Safety in Numbers

Bring me dead horses
To flog,
My whip’s ever ready,
And one has to amuse oneself
Somehow.
Please do not mistake me
For a real person
Or anything as vulgar as that.
I might have been a librarian
Tiptoeing round the shelves
Through rainy afternoons
Caressing the tomes
With masturbatory fingers
Sighing over exotic adventures
And sordid thrills.
What a strange and worrying creature I am,
Mythical and mundane,
Neither fish nor fowl,
A limerick scrawled across the sky.
I perfect my perversions
In redbrick reclusion
And tickle sly fancies
Till kingdom come.
In swinish filth
I find more truth
Than in all the world’s
Philosophy,
Politics
Or art.
A diva of suburbia,
Hitting the high notes,
I shatter the dusty wineglass
Of a Tuesday afternoon.
We,
The shy and inoffensive,
Demand our right
To storm the sky,
Building barricades of words
To aim our toy guns from.
From a boy’s bedroom,
Monte Cristo’s cave of cursed jewels,
Comes this torn treasure-map
You hold in your hands;
So let the pirates sail,
Let the skull and crossbones fly!
One day you may well read
Of my secret life
Of debauchery and scandal,
One fine day, perhaps…
Ah, but my head is so enormous,
How would I ever find a hat to fit,
If I ever chose to wear a hat, that is?
Who needs heroin,
Who needs cocaine,
When everything is so wild and lovely anyway?
I lie on my bed,
Sweating tertiary fevers,
A thousand years old or more,
And no-one and nothing
Can save me
For I do not wish to be saved…
This loneliness
Will be with you always;
Do not fool yourself
That the future will be better,
That people change
And all wounds heal.
All your life
You will feel
Like a fat ballet dancer
Toppling over
When you dare a pirouette.
In the trite lines
Of pop songs
I once glimpsed salvation;
In pin-ups and centrefolds
I beheld holy icons.
O vacuous decades
I have mooched through,
A golden mooncalf
-And when I die
Write on my tombstone:
Killed by common sense.
I hiss at myself:
“I will have my revenge,
I will have my cold cruel revenge
On you!
You infamous villain,
You laughable poltroon!”
Then I turn to my face in the mirror
And declare:
“I’ve got plans for you.”
Life
Was thrust into my hands
Like a greasy bag of chips.
Inside me that petulant little brat
Is still bawling at his parents
“I didn’t ask to be born!”
Apostle,
Apostate,
Choose your martyrdom:
Would you rather be torn apart by lions
Or crucified upside-down?
Or you could just
Kick the world in the balls
And run.
Every night
I go to bed
With famous corpses
And dream of God knows what…
I think I may be
The greatest grave-robber,
The happiest grave-robber,
in history.
This sickness
From which I have suffered all my life
Is the weapon to set me free…
The damned still dance,
Only now, it seems,
they no longer believe
in Hell.
I was my own Pope
In childhood’s Vatican
And excommunicated myself
And cried: Burn the heretic!
Bring me his ashes!