WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

Ditch by the dilapidated buttress
has my name
poorly pissed into it by a drunken sentry.

Needing to squeeze
the ill-kemp ennui from bittersweet me,
traversing the headlands stealing Trafalgar,
Gibraltar, Pillars of Hercules;

got a physique on short-term lease,
teasing out tattered virility,
percolated coffee-grind mind.

Mindset.

Mind set,
mind where you sit. Or shit.
Do it on your doorstep.
Not mine, not theirs.

Who cares?

‘Unfuck the World’ – nice t-shirt -
cause célèbre Wall Street picket plaudits:
gonna get your hands in the dirt?

How does your garden grow?

Packaged in poly- on sterile shop shelves,
praising plastic neodeities
for fossil-fuel deliverance -
until the slick black,
force-bled from our Mother,
runs dry from drilled vaginas.

Permanent PMT;
increase in natural disasters
hardly surprising. She’s rising.

I’m pissed, pissed off, off, off-colour, colouring,
but my name has sunk now from the
pissed-sentry-piss-ditch piss-off.

Off-piste epistemology.

</rant>

8 people like this post.

Like

Unlike

Conservative Leader and UK Prime Minister David Cameron

Their toxic manifestos blind our sight,
Authoritarians lay traps and wait.
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

By Coalition, Liberals chanced the night -
the Tories forced into a strange stalemate -
but manifestos must be kept in sight.

The plotting Palin proves Obama’s blight,
while India and China crash the gate.
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Control whole Middle-East, least if they might,
securing all the oil, at any rate.
Their faking manifestos blind our sight.

Don’t think you’re still ahead just ’cause you’re White,
and turn that huntin’ gun on me, irate.
Rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

Misled; within your eyes, Hell’s Flames alight,
unlock those missile-sights, all set in hate.
No toxic manifestos blind our sight;
rage, rage against the lying of the Right.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/ukparties2010
http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008

Republican Sarah Palin, left, taken down a peg by satirist Tina Fey, right

The wonderful line I have used as my second refrain, which sparked off this villanelle in the first place - ‘Rage, rage against the lying of the Right’ – (playing on Dylan Thomas’s famous line ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’), is sourced from the Liberal/Left political website www.myleftwing.com and used with their kind permission. Indeed they have t-shirts with the it gloriously emblazoned across the front.

2 people like this post.

Like

Unlike

“I’ve gone to look for America” *

Expansive, America
what now?
Expensive, America
what, now?

Detroit -
Mad Maxing social fractures; both sides
are the wrong side of the tracks.
Eight Mile disintegrated
Eminem dissociated

Detroit -
where the Industrial Revolution
finished up. Where carbon-coughing
chrome horses are foaled

The Four Chryslers of the Apocalypse
are upon your bereft
blacktired black streets

“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”

George Clinton -
singin’ “Paint the Whitehouse Black”,
prophesied

Black Obama, well, black enough
(if you’re brown, stick around, they say,
but the First Lady’s blacker, ain’t that enough?
Does she sully the White House white sheets
with her naked Negritude?)

Health-Care Reform for oil -
you spoil the gesture. Oil, that is,
Black Gold, asphyxiates
beneath black slicks

(Beverly Hillbilly hicks, archived,
remain analogue black-and-white)

Nobel Peace Prizer-
make Peace that goes beyond
getting elected over warmongers

They, in their black sedans;
they, with their missiles launched
from hallelujah high-horses
kneading bread-dough minds,
destroying Iraqi lives.

They, who climb down only
from a lectern and
starrystriped standing ovation

“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why”

Expansive, America
what now?
Expended, America
what, now?

Let’s cheek-to-cheek the Decadance
on this broken ballroom floor,
you and I, till our feet fall off

You
are already missing a
shoe

“They’ve all come to look for America”

☆

*NB: Lines in speech-marks are from the Simon and Garfunkel song America (video with lyrics beneath)

NOTE: This poem is in no way intended as an attack on the American people, nor America generally. I ran it by American poet friends before posting to make sure it didn’t come over as anti-American/ignorant/xenophobic. Some is observational, some is socioeconomic/geopolitical statement, the ramifications of which ultimately encompass all Western Civilisation, Europe included. We are on the downturn, unequivocally. The Romans denied it too. They all did. The question is whether we can, as we fall, gently integrate into the Global economic village that China and India are swiftly building, or whether we allow ourselves, through the myopia that avarice and collective ego bring, to be overrun by neo-Vandals.

2 people like this post.

Like

Unlike

BP: look
at me.
I flinch; God
you’re ugly.
Myopic, dystopic.

This topic
dares me
to fight you;
scares me, but
fuck you.

If

you

go

d

o

w

n

I will be
digging.

Happily.

Sweat never
tasted sweeter;
a graveyard never
more sun-filled.

Birds sing
this morning,
done mourning
their cousins,
they sing.

Happily.

1 person likes this post.

Like

Unlike