Turquoise Monster

Burning Books

An idea is creeping
This concept is bleeding freedom dry
Bleaching our souls to dust
Carving loveliness into nothing

A vision is stealing rational thought
Turning the good to turgid insipidness
Leadership whips to spoil
Leaving people and lands boldly strewn

A nightmare is building out of the hate
Filling the belly of the best
Bubbling with grief that can destroy
Leaching humanity from its core

A cycle is beginning
Blaming, hating – are the new creeds
It begins with books and ends with people
Hold it together and no one is free

A pyre is belching a column in the sky
Smoke dirty as a sewage overflow
How many people will be maimed
For Pride and Glory and the Political Way

I Am An Ammonite is a poem written by Marcus Moore as part of the Cotswold Water Park Trust. I feel very lucky that a few years ago they all said yes to me illustrating it and placing it in the Science-Art Exhibition at Centre Arts in Cheltenham. The poem is on canvas and I attempted to make it seem as if it was in a sea full of ammonites and also a sea turned to stone – all at the same time.

The exhibition was fabulous and involved several other examples of science poetry as well as various sci-art projects.

If you wish to read the poem you can see it on here on Marcus’s blog. And yes I took a wonky photo.

Brains severed down the middle
Bloodied silver gleam
Echos of the self
Served in grey matter pulp
Memories disgorged
To the air
Swirling currents
Entering the mind
Thoughts erasing
Infection ingrating
Scrambling
That which is not cut
Grey-pink ribbons
A smell of iron jelly
Complete with spoon

A humming bird is the girl
Flitting from group to group
Stopping to drink but never her fill

A satallite is the girl
Orbiting around them all
Around and around but never to land

A firework is the girl
Waiting benign to explode
Contained potential but never lit

A dragon is the girl
Ferrocious in imagination
Tamed in the light never to fly

My dreams that where
Have all but shattered
Time alone would make them scatter

Within my mind you may find
Nothing but reflections mask
Deep within some repetitive task

Over and over
Learning the emotion pain
Express it or go insane

Legs dragging like rubber lumps
Stumps of trees used to bluggen
Liquid treacle air
Beware the morning song
Echos of dreams and future lies
A moment – such a moment
Such a dream
Scream light blossoms
Crustal liquid move
Nothing but for now
Me, you, them, us
All swirling thoughts
All memories of it all
Washed away
Dank drink binging life
Drowning in the under tow
Throttling the night
The gloom of the sky
Knotted hope of the forever life

Society wields a lobotomising blade
Severing self from self
Pushing into isolated darkness
That which needs the light
Hiding away arbitrary bits
For religion
For the state
For the neighbours
Society self lobotomising
Society self cannibalising
Swallowing their victims whole
Victims turned to automatons
Living flesh – the machine
Ordered and obeying
Self lobotomising, self cannibalising mind
Slowly the self dies
Leaving societal drones
In a stagnating nation

Whisper whisper shimmer bright
Glitter glitter sparkling light
Shiver shiver in the night
Glimmer glimmer hope or flight?
Bitter bitter lost in sight
Figure figure hold on tight
snigger snigger what is might?
Flitter flitter a new plight
Gobble gobble too few bites
Struggle struggle through the blight

Climbing up
Falling down
Wondering when I’ll hit the ground

Emotions spinning me around
I walk numbly through this town
Wondering if…
I scream right now
Would my need just rebound
For I am not heaven bound
So would the angels hear the sound?
Cos there’s a secret I have found

I’m Hell’s Queen
I wear the crown

Multicoloured multitude
Thronging past the window
Burdened with the gifts of consumerism
A force like a tide of poisonous algea
Swarming up and blooming toxic
The concrete street a river of your own detritus
The homeless shifted pebbles to another store

I hate you
And am part of you
Sipping coffee
With my bags of impulse buys
The greyness of the air
Drains the colours from you
Leaving a bland blanket of humanity
Treading across a desert of your own creation