The Satires, Duncan McGibbon [early reader books TXT] 📗

Visible Man

Four Books of Satires

by Duncan

McGibbon
 


First Book of Satires:


An English Romance

 
Biafrans

I wonder if their fate they’d missed,
starved in the bush for a soldier’s kicks,
had they been white non-conformists
instead of black and Catholics.

1970

The Children’s Crusade

There were no soldier ghosts to rise within
that hall, so safe in anti-academic mouths;
no visions of De Toqueville, Camus or Koestler.
No doubt, the books and the ideals nestled
on shelves, in minds, in other worlds of care,
though speeches continued and postures sprawled;
we couldn’t mention Dubcek as the CP had the vote.

It was a sudden midnight whim.
After the tedium of card vote debate
none wished to return to bare hostel rooms.
We were too many blokes, but with beer enough.
Not knowing the way, Barney, at the wheel,
did his lurching turn at the roundabout,
leaving the sterile white wonder of halls
far behind us in the night, heading first
for the bleakness of the moors , then
someone decided for the sea.

The beach was black and cold, a bare expanse
of mud and protoplasm, rancid with weed.
On the sea front hotels were silently
hidden in the albumen of neon lights.
It ran to blurs and unseen Irish waves.
A jetty sank down to estuary flats,
brooded on by rotten, wind-swept shelters
We stood there feeling perspicuous, joking.
There was no further we could go

The cry was heard against the charred sky-line
Someone had slipped. All I could remember
was the sudden sight, a girl spread-eagled
in the mud. It was the merest fall,
but no-one wanted to touch her,
no-one wanted the contagion
of her mud on the few clothes
they had brought with them.
From head to foot she was black
with stinking sand and oil. She went
from one to the other in her sodden dress.
Feeling wooden, I never knew how
she cleaned herself up, how love ever thrived,
how our consciences survived

1972


Fall Out.

Truth will not be published this year,
due to lack of funds,
but an edition of everyone's
emotional guesswork
will be forthcoming.

It will liquidise all we value, mean much pain,
but none will be overlooked, be clear;
even though cities will shatter
in the blast of a billion breaths.

Though claiming a privileged point of view,
survivors will have little to gain,
as the truth of their statements
depends on what really is the case.

And we will have abolished
every case that’s true,
once our devices have been launched.
In the present circumstances
the prospect is more equal than we thought.
1985

The Grasmere Cuckoos

The village was cut off for fifty minutes
under the hazy air of a May morning
in Cumbria. Tourists and school parties
stared dumbfounded at Saracen cars
and foot patrols which ringed its limits
and came to a halt in a line across the lane
from the A592. By the time they could
advance, eight women members of a
creative writing school lay pregnant
in a stupor of innocence, defying the doctors.
Then came the bitter January births.
Midwives under the Official Secrets Act
delivered eight blue-eyed, flaxen infants.
Having leaped up at once in their mother's arms,
they topped the percentiles with un-Piagetian haste
and at six months questioned the care
of their homely nurses in complex scansion.
Juveniles, they brooded at home in Grasmere
zapping out miscreants who blocked their vistas
of rainbows and lovely roses or cut across
the splendour, or spoke while cataracts sounded.
Later they dropped speech and kept in touch
through eternities of thought. Thus they
tapped the still, sad music of the population.
All found out in dialogues of business and hate
were blasted with lazar eyes
From their mission control at Rydal Mount,
each meadow grave and stream was
kept under surveillance. They could drive
any developer or National Trust worker
to suicide, the minute they touched an unhewn stone

The nation, in its grim concern, called in
the Minister and MI6 and promptly
informed them that similar bardic delinquents
had been found all over the world.
One had liquidated the K.G.B. in Leningrad
with tactics based on the works of Puskin.
The international order was under threat,
so a force of regular practical critics
was dispatched from the University Department.
Aged Leavisites advised them on strategy
and the purity of English Diction.
The Regional Arts Committees confiscated
old, unhappy, far-off things. In the end
close Urban Warfare by a television arts
programme presenter staked them out
in a roofless hut where the children
had gone to muse in solitude.

As they writhed in hysterical pain,
brought on by anaerobic negative ability
the children gasped a last message.
They were aliens, here to imitate man’s best.
They had not meant to take poetry seriously,
merely to control the earth;
the emulation of poets was merely a trick,
based on the assumption that mankind
would give anything to realise a fantasy.
This instant the aliens’ computers were
re-programming for social perfection.
The Arts man ran out. The TLS was rung.
The deal was on, but too late,
he found the poets dead in frozen prosody.


1985

Intruders on School Sites.


To all the Authority's Headteachers,
Deputy Heads, Department Heads, Year Heads,
cleaners and school secretaries.

We ask all personnel who work in the
authority's schools and structured centres
to be on the alert for a circle
of prowlers who have shown anti-social
interest in our children and students.

A scale two teacher of Social English
reports that an old man of average height
with white, thinning hair and rustic clothes
(possibly stolen from a museum)
was seen to take a group of her children
to play 'horses' down by the canal and
encouraged them to steal a house-boat
and then to write about it in blank verse,
(which worries the advisory teachers),
heedless of their level of cognitive growth.
He is said to be violent, morose
and to carry a heavy walking stick.

Around the dust-bins of a local college,
a stout, pale faced man, with wispy hair
has been seen by Appendix Two staff,
offering link-course students opium,
on glue to sniff, in exchange for dope.
He has attempted to convert them
to a cult of absolute beauty.
He can be recognised by a large,
decomposing seabird round his neck.
Like the other intruders, he advocates
conventions of Romantic diction and
threatens German, metaphysical doctrines
when challenged or prevented.

The Head of remedial (restricted-code)
Communication Studies had told us
of a small, periwigged, crippled man
who takes children down to grottoes
where he inculcates the acceptance
of non-participatory Tory dogmas
and encourages the criticism of innovation.
He has also been seen to indulge in
acts of Augustan detachment
in the presence of our changes.

A member of the Disadvanataged
Department was seriously hurt
in an encounter with an old, stout,
balding man who rides a moody horse
who tells the children sexist and
class-biased stories then entices them
to go on pilgrimages and drink
beneath the statutory age.
He has a compulsion to visit
Church of England sites where his gang attempts
to walk through partitions
to the detriment of restoration work
He claims once to have been a diplomat
and has reactionary ideas
which verge on Monarchic despotism.

Another, this time tall and thin,
with a limp and wearing a long cloak,
has been seen distracting school leavers
from sexual counselling and imposing
attitudes of remorse, contrition
and socially divisive distain
in their pre-marital relationships
and petting behaviour among their peers.
He frequents groups travelling to off-site
swimming baths and is rumoured to have
made a highjack attempt on a school bus
and demand that it take them to the Hellespont.

Finally, the entire Social Studies Department
of a nearby comprehensive
were accosted by a small, thin man
speaking a Northamptonshire accent
and rumoured to have escaped from an asylum.
He lures our pupils into noticing
the seasons and ruins council open spaces
by breaking down bushes and stealing eggs
to encourage the children to recognise
their colours. He has also been seen to push
them into responses of unrequited love
for dangerously unrealistic ideals.

These men are malevolent, have no fixed addresses
and no visible means of support
and seem determined to prevent our educands
from coming to terms with life in a socially relevant way.
They are an organised cadre
and have often been seen holding meetings
in waste grounds where they exhibit
perverse interest in a rotting, decapitated head,
which has been known to sing aloud
all night long, causing considerable nuisance,
fear and annoyance to the neighbourhood.


1985

Final Report of the Secretary to the World Council of Cults

By now the fission and fission chains
have accelerated under a determined law,
which you, in traditional inhibition,
can be relied on not to interfere with.
The North Western sector has taken
the impact of the cataclysm
with clichéd predictability.
For famine, time was waiting,
but pestilence and death is
much in demand and all the
screenplays have been superseded.
As for the East, the fires and
destructions obliterated more than
the experts ever thought they had to lose
And as the final siren sounds,
activated by tracers counting
the fall-out levels metre by metre
as they sink to find me here
alone in my studio cell
with Papacy, Episcopacy, Ayatollahs,
burned from the surface
of a blackened world,
I give my last report to you,
via a satellite link to my distant moon,
frozen in its seas of ice
to relay my voice to infinite eruptions
of interstellar space, I have this much to say.
We sought You everywhere
and at all times in our history.
Now at last we have You cornered.
Your deistic fantasy is ended
as the fallout weighs on my tongue,
we have eliminated all reference to your Son
and thus we bury both ourselves
and You in the null eschatology
of final, unjudgemental burnout.


Epistle from a Lady.

I admit you have a point of view.
Just as I must let the fundamentalist
destroy his children's lives
Now if a doctor intervenes,
I cannot repress a sense of justice
but what you fail to understand is that
we have consciences too. Granted you and
your batchelor priests view every scrap
of life as having humanity, but
I will not concede my responsibility.
The lives you talk about are part of me.
They share my human mess. We are not islands
but I alone have authority to judge my acts
and those parts which are mine to prnounce.
No one else can move my hand if I choose
to defend myself or not. As a woman
and a mature administrator of lives
I must choose conditions that but ensure
the happiness of those whose rights cannot
be expressed except in terms of possibility.
I must decide the effect such lives
will have on all of us. We are happy now,
and know how hard a struggle it has been
to make this so. Would other lives
keep this group balanced and , if not,
what value hangs on lives that are not able
to answer, yet if born must be fulfilled.
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