Hollywood is the cruellest place, breeding
Anorexia in the brightest starlets, mixing
Money and desire, stirring
Dull talent with sharp aspirations.
The war on terror kept us sober, covering
The lurid greed for that Afghan oil in stars and stripes-
The UN wondered if the campaign fed on Bush’s ego
Or Blair’s! To the ecstatic frisson of the psychedelics
On Coney Island’s giant Ferris wheel
- Creeping slavishly under the Statue of Liberty
I chewed off a bit more of that Dove, and said
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias,
They had warfare and terror, murder and bloodshed.
But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci,
And the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love
They had five hundred years of democracy and peace,
Und was machen sie? The Cuckoo clock.
It just goes to show: de killing-ibus non est disputandum.”
We were on top back then over the Middle East, the world at our feet-
But the cops got us just as we were feeling free!
When I left rehab in a hurry I forgot my fake noses.
I had them airmailed. How I hated my small upturned nose.

You ask me what can grow out of this soil,
This soil sodden with perpetual acid rain?
Son of God, You know and guess:
You say the word, Lord, and the West’s on her way.
We see those men we shot crumble before us
Into a heap of broken images. The world trembles
And grovels with pain at our feet. Not that You mind the killings.
Your book is full of killings.
Though we know there’re things You do hate, Lord:
Godless things. Black-skinned things. Things with covered heads.
There’s too many o’ them. Can’t kill a world. Only
There is shadow under the Union jack
(Come in under the shadow of the Union jack)
And the monstrous glare of guns will show us something different
From either Your cross guiding like a carrot before us
Or Your cross whipping like a stick behind us
It will show us terror in a handful of dust.

Lord, You created the Earth on 12 October, 3993 B.C.
This Jerusalem we uphold by the .35 Enfields.

<i>Don’t read much now; the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives; the chap
Who’s yellow and keeps the store
Seems far too familiar. Get stewed.
Books are a load of crap.</i>

You gave me your heart years ago,
They called me “the ladies’ man”.
Yet when I came back, late,
An engine newly made by the civil service,
You were all drunk from the highballs; you’d been seeing the other lobsters
- I smelt their cheap aftershave and pincers in the bedroom
All drenched in seaweed and oozing slime
Knowing your infidelity, I was neither forgiving nor human.
You looked into the heart of evil,
My fists, the silence.
It macerated across the Atlantic
To the lips of your Lobster Telephone. (Original attr. Salvador Dalí)
I said, “All women are dumb,
Some dumber than others.”

O la dame aux camélias, you who once cut your teeth
On where my heart should have been-
I sawed you in half in the circus tent on Cahuenga Boulevard
Until Madame Sesostris, the famous clairvoyant, put a stop to it
- Those Weird Sisters always put a stop to my luckiest pranks
(Just ’cause I got a really fortunate Lyra, you see)
Though sometimes you wonder who’s serving whom –
So I’ve got the boys again, Dorian and Gray, and that Gatsby lad too,
We all came round and sawed them gypsy tents in two
(And a couple o’ the gypsies too)
I let out my darker side: “Crazy ASBO… Imperial ASBO….”

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of an LA dawn
A crowd flowed down the Sunset, so many,
I had not thought the movies and needles had undone so many.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Luther King!
You who were with them in Alabama, upon your pulpit of dreams!
Have your dreams perished so soon? Your voice failed so soon?
Has life forgotten you so soon?

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