( 1 )
( An article "Radioactivity is good for you" advertised a book "The March of Unreason". )
It's "five billion to one" that atom plants kill.
You'll never notice your electric bill.
Hiroshima was not so much to answer
for. CAT scans radiate that much cancer.
We spilt the milk spoilt by Windscale fuels.
But we didnt spill the news.
Leaked radioactivity is good for you.
It gives a fizz to the Irish Sea and you.
Mother Nature does it too.
At Three Mile Island, nuclear fission
gave a few, in the know, a frisson
at the threatened blow over a city
or ten, which would have been a pity.
But no-one came to any harm.
Not even the core died, for all your alarm,
in its billion dollar concrete tomb.
Burrowing Chernobyl averted a doom
warned about in "The China Syndrome".
Only a few workers would not go home.
Why do you moan? Why do you grieve?
The winds blew away from Kiev.
You say they blinded a Polish peasant?
That was a little unpleasant.
It is the march of unreason
to demur that fall-out gets a breeze on.
I shan't be losing any sleep on
its European trail of hotlands
to geiger-counted sheep in Scotland.
This "deadly dear way to boil water"
is a problem for sons and daughters.
Mother Nature, human nature will relent
from breaking open poison presents.
And if they don't, debtors can be hired
by a few big energy suppliers
to police every pile and dump enough
with bribes for the locals to stow the vile stuff.
All of the multi-national Dirties
don't spend real money on clean energies.
New Labour embraced plutocracy.
Labour and Tory are a one-party
state in being the plutonium party.*
( 2 )
When T-54s rolled over the North German Plain,
the fascist hyenas hid behind the Pyrenees chain.
All the continent, they hoped to contain,
from their American bases in Spain.
Marshall Stalin signed the Peace of Paris
with Nato in a railway carriage.
This island must throw in the flannel.
Air lenses, over the Soviet Channel,
the Red Army at play in its breeches
as if Dunkirk sands were our own beaches!
As your candidate to the British Soviet,
I'll end this decadent farce of free speech yet
for electing capitalist lackeys
and running dogs of the plutocratic press.
My opponent Comrade Sellsfish sneers
at my public school and plays on class fears.
In classics, my heart was with the Spartans.
At Cambridge, I joined young proletarians,
who rolled up sleeves to shake fists --
Comrades, I was ever a Military Communist --
against that terrible little bourgeois H G Wells,
as Lenin, who met him, so correctly tells.
My uncle, the baronet, as it pleased
Comrade Sellsfish to call him, is of the Peace
Party. He ensures a respectful nod
for partisans, come revolution, come prod
out old imperialist war-mongers,
who will cling to office no longer.
Comrade Sellsfish boasts a good working class birth.
On his good-will trip abroad, it was worth
asking the European Soviet Union's clemency
for his deviationist tendencies.
Comrade Selfish has been pulled in for questions
and is contributing a signed confession.
( 3 )
An Old Master, who paid for death duties,
watched over me, at my spell in the Treasury.
Twenty firms pay for my name on the board.
Lightly on me fell the monarch's sword.
Why arrest the receivers of party chests?
Place-holders are under their own arrest.
The snap-ups of corporate alligaters
are our nostalgia for primeval theater.
My stock rose when we cleared the jungle.
The envious Greens said it was a bungle.
But I was guest of honor at the village tombola
to help the natives left alive from ebola.
My agribusiness spray spread from little pests.
Sooner or later, all creatures are laid to rest.
They worship my Midas touch in the States
knowing that wealth makes one truly great.
Loans from all the best credit card raters
own us the world and its creator.
The nation yet can no more avoid
mortgage itself than miss asteroids.
To be holy beggars is our business plan.
We take from all wherever we can.
Utilities and banks also pray for alms
when they dream-up another standing charge.
Their ransoms were mine to judge on a quango
with a super-model who taught me to tango.
From bottomless pits of other folks money,
I'm patron of causes odd or funny.
I'm a bean counter, a paper chaser
and a party man, lobbies both racers.
I sued the taxman to offset losses in Europe.
Lower corporate rates or my firm's stay was up.
"Only the little people pay taxes"
for the savings they lost on fraudulent crashes.
Wall Street's invested at least by a SWAT team
after drugs, laundering, hits and Inside deals.
As air-liners sink in high seas of glass,
a tower's told "Back to work" like kids in a class.
Hold the masses down to a two per cent hike.
Our Fat Cat options are to take what we like.
An "Independent Appointment" made me
a "People's Peer" tho they scarcely paid me.
I took the title Lord Piefingers.
The Press maligned my attendance: "malingers".
My line was of honest robber barons.
Like them, I did best when there's a war on.
The Lords, for lawyers and parties against the mob,
pleased the PM, against PR for all jobs.
Come golden hello, come golden parachute,
when the fleeced lambs give me the golden boot.
With dud funds, worry not, in any event me,
just raise the state pension age to seventy
and remember the promise of an age of plenty.
(Little political, less economic democracy
rule. Realists apply official force
to war on the world with capitalist fraud.)
*The last two lines of poem 1 read:
As New Labour embraces plutocracy,
quietly Tories are the plutonium party.
From 6 July 2006, the last line cannot be up-held. But the old
Tory plutonium party staged a rebellion, revealed by e-mail leaks. For more
detail, see my page:
A default government pushes more nuclear power pollution.
17 april 2008: The last lines have been changed for a third time, since
the Labour government went in for more radioactive waste production stations
(nuclear power plants) after the general election. The Tories have gone back
to supporting more fission energy, as they did before the election, now that
it seems this unpopular policy cannot harm them, with Labour supporting
it.
It is a nuisance having to amend a poem's envoi, time after time, because of
the untrustworthiness of the two-party state, on this issue a one-party state
defeating democracy and the country's future welfare.
Poem 3:
I originally wrote of a "three per cent hike". But the chancellor soon after, and also this year of 2007, insisted on a two per cent rise limit for public sector workers. So, my satire on inequality was out-done by reality.
Likewise, the satire speaks of a firm suing the taxman. Since then theyve won, opening the way for corporations to rake back billions from the Treasury. This is another sign of the globalisation of capitalism or world plutocracy.
2004.
( Logged: March 2005. )
Up-date: 6, 17 July 2006;
20 March 2007;
slightly amended 14 april 2007;
17 april 2008; 29 jan. 2010.
Richard Lung.