The white-armed goddess of the golden throne, swats away her husband’s Olympian hand. Lord of the ‘tug and pull’ h-shake, he meant to re-align her, bringing her back into step with him. But the First Lady would have none of it.*

Fixed on the face of the patriarch, portly but powerful.
Affirming his unchanging expression, the music builds and finally resolves.
Panning across, now trained on the cornflower blue of his loyal spouse: shot remains the same, soundtrack builds as before.*

*As seen by the Ancient Greek poet Homer
*Through the lens of a family melodrama on Indian TV.

Husband and wife looking out onto our world with their what’s-the-deal? eyes.

These actors are so good, they seem to be wearing the camera – as comfortably as an extra layer of make-up.

As the ship of state goes down, the violinist plays on…..
Serenading protestors until that ‘body of armed men’ broke his strings.

Amidst the tear gas, baton charges and Molotov cocktails of anti-government protests in the streets of Caracas, violinist Wuilly Arteaga continued playing.

There he is among the masked cocktail mixers, guided and part-protected by them – soft boy in a hard place, not-quite-right symbol of their not-innocence-exactly.

Amidst the slowing down of the world economy, even after ‘recovery’ from the credit crunch and global recession, the price of oil has continued to fall.

Venezuela’s national anthem is Wuilly’s favourite tune; his clothes match the colours of the national flag – yellow, blue and red.

Venezuela is a one-chord band, oil the major earner. Demand now diminished, currency devalued, imports impossibly expensive.

Sans violin, Wuilly’s folks play ‘supermarket lottery’* for the chance to go into a shop and buy something.

*Write down your number and put it in the hat – if your number is picked out, they’ll phone you.

Eating garbage off the street
After a prison riot, eating the bodies of fellow prisoners, allegedly
The man set on fire during a protest – maybe ’cos he’s a thief, perhaps for supporting the government
Deaths during recent protests (55, or over a hundred, depends who’s counting)
The student – his parents asked him not to go – killed by a canister that came at his chest from the ranks of the national guard.

Venezuela can’t string it together much longer.

(You don’t need me to say ‘broken violin’, do you?)

Down the escalator from the keening and yearning of pre-teen spirit

Back into the banality of Mum and Dad; but this was to be no Happy Monday

Panic among pink balloons, ‘surreal’ and ‘bizarre’ said the ones who got away

Early enough not to know of the Manc who flicked the switch and made himself an It.

Not wishing to speak his name lest I nominate a martyr for that cause with no merit,

And all must know he’s worth less than that; but It’ll live another day

If treated as ineffable. There’s more strange fruit to inherit

Unless the bastard us in him – his nihilism, we address, and first, admit.

Bastard Brady – was born out of wedlock, y’know
Bastard Brady, rot in hell! Wot you did, done broke the spell

Shadows on the moor – there’s more out there, y’know
Shadows cross that herbivore world: Mods and Minis,
Long legs and Twiggy, in England’s pleasant land.

We could have believed in it, that’s how we conceived of it
Till you came along and bared your rotten teeth

In the back of a car like a rock’n’roll star
Your cherry red lips are unmissable
Still kissable even in black and white

We value human life for what it is
But even more for the possibility it contains

‘Total possibility’ is how you described it
But better dead already than soaked in your atrocities
Boys and girls, begging unheeded; their lives shut down, unplugged
And, of course, your own

Never more the wee boy still as the deer you saw deep in the forest
No longer even the VIP prisoner neighbouring the Krays
And twinned at chess with a disgraced Labour minister.

Inhuman quantities of salt, spewing and shouting; hand hits wall, fractures (not the wall), only eight stone on a six foot frame. Was this when you wanted to be transferred to a secure hospital, or when you went on hunger strike in order to be sent back? Night time snacking, nurses reported, and who knows if it was full blown mental illness or a personality disorder fit to be contained in prison?

Either way, never anything but detained: lucky to have missed the rope; only by a matter of months.

Fifty years of a locked-up life
Brought down to where the sun don’t shine.
Room, no view; and all this time never exercised in the open air.
Box not much bigger than the one you went out in – unless you’re still there.

We’re not talking ’bout lead in pencil
But strip down base graphite to a single layer of atoms –
It can be done – and a new world of possibility opens up. read more

‘Beyond words.’ The pilgrim from Hamsphire, one of an estimated two million worshippers in the town of Fatima, had entered a state of grace. Or else it was all too much for her – the Pope, the crowds, the Portuguese sun, and the little shepherds whose visions of the Virgin Mary have finally brought them to sainthood, a hundred years after the Madonna first appeared to them.

A hundred years of people striving, warring, winning, losing, dying; now colonised for Catholicism by the Holy Father. Make no mistake, besides claiming for itself the presumed innocence of Francisco and Jacinta, who died in the global flu epidemic before they had a chance to grow up, this was the Holy Apostolic Church taking back a whole heap of time, amending what times past are remembered for.

See how it’s done. Not faultlessly, for that would be in error – perfection has no need of prayer. Instead let the faithful glimpse the feet of clay – this Pope’s jug ears, his Mr Potato Head, so to see themselves making the difficult ascent alongside him.

At the open air altar, in the midst of the sacrament, a flash of calculation in the Pope’s typically humble countenance – perhaps something in his line of sight that wasn’t quite right.

It’s ‘artisanal’, this ecstasy; as he himself might say, ‘you work on it every day’. So how to work the myth and reality, folding each into the other like eggs and flour?

Take two thousand years of practice and as many of belief, moderately sincere……

Birds singing undisturbed at Drayton Manor, closed again on Thursday. A chorus of Tweets meanwhile, after 11-year-old Evha Jannath fell to her death in the water-course of Splash Canyon, a ‘rapids ride’ at the Staffordshire theme park.

Tableau of men in black, casting shadows. Police, Health and Safety inspectors – too late now!

Circled by chutes of water – its unaccustomed stillness; curved lines of the flat surface they’re standing on, standing in for the grooves on my record deck.

Album of cries and shrieks, long played out on Tuesday. When the needle dropped on this poor girl, were there rubber-necking onlookers – or did we keep our distance from the scene?

What did for her, they say, was standing up to change seats. Because the banter’s always better on the other side.

Bish, Bash, Bosh went the Twirly-Whirly Boat; and this Comic Strip just got real.

Earlier that morning, Evha wasn’t dressed right. She borrowed clothes from classmates in order to come on the school trip.

Your modest Muslim clothing: perhaps too loose for a safe ride.

Drayton Manor Theme Park reopened for business before the end of the week.

Did you think it would be ‘just a perfect day’,
Or were you miles past thinking, anyway?

As ship leaves shore, easing aside all agitation
Hypodermic depletion, you’re expecting repletion
Now fully at…. Rest.

State you’re in, you’ve got to laugh about those Chinese imports.
Needle-shaped candy available in local newsagents:
Depress the syringe in order to squirt the sweet juice into your mouth.
If only it were so easy, easy, easy.

Never as simple as brass bands and that.
In those days, it was round the Tarn and on to the Ba Ba Club,
That’s where your Mam were at.

Couldn’t you have managed this, too?
Making it through
To something more ’n your final fill
Of heroin spiked with fentanyl.

(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