I saw a UFO today
they were auditing the Milky Way
probed me with a questionnaire
(I didn’t care
I wasn’t in the mood
but I didn’t want to seem rude
if they used their superior weaponry on me I’d be screwed).
it took ages
endless pages
jesus christ
I gritted my teeth and acted nice
eventually – finally – it was over
the door slid open on their interstellar rover
just before they left they thanked me for my time
covered me head to foot in slime
(something they said was a ritual amongst their folk
but one of them sniggered so I’m guessing it was a joke)
anyway
they flew away
thank god
but not
before handing me a gift that glowed in the light
‘a magic stone’ they said (oh really? yeah, right)
poems
fit test
the TV flickers
look at this picture
a doctor in a ducking stool
poised above the viral pool
masked & aproned
by a grateful nation
sorry for the technical glitch
sometimes medicine’s a bitch
but she’s no snitch
she’s a wise woman not a witch
she’s braver than that
and anyway, PPE doesn’t stretch to a hat
whatever
there’s no such thing as bad weather
just bad clothes
as well she knows
and as this thing goes
so does she
they film the whole ducking ceremony
and don’t worry
she’s more loved than ever
they’re all like: come live with me and be my love
and don’t forget to double glove
meanwhile
in a galaxy far, far away
cluster one clips cluster two
the system gets busted
everything and everyone flung out & dusted
spiralling off on a whole new adventure
in this cold and glittering universal architecture
rapture capture
sing a song of silence
a pocket full of why
military wildcats
on a fly by
all this toing and froing
where the fuck do they think they’re going?
there’s no way of knowing
but I’m guessing
they’re monitoring the massing
in the high street
the solitary shoppers flocking
dropping
drumming, drumming
there’s a mad messiah coming
the worst kind
the ordinary, ornery kind
and this one’s not kidding
his tweets are twisted & totally forbidding
so don’t go
please don’t go
stay safe and low
he’s not come to play frisbee with that halo
look at him
just look at him, standing over there
with his seedy, self-cut hair
his big beer belly bare
ignorant of everything
vexed & flexing
furiously texting
‘My God, my God – why hast thou forsaken me?’
smiley
angels with flushed faces
We are the NHS angels
fluttering into battle
with bottles
of alcohol gel
wings of flimsy plastic
halos riding up on loose elastic
dependable
expendable
belov-èd
double glov-èd
invoked by politicians when the system hits the skids
summoned by bells made of dustbin lids
shaky reiki
The friend of a friend of someone I know
(a pretty loose connection as these things go)
has started yet another new business
spiritual well-being & fitness
specialising in Angelic Reiki
which sounds a little shaky
but apparently she’s passed all the levels
from Elementary Handling of Devils
to Advanced Astral Repositioning & Revels
so now you too can be a student
and spend your way to spiritual attunement
plugging in to the angelic movement
with a direct debit for regular payment
(and yes, I know, in the current crisis
the official government advice is
Stay at Home unless it’s urgent
for things like bread and milk and detergent
But how much more vital could it be
to seek protection angelically?
Anyway – you needn’t fret
that they haven’t ended the lockdown yet
because a benefit of this particular therapy
is it works just as well on the landline, apparently
which I have to admit is quite a neat feature
for such a complicated procedure).
a poor nursing assistant curses his luck (again)
There was absolutely no-one in the car park but me
which is why I couldn’t help taking it so personally
when a seagull, vindictively,
blatantly acting tactically,
voided its bowels acrobatically
spattering me liberally
the very second I took off my PPE
know your enemy
Viruses are biochemical malware / you can download from a table or the back of a chair / a sandwich wrapper or an item of footwear / a shopping trolley / the handle of a brolly / a volley / ball / the lightswitch in the hall … / basically, anything anyone’s touched at all / not to mention from a cough or a sneeze / where the virus spreads with comparative ease / in the old-fashioned, pneumo-plaguey-way / deadly and direct as an aerosol spray / from a can marked Quik-Infect / with a list of all the side effects / a hotline number for questions to ask / and a picture of a skull in a surgical mask
SARS-CoV-2 / (coronavirus to me and you) / is 120 nanometres spike to spike / and to give you an idea of what THAT looks like / you could put 650 from here to there / across the diameter of a human hair
The virus is built to hotwire cells / and utilise their organelles / knocking out bunches of viral clones / that eventually burst out like drones / to carry on the replication / in neighbouring host cell populations / surfing the ancient genetic wave / of all the poor organisms they invade
They’ve been around since Deuteronomy / rampaging through the world’s taxonomy / you find them in camels and mandarins / bats and cats and pangolins / and although a virus isn’t strictly alive / you’d have to admit it shows plenty of drive / constantly making adaptations / capsid hacks and alterations / endless genetic recombinations / and even though the thing’s inert / and depends on hosts to make it work / still, it thrives in its micro-domain / nestling spike-deep in a cell membrane / one more key in one more lock / one more twist on the evolutionary clock
But I didn’t want to leave you without some hope
The thing they really hate is soap
early surfers
‘Fossil hunters find evidence of 555m-year-old human relative’
The Guardian, Mon 23 March 2020
Ikaria wariootia / five hundred and fifty-five million years / before its picture finally appears / on the screen of my computer / anonymously famous / the bean-like creature that became us / minutely modelling mouth and anus / demonstrating with sweet simplicity / the evolutionary benefits of left and right symmetry / nudging through the ooze / on its long, sedimentary cruise / wallowing, swallowing / blindly following / the restless motive fact / of its elegantly elementary, alimentary tract / an ambitious snoot / snuffling around at the root / of the great ancestral tree / that branches out to humans like me / scavenging on the internet endlessly
doggy long legs
it’s all wrong / Stanley the lurcher’s legs are way too long / four pawed limbs of such epic proportions / it takes a series of spectacular contortions / to cram himself into Lola’s basket / like an octopus suckering itself into a sunken casket / or a sequinned circus freak / who waves but doesn’t speak / delivering the shocks / waddling backwards into a tiny perspex box
I mean – come on! / this really is some super-leggy phenomenon / a miracle of locomotion / and long bone syncopation / like he swallowed a magic potion / for the legs of a giraffe and the body of an elephant / and the ears of something entirely irrelevant
how he does it I don’t know / figuring out where those appendages go / and when he lands he lands with a lump / and it’s one helluva job to get back up
ghost protocol
I’m sorry, but if you’ve been murdered
and want your cause for justice furthered
you can’t simply fire off a furious email
describing what happened in meticulous detail
No.
You’re contractually obliged to be scary as shit
while you draw the whole thing out a bit
scrawling on mirrors, freaking out dogs,
looming alarmingly in spooky fogs
and even though you can open doors
and make wet footprints on kitchen floors
type your initials on a computer screen
or work the buttons on an answer machine
you’re totally forbidden to write a letter
that would explain the thing a whole lot better
or pull up a chair and have a chat
about who it was killed you and stuff like that
It doesn’t make much sense, I agree
and only adds insult to injury
but them’s the rules. I didn’t make ‘em
who the hell knows what happens if you break ‘em
