The Truth is 96 Lines Long

Gates of knotted scarves, ruined
red ribbons like tangled
Chinese finger-traps. Golden marble names
in memoriam of storms
where dreams were tossed and blown and
broken in a cattle pen.
Now go home to pavements of flowerbed
bouquet’s; plastic, twine, petals, stems, wreaths.

 

Fences and wire. Turnstiles with the
clockwork jaws of a can-opener that
click and grind for ticket-stubs.
Tar-pit trap in a terrace
with the teeth of a foothold
hidden in grass.
Now it could be cuddling the mesh
like dolphins in a shark net,
like skeletons in striped pyjamas
from textbook pictures.

 

The passing bells of a whistle in
black and white stripes calls attention
to confusion and chaos
sponsored by Lepings Lane,
‘we’ll be back to match of the day
after a short break’.
But a copper cup never cost this much.

 

The Sun will shine a light on what transpired
tomorrow with ‘The Truth’, front page news
that landed some Conservative a raise.
Just pen a half-arsed apology in a few days
and run it on page twenty, then frame it
in the archives with Sir Elton John’s little
rent boys and the revelation:
‘Straight sex cannot give you aids’.
Put it in scrap-books
with love letters to an Iron Lady
after Tory wet dreams:

Dear Maggie,
with love from
Rupert and the rest of the
Totenkopf editorial team.

 

The Truth isn’t written
in bigoted ink on paper fit to fuel
a Nazi pyre.

 

The truth is 96 lines long,
golden names sung
in the sweet silver song
of a
Lark.

Author's Note

I wrote this poem before the recent inquest into the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 but thought that it was an appropriate time to upload it as my first post on here. Let me know what you think of it.

Reviews

[Threadgold]

Read this on your blog man, really powerful stuff!