(1)
This monster’s no metaphor: old bones, matted hair and the bristly genitals of a Fritz the Cat; but really they’re remnants of the long-dead parasitic twin pulled out of the belly of a Malaysian teenager who only recently complained of stomach pains.

Meanwhile in Chicago a baby girl has recovered from an operation to remove the remaining parts of her alter ego: in their mother’s womb the other fetus tried making itself invisible by diving into the sole survivor’s abdomen.

In Australia a toddler from Bangladesh is learning to walk normally after doctors cut out duplicate organs and a third leg attached to her back – more like an elephant’s trunk; again, belonging to a second fetus which failed to develop.

(2)
First the parents ‘marketed’ their missing daughter. Mad keen, they were, to keep her in the public eye. Bobbed hair, milk teeth and marshmallow eyes: the prospect of everyone seeing that picture may have been the next best thing to a real sighting.

A few months later, monstering the McCanns: parents’ nightmare became nightmare parents; until the libel courts put this mutant story mainly to sleep.

And now, a decade later, if instead of praying for Postman Pat to bring her home, secretly you would put on surgical gloves and cut out this 10-year growth, who could blame you?

(3)
There are the monsters we make, and others imposed upon us; but also our ingenuity.

Vitriolage sounds heady as perfume, earthy as privates on parade.
But a word you’d think to find next to décolletage, inside the Moulin Rouge
Is French for burning the skin off – and more: taking a face and making it unmade.

This one’s lucky: seemingly a squirt of blackcurrant, dry-dripping down her cheeks
It’ll fade, in time. Absorbed, in time, as plain old jealousy and pique.
But if your face’s fully bathed in acid, even ‘recovery’ is emptied of normality.
No make-up can make up for its effects: indelible mark of desire, thwarted.
Permanent marker of respect – inverted, warped and grossly distorted.

In Paris and long ago London, this was passionel, chemical and industriel.
Later, out East at least as far as Bhopal, the criminal commuted from factory to familial.
Now entering the century of the selfie, effacing others has found its way home
In the âge of Instagram, vitriolage comes into its own.

John 20: 6  Then Simon Peter..went in to the sepulchre and saw the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but rolled up in a place by itself.

On Sinhalese New Year’s Day – Avurudu to you!

The mountain came tumbling down; down upon the dolls’ houses

With people living in them, tucked into the foothills of Colombo’s

Municipal rubbish dump at Meethotamulla.

‘There is nothing to be done’, Vladimir declares to Estragon,

Waiting For Godot on the slag heap of everything-we-know.

(Or is it the other way around? Does it matter?)

At least those n’er-do-wells would have needed a tree to hang from;

For some, shifting ground is all it takes to make strange fruit.

Twenty-one dead in Meethotamulla, toll rising

Like black water coming up through the floorboards on Friday afternoon

And then the earth moved…..

Then a wave of people came to raise their fellows from the grave.

Of some houses the landslip had rolled away the front half,

Others were taken from behind: prised open to public gaze,

Delicacies of private life made even more delicate

The daily grind, ground down still further.

Open to failure, open to failing better.

In the suburbs and shanties of Sri Lanka

There are burial clothes neatly folded

And everything is still to be done.

• With apologies to Basil Wright

Matthew 27: 51   And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.

From way back here the beauty of war is hard to miss
Impossible to dismiss the moment of ‘massive ordnance’,
So intense that afterwards the cinema of cloud formation
Seems like afternoon TV. But what if
Destruction is less creative, the closer-up you come?
I have in mind how physical pain demeans all other considerations
Remember, it wipes away everything but pain itself.
And what of those entire lives spent in the aftermath, clearing up?

So that’s how it’ll be for most of us when our time comes!
Not seen and heard and recognised for its terrible beauty, more like
A tawdry giving-up of everything but the next breath, which
For want of anything more to stay for, then becomes your last.

Sublime requires ridiculous, not only as its opposite.
They may also change places, according to where you’re sitting.

1 Corinthians 11:24  And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said ‘This is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’

Whose body is the bread; whose blood flows like wine. But whose is the ‘whose’ here – son of God, or son of yours and mine?

Let’s say it’s the son of man, then bread-into-body is what we create.

To transubstantiate is no loftier than the higher state which people, plain people, may enter into when we come together.

No need for the grace of God; these moments we ourselves make in order to make ourselves more human.

Yet just because we can, does not mean that the body politic will always be provided.

Take the recent summit of G7 foreign ministers, holding court in a grand palazzo.

Circular table, tastefully decorated, all set for History to sit down for supper with the secretaries of state. But that day, History must have had another date.

Pity the poor ministers, who don’t know how to celebrate.*

*In the liturgy of the Mass, the celebrant performs Jesus’ role at the Last Supper.

Matthew 26, 14: Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?” So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.

Nobody does it for the silver, surely – never enough pieces to hang a new life on.
And is the Judas kiss the tenderest of them all? Knowing it’s the one and only.

They stopped the car and told the young volunteer his life was coming to an end.
After lengthy interrogation by enemy forces, he had revealed what little he knew.

Released by the British, he was de-briefed by his own side, and advised he’d soon be home. Instead the car turned off so that he could be taken somewhere suitably out-of-the-way, and shot.

Having talked (who wouldn’t?), and being known to have blabbed, he was considered a security risk. But the volunteer was so much a soldier for the cause, it is said that even in these circumstances he accepted his own death as for the greater good.

Looking back at the days of ‘Stakeknife’, the IRA gunman who was really running for the Brits, as revealed in full in last night’s Panorama, the harder question is not what was done, but what, in those days, it was done for.

The war that dared not speak its name, was bound to be a patchwork of double cross and deceit. But where the ex-combatants’ eyes have stayed purposefully clear, how different is their former zeal – legible in their faces even now. How different from doing the deal, doing the deal, which is the only order of today.

Perhaps we need but note there are different kinds of betrayal.

Matthew 26, 6: Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table. And when the disciples saw it they were indignant, saying ‘why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.’

Am I, aren’t I? Do I, don’t I? What are you willing to believe?

Damien the diamond, bald geezer who also plays with emeralds and the truth

His latest wheeze – he coughed fifty million quid to produce it,

Y’all better believe it, includes everything but the kitschen sink.

From Death and Myth to Disneyland

And who’s to say how many cigarette papers there are between them?

Just so’s you can make what you will out of my make believe.

And if you believe that…, the sceptics say,

For this is extravagant, decadent, insanely opulent

Market-making hyperbole.

But if Hirst’s Treasures can make kitsch, sublime,

Then he’s found the (postmodern) philosopher’s stone

Whereas a penny spent’s already too much pish,

If all there is from him is further deconstruction.

Matthew 12, 13:  Then he said to the man, ‘stretch out your hand’. So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other.

In the medical photograph you can see a hairy forearm, wrist, thumb, part of the man’s palm, and then your eyes tell you that the fingers must be stretched backwards, out of sight.

But that’s not right: the fingers are not there in the picture because they’re not there at all. This is what’s left of the hand of Chris King, aged 57, after a metal pressing machine amputated most of it – and most of his other hand, also.

In 2013, at a lighting factory near Doncaster, the machine-guard failed and his hands were scythed away. Like lightning.

Earlier this month, however, Chris wrote a thank-you letter to the doctor who sewed him a new pair.

He has achieved a remarkable level of manual dexterity since major surgery in July 2016; and there will be two more years of further progress, according to Professor Simon Kay, who took the hands of a recently deceased donor and attached them to Chris’ stumps.

Already ticked off: undoing shirt buttons, clapping, holding a cup of tea, pouring a pint. Still to do: tying shoelaces, fastening shirt buttons; then Velcro gets the long goodbye.

Bones, tendons, nerves, blood vessels: they’re all connected up and tied together. One man’s blood is flowing through another man’s fingers; though the texture of the flesh remains unusual, almost unsavoury.

Parts of the patient’s hands are pale and puffed up – you might think he was suffering from gout; and in press photographs he is seen cradling one hand with the other, as if there’s something babyish and unfinished about them.

Perhaps Chris is close to acknowledging this when we calls his hands, ‘my boys’. But at least he’s not suffering from ‘they’re not my hands’ syndrome, a hostile psychological reaction which has afflicted other beneficiaries of this ground-breaking surgery. read more

Matthew 21, 8: And a very great multitude….cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way.

It was to have been a glorious procession

From photo-shoot to street-life, the starlet’s progression

Nevermind the film within-a-film, outwith the play of reel-to-real

The message in the bottle – Peace, is what we were meant to feel

Bottle breaks, glass splinters, puncturing the starlet’s tender skin

Hostile crowd rolls up the red carpet: ‘You know nothing of the state we’re in,

Little Miss Privilege, riding into town on your half-sister’s ass.’

But leaving slebs aside, who’s been milking what, is the question (not) to ask.

How, then, does it start? As a piece of cake, perhaps.
Thin slice to begin with, nothing rude or impolite, then another
And another, until there’s no more left of him to bake or break

After hours of Goating in the pub, what little self-control you had
Collapsed like the dominoes he enjoys. His not looking for trouble,
You took it as your cue and chose to trouble him with it.

And is there one of you that takes the lead – the one always tipped to succeed?
In school and on the street, the thickness of his hair, the way it hangs….
Different days might have seen the man decorated, ’stead of ‘ringleader’ and ‘accused’.

Or nothing of the sort. Only time hanging heavy and chance presents itself
Like cookies cooling on a plate when no one else is looking,
And afterwards – pangs of regret for having taken too much.

So much the boy you beat nearly died – fractured eye socket,
Fractured spine, bleed on the brain. And did it begin with a question:
Why are you even standing there, inviting our disdain?