Against the Denouncers of Robert Service

God damn those professors of literature,

May their bones rot

And their souls burn hot,

For there certainly isn't an earthly cure

For their arrogance and mendacity.

They're quick to condemn far better men,

For the crime of excessive lucidity;

As there's nothing for them

In words that are clear

They pretend that clarity's stupidity.

They praise only works that befuddle the mind,

As the touchstone of intellectuality.

The real fault, I fear,

When the meaning seems clear

Is that won't help them earn their salary.

For Service they save their very best phlegm;

They fulminate fast and furiously,

With a kind of imperious majesty,

Designed to disguise their jealousy -

And fear of eventual redundancy.

Service wrote humorous verse of astonishing technical skill, and was vilified for it by professors and literary critics of the parasitic type. They criticised him on the most spurious grounds.
On related topics:
Reclaim Poetry for the People
Pretentious Guff 

Vanity and Truth

The bane of daft humanity
Is our accursed vanity;
For centuries we saw ourselves,
Not as something small,
But on a cosmic stage,
At the focus of it all.
The planet Earth was central,
Around which all revolved.
To us it might seem mental,
Yet our ancestral sages thought 
That God up in his Heaven,
Had nothing else to do,
But sit with bated breath,
Watching me and you.

To get a true perspective,
Science is our friend.
Our lunacy collective,
We really must amend.
If we are just mad monkeys,
Our future looks quite grim,
The light of civilisation
Will very soon grow dim.
It's not about technology,
Or half-baked sociology,
But knowing Nature's kingdom
May grant a kind of wisdom
To care for ourselves better.

Our first views of the Earth from space
Gave insight to the human race.
We saw the world a different way,
Which changed our way of life today
To one not quite so feckless
As it otherwise would have been.

Some people may not care
If life exists elsewhere;
They'd rather cash was spent on cars
Than on exploring rocky Mars.
I think they are entirely wrong:
Our true place in Creation
Is what we must explain;
To know the truth won't set us free
But it might make us sane.
 

This work is so strongly linked by theme to the previous post, The Red Planet 

 that I thought to make them one. It would have been a bit long, though.

The Red Planet

The planet's red,
And very dead;
It's air so thin
It's barely there.
The nights are cold
And so's the day;
Yet howling storms
Sometimes unfold
And blow the dust away.

An empire's ransom has been spent
Exploring this strange land;
In spite of which it still remains
Untouched by human hand.
We cannot go to Mars ourselves,
The rays which fill the void between
Pose too much risk to health.
In any case it seems like Hell,
I'd rather visit Ingoldmells.

Our robots traverse its cratered realm
And send sharp pictures back
To Pasadena labs, which helm
These artful metal wanderers on caterpillar tracks.
We're shown that flowing water once
Shaped pebble and crevasse,
Not sparely or just briefly,
But for time spans that are vast.

For signs of life they vainly grope,
Cross shattered craters and harsh fells.
It seems a forlorn hope.
We're a billion years too late,
A long long time ago
Escaping air sealed Mars's fate.
The hurtling moons of old Barsoom
Look down on Man's devices.
Did once they shadow motile life?
Or was it just some single cells?
It seems unlikely Mars gave birth
To fragrant flowers or leafy dells.

Yet if once germs existed there,
Even though their time was fleeting,
It would change our way of seeing
The vast star-fields which us surround,
In which we know that worlds abound.
On Mars the knowledge that we seek
Is that life on Earth is not some freak
But part of a great sea of being
That washes cross the cosmic shores.

Sanity and insanity

It's not the madness of the mad
Which does resources drain;
The thing that causes havoc
Is the folly of the sane.

The bosses speak in praise of greed,
We must to them explain,
That the true monstrosity
Is their epic grandiosity.

The sick and the unemployable seem to be the favourite scapegoats for the current regime, who hold them  responsible for the nation's financial crisis. Perhaps the Govt should look closer to home.
 The first verse has a more general applicability.

Spring the Changes

How quick the daffies disappeared.
Spring rings the changes now it's here.
Each kind of flower makes fleeting show,
The colours change in endless flow,
Brought to me by the wobbly bus,
Which drags me slowly to and fro.

Though now the winter's gone at last,
The folk are all too cold or hot,
We're never happy with our lot.

Castle Gardens

The flowers burst out through the bars,

Reaching out toward the cars.

A kind I have not seen before,

White and spiky balls of light

Which glow in the warm springtime night.

Their escapist exuberance

Creates a kind of balance with

The crucified trees that lie within.

Nailed upon an iron frame

They seem to almost be in pain.

When daylight comes the garden turns to vile;

The winos sit upon their benches,

They shout into their mobile,

Or chat with drunken wenches,

Whilst swigging from a can of special strength.

They laugh and curse and dominate.

The people keep on walking through,

This garden's not for me and you.

Who'd sit upon the next bench to

These tattooed men who swear and shout.


More on winos:Drunkards of the Dosshouse

The Falklands Factor

We are told by one of Dubya's Texas cronies that he intended the Iraq War even before winning his first Presidential election. He and other politicians are fascinated by the 'Falklands Factor', the popularity boost that Margaret Thatcher got from winning the Falklands War. He started a war to 'have a successful Presidency'.
    But do they understand the Falklands Factor?
    I suspect that they do not. They don't understand the extent that it was due to the bumbling of Opposition Leader Michael Foot.
    The war transformed Thatcher from a hugely unpopular and obviously doomed PM to one who was riding high in the polls and effortlessly re-elected. I believe this was due to the way in which Foot vacillated between the two wings of his party. One wing was for the war, the other bitterly opposed.
    He attempted the ridiculous feat of trying to appease both, while the war raged. All he succeeded in doing was convincing people like me that he and his party were unfit for office. No matter how much I eventually came to despise Thatcher, I never voted Labour.