee We
A sponge, it seems, stores all our thoughts.
Bizarre bacteria ferment our food for us.
We walk about on stilts all stuffed with marrow,
Move by sinewed levers – just like lemurs;
Judge the world through holes in our heads, and touch,
Make love and pass water with the same odd organs;
Locate our souls in the warm red liquid
Pulsing round our plumbing – thermostat controlled –
Which pink parchment vainly covers, yet
The sun dyes deviously other colours.
We breathe gases from the sky above us –
Most which (the toxic bits) we made ourselves.
Hot and toxic liquids we pour down our throats,
Eat piles of foods we know are bad,
And laugh as our perverseness makes us ill.
How very wee we are.
We scribe our sound and silly thoughts upon
Flimsy flat white pieces of transformed trees;
Then argue unto bloody rage how much
More God loves us than our unknown neighbour,
Till we slash each other’s parchment covers
And spill our life-force on the embarrassed earth.
Then woe! Those will-fed levers lose their grip,
Those mystic sponges in their proud towers shrink,
Bacteria turn foul against the fallen,
And rabidly destroy what once they fed,
Until the stilted forms lie deadly dead,
Stinking, rotting – on the earth they rose from
(And presumed that on a great day would escape).
Here’s a long dark laugh for an epitaph:
How very wee we are.
[December 1992]
