The Unknown Poets of Crazy Town

And in the Black House of Youth
I sat down with unknown poets
And not one said “I am a poet!”
For not one knew he was so
As no-one could write
Indeed
Never a single word was ever written

And one was the illegitimate black bastard
  child of Margaret Thatcher
And another had Royal Blue blood
And one had ground his teeth away
And another had stabbed tribal scars into his face
And one had a wooden leg
And another a glass eye
And one lived in the roof
And another sniffed crusty soiled panties
And one walked with a limp
And another was pushed around
And one was a murderer
And another raped women on the heath
And one flashed his cock at little schoolgirls
And another sat teenage boys on his knee
And one wore mismatched shoes
And another had no shoes at all
And one had his name tattooed on his forehead
And another inserted hacksaw blades into his urethra
And one dressed as a woman
And another gave blowjobs on the Green
And one was obsessed with tabloid Bingo
And another ripped his money up and threw it
   in the fire
And one put a mans chest in with a mallet
And another said “You can call me NIGGER
   but no-man call me BLACK CUNT!”
And one ran through the streets on fire
And another gritted his teeth on liver cancer
And one rotted away in a chair
And another had a pet stone
And one indecently exposed himself outside
   Buckingham Palace
And another took a shit in the cereal aisle in
   Sainsburys
And one pulled his fingernails out with pliers
And another sliced his eyelids off
And one drew a Hitler moustache over his lip
And another wrote 'smile' where her eyebrows
   used to be
And one rode a bike with no wheels
And another talked of what the grass was like
    on the moon
And another watched and laughed at a broken TV
And one begged to be beaten black and blue
And another said “On a clear day I can see Hell”
And one thought he was a dog
And another barked; and they all barked back


So while you, My Dear Illiterati Friends, took in medieval literature; literature of the 17th, 18th and 19th century; pre-colonial literature; post-colonial literature: linguistics and that bore of bores: gender studies
I took in only The Poets of Crazy Town

And I didn't read the Poets of Crazy Town
For there was nothing to read
I listened and I watched and I smelled and I breathed
And as one told me of child ghosts with no faces and their feet twisted back-to-front
Another swallowed strong beer
And with eyes jaundiced from liver disease and candle light
He told me about Guppies and throwing rice over the kitchen floor
And instead of reading Joyce
I sat and watched Bridget
As she lay in her bed
Wrapped up like a disease
Smoking and retching and bringing up lumps of black lung
And inbetween her dying
I closed my eyes and imagined
As she told me of her cross country walk
From Cork to Dublin
Of how she finally ended up in Donegal
Sucking back-alley cocks for shots
Saying: “Pray for us sinners
              now and at the hour of our death”
Before
Pouring another one down the hatch

And it was a House of Poets
For poetry was in the house
But this poetry wasn't of ink
Nor made for the page:
It was vomited up the walls
Pissed into beer cans
Shit into plastic sacks
Carved into faces
Raped into the unconscious
Exposed through open trousers
Born out of wedlock
The Black bastard child of Margaret Thatcher
Dangerous
Transgressive
Subversive
Immoral
Profane
The Verse of the Dead and Dying
A Degenerate Stanza of living
And I was there
Protruding from the mucous membrane
A polyp of youth
With Royal Blue Blood
A cheap BiC pen
Heir to the rotting throne.