'Where do the reptile eyed go
When the sun comes up?'
asks a girl holding a black spider*
‘They go where white cells clot,’
Said a gossamer boy with webbed eyes.
‘They hide in oak veneered Gothic parlours
Lined with the scabbed carcasses
Of their penniless prey;
Hide where blue-blood* turns green,
Where baying swine
Feed from plates of peasant offal.
‘Where they talk in hushed code,
Where souls turn charcoal
In dirty handshake rooms,
Where wax faces reflect disbelief
In mirrors gilded with the bones
Of forgotten corpses
Of rag and bone men
Who died as they were born
so were laid in pauper graves.”
II
Champagne priests chant
Folded double inside
Green leather backed thrones:
‘We must exorcise dissident-men‡
Pierce their eyes
With scalpel sharp pens,
Sacrifice their tongue
To our dumb Gods
So
they cannot see or speak
Of the horrors hid in glass nests
A thousand feet tall;
Retell the horror of daylight spiders,
Suited thieves in shark toothed boots
Drinking the milk-blood
From scum patinated streets
‘We must snip societal muscle
From societal bone,” they sing
In neither tune nor melody.
“Slice sinew holding flesh to flesh
Divide diseased estates,
Cause homes to haemorrhage love,
Break bonds till brother and brother
Are enemy,
Till their will turns to poison
In their hollowed cheek.
Crush these velvet black ants‡
As they scapper through OUR city.”
III
By Lucifer’s light
The angels shall descend
To save those with sacred tongue texts;
The ants will be burnt
In rusting cauldrons
By alchemists perfecting
Potions and salves to stave off death.
While the spiders dance
Around the pyre
Reciting Crowley’s rhymes
Till their loins explode with fire.
History will be rewritten
In these oak veneered Gothic parlours;
The dissidents will become
Hate figures. Scapegoats.
Demonised.
The reptile eyed
When day arrives
Return to your mother’s oak veneered womb.
So,
Hold gently that black spider,
Little one.
*the establishment/politicians
‡ the poor/working class/unprivileged
