The Commodity News

The price of everything, for what it’s worth

“Is what’s happening

today really happening to us?

And is that red thing

heading for us now a bus?”

[From a railway carriage on the
journey to find where power lies]

A girl whose hope and heart

had been too early charred

by knowing of disasters

that would overcast her

rasped like one close to their last,

broken sparse and harsh;

she spoke as if her age was past

and quietly imparted

her precocious forecast

to the listening compartment.

1. A Child speaks of her concerns

Words, all grown up throw-up words,

your phone app blown up donut words

words that won’t condone or show concern

or even own up that I’ve heard

the future’s been deferred by words.

Greater mouse-eared bat, goodbye.

Bye bye, large copper butterfly;

Farewell before we even have identified

a hundred undiscovered fungi.

So long lamb succory;

downy hemp nettle, respectfully

yours – all the bestoya.

Mind how you go to woad, and so nearly

da boch chi,

so briefly known cold Snowdon lily?

Then, how long before times freeze

on bluebells, pimpernels, herb paris

wood sorrel and anemones?

When will the child be born who sees

and mourns the last of these.

Like ungulates that peer through leaves

by woodland paths among the trees

where summer evening light deceives,

or like fluffs of rosebay seeds,

each timid species

only stays if no one breathes.

Our ancestors

loved and lived for forests for a

hundred thousand years or

more till you, incautious warders,

brought us …

… what? Discord? Disorder?

Nature falling to a vortex?

2. The student explains why he doesn’t vote

Forewords. Sure words.

Flaw-words, not easy to ignore words.

Your words, little sister, got it bossed,

cos words record the time we’ve lost.

Words describe the thresholds crossed.

Words are how the truth was glossed.

But words alone don’t count the cost

of passivity that follows

on from life, survival in the shallows

which business swallows.

Your industries for centuries like dinosaurs

have pawed and mauled and gnawed us

till they wore a gaping sore a

nation-broad, a sward, a

weal across our commonweal

which your all wheedling can’t conceal.

They’re even now extorting new rewards

and courting your applause as

3. The Politician has a response ready

Words – words – just mark these words

they’re printed large so hark my words

sharp words, stark words

and don’t-go-alone-by-dark words.

Of course we share our citizens’ concern

for our precious natural world,

and I’ll leave no stone unturned

till its security’s returned.

But government is a match of thirds:

our policies – our enemies – the herd,

and all we want to do is serve.

Though the sceptics speculate

excoriate and fabricate,

I’ve always properly confessed

a priority for those with less

and how we wish them some redress;

though poverty is weakness,

their poverty is also blest,

and my kindness is no game of chess.

The point so often missed is this:

to save the people’s and the planet’s health,

we absolutely must create more wealth.

So why object when I profess

that migrants should routinely face arrest?

They only claim asylum to access

the benefits of safety and success;

then everything they take leaves us with less.

It’s hard to know the bigger pest,

their lawyers or those who fake distress:

both are infestations and a cause of interest

to enemies who want to harm the West,

and that it’s self-evidently best

this deviance is soon suppressed.

Forgive me, I’ve digressed.

Poverty’s a form of theft

by aliens who would be guests

and layabouts with zest to rest

their elbows on our treasure chests

in hope that they’ll divest

those whose means are properly assessed.

We must do all we can to erase

the insult and the waste

of this base and national disgrace.

Then we’ll address this regrettable distaste

for the flowers and creatures displaced

by the well-intentioned haste

to make our country great.

I rest my case.

4. An Investor drools

True words – few words – due words

to flush and lose the turds

who’d screw you.

This discourtesy and hurt

that you’ve incurred from those accursed

is underserved, unearned and worse.

But don’t be urged to reimburse

these perverse and worthless

smirking bits of dirt.

We, the better dressed,

are irked but shouldn’t be obsessed:

hurt pride will always be redressed.

when we invest.

You can’t go back on mining stocks:

the Chilean are minimum for lithium in rocks,

But oil is still the crack

the nation lacks,

and you can max your cash

and even get relief from tax

since gilt is guiltless for the mack

with balls who fracks

the shale and extracts

two quadrillion cubic feet of gas

that’s packed beneath our towns and tracts.

What man doesn’t get erect,

who doesn’t genuflect

or sense that destiny’s possessed

him when the markets and the index

collectively detect

where wise funds should be directed next?

And for those not quite so blessed

as us who have a smaller pot to test:

why not a little property, a nest,

a comfort from a sad bequest,

returns for all those closest, dearest,

(and somewhat less for all the rest)?

It’s essential everyone concocts

a hedge against commercial knocks:

an office block perhaps beside the docks,

a row of second homes in Wester Ross,

flocks of rare breeds on the Quantocks,

some mansions down at Boulters Lock.

Then since life sucks,

they say, for those in flux,

you can be the friend who chucks

up homes for all the clucks.

To everyone who shucks

out half a million bucks:

a pretty, private hutch,

their little box.

Whatever’s wrong with making profits?

It’s the reason we’ve got pockets,

(though we buy our real estate on credit

for as long as we can get it).

But oh, what happy recompense,

those dissidents that we’ve incensed

will have to pay our interest

and our rents.

5: The Adman promises

New words – shrewd words – and reused words –

it’s our job to choose the schmooze words,

working words you heard here first,

set loose to be absurd,

abused and cursed.

Ours is the currency that listens

in worlds of larceny and prisms;

they’re the mystery that glistens,

gives novelty its chic and frisson;

they tell you all what is, and isn’t;

they’re words to liberate your reason,

set the price on things you’re missing.

Whatever people see that isn’t taken,

my job’s to make them

ache to get them –

any flotsam, any jetsam

any mission, hokem, token,

any off-street on-screen legend,

any molecule or serum

fake elixir or gem

anything that’s made or mined,

any meme to mate with minds

that might defuse the surplus time

of purchasers of things divine

and bring them closer to sublime.

We only need to make them shine.

Our every word and number’s prime.

6. A Single Parent minds

Snot words, slot words, grot and rot words,

any shot that gets your slop heard

don’t-you-give-us-all-the-trots words.

We get your drift,

your glyph, your riff.

But say you’re home and frozen stiff?

When did you last play what-if

with an empty fridge and empty kids?

never getting half a sniff

at the extra evening shift?

watching meals arrive as gifts?

slowly slipping off a cliff?

Did you start the week with nothing left,

without relief, adrift, bereft?

When did you ever lose belief

in the power you’ve achieved

for inflicting grief?

Clearly your collective interests sit

in cutting benefits to lift

us into work that doesn’t fit

our family, or faculties, or wit.

We can always take our pick

from anything that makes you rich.

So in the end the lives you break

are equal to the stake

you make us make you make.

Crude desperation which induces

us to queue for scraps of food

naturally eludes the farmers who produce

it and middlemen whose skewered

duty is to process out what’s good.

So industry and politics collude

to boost their dividends and dues,

choosing rude excuses

for the damage that ensues.

The bottom line can wear a minor bruise

from any obtuse news

about the lives they lose:

mere inaction keeps the revenues

while your profit still accrues.

While you win, we lose, and lose, and lose.

So, you phonies and you donors

city brokers with your bonus

you elected ones with boners,

floaters, hangers on and chronies

famous just for what you’re known as,

you told us that our dreams were out for hire,

we could be a flower, be a flier;

were free to trade in moonlight or in sky or

merchandise state-customised desire.

You thought the songs you gave us would inspire,

but we were never asked to join your choir.

You played on platitudes and promises

that someday every worker will have riches

and everyone alive will purchase ...

what? Fame? Success?

Presents for their little prince or princess?

Or anything to fill the emptiness?

Now it’s clear just what you meant:

you will choose the time when you relent,

and those on whom the system’s mostly leant

till then stay worn and weak and spent,

ignored and worthless, condemned

as wimps, lifewasters, kept in contempt

by you lifewasting pimps and gents

at the national Department of Pretence.

7. An old man with a can of beer wakes in alarm

What mist? What lost mythology?

What careless airborne mystery is this?

How could we miss these

indiscrete asymmetries

and this poor woman’s miseries?

What twist-fisted economics

that were supposed to make us rich

could leave so many in the Styx?

What a system and what wisdom to inflict It!

You must have missed some interdicts

restricting use of these slick tricks –

to make a fixture with no fix

and one that stinks so much like piss.

It’s odd the state’s so often

stated first obligation

is the safety of the population

yet in self-delusion

it can’t even find excuses

for its climate change confusion,

and abrogation of its duties.

Now, after many years of rumours,

storms, floods and fires are here like tumours

to alarm, bemuse and doom us

while leaders couldn’t be more clueless,

do less.

Meanwhile tumescent

rivers now assume a

loose and gruesome sluice

that flows down avenues

and roads of beech and yews,

choosing where to nose and ooze,

in whose home the sewage spews,

who’ll lose, who rues,

which of us soon discontinues.

Then what comes after?

What next destruction? Fresh disaster?

What slow starter and unchartered,

unobserved departure

that is yet to come?

Not water tumbling

but perhaps the scum –

fungi back from summer slumber

with blackened tongues damp and fumbling

through the things we own, and crumbling

all we think that we can summon –

till our culture has become their medium,

something feeding in a seep

of failure, slugs that come in sleep;

a vague malevolence that creeps

through all we sow and reap.

I can sense a grieving,

sleazy thieving

running in my margins

and imaginings like merciless machines.

I even dream my own awakening

as if reality is breaking

down and flaking

in the aching age before I’m taken.

8. The Last Optimist tries not to sound desperate

What? No words of hope?
no words of hosts and homes?

words of closure and repose

no scope for roses, hawthorn, sloes

small promises for moles and voles?

Slow down: we must be cursed

if we can’t nurse diversities,

put nature first,

reverse adversities and hurts.

Say goodbye to Perses and Circe,

and empty out your bursting purses –

there won’t be thanks for smaller mercies.

If enough of us can work it

and our effort is concerted

together we can still revert it:

So everyone get down (don’t bow, don’t curtsey)

and don’t get up until you’re dirty.

Already farmers have made pledges

to replant the wasted hedges,

put back those tatty, unproductive wedges,

of dispensable field edges,

the once extraordinary engines

of life’s connections and defences.

They say that they’ll return with tractors, dredgers,

dig out long-lost ponds and ditches,

entice back sedges, toads and midges

before the last of swifts and skylarks fledges.

There could still be hedgerows left to etch

the landscape, split the stretched

out boundless fields and stitch

the farmland back together.

Why not refix the once green bridges

so slow worms, fieldmice, crickets

woundwort, stitchwort, blackthorn, vetches

can flex their ranges, mix the sexes,

reclaim sustainable genetics?

Though we obsess about the snow

and the roads it closes,

and how the nation blows

its top at bans on hoses,

there must be someone here who knows

the scent of smoke on roses,

and chauvinists could save oceans

by imposing more than prose and poses.

But maybe there’s a double-take and

our concerns for safety are mistaking

quakings of our mind’s own making.

Let’s be optimistic and contend

our great experiment

with greed comes to a sanitary end,

and we won’t let an

angry planet take revenge…

… Yet even then,

if we weather weather here with ease

it must depend

what power oversees the overseas?

Oh please, one final semanteme:

is what’s happening

today really happening to us?

And is that red thing

heading for us now a bus?

9. Now everyone joins in

The librarian objects

What? Still words?

No, worse.

Sick witless winded words.

Words that never did a day of honest work:

nitpick, fickle and lickspittle words,

teeth-gritting and earth-shitting worms

of words in verse.

And this is not the worst…

The park keeper keeps nothing back

All of you with power

are a trowel-coward shower

of cock-furrowed clock-borrowed

stock-horror harrowers,

famed for your outstanding

loutish misbehaviours,

pronouncing nature’s nadirs

to tout yourselves as saviours –

like gardeners flouting failures

with azaleas and dahlias.

You lounge about the wallflowers

crouching over leeks and sprouts

and souring the ground round gallows.

You mount with the hounds,

you joust with old wheelbarrows;

while you measure in todays

you’re plouging our tomorrows.

The reporter sees the future

The delegates to COP-Con Fifty-two

meet on a cruise ship over Tuvalu

to watch beneath a lovely sky of puce

the islands disappear into the blue.

Governments who come with dirty flues

jostle there to flog their fossil juice –

and fight their futile feuds

intended to excuse

refusals of the mitigation dues

to countries that have nothing left to lose.

The West comes dressed as a flock of ewes,

while the Non-aligned aren’t easy to amuse,

and oil men take you back to rooms

for talks with floozies, coke and booze.

There’s not a leader here who leads or even moves

while commodities are burning down the fuse.

The chef vomits

What amazement and distaste.

What dismay, what waste,

to negotiate with the Don Quixote

president who brays,

and liaise with states already dazed

in the cage of their aphasia.

Their taste, some say,

is their worst mistake,

their execrable taste,

glazed by gross displays

filling up their faces, waists,

and all the vacant spaces they embrace

with the stuff they craze.

Like a kid who plays

with sucrose and chlorates

they so need us to be amazed.

Their tyres, their brakes

scrape way below unsafe,
while Earth spins in an autoclave,

awash, ablaze,

and plagues rage

as if these are the last of days.

The divorcee demands concessions

What differences? What dissent?

It’s the job of businesses and parliaments,

not citizens, to show repentance,

and relent on those demented

vain pretenses that incense us.

Maybe once, to engender some consensus

(since they’re barred from membership of Mensa)

in preference to their entry-

level common sense

they could condescend

to demonstrate intelligence.

The street sweeper takes up a shovel

You’re our pavement,

we’re the pissed off claimant:

it’s not punishment we want,

but you won’t change our sentiment

till you’re scraped clear of excrement.

The engineer breaks down

What crocks! What schmucks!

Where’s the stop, cock?

Can’t you lock it?

We’ve only ever had one rock yet,

and you had the knowledge

that could shock it, shuck it, hock it;

you gave it pox, you made it toxic,

now you want the Moon to mock it,

pock it, cock it

up too (you’ve got the rockets),

but when it’s gone you can’t rebox it.

So here is why it’s time to knock it

off: you’re the gear that’s missing sprockets;

you’re the hole that drains the bucket.

You’re the pests, you’re the vermin

leaving stinking trails of urine.

You’ve filled our home with dog-shit

pig-piss economics and logistics;

but you’re not the ones to brick it,

so you can stick it, lick it.

Get it?

The girl suggests an economic solution

Fuck it!

It’s our planet.

We want it back,

and you to fix it.

10. The author reveals his bias in doggerel

“Why give up on our conversation?”

demands the passenger, my muse.

Because we know there’s no solution,

just the time to come we can’t excuse.

Bads and goods

What disparities; what iniquities.

Despite our infinite capacities

as the wonder species

which can conjure cities,

number galaxies,

aren’t we also numbed and humbled oddities

who have become commodities?

Untended consequences

Everything depends on one assumption:

our salvation comes from more consumption.

The Pound pub hangs a giant coin outside,

Pompeiians only speak by selling guides;

dumb bank subprimes and rock music idols,

speeding with the past, die suicidal.

Then if poison logic panics winter sales

we’ll make it true in next year’s rationale;

tomorrow’s prophets must incentivize

though when we tell a lie another species dies.

In a future age when rebooted words

loot all we say and loosen the absurd

there’ll be nothing left that’s a point of view,

and nothing we believe will be untrue.

Leading questions

Are we Star Trek humans who somehow got benign?

Was there a New World Order after Eighty-nine?

Did pre-post-covid fear really make us more aligned.

No, conflict, malice, greed are part of the design.

and yes, we share the blame for missing lethal signs –

no one who’s alive today can default the fines;

so we don’t need governments standing back behind

the focus groups they pay for telling them the time.

Give us just one guardian with the strength of mind

to confront reality, someone who’s inclined

to lead campaigns for remedies, not blame for crimes.

Whitehall floors

Don’t load your guilt on us, your pawns,

expect our gratitude for paper straws

or that closing stable climate doors

in a thousand years restores

the balance of your causeless wars.

Saving plastic bags is not our cause:

this distraction and futility is yours.

Thicket brake

Still as spray in pictures of cataracts

the graceful grazing ungulates ghost us,

posed a moment on an open track,

and dare just long enough to focus

on the slope we’re on – to almost scope us.

If only piston senses could relax

that cervine spine while they broker

the impulses and instincts to contract

with our own laxative and broken locus,

wouldn’t they see creatures wracked

by helpless fear, both real and bogus,

and a world in anguish at our backs?

Yet these survival facts don’t slacken

in their instant dash back into bracken.

Owed to a Skylark

Sorry, old soaring blythe-spirited mate,

they’ve draped our Downs in oilseed rape

wrapped fields in blue linseed, green belt, red tape;

If you still expect to twist and twitter

you’ll be constrained to mountain tops

without our wildlife, shelter, crops.

You may survive, but your song grows bittern.

Free for all

Who knows if nature, which abhors a

vacuum and has been your whore as

long as men have cheated whores, can restore a

sound discourse, a

lasting equilibrium between and for all?

If I was air…

Today I’d travel north with clouds against the flow.

While office girls and sisters fly the streets

and city south to blister on the beaches,

I’d convect to peaceful upland meadows

flushed late green by steamy sun-soaked mists

that pin the Snowdon lily high on cliffs

and backs Scots primrose up against the sea.

I’d linger with lost bewildered species,

escaping natives, displaced casuals,

with bitterns, butterflies, and pipistrelles,

and whale and shark arrivals on the shores.

Yet, meanwhile, I’d take everything by storm

industry has made since the earth was warmed

till your hot and poisonous breath would force

a course back home through the holes in your skin

where sweat seeps out and nothing yet gets in.

Lent sacrifice

Hang on, fellow citizens:

incompetence and violence

in all bents of government

make incoherent sense –

except to censure innocence,

and render an immense

propensity for crapulence.

So if we shine a lens

on what their moral indigence

and indifferent defence

of borrowed growth has meant,

we’ll display a world’s descent

in a blaze of pain and mad dissent.

Application

Was all life an interview

for us to overstate

what we can and want to do,

then fail to interrogate

the obligations due –

or maybe to evaluate

our options when refused.

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