Come And See (My World Cup Bid)

Dear Sepp Blatter and associated FIFA bigwigs, liggers, and cronies,

England is a perfect venue for the World Cup! I hereby officially invite you to come and see for yourself.

Come and see the country where millions of grown men pay thousands of pounds to watch lithe young men in short little shorts parade their five hundred pound haircuts and inability to remain upright after the slightest of contact, and paediatricians are attacked in the street.

Come and see the country where everyone can name Man U's starting eleven, but nobody can name 10 MPs.

Come and see the country that loves foreigners , but only if they've got a solid left foot and a healthy streak of arrogance and greed. Otherwise “Fuck off outta here, Abdul, the country's full”.

Come and see the country where footballers are paid more than novelists. This isn't sour grapes because Wayne Rooney earns in 90 minutes what I earn in a year – I have no desire to be a footballer, as I like my girlfriend to have a brain. And I don't wanna have to share her with my workmates later in a hotel room in North London.

Come and see the country where we're told we have talent while a grinning shitsack of tanned botox pumps insipid ball-less guff unbidden into our ears and our national team can't even beat a nation that doesn't know the rules.

Come and see the country where my mates think talking about football is more important than listening to drunken me hold court.

Come and see the country where footballers can get away with rape and a man who tells the truth gets accused of it.

Come and see the country where neighbours will murder each other over a parking space, despite apparently believing that putting your hazards on means you can park anywhere you damn well please.

Come and see the country that fires scientists, but welcomes with open arms a bigoted, AIDS-spreading, hate-mongering purveyor of fatuous fairy-tales called the Pope.

Come and see the country where “You watch where I'm going” is an acceptable substitute for personal responsibility.

 

Come and see the country where Alan Carr is allowed to call himself a comedian.

Come and see the country where kids can spray graffiti but not spell it.

Come and see the country that thinks copying America is a viable long-term strategy.

Come and see the country that never makes a fuss, but thinks the French are lazy.

Come and see the country where people are angrier at me for not voting than they are at the politicians they voted for lying their asses off to get elected. “Well, if you didn't vote, you can't complain!” Really? Watch me. I didn't vote in X-Factor either, but I still know Jedward are cunts.

Come and see the country where politicians think that duck moats and a university education are the same thing – they're both fine, as long as you pay the money back afterwards. No! They're not the same thing – one is you stealing money from us for something frivolous, vainglorious, and dumb, the other is you selling other people's children's future's down the river to line the pockets of your mates, saying “Yes, we'd like you all to be educated, rational adults, we would. That'll be fifty grand and a lifetime of crippling debt, then. Never mind, to help you pay that off we've got some nice business interests we've made friends with who are looking for cheap graduate talent to grind to torpid dust on the greasy pole of corporate bullshit mixed metaphors”. Thank you very much Vince Cable, you two-faced, back-stabbing, soulless, turncoat whose yellow tie and yellow belly are the only things that differentiate you from a right-wing, neo-con, money-grabbing Tory moron fuck.

Come and see the country where the government would rather spend £17 million on a four-week advertising fest to distract the populous from a right royal buttfucking than spend the money on good schools and clean hospitals and anti-Top Gear missiles.

Come and see England. We might not be as corrupt, backward, sinister, avaricious and tyrannical as Russia, but we're trying really hard.

PS. Should you be looking for somewhere different to Russia, we'll need a regime change. Quickest way to achieve this is to make the Queen all dead and stuff, dissolve the parliament, and start again. But I guess the Russians beat us to that one, too.

Ode On A Distant Prospect Of The Future or It's Not Folly To Be Wise

Following on from a conversation with Matt Panesh The Monkey Poet

Scene: The not-too-distant future.

The last clever people on Earth are trapped

In a maze of their own devising.

Nine of us are left, just nine,

Like Muses, or Ringwraiths,

Or stitches saved by the timely.

No needlework can save us now,

For we are doomed, doomed to die -

Again, a bit like Ringwraiths.

We quiver quietly, await our fate,

And ponder our survival rate.

Not zombies, wolves, or orcs we fear

But the horde of fuckwits drawing near.

We happily co-existed, not so long ago.

We got lost in libraries, they had football

And fighting, and fake tits,

And other things that real men like.

But while we were reading,

They were breeding.

While we were pleading with our girlfriends

For some environmentally-friendly anal sex,

They were filling four-by-fours with

Fat kids and gasoline,

Until we became an endangered minority,

Like Polar Bears, or Tigers,

Or the Irish.

And when the gas stations ran dry,

And they were forced to think for themselves,

They'd forgotten how to do it.

And they turned on us,

Desperate for someone to blame

And to make their kettles work.

They turned with fury unrestrained,

They hunted us 'til few remained.

Relentless, like a rising tide,

The horde of fuckwits just outside.

In the name of God and Clarkson they march,

Under a Hogwarts banner.

Destroying what they don't, or won't, understand.

Like Pollock's paintings

“Coulda bin done by a four-year-old!”

Or Cage's compositions

“Four and a half minutes of silence my arse!”

Or the idea that anything good might exist outside London.

Egged on by politicians who parade their piety

While legislating the loss of liberty,

With money mad marketing men

Singing the theme to Hollyoaks and chanting

Ignorance is Bliss!

Ignorance is Bliss

Britain's Got Talent!

Ignorance is Bliss!

With Gray in his grave, slowly revolving,

Humans chose to stop evolving.

The result of which – we can be sure -

The horde of fuckwits at the door

For a while we kept them at bay.

The outer defences sliding doors

That said 'Push' and 'Pull' on them,

Signs that pointed left, and said 'Keep Right'.

Inside those, tables, strewn with

Packets of nuts with nuts inside,

Scalding hot, warning-free coffee,

And a knife that was guaranteed suicide-proof -

We figured they'd see that as a challenge.

But there were so many of them.

On they came, like Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad,

Only with warmer, puffier coats.

On they came, past the Paris Hilton exhibition,

Ignoring the Rubik's Cubes and Slinkies littering their path,

Past the astrology readings that said

“With Scorpio in the ascendant,

Treat yourself to some KFC and X-Factor”

On they came, determined to crush the last remnants of

The smart-arse, clever-dick, big-word-using,

Poetry-reading, faggot world we represented.

They're just outside now.

I still refuse to pray.

We hear the knuckles scraping floor,

As foreheads seek to smash the door.

Our fearful fingers scratching skin:

There's a horde of fuckwits breaking in

But this is the future, it isn't set -

There's time to change this vision yet!

Ignore the rumours that you've heard:

Intelligence isn't a dirty word.

Think for yourself, wonder, question,

Try to cleanse the doors of perception.

Be proud of your learning, proud of your smarts,

(And stop them from slashing the funds for the arts!)

Reduce population in the simplest way:

Try to stop fucking, just for a day,

Teach your children to think straight from birth,

Before all these fuckwits take over the earth.

                     Intellectuals of the world unite!

                     You have nothing to lose but your brains.

Poetry Is Hard

I haven't written a sonnet since I was 17. I challenged myself to see how quickly I could write another. This took me four hours. You can probably tell.

A sonnet: only fourteen rhyming lines.
A hundred-forty syllables ain't much - 
It's hard to write a poem that sticks to such
A strict and miserly amount of time.
It's tricky to compose a verse sublime
Within such constricts; one that's meant to touch
The audience, without some kind of clutch 
Of how to cheat and just contrive the rhymes.
Upon line nine the rhyme should really alter
(I think it's technically called a 'volta'),
Which leaves the writer just two couplets, say,
To end the poem in a stylish way.
But all you really need is pen and ink - 
A simple sonnet's quicker than you think. 

Hippie Hop

The Pen and The Sword had a fight, this once -
The Sword got sick of The Pen and his rep -
Just strutting around with undeserved fame,
Going “Yo, I'm The Pen! You gonna step
To me bitch? I'm the baddest!
You try and fuck wi' me,
You'll be the saddest
Cuz me and my nib'll put your ass in the morgue -
Ev'ryone knows The Pen's mightier than The Sword!”
The Sword wouldn't take this, he had backbone
A pattern-welded spine, entwined on the inside.
His steely constitution wouldn't take no shit
From an upstart Bic, a fucking glorified
Crayon, He ain't playin'
Designed for killing and he lives for slayin'
He says to The Pen “Damn, boy, you're a fool,
No way you can win – I'm a weapon, you're a tool.
Let's duel, here's the rules:
We meet at dawn, we stand back to back,
We take ten paces, and then I start to hack
You up sucker. Now hit the sack
And sleep – it your last night tonight -
When the sun comes up, we'll see who's got the might”.
At first light they meet, both prepared to fight
To the death, to the very last breath.
(I know swords and pens don't technically breathe,
But this is just a poem, suspend your disbelief)
Back to back they stand, The Sword and The Pen,
They start to pace and count to ten,
They turn to face – the pen drew first:
Drew a picture annotated with a scrap of verse,
Turned to The Sword and said “You see, I'm so great!
You can kill and maim, but I can create:
Pictures, and poems, and the ABC.
Give it up, Stabby, you'll never beat me!”
The Sword flashed and slashed and cut that shit to ribbons,
Destroying ev'rything that The Pen had written.
He advanced on The Pen, screamed “You jumped-up quill!
That's the last time I let you up in my grill!
I'll kill you, spill your ink!
Don't even think I can't make you extinct
Quicker than a blink!
I'm not gonna, cuz I know you've been misled,
You've got a stupid platitude running through your head.
It's just an old saying, you can't take it at its word,
It's ludicrous to think that a pen could beat a sword.
It was written by a bloke in a play 'bout Richelieu
In 1839, that doesn't make it true!
We need to change the maxim, it's time to announce
That it's the mighty mind behind the pen that counts”.