The Wokeiad
a satire in heroic couplets
Book 1
The Proposition, the Invocation, and the Inscription. Then the original of the great Republic of Wokeness, disclosed as the eponymous Demon slumbering in a shallow lake of her own filth, until awoken by the advent of a plague of oriental provenance, although whether ’twas of Nature’s making or Man’s artifice is moot. Then the poem hastes into the midst of things, presenting Wokeness revolving the succession of her spawn and the changes to be wrought. The moveable College of the Goddess Wokeness, first at a renowned school of the liberal arts, then at Berkeley and Paris, in particular her Philosophers Ms. Butler the doyenne of illiteracy and Mr Foucault the pederast, and finally at Albion her hot house for scholars, rioters, vandals, Maoists, snowflakes, baiters of Hebrews, and the genuflecting kickers of bladdered gas. Wokeness fixes her eye on Master O___ J____, a scholar of Oxon, to be the Instrument of that great event which is the Subject of the poem. He is described prostrated upon a bed of woke books, atoning for his Whiteness, bewailing Albion’s vulgar aspirations to independence, and also the fall of the profitless Jeremiah. After demeaning himself all night at fetish roleplay and despairing thereat, he raises an altar of literary classics, and (making first his solemn prayer and declaration) purposes thereon to immolate himself together with all his scribblings in the Guardian. As the pile is kindled, the Goddess, beholding the flame from her seat, flies and puts it out, by casting upon it an inferior poem by Mr Dunthorne. She forthwith reveals herself to Master J____, unfolds her Arts, and initiates him into her Mysteries; announces him Woke Laureate, carries him to Churchill College Cantab, and to the woke luminaries of that place, being Professor G____ and certain of that estimable lady’s colleagues, proclaims him her toyboy, and they rejoice and give thanks, before getting drunk at Formal Hall.
Of new religion, and its hierophants,
Their fluent gibberish and soaking pants;
Of prancing unicorns, iconoclasts,
Of women’s jails filled with male pederasts;
Of educated people burning books,
And Twitter’s poison darts and baited hooks;
Of Black Lives Matter thugs attacking Jews;
Of Antifa and of - dear God! - the Trews;
Of these, and people of the alphabet,
And lastly of a Demon and her pet, 10
The chav’s defender and the gammon’s scourge,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, before I lose the urge!
Back in the day, when speech was unpoliced,
There lurked Wokeness, an atavistic beast
Mired in a slough of her own excrement:
A vile chimera formed from sentiment
Admixed with proud and purblind ignorance,
Unnatural selection, lewd mischance,
Some ill-digested Leninist extracts,
And theory disembarrassed of the facts. 20
Her face was formed from foreskins of sore dicks,
A forked tongue spat her ill-considered sick,
Over her brow a blue mohican jagged,
Wings and a tail like punkawallahs wagged,
A gut capacious and surpassing wide,
In which Truth, swallowed whole, had choked and died,
Attached two mantis claws and several feet
Which, facing backwards, tended to retreat.
Her throne usurped by the Enlightenment,
Beyond the civitas’s pale, she spent, 30
Deprived of fink and fudge and foisted fake
Some decades hibernating on her lake.
One day from Wuhan came a deadly plague
Of portent grim though provenance quite vague:
Some blamed a bat, and others as they list
A pangolin, or else the communists.
The dropsy spread from lung to lung by breath
And caused a nasty cough, and sometimes death.
Flagellants flailed themselves with nettles green
And droned their epithet: “Unclean! Unclean!” 40
The hospitals filled up with choking souls,
And curfew sirens clanged their ghastly tolls,
Stirred by the clamour of the pestilence,
Wokeness awoke and snarled “this represents
An opportunity! I’ll now reclaim
By subtle subterfuge my former fame.
From Reason’s body Logic’s head I’ll twist
And leave the corpse for the postmodernists,
Decree that two and two is henceforth five,
Up’s down, true’s false, left’s right, and dead’s alive. 50
I’ll topple statues and I’ll loot the malls,
And scribble filth on war memorials,
I’ll bowdlerise the Holy Decalog,
And smash the windows of the synagogue.
My squads of gents in frocks will go among
The ladies’ cubicles to drop their dung,
And win the prizes in the ladies’ sports,
And stop them meeting to express their thoughts.
My regiments of crazed millennials,
Pumped full of ill-digested testicles, 60
Will all the schools and colleges infest
With specious, canting, spurious protest.
Nor shall the businessman resist my law:
My writ shall run upon the bourse’s floor,
and corp’rate HR mavens shall bewail
The male, the stale, the hideously pale.”
Wokeness flaps now her pterodactyl wings,
And dislodged faecal fudge around her flings,
Then rises dripping from her rancid sty,
And like a rabid bat takes wing to fly. 70
Her journey’s first unto the USA
Where lib’ral schools the adjective betray:
Here Aristotle languishes in chains,
And hemlock flows through Socrates’s veins,
And Russell, Quine, and Frege are forgot,
For Chairman Mao, Heidegger, and Pol Pot.
Alighting first at verdant Evergreen,
Wokeness anointed is their Sovereign Queen,
With regal eye surveys the portal doors
Whereon are writ th’inverted Jim Crow Laws: 80
The black exalted and the white debased,
Falsehood promoted and the truth effaced.
Behold the gorgeous golden toilet seat
On which enthroned, and drawing up her feet
So Wokeness squats, is crowned, and defecates
While Erinyes exulting masturbate.
Now neither washing claws nor wiping arse,
Wokeness takes wing and flies South business class.
Where Berkeley’s Judith Butler plies her trade,
Her torch of idiocy casts its shade: 90
Gender performativity’s her thing,
A stinkpot full of greasy ink which stings.
Let Logos wither now, deprived of light,
And all of Oakland bathe in blackest night.
Watch Butler tie up Sense in tangled rope
Of subclause pendant from embedded scope,
See Preposition yawn over chiasma’s void,
Neologism coined, curdling, and cloyed,
See Sentence butterflied upon the wheel,
And Meaning, drained, in agony congeal, 100
Poor Commonsense, imprisoned and ignored,
Naive Intelligence, traduced and bored.
The smiler with the knife under the woke,
Who patronises ordinary folk,
The sugared pill, the blandness and bromide,
The utter bollocks never once defied.
With awful majesty writ on her brow,
The cold sarcastic stare of moody cow,
Wokeness presides over the crazed tumult,
The warped psychotic nonsense of her cult, 110
The Jonestown Kool Aid of which she’s the cause,
And chews the lib’ral writhing in her jaws.
She tarries not, but spreads again her wings,
Spangling the welkin with brown stinking things.
This time the demon’s course is Eastward set,
Faster than snail but not as quick as jet,
O’er snow-capped mount, o’er desert vast and numb,
O’er palace, project, piggery and slum:
Terra incognita between the coasts
His ignorance of which the wokist boasts. 120
Wokeness now glides over Miami Beach
Where wellness gurus pseudoscience preach
To geriatric dentists and their wives,
Those wan asthmatic martyrs to the hives.
As whale road supercedes the prairie fields,
The nimbus builds and vanquished Helios yields.
Aeolus loosens now his knotted bag,
And the Anemoi from their prison drags.
Mild Zephyr cedes to Boreas the stage,
And Auster vies with Eurus in his rage. 130
Zeus flings his bolts and furiously raves,
And Lord Poseidon’s trident moils the waves.
Wokeness remorselessly through wind and rain
Grinds o’er first Lusitania then Spain,
Where Helios in triumph late restored
Is by his sky-clad acolytes adored,
Then left at Benidorm and up the coast,
Where basting nudists on the playas roast.
Over the Pyrrenees to soaked Camargue,
The hinterland of France’s nouvelle vague. 140
Next Paris, pantheon of po-mo spells,
A shrine to Foucault and to Foucault else:
The Tunis Gary Glitter, Humbert of
Bedouin boy, the freshman’s Nabokov,
White polo-neck, bald head, perverted grin:
Glans penis peeping from its peeled foreskin,
Wokeness’s Baptist John or Salomé
Traducer of epistemologé.
The demon lingers not, but soon is gone
Across the Manche to faithless Albion. 150
Here Wokeness is most gratified to find
A seemingly pervasive loss of mind:
The snowflakes melt, the hipsters lick their toads,
Rhodes scholars vote to topple Cecil Rhodes,
Watch morons paid to chase the bladdered sphere
First “take the knee” while bored spectators jeer,
See Luddite activists trash GM crops
And Bristol’s rioters shit on the cops,
The dark imagining sprayed on the walls
Of rampant knob and swollen pock-marked balls, 160
The colleges prohibiting debate,
The blue-haired Furies, scowling and irate,
The gender benders in the Tavistock,
The children with their puberty be-blocked,
The Jew-baiters in cars on Finchley Road,
The new left’s acolytes of Roderick Spode,
The people, cowed and muzzled in their masks,
Jumping through hoops and doing servile tasks
Who face the sack for saying what they think,
A raised eyebrow, a back turned, or a blink, 170
Offence insisted on though never meant,
Nor e’er forgiven if they should repent.
Wokeness observes it all, and is well pleased
To see the body politic diseased.
And yet one element eludes her eye,
One piece is missing from the jigsaw lie.
“It wants,” she snarls, “a useful idiot,
Some naive kidult who resents his lot,
Some milquetoast bellend, wet behind the ears
Some thirty summer suckling prone to tears. 180
His name is Legion, though, for he is many,
His kind’s superfluous and two a penny.
I face a cute embarrassment of choice.”
Just then is heard a chafing, peevish voice,
The whine of angel fallen into Hell,
Not so much ringing as to crack a bell.
Wokeness looks down to see who harshly moans
And fixes basilisks on O___ J___.
Half Oxon scholar and half stream of piss
A Gaveston unsponsored by Marquis, 190
Vile parcel of caught dirt from Shoreditch pub,
A chrysalid which hatched a writhing grub,
A scribe who now the noble chav defends
And now with fierce polemic gammon rends.
Today, quite out of countenance, young J___
For his oppressive whiteness thus atones,
Reclined like Chatterton without his looks
Upon his bed of anti-racist books:
‘Why I’ll No Longer To Pale Cracker Talk’,
‘A Dozen Recipes For Curing Pork’, 200
‘On The Fragility Of Mr Snow’,
‘Laugh At The Tears Of Mrs Wypipo’.
A hundred other tomes haphazard spill
O’er unwashed coffee cup and unpaid bill.
While J___, this farouche starveling Jabba Hut
Troubles deaf Heaven with his scuttlebut.
“I mourn,” he lisps, “the gammon Brexit vote,
That suffrage be extended to the scrote,
That sweaty yob in white acrylic socks
Should profane thus the sacred ballot box. 210
It seems unreasonable to give a choice
To glottal, estuarine, unlettered voice,
Who disobeys his betters when they scold,
And does the opposite of what he’s told.
No more shall Jean-Claude’s lips on cheek resound
And Toynbee’s Tuscan manse is out-of-bounds.
Who shall serve us our Macchiatos now?
No Slovak ballet dancer. Some fat cow
With mottled flesh bulging from Primark pants,
All blackened teeth and missing consonants. 220
These lewd Neanderthal Brexit baboons
Should know their place and stay in Wetherspoons.
And that’s not all,” he sobs, “for I lament
Profitless Jeremiah’s force is spent.
Allotment Cincinnatus in your shed,
To you I sacrifice the sourdough bread.
Yours was the PM-ship, your rightful prize,
Until by Rabbi Sacks’s devious lies
The stupid gammon and the honest chav,
Who reads his Mirror in his outside lav, 230
Are both infected by the Tory pox.
Now buffoon Boris with his flaxen locks,
That dilettant’ beyond all vexing vague,
Negotiates the treaties, fights the plague,
And makes unfortunate off-colour jokes
Which don’t offend those not already woke,
While Magic Grandpa languishes exiled
And by the profane vulgus much reviled,
For petty things which anyone might do,
Like saying ‘Zionist’ and meaning ‘Jew’.” 240
Now in despair Wokeness’s paladin,
Fuelled by recourse to hipster wanker gin,
Logs into a lewd fetish role-play site
And there pretends to be a pup all night.
As dawn insinuates its sickly glow
J____ logs off sickened with himself. Now, low
Though be his brow, he still maintains a shelf
A simulacrum of his better self,
On which some literature gathers dust,
Bookended by Karl Marx’s scowling bust. 250
Though justly famed, on J____’s shelf ignored,
Here languish Lawrence, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford,
Jane Austen, Conrad, Waugh, and Henry James.
“I will decolonise these dead white names,”
Cries J____, “I’ll build a sacrificial pyre,
And fling myself in suttee on the fire.”
Now Clio sighs and Calliope weeps
While J____ piles all the classics up in heaps.
Some Guardian articles by his own hand
Torn into strips serve as the kindling, and 260
Some smegma squeezed out by Novara too
Describing how Wall Street’s controlled by Jews,
Serves as accelerant. And lo! The flame!
A tribute to the suffering of BAME.
Wokeness aloft on gentle Zephyr’s breeze
Above this bonfire of the vanities,
Looks down in some disquiet at the blaze.
“The fashion’s not for sacrifice these days.
What price the Jupiter whose martial boast
Commemorates the burning of the toast? 270
I want to jerk my puppet on a string,
Not barbecue him like a chicken wing.”
Wokeness in winged dishonour now descends,
Her steps to J____’s bedsit straightway tends,
And finds the conflagration in full blaze.
“The remedy for fire’s a nice cheap phrase,
The squalidest epitome of lame
Is what serves best to extinguish a flame,”
So Wokeness roots about for a cliché,
Some stale quatrain with meter gone astray, 280
Some rancid ode with meretricious rhyme,
Sifts through Victoriana, beatnik, grime,
Discards McGonagall, Bukowski too,
And finds that Ferlinghetti won’t quite do.
The Staggers moulders in the bedsit bog,
Which J____ peruses when he drops a log.
This more in expectation than in hope
Wokeness scans thereof each abusive trope,
Between its glued-together pages finds
The jizzmop of Joe Dunthorne’s tiny mind, 290
The slimy pus of an inflamed abscess:
‘Poem In Which I Practice Happiness’.
What editor would publish this affront,
Of she-hyena’s womb th’aborted runt?
Dunthorne ‘loves pigeons when their claws are stumps’
And 21 more lines of Forrest Gump.
Apollo groans and crumples up his wreath,
And sage Athene’s rusting spear is sheathed.
“Res ipsa!” Wokeness cries, “the very thing
To extinguish a fire or block a spring.” 300
Wokeness takes up the mouldy paper sheet
And lays it like some barbecuing meat
Upon the conflagration of great works.
The fire becalmed, young J____ springs up berserk.
“Most noble goddess! My eternal shame’s
That my self-immolation in thy name’s
Not worthy in thy eyes. A cis white male
No matter that he does the work must fail.
Oppression’s apex is the silent pique,
Where Whiteness must shut up and no more speak.” 310
Upon him Wokeness now inflicts a smile,
A rictus diabolical and vile.
“Silence is violence, apart from which
My plan is to appoint you as my bitch.
In words of condign dignity, your fate
Is that you’ll be my first Woke Laureate,
A Faust without the learning, ignorant,
And filled to bursting with my heinous cant.
In online column and on TV screen
You’ll broadcast lies, hypocrisy, and spleen, 320
Be self-abasement’s gurning posterboy,
The Maoist’s tool and the race-baiter’s toy,
Wash sweaty feet of righteous leukophobe,
And learn to love your daily rectal probe,
Your sure reward an ill-starred fame, which we
Call by the mystic name ‘Celebrity’.”
Enraptured, writhing like Uriah Heap,
As crystal stream from pants begins to seep,
Young J____ ecstatic cries, “I’ll be your boy,
All waxed and oiled for care bears to enjoy, 330
And when the work begins to seem too hard
Bathe in the ocean of my self-regard.”
Wokeness next flourishes a document.
“Behold: the contract which I now present
Which specifies the duties of your roles
Uniting in this project both our souls.”
J____ takes his pen and sits down at his desk,
Repudiates in cursive Arabesque
All rights, all appanages, and his fee,
And his pretensions to integrity. 340
“And now,” says Wokeness, “mount upon my back.
You’ll find some jagged ridges and raw cracks,
Encrusted with Swarfega and Deep Heat.
Insert your hands, and grip with knees and feet.”
J____ jumps aboard and Wokeness flaps her wings,
And “Doors to manual!” in falsetto sings.
Out through the bedsit window squeezed like pus,
Bed-wetting melt and demon venomous,
O’er verdant meadows, pastures green and gay,
O’er retail park and busy motorway, 350
At length the concrete and the asphalt yields
To serried ranks of cabbages in fields,
And these in turn cede to the dreaming spires.
J____ the Obscure with galvanised blood wires
Cries out as they touch down in Churchill’s Quad
To see the gathered pantheon of gods:
Professor Gopal, Brahmin demiurge,
Of cringing servant and cowed porter scourge,
Professor Andrews, the woke Brummagem,
Of anti-racist cant crème de la crème, 360
And Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,
PhD, MBA, and IAQ,
And LLM, MA, and LLB,
Who by acquiring letters came to be
The alphabet chimera, nemesis
Of mansplainer and white supremacist.
To these, the sybils of her facile cult,
Wokeness announces J____ as fate’s result,
Frog spawn of dialectic, Hegel’s toy,
The Karl Marx Brian, her anointed boy. 370
“Woke Ganymede!” her luminaries cry,
“Your column full of woke philosophy
Will make grown adult shed a bitter tear
And pink-faced gammon choke upon his beer.
Each straight white cis undeconstructed man
Shall be cast out by the woke Taliban.
No curator of Heritage or Trust
Without a rainbow lanyard on her bust.
Let teacher thank us that she now can teach
Without the crushing burden of free speech, 380
And let the scowling huge woad-painted smurf
Expel from academia the TERF.”
Now prating profs update the Twitter hordes
And fling into the air their mortar-boards,
And, wrapped in gown and enveloped in guile,
With research postdocs form a crocodile
Proceeding solemnly to Formal Hall
And the prospect of port postprandial,
Where toasts to the Woke Laureate are drunk
And Fellows fill their Meerschaum pipes with skunk. 390
And now beyond the candelabra’s glow
Primordial Nox insinuates a toe.
The porters pick up all the hardcore porn
Composting on the College Master’s lawn,
And jowly Fellows yawning stretch their legs
And drain the Tawny down to its last dregs,
And mouldy Stalinist and Maoist creep
Leave off their quarrel and retire to sleep,
And soon the quad resounds with gurgling snores
Of rat-arsed monomaniacal bores. 400
**********
Book 2
The Woke Laureate being proclaimed, the solemnity is to be graced with public ceremony. Thither stumble from their beds the acolytes and hierophants of the cult, hastily reassembling their wits following the debauches of the previous evening at Formal Hall. Wokeness is pleased for her disport to propose games - which combine the exercise of crude bodily functions with vicious duplicity. The game of Farting described, with its diverse accidents, in which two scribes of Woke Books Ms. Fudge and Ms. DeRangelo connive and compete, but are overcome when Ms. Sarker the Communist acting at the behest of the Woke Laureate Master J____ ignites the ignis fartuous of that gentleman while he treats a grateful audience to the undoubted bounty of his squealing. The game of Farting being followed by that of Chundering, in which Master J____ outwits Professor Zizek’s situationist challenge to basic hygiene by the tactic of an oily emesis; and finally a third game of Burping, in which Master J____ is again blessed with triumph, on this final occasion over the eructations of the tribunes of the plebs Mr Muscle-Royle and Ms. Abottom, which he achieves by dint of belching the Woke Alphabet. A Woke Feast being held to commemorate Master J____’s victory in the Games, in the hour of his triumph the victor and the assembled company are overwhelmed by the keynote speech of the famous antisemite Mr Hitler Livingstone.
In the small hours, with modesty and grace
And lucent glow of pale averted face,
Who else but fair Aurora Columbine
Usurps the screech owl and the saturnine?
What though the old day shrivelled up unshrived
A thing to be endured if not survived?
Banish the spectre of the headless ghost
With Fair Trade coffee and sliced sourdough toast!
Aurora glides in with the morning dew
Broadcasts indulgently o’er pavement spew. 410
The burglar sighs and homeward softly steals
To smoke his crack and microwave his meals:
Morlock goes down, Eloi comes out to play
In Boden frock of unassuming grey,
And when the early morning refuse crews
Clang dustbin lids, and folk switch on the news,
Now the Woke Twitterfeed cranks into life
And twists again the wound with rusty knife.
Behold the scholars who imbibed too much
And talked of Kristallnacht and leftist Putsch, 420
And shot their mouths and shamef’ly overslept.
’Mongst whom yet earworm Twitterfeed now crept,
Updating them with news of Wokeness Games:
Instead of Honour, prizes are for Shame,
This being most fitting to commemorate
The coronation of Woke Laureate:
For gross abasement - burping, spitting, farts -
While practicing the sophistical arts;
A golden shower poisoning the well,
A bait and switch with an unseemly smell, 430
Juxtaposition of the choicest mot
With left up lid and brimming chamber pôt.
Hungover, forcing down the Andrews Salts
Lamenting yet the absence of John Galt,
And in the grip of unspeakable dread,
Woke Politburo stumbles out of bed.
Oh for a blissful afternoon of pharms,
Free from the panic pipes and woke alarms,
But forced instead into proximity
With thrice cursed spoken woke turd poetry. 440
The first Olympic game is for Best Fart.
Each petomane displays their nether part,
Oh chocolate starfish! Wrinkled petit trou!
Amass the hydrogen, the sulphur too,
And when the buzzer sounds, rectum let rip
With sphincter tightened and with puckered lip,
And each emission rigorously judged:
how long, how loud, how odorous and fudged.
And finally, the scores being totted up,
And gases siphoned off for Thyssen Krupp, 450
And Duckworth Lewis weightings square deployed,
And Preparation H rubbed into ’roid,
The victor garlanded on dais stands
With book deals, soothing cream, and krugerrands.
The game’s contestants are a pair of scribes
With all the defects of the Wokeness Tribe:
A sophist by the name of Udder-Fudge,
Typhoid of dialectic, logic’s smudge,
Proud author of woke racist anal squeak,
“Why I’ll No Longer To The Paleface Speak”. 460
Her rival is Rabid DeRangelo:
Grifter’s feigned piety and face full pô,
Paid huge amounts for her ability
To bloviate on white fragility.
Now does each athlete squat and flex, and rub
Her bum with liniment got from a tub.
DeRangelo downs gallons of brown ale,
While Udder-Fudge chews cabbage, prunes, and kale.
A murmur rises up among the crowd
About how many baked beans are allowed. 470
They’re under orders, and the whistle blows!
Each Grub Street maggot holds her breath, and goes
A puce which wouldn’t shame Farrow & Ball.
But neither grub considers this at all,
Turning instead her thoughts to rumbling bowels
And ordering of consonants and vowels.
Rabid is first to bleat but Fudge to fart,
A syncopation of the classic art,
The rich contralto and the alto sax,
Sulphur dioxide and distorted facts. 480
Oh wrinkled nose, thou slave to pot pourri,
Who from the thunderbox recoils and flees,
Imagine what Nirvana ’tis to judge
The rant of Rabid and the fart of Fudge:
Unreason mingled with a bottom’s scent.
But Rabid’s rant and Fudge’s fart are spent.
Open at once the door! Switch on the fans!
And stimulate the stunned adrenal glands
Of nodding audience of narcolepts
O’erwhelmed by noxious fumes and false precepts. 490
But woe! Hope of deliverance is cursed
As the status quo ante is reversed:
Now Rabid’s gut expels clouds of methane
And Fudge becomes increasingly inane.
Switch off the fans! Close once again the door!
Choke in the perfume, listen to the bore,
A non-ecstatic mumbling and some gas,
colloid of Zizek suspends Habermas.
And in such vein for hour after hour,
All hope forsook of respite or succour, 500
First one and then the other swapping roles
Contaminate the air with both their holes,
Until - Gaudeamus! - both wells run dry,
Both natural gas and noisome orat’ry.
The room, though, has its looming elephant:
Which grifter, which race-baiter, which pissant
Should wear the laurel garland on her brow.
Concerning this, a most unseemly row
Erupts. Some say the farts of Udder-Fudge
Are more melodious, but others judge 510
The Rabid dirge foremost in speciousness.
The parties rage, prevaricate, digress.
The judges threaten to restage the game
And redistribute the full share of shame.
The audience most forcefully protests.
“Please talk no more of this even in jest.”
Just then is heard a weedling petty voice
Familiar to the ear, though not by choice.
“What’s missing’s thrill, the headiness of risk.
Instead the scowling blue-hairs go ‘tsk tsk’. 520
Let’s shake things up. Let’s push the envelope.
Unleash the Twitter horde to tweet their tropes.”
So said, unbuttoning his sagging drawers,
J____ “takes the knee”, then crouches on all fours.
Ash Sarkar, literally communist,
Grasping a lighter in her girlish fist
Awaits the shouted signal: “Gas girl, quick!”
Guts rumble. “Thar she blows!” The lighter’s flicked.
Now from J____’ fissure comes a mighty roar
As of a cataract or rutting boar. 530
Greek fire or North Sea gas, no one can tell
Prostrated as they are by the foul smell.
No wind of Satan, nor his foetid breath,
No cellar where an old rat met his death,
Bears a comparison to such disgrace.
All full of puking is that sorry place.
Nor are the ears from punishment exempt:
The bum trombone, lit at the first attempt,
A Handel’s Fireworks in cacophone,
Volume intensified and lowered tone; 540
While J____ on all fours starts a porcine squeal
Piercing enough to make the blood congeal.
Now doth Aeolus inside J____’s arse
Brew up a further helping of the farce.
How very Anglo-Saxon of young J____
To steal Jove’s thunder from his awful throne.
New gas expelled, and by nymph Ash enflamed,
Apollo contemplates art’s final shame,
While Artemis scornfully blocks her ears,
And Pallas Athene blinks back the tears. 550
Oh weep, DeRangelo! Udder-Fudge, rage!
J____’ pyrotechnics your conceits upstage.
What lager hath he quaffed, what cabbage munched!
Just think of all the beans on which he’s lunched!
A man for smorgasbords in green cafes,
For lentil bakes and spinach canapes,
A connoisseur of figs and fennel juice,
For whom pink rubber tubing has its use.
To cap it all, his squeal of neutered boar
Strips bare amygdala and flays nerves raw. 560
Surrender, Fudge. Give up, DeRangelo.
There’s no point striving against this Wind Bro.
The ballot papers in, cheered on by tribes
Of partisans, the judges take their bribes.
Watch as they open first the sealed bids:
The Oxbridge place for feckless failson kid,
Courtesy car and Seychelles holiday,
Gold bullion gorgeous on its gleaming tray,
The grace and favour flat with concierge,
Champagne and Kir in Meribel auberge. 570
A brief hiatus, then the whitened smoke
Provokes another protest by the woke,
Subsumed however by the mounting joy
Of the supporters of the Wokest Boy.
All hail the probiotic bactereme,
Yoga, green tea, and purgative regime
Let white men blush and Tories hiss and tut,
A nice clean mind starts with a nice clean gut.
So triumphs the Woke Laureate’s nether mouth
With lambent perfumed flambé of deep South. 580
Rest not upon your laurels, Ganymede,
The Court is wearied by your rehashed deeds.
A new game is announced, a thing so lame
You see them writhe disgustingly with shame.
No raging Zeus hurls now his bolts of thunder.
Instead sociologists examine chunder,
For daubing canvases with carrot diced,
for puke-stained metaphor, pungently spiced:
The Bridge at Arles in duodenal bile,
The pavement pizza on the Golden Mile. 590
Alongside J____ the sophist raves and gags:
Zizek, in yolk-encrusted beard and rags,
Fount of inanity and spoken spew
And has of what he speaks but little clue,
Dishonest signifying priapist,
Always post-coital and always triste.
See now each athlete munch emetics, bloat,
Each stick his thumbs and fingers down his throat.
Now Zizek contemplates Bede’s Book of Turds,
A thing monks made of images and words 600
To stimulate the vomiter’s hormones,
An aide memoire disdained by steadfast J____
Who wolfs down puffa fish and ancient eggs,
And barrel scrape and maggoty old dregs,
While Zizek on his own lung’s mucus dines,
And cheap cocaine and vinegary wines.
They’re under starters orders, and they’re off!
Zizek’s first gambit is a hacking cough,
A rumbling’s heard as of church organ’s swell,
Poor tortured bronchioles enduring Hell. 610
Now Slavoj wipes off snot with t-shirt sleeve,
And spittle squirts like water through a sieve.
Poor J____ begins to look a mottled green,
While Slavoj’s gone completely tangerine.
Who’ll be the first to prostitute the truth,
Vomit on verity, corrupt the youth?
Professor Zizek is the first to speak,
A veritable smorgasbord which reeks
Of fallacy and sophistical cant,
Delivered with a lamentable want 620
Of etiquette: with back of hand, he smears
His greasy locks behind his waxy ears,
Burps up a specious, inane apophthegm.
Pursued by some hastily swallowed phlegm.
No more emetic spectacle than this:
The trouser front stained with its patch of piss
The drool that glistens on the unwashed shirt,
The fingers crusted with the grimy dirt.
Now, as he hearkens to the hypocrite,
Woke Ganymede - the ghastly little shit - 630
Assumes the glassy stare of manse gargoyle,
And starts to vomit up a kind of oil.
No spermaceti this, no Ambrose curd,
Instead a ruptured sac reeking of turd;
Beige semolina from a ripened cyst,
Jettisoned bronchiole of Communist,
Discourse’s clog, the fallacy in re,
The black and white dissolving into grey.
What comet’s flight, what psychedelic drug,
What Sybil’s croak or tea-leaves in a mug, 640
Foretold this thing that ought not to have been,
Hallucination born of fevered spleen.
To chambers with the judges for their lunch
to nibble Stilton and sip Pimms fruit punch,
There to determine who deserves the prize,
Spewed the most nauseating calumnies.
Some advocate Zizek’s apologism
For Robespierre’s Terror and for Stalinism.
While J____’s herring’s redness wins acclaim
Among the grifters speaking for the BAME. 650
Now once again sleek lobbyists arrive,
Form factions, haunt the corridors, connive.
Scraped is the barrel now for all its pork,
Geldings are traded in a slough of talk.
Gifts are exchanged, goodwill intangible,
Flash of gold Rolex and white mandible.
After the pleasures of this interlude,
And breaking wind - since not to would be rude -
The chief judge now resumes his awful throne
And, in his typically abject tone 660
Of whimper flatulent instead of thunder,
Announces who has won the prize for chunder.
This is, wonderful to relate, young J____.
Now see the woke kids order buzzing drones
To bring organic champagne, gluten-free.
And blue-hair scolds snarling triumphantly.
Now see twice-garlanded woke athlete J____,
Crowned with the ceremonial traffic cones,
His purple nylon robes all vomit-flecked,
The plastic toilet seat slung round his neck, 670
Accept the adoration of the crowd:
Formal congrats from Glastonb’ry and Stroud,
Homage of delegates from Oregon,
And eminences grey of Islington.
J____ on his dais simpers like a gimp
Freed from its box by an indulgent pimp.
Who’d not swap places with him for this hour,
The heady psychopathy of woke power?
If Conscience in his ear whispers her ruth,
His narcissism trumps her with his truth 680
Yet all his celebration’s premature.
A proclamation cuts through the manure:
That Wokeness honoured be with one more game,
Of burping like a bullfrog with no shame.
Garlic’s repeat, metempsychosis, fate:
Who will step up and dauntless eructate?
What lunatic escaping from his shrink
Will gulp the air and glug the fizzy drink?
A brace of politicians volunteer:
Voyde Muscle-Royle, Camptown’s gay dalek. Hear 690
The grim metallic rasping of his speech:
You’d think the Klingon Marxist gargled bleach.
Abottom in her trademark two left shoes,
Fresh from her latest car crash interviews
With glacial stare and diction tortoise-slow,
Painstaking … emphasis … just … so … you … know.
Now shall each athlete swallow diet coke,
Force down legumes, on green bell peppers choke.
Now shall each gen’rously upholstered rump
Be introduced through tubes to cycle pump. 700
Oh let them quaff their Perrier and ale,
Chomp ripened figs, and prunes gone slightly stale,
The beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
The distillation of the sweaty gym.
The judge tosses the coin up in the air,
And Voyde goes first, and offers up a prayer
That Hesper might blow from his gastric bag.
On final mouthful of San Pell he gags,
Swallows a metric ton of heated air,
And bloated like a toad begins to blare. 710
Instead of Hesper, what satanic gale,
What prison stink now breaks out of its jail,
What reek of corpse exploding with a squelch.
Speak not of the sound of the dalek’s belch,
Death rattle of embittered communist,
Woke phalangist saluting with limp fist.
That metal gauntlet down the blackboard pulled,
Disgusting gurgle of the sleeper’s drool,
Don’t mention seagulls shrieking, nuclear trains,
Heavy artillery or bad migraines. 720
The impudence of Brighton’s flame-haired twerp!
Abottom for Stoke Newington must burp!
She pond’rously about her business goes,
With oxygen arriving chilled at nose
Heated by engines in stupendous gut,
great tub of acid mixed with scuttlebut.
At length, Abottom with her Gorgon stare
Begins the broadcast of her hot stale air.
Now shall the dryads vanish and the nymphs all flee
From her drawn out and grim prolixity, 730
And those who stay and listen to her moan
Shall doze, and as they slumber turn to stone.
But now’s the turn of the Woke Laureate;
Watch as he gulps the fizzing carbonate,
Pours the libation of stale orange juice
Down Halitosis Lane into red sluice,
Seizes a canister of compressed air,
Puts tube to lips and offers up a prayer.
Now with a mighty squeal Squealer inflates
Beyond all Health & Safety estimates, 740
Woke Laureate becomes Woke Zeppelin,
Kim Jong Un’s clone, Abottom’s bigger twin.
So lend your ears as the Woke Laureate
Belches the whole of the Woke Alphabet”.
Now, mark you this, our friend the ABC
Falls foul of modern sensitivity,
In J____’s version “L” comes first, then “G”,
Punctiliously trailed by “B” and “T”.
Then “QUERTY”, and soon after “UIOP,”
And lest we dare to hope that he might stop, 750
“Two spirit,” and further proclivities
Confided to us by his gastric breeze.
Dalek’s dumbstruck, Abottom stands amazed.
Both sing of the Woke Alphabet the praise.
“Who could with good integrity compete
Against an eructation quite so neat?”
So for a third time J____ on dais stands,
An ending happy with relief of hands,
Wokeness approaches bearing bogroll crown,
Skulking abjectly with her ugly frown, 760
And in conclave with her chief hypocrites,
Opinion-formers, sophists, and halfwits,
Crowns J____ the Champion of the Woke Games.
Rejoice, non-binaries! Exult, ye BAME’s!
Now hoist upon your shoulders Squealer J____,
Bear him in triumph to his awful throne.
And when he’s finished with the thunderbox,
Vaccinate him against the Wuhan Pox.
They celebrate the Games with a woke feast.
Abundant kale and artificial yeast. 770
Macrobiotic yoghurt, Quorn, wheatgerm,
The fruit fly larvae and the writhing worm.
Surplus of rhubarb wine not sold to Krupp,
Warmed for an epoch in a plastic cup;
Vomit-resembling orange lentil dal,
The virtue-signalling beyond banal,
Rye loaf convincing as a concrete slab,
Halloumi gibbeted on its kebab,
Ice cream of hippies boycotting Israel,
All gluten-free is the organic ale. 780
Dropsical hour arrives for keynote speech
When Hitler Livingstone stands up to preach,
Casual anti-semite of hard left,
Of ill repute but still some cult’ral heft,
Cringeworthy egotist who drones for hours,
Raising remorselessly his Babel Towers,
Tsunami of concocted stats, bald lies
Confident nasal tones and shifty eyes.
And as he preaches, all the sniv’ling creeps
And Antifa phalangists fall asleep. 790
And as they slumber still the windbag drones
And even vanquishes our hero J____.
No more unto the victor cede the field,
Now victor doth to filibuster yield,
Until that bitter hour when boringness
Subsumes the boor in his own puddled mess.
And as the horloge tolls, the senses numb,
The blue-haired termagents are stricken dumb.
For all except the odd degenerate,
The gurgle and the snore predominate. 800
**********
Book 3
Wokeness having whisked away her Pet unto an Airbnb, the latter creature slumbers lulled by the Demon’s manure, and presently falls into a revery induced by the perfumes thereof, wherein Mungo Bunghole in the guise of Tiresias is his psychopomp, and sheweth unto him the unwoke shades haunting the Fields of Asphodel. J____ is subjected to the ridicule of these Tophet dwellers, whereupon Ash Sarkar the communist is discovered dwelling in the midst of the Cancelled Souls, and relates unto J____ and Bunghole the sorry tale of how YouTube demonetarized Novara. J____ and the maiden communist lament the falseness of Fortune’s Wheel, until they are chided for tarrying by Bunghole, and reminded by that nonbinary personage to continue their inspection of Asphodel, which affordeth them diverse vistoes of the place, including the minor injuries suffered by those intolerable gammon who will insist on booing when their sporting idols “take the knee”, a museum of woke nonsense with a tapestry in it, and also J.K.Rowling and Professor Stock languishing in the Jacuzzi of Tartarus wherein they are tortured by the demons with champagne and canapes but never quite enough thereof. Eventually driven thence by the excoriations of the unwoke, and spurned by Ash Sarkar, literally communist, who decideth to stay unwoke, J____ and Bunghole return to North London and there part company. J____ is presently run to ground by the Woke Hunt and is entertaining the prospect of being quartered by the Maenads with their “ponies”, whereupon he awaketh from his reverie and, discovering himself combled in the filth of Wokeness, gives thanks for his deliverance from the vice of unwokeness, and is bid by his mistress to prepare himself for her Triumph.
**********
In heaps the social justice warriors pile,
obliviously snore and self-defile.
Woke Laureate, unseemly little creep
Lasciviously grinning in his sleep,
Is from that Sodom’s bourne by Wokeness fetched
To nice Airbnb, with cream walls etched
With unexceptionable hipster porn.
French windows open onto well-kept lawn.
Across the living room spreads Ikea rug.
Stained by the taking of a lot of drugs. 810
But J____ unconscious of this slumbers on,
woke narcoleptic, woke automaton,
Until on carpet dainty Wokeness squats,
Peppers the territ’ry with petites crottes.
And as J____ breathes in Wokeness’s perfumes
The fever tormenting his brain resumes.
A spectre visits him inside his dream:
Epiphenomenon of bactereme,
Non-binary and militantly so,
Cat-walk Tiresias with face full pô. 820
“I am thy psychopomp, Mango Bunghole.
By intersection I waylay a soul
Transport by ferry over Lethe’s flood,
Marooned by Charon on morass of mud.”
“And how yclept,” quoth J____, “this fetid Hell?”
“They call it,” replies Bunghole, “Asphodel,
Where Wokeness sends the ones who just won’t see,
Degenerates who will not ‘take the knee’”.
“You’re most persuasive,” J____ says, “I am sold.
I’ll genuflect and do what I am told. 830
Please take me as a tourist to this place,
That I may meet the Cancelled face-to-face.”
Hell’s mouth’s a nasty little puckered trou
Wrinkling the riverside near Waterloo
Darkness at noon, forgotten factory,
Lord Archer lives in close proximity:
A backwards place where water uphill runs.
Embark they here, with shop-bought currant buns,
Gifts for the nasty, dirty little sod,
Who doesn’t dignify the label ‘god’, 840
But ubers cancelled souls across the stream
To Kennington and Croydon and East Cheam.
Now Charon gracelessly accepts his tips,
Emits an epithet from jaundiced lips,
Noses Toyota into oozing road,
Diesel particulate, black smoke, grey choad,
To somewhere in the deep benighted South,
With signs for Burgess Hill and then Portsmouth.
They come to a place fairly nondescript,
but not with all nuance completely stripped: 850
Estate of blocks divided into flats,
Each named after some dead aristocrat:
Asphodel Fields, which pleases not nor pains.
J____ pours a can of lager down the drains.
There now materialise the dissidents
Who for their woke transgressions won’t repent:
The stubborn sceptic about equity,
The Sentinel who will not “take the knee”,
The gender-critical philosopher
Who will insist that feels don’t make “him” “her”. 860
Schoolgirls there are, lamenting how their sports
Have been usurped by burly blokes in shorts,
See dinosaurs who won’t state their pronouns,
Primitive folk from actual Northern towns,
Comedians deprived of their best jokes,
Conservatives, and ordinary blokes.
J____ mocks these gammon with their pasty skin,
Their whiteness and their golf clubs and their gin,
How quaint and how ridiculous it is,
How horrifyingly pale and all that jizz, 870
Yesterday’s men, by history erased.
Bunghole professes themself stark amazed.
Now doth that scowling fretful blue-hair sing
“Woke Laureate thinks only the right thing,
And by so doing sets himself apart
From common herd, from mainstream, from old fart.”
J____ preens himself anticipating cheers,
Instead meets with profanity and jeers.
The Cancelled sceptical about him crowd.
“Out here beyond the pale, we’re still allowed 880
To vent our low opinion of your guff.
You’ve got away for too long with this stuff
Of truth and logic utterly bereft,
Woke racist moron of the idiot left!”
From all the thronging cancelled one hangs back,
Fizzog familiar of Novara hack,
Of wokedom’s acolytes the prettiest:
Ash Sarkar, literally communist.
“Comrade in arms!” cries J____, “soulmate and muse!
The woke computer must have blown a fuse. 890
Doyenne of Blackness, ally of the Queer,
What gross misunderstanding brought you here?
Tell me it’s not some tribune of the plebs,
No nasty little quisling Rosa Krebs,
No Woquemada broke you on the rack
For not capitalising the word ‘black’.
What arbitrary rule change caught you out?
Whose shibboleth did you unwitting flout?
Which termagant misgendered seethes with rage.
Which martinet scowls at your badinage?” 900
On J____, the lit’ral communist bestows
The explanation of her present woes.
“Cursed be the tech bro,” sighs the beauteous maid,
“That pusillanimous, top-knotted jade
At whose behest I swinked in servitude,
Scribe of his propaganda vile and crude.
The veriest epitome of woke
Long pickled foul hyperbole I’d soak,
Assemble strawmen, burn them down again,
Add sophistries more blatant now and then, 910
The more the merrier, since this displayed
Mankind’s abasement, plain to himself made,
Curled Ozymandian sneer of cold contempt,
Jackboot Orwell’s O’Brien fever-dreamt.”
“In service of Wokeness,” says J____, “you toil,
To its absurdest precepts you are loyal
Gaslight with blatant falsity the folk,
Humiliate them with bemerding woke.
Wherefore your exile then with renegades,
These skulkers in the whiter pale of shades?” 920
The communist responding heaves a sigh.
“No contra-woke transgression roused the spies.
A curse indeed on fickle Fortune’s wheel
Which Patreon’s favour from poor yes-man steals.
You want the truth plain and anatomised?
YouTube Novara hath demonetized.
I, exiled platformless to blasted heath,
A troglodyte, squashed cockroach underneath,
From woke’s excoriating napalm flee
And learn to exercise parsimony.” 930
In J____’s breast beats the heart of a simp,
Discreet, helpful, but still annoying gimp.
Of Ash’s woeful tale being thus apprised,
At once the fountains gush from his pink eyes.
“Fain would I wear thy favours in my cap,
Out of thy haters beat the living crap.
For now I serve thee as thy bounden knight,
Pledged to restore thy name in public sight.
Deliver thee from gaping wokeless Hell,
This tepidly beguiling Asphodel.” 940
“If I may interrupt,” says Bunghole then,
“The time to rehabilitate her’s when
I’ve finished the performance of my role,
As guide for woke tourist gawping at soul
Of non-conformist sceptic Question Mark
Who ‘doesn’t like to be kept in the dark’”.
Bunghole leads them along the winding lane,
Quite pleasant if verging on the inane,
Where those who boo when sportsmen “take the knee”
Live, slightly impeded by injury. 950
Here trainer rehabilitates the crip’s
Cartilage ruptures and meniscus rips.
Here folk do physio, or lean on crutch,
And some get better, but some not so much
And no longer play football quite as well.
This suburb bears the name of A.C.Hell.
Bunghole leads them beyond the boo-boy slum
Whose beige aesthetic leaves them slightly numb,
Unto a grotto hung about with screens
Framing the art of various has-beens. 960
‘Museum of Degen’rate Art’ is writ
Over the door in font promising wit.
Statues stand up, defiant in redoubt,
The brawny sinew and the scant breechclout,
Of those for whom tenuous links were found
To Martin Heidegger or Ezra Pound.
Slavers’ descendants, cancelled, in bronze glare
At rather pompous but benign Lord Mayor.
Here hangs a tapestry between two doors
Telling the story of the Culture Wars: 970
The petri dish in the arts faculty,
The trendy vicar in the rectory,
See Weatherman ’fore Panther cringe and scrape,
Lancastrian campaign of ethnic rape,
The snide remark directed at the Jew,
The Baader Meinhof and their retinue,
The urine sprayed on gender-critic’s door
By activist with pecker held in paw,
The gammon fired because he made a joke
Not cleared by the tribunal of the woke, 980
Sack of the Citadel, Thermopylae,
Unwoke’s damnatio memoriae.
Beyond the gallery a new annex
Almost entirely built from sheet perspex,
Houses a triptych of, first, a parade
Where people dance and drink warm lemonade.
Upon the second panel is depict
Red SUV of moral derelict,
Contact bull-bumpers with live flesh, and screams
Of grannies mangled up with hipster memes. 990
The third panel, J____ is amazed to see,
Depicts his own blatant hypocrisy:
His ‘Look, a squirrel!’ and His ‘What about …’,
His insincere raising of spurious doubt.
Now Bunghole leads them on through Asphodel
To where great doors announce Woke’s Special Hell,
Reserved for celebs who won’t tow the line,
The author who stepped on the primed woke mine
Saucy comedian, insouciant knave
Who makes us laugh and never two fucks gave, 1000
The footballer who will not “take the knee”,
Conservatives in the Academy.
The three-head pie-dog pacified with treats,
Protesting door on unoiled hinges bleats.
Within’s a spa, hygienic and pristine.
In Charybdis, massaged by jets unseen,
Loll J.K.Rowling and Professor Stock
The latter as yet processing her shock,
And ever and anon woke demons come,
Deaf to entreaty, blind, and stricken dumb, 1010
With tiny little glasses of champagne,
To ask for more entreats favour in vain:
Bonbons delicious but still minuscule,
The eating of which never made you full.
In the lounge Palin, Gilliam, and Cleese
Avail themselves of thin slices of cheese.
There is in Asphodel a decent pub
Where unwoke congregate for drink and grub,
To sip a pint of unpretentious mild.
Then some go home to waiting wife and child, 1020
While others gather in a cheerful group
To laugh at video played on a loop:
Watch cricket fans in the MCC bar
Throw white bread rolls at cringing Nish Kumar;
The booing of the proles at the New Den
At two and twenty nonplussed kneeling men;
Parents rebelling against CRT
And creeps who just won’t let their children be;
The jeer they can’t delete, the viral meme,
The deconstruction of woke’s fever dream. 1030
“I worry,” whines Bunghole after a while
“That far from putting the cancelled on trial,
My guided tours expose Wokeness instead.
The toxic Twitter mob’s built up its head,
And the fact-checker blood hound’s nostrils twitch,
His piercing howl audibly changes pitch.
But he no more bites out the unwoke throat.
Instead it’s Wokeness which has got his goat.
Is this a moment? Woke’s El Alamein,
When the grown-up with still functioning brain 1040
Stands up and boldly says enough’s enough,
That he’s not tolerating this woke stuff?
But then again,” continues Bunghole, “all
That’s happened here is immaterial,
Successful money shot, the pie of cream.
Figment of the Woke Laureate’s wet dream.”
The dreamer pays no mind to this remark,
But stumbles through a region not too dark,
Whose brigands resident with rapier wits
Slice Wokeness into nasty little bits. 1050
J____, Bunghole, Ash: now each the gauntlet runs,
Object of put-down and sadistic pun,
Half village idiot and half posh twat,
The intersection which Wokeness squats at.
Just as wit’s butchers are grinding their knives
Like US Cavalry, Uber arrives.
Bunghole and J____ climb into the rear seats
And J____ the maiden communist entreats:
“Come back to the left side of the woke pale.
If you’ve done nothing wrong, concoct a tale. 1060
Confess that you did once internalise
The white man’s values and priorities.
Promise to do the work, firmly commit
To antiracist training, gender shit,
Whatever’s the hot issue of the hour,
Whatever makes the blue hairs tut and glower:
Make that your area of expertise,
Stake your positions at extremities,
And never let the left your lines outflank
With Maoist guile or facile sixth form wank, 1070
But be more devious and facile too
Your fraud embellish and facade renew.
Back with us and resume your rightful place
With liar, hypocrite, and well-soaped face.”
Demurely now, the maiden communist
Twists off the fingers clamped upon her wrist.
No Amazon with tungsten brassière,
No Afro’d gorgon draped in purple flares,
No blue-haired Erinye scowling and grim,
Nor freakish gargoyle from the ladies’ gym, 1080
No force-fed suffragette nor bridled scold
Stared back so truculent and icy cold.
“I’ve had my fill of woke jugend pipsqueaks
and won’t shut up when it’s my turn to speak.
I’ll never more give in and contradict
A patent truth. Arses can stay unlicked.
I’ll live in exile here in Asphodel
Without woke’s benefits but not in Hell.”
It seems to J____ as Charon drives them back
That in woke’s fabric now appears a crack. 1090
Knowledge is power saith The Paedogogue:
Sole truth in all those canards he once flogged.
As, skirting Clapham Common on bald tires,
Charon returns to Hackney both the liars,
There is a certain emptiness between
The psychopomp and the eternal teen.
The traffic halts again its slow advance,
Bunghole makes off without a backward glance
And vanishes into South London’s streets.
Now J____, ignored by everyone he meets, 1100
No longer struts his stuff in Tufnell Park,
But sidles from his room well after dark,
Furtively skulks to Kurdish corner shop,
Giving a wide berth to the lounging cops.
And his acquaintances all glance at him
And look away and scurry to the gym.
Now J____ his plaint most prettily doth tell:
“Woe that I bear the stain of Asphodel.
Guilt by association, Salem’s stench,
The tempered mercy of Judge Jeffrey’s bench . 1110
Unconscious bias tests, the Twitter mob,
Quick dry cement mortaring gaping gob.
Such is the fate of that most wretched bloke
Who slides back down the greasy pole of woke.”
There chances to be, in the queue behind,
A woke phalangist, pompous and unkind,
An uptight pharisee with syringed ears
Who likes to take offence at what he hears.
Just as the shark, when orca wounds his friend,
Does not to mutuality pretend, 1120
Nor scruple entertains about a feast,
But will partake of pancreas at least;
Or much like Saturn eating his own son
- Sliced buttock flash-fried with a wholegrain bun -
The revolution shall devour its own.
Farewell Robespierre, and goodbye O___ J____.
Unleash the mob! Let Twitter grapevine jive!
Let false friends fall away, and frauds connive.
Now J____ emerges furtive from the store,
full bag of groceries hung from each claw. 1130
At once the cry goes up, the view halloo,
As when Antifa’s blackshirts hunt the Jew.
They chase J____ out of Camden and Chalk Farm,
And all Stoke Newington is up in arms.
West Hampstead and Swiss Cottage bar their gates
While Islington acidly deprecates.
There’s nothing in North London for young J____,
And nobody is answering their phones.
To keep Renard from Kilburn and Cheshunt
They delegate the chase to the Woke Hunt: 1140
Gimpsuited Maenads in their bright pink coats
In chariots pulled by “ponies” fed on oats;
Watch as old man with jowls of giant toad
Is forced to canter up the Edgware Road,
The bridle forcing down his forking tongue
As reaching Maida Vale he busts a lung.
And here the fugitive is run to ground
No Cheyne Walk for him, nor Square of Lowndes.
Instead a nasty dirty little box
Smelling of other people’s farts and socks. 1150
They force him out, the huntsmen with their whips,
By yanking on his hipster bugger’s grips.
They shave his hair off with their razors blunt,
Excoriate him as a Tory cunt.
They set a cardboard dunce cap on his skull,
His social credit and his fame annul.
Now ropes to each of his thin limbs are tied,
Attached to “ponies” harnessed for a ride.
Whipped by the jockeys in their gimpsuits gowned,
The old men, blinkered, neigh and paw the ground. 1160
The Master of the Hunt bids them to start
Pulling the Laureate of Woke apart.
Now some of us have haply heard it said
That if you dream you’re dead, you’re really dead.
Then happy Laureate as ropes go taut,
And Maenads in their ecstacy disport,
To feel beneath his cheek the IKEA rug,
To smell the perfume of Wokeness’s fug,
And hear the buzzing of a billion flies.
He opens now his grime-encrusted eyes, 1170
Blinks in the sunlight slanting through the glass
And yawning sits upright on bony arse,
And thus discovers, not to mince one’s words,
That he is covered in Wokeness’s turds.
“I thank thee Goddess,” cries her hierophant,
“That thou seest fit to lower thus thy pants,
And on thy humble servant defecate,
For I have dreamt what destiny awaits
The heretic who will presume to dwell
Cleansed of woke dysent’ry in Asphodel.” 1180
Wokeness smiles most becomingly at this.
“I do appreciate a masochist
Returning prodigal from freedom’s bourne,
And just in time for the woke Golden Dawn.
For comes the hour when I inspect my troops,
My serried ranks of furries, smurfs, and dupes,
A tepid shower aping a parade,
A motley march, a mincing masquerade.
As Dauphin, yours shall be the central role,
Official mouthpiece, or perhaps arsehole.” 1190
Now from without the woke AirBnB
There penetrates the din of soldiery:
Shouting of orders and the grind of tanks,
The ceremonial field gun shooting blanks.
Wokeness hands J____ his ceremonial dress:
Beige suit of Mao and jackboots of SS.
See next the demon and her nodding slave
step out onto the balcony and wave,
As down below there shuffles past the throng,
All hideous, all out of step, all wrong. 1200
**********
Book 4
The monstrous regiment of woke commences its march past in honour of the demon Wokeness and her acolyte O___ J____. The squadrons and companies are described with their sundry peccadillos: the blue-haired smurfs being obese and humourless, the black-clad Antifa behaving as the fascists they purportedly oppose, and Black Lives Matter burning and looting and smiting the Hebrew both hip and thigh; these being followed by phalanxes of eco-loons and Vert Rouge, human resources mavens, bourgeois triumphalists, and then Pride, during the parade of which a bout of intersectional fisticuffs ensues betwixt the activists pretending to speak respectively for the trans and for the gay, lesbian, and bisexual tendances, with the former prevailing in the lists. Afterwards, the march past gradually peters out, becoming more of a straggle past on the part of various unsavoury elements hitching themselves to the woke bandwagon. Presently, following a brief intervention by the Wokeler Jugend, news arrives regarding the depredations of the Muscovites, the which intelligence immediately and entirely undermines the woke movement. The public drifts away from their standards, although a dwindling band of true believers lingers on in the woke bunker or palace of pandemonium. One morning however J____ awakening finds himself alone and, walking through the deserted halls, after encountering Wokeness’s golden toilet and the allegorical horrors therein, discovers on his throne a letter from the Demon herself informing him of her retirement to her lake of filth. Overcome by her cynicism, J____ laments, but finally adopts new purpose, resolving to return to his bedsit and keep the woke flame alive.
**********
Behold the monstrous regiment of woke,
Science’s nemesis and butt of joke.
First waddle past the squads of scowling smurfs,
With cardboard signs excoriating TERFs.
The sunlight bounces off each azure scalp
And dandruff glitters like a Switzer alp.
Above white knee socks, fat and dimpled thighs
Betray the sacrifice of untold pies.
Hotpants which emphasise the camel toe,
As Adam’s apple does the beard’s shadow. 1210
O’er each fraying belt tremulous blubber juts,
On porcine face the lipsticked gob tut-tuts.
The cheesecloth working shirt with rolled-up sleeves!
The animosity! The petty peeves!
With pond’rous tread they stamp upon the ground.
Buildings collapse, and light aircraft are downed.
The birds fall silent and the dead revive,
It isn’t bliss that dawn to be alive.
Next marches Antifa’s Sturmabteilung,
From lamp posts effigies of Jews are hung. 1220
Black shirts they wear, and black shorts underneath.
Black are their souls, and equally their teeth.
Pissant pathetic parliament of fools,
The stinking sewage of the public schools,
Tarquin and Henrietta on the slum,
All trust-funded and terminally dumb.
Each wears a skateboard strapped across their chest,
Razors embedded, and a kevlar vest.
With lowered standards dragged through guttered muck,
They show the world how they don’t give a fuck: 1230
Portraits of Molotov with Ribbentrop,
The Red Flag with the Swastika on top,
Sayings of Mao, diktats of Xi Jin Ping,
The vanguard does its genocidal thing.
Behind on tumbrils prisoners are drawn,
The lumpen proles, objects of Twitter scorn.
The hipsters at their whiteness take the pee,
Joke about rickets and Vitamin D.
Now Black Lives Matter flaunt their camouflage,
And fling their epithets at Nigel F’rage, 1240
And Jon Snow fainting falls upon the floor;
So many white people he never saw.
They pull down statues and they “take the knee”,
Dismantle whiteness and the family.
On surfaces four-lettered filth they spray
And chase the po-po and the Jews away.
A black conservative in tailored suit
Disturbs the felons as they burn and loot.
They beat him with their skateboards on the head
And with their razors roughly shave his dreads, 1250
And call him “pet nigger” and “coconut”.
The businesses they burn! The stores they gut!
Maggot on civis, roach horde under fridge,
The botulism in the club sandwich.
And as they march, they hold aloft their texts
and Wokeness wreaks remorseless her effects.
’Tis now the turn of the Aquarians,
Vegans or at least vegetarians,
To shuffle past in sandals open-toed
And fill the screen for a brief episode. 1260
Homeopath, post-fascist charity
Wanting in intellectual clarity,
Hidebound opponent of the microscope
Sworn enemy of bath and bar of soap.
The creepy masseur and the mesmerist,
The slightly rapey male feminist.
Organic farmer and anarcho-trot
Who worship a Swedish child idiot.
Eugenic theory, both the why and how.
Worzel Gummidge reads Thoughts of Chairman Mao. 1270
A special place in Hell’s for the Vert Rouge
For their cruel primitive subterfuge.
A captive dragged on ropes staggers behind,
Vitamin A-deficient, almost blind.
They taunt him with handfuls of Golden Rice
Dropped in the gutter for the rats and mice.
As these march past odours suffuse the nose
Of the manure in which the poison grows:
The combination of patchouli oil
Leavened with the sour reek of armpit royal, 1280
The cat lady redolent of old tom,
The battle axe with face like Herbert Lom.
In thick wool tights huge women come and go,
Talking of long drop toilets and Osho.
Now forms a suffocating tight phalanx:
Human resources in their serried ranks.
These do not raise, it’s true, a farmyard stink,
But reek of satisfaction and groupthink,
And brandish quizzes which pretend to test
Th’unconscious bias harboured in the breast, 1290
The whiteness baked into the DNA:
Dogma and Derrida, Talcum X, Ché.
Let each now cultivate upon her blog
Her paragraph of obfuscating fog,
Bordered in Black, bold and capitalised,
About the concepts she’s conceptualised:
White privilege, the original sin
Of Jaguar, of golf club, and of gin.
The woke bureaucracy is followed by
Bourgeois triumphalists called “Giles” and “Guy”. 1300
Florid and rubicund, portly Hugh Jarse,
Flown in from JFK in business class:
Resplendent in his ceremonial dress,
The wife’s kimono and the floppy tress,
With baseball bat he clubs a passing fox,
While A.C.Grayling with his foghorn mocks
The knuckle-dragging Leaver, fat and white,
Gulping his Stella and Sunny Delight.
The Tuscan villa, the Dordogne farmhouse
Entitle Giles to patronise the Scouse. 1310
How dare the horny-handed sons of toil
Wipe off his smoothly lubricating oil?
Just stick to hewing wood and digging ditch,
And grumble now and then that life’s a bitch.
This tribe’s succeeded by the tribe of Pride:
Cowboy in leather chaps who sits astride
Pup masked in black and shiny neoprene;
Bear and his twink, waxed smooth and epicene;
The buzzcut butch with stubble on her chin,
The connoisseur of methamphetamine, 1320
The dominatrix and her cringing simp,
The exhibitionist and hog-tied gimp.
As these march past, a bitter fight breaks out,
Trans sophist brawny against sapphist stout.
Speak not of saintly Nozick nor good Rawls:
Instead prop forwards scrum for shrunken balls.
Transwomen weaponise ‘they/them’ pronouns,
And Logos in the muddied waters drowns.
The fighting spreads, engulfs the whole parade,
The trans castrated and the cuckold spayed. 1330
Here Lived Experience vanquishes Truth,
Boomer decrepit yields to coxcomb Youth.
Alarum and the screams of the erased,
My Lady mansplained and My Gaylord tazed,
The rampant T batters the LGB,
And gender activists shriek “Me! Me! Me!”
Their personalities stripped of pretence:
Just narcissism of small difference;
No more shall superego restrain id
Upon the apex of woke’s pyramid. 1340
Upon the balcony above, Wokeness
And J____ in furry Russian hat and dress,
Gaze down with cold command’s impassive sneer,
Deep frozen Brezhnev, glacial Beria,
Upon the seething, suppurating throng,
The spawn of ideology gone wrong.
Was it for this that Hobsbawm’s Ganymede,
The Stockport Stalinist, the Oxford weed,
Took up his stinkpot and his feathered plume
And penned in that dank foetid bedsit gloom, 1350
Defence of Chavez and anon of chav?
What broken moral compass, bust Satnav
Beguiled this Eton Mess into his Slough?
Send not to know the wherefore, why, or how.
Don’t lift your gaze above the parapet,
Keep staring at your iPhone screen in Pret.
There shuffles hindermost the rotting trunk
Of stale hypocrisy and yellow funk:
The wasted tech bros hooked on hentai porn
The woke zombies, and children of the quorn. 1360
The fact-checkers tied up in string trip past;
The Twitter mob, offended and aghast;
Millennial with really stupid hair,
Fat smirking public sector pensionnaire.
The tall patrician with the Roman nose
And Baader Meinhof t-shirt from Waitrose.
Air-head with gender studies PhD,
A nose ring, and a gluten allergy.
Th' eternal verities being thus betrayed,
Poor Conscience compromised, traduced, and flayed, 1370
And Soul of its integrity bereft,
The martinet’s falsetto shrieks “eyes left!”
Now robot peepers swivel on their stalks,
And fork-tongued sophists polish their TedTalks.
In all this vast and suppurating throng,
This biomass of everything gone wrong
This beating heart of evil, bland, banal,
There lurks a rarer breed of animal,
A not unphotogenic school of youth
Brain-washed, foul-tempered, bracingly uncouth: 1380
The Wokeler Jugend, useful idiots,
Woke’s janissaries, eunuchs, clowns, helots.
A kind of uniform marks out the dears:
Cute furry onesies, masks, and rabbit ears,
Mascara whiskers on smooth apple cheeks,
More aggravating than Juvenal’s Greeks.
Rancid compound of winsomeness and bile,
Weird union of gormlessness and guile.
Ovid on acid, Kafka on mushrooms,
Fonda and Hopper in the catacombs. 1390
The Wokeler Jugend’s function is to shriek,
And to coagulate in spiteful clique,
To form the mortar or the agar base,
To catalyse the mob with well-soaped face,
To infect with Woke Terror every breast.
Now shall the clapter clown anodyne jest
And ghouls laugh bitterly and snap their thumbs,
While gin the faculty of oldster numbs.
The jackboot stamping on the human face
Is multi-coloured with a rainbow lace. 1400
Wokeness deploys these when she has the urge
To instigate a pogrom or a purge.
These are the kids who root out all the vice:
The old white man who isn’t always nice,
Horrific karens from suburban towns,
The renegades who won’t state their pronouns,
Micro-aggression of executive,
The colour-blind who say ‘live and let live’,
Misspoken speech, the thought that goes astray,
Bromide congealing on formica tray. 1410
One’s most contemptible of all of these,
The stand-out star of the youth pharisees,
The Wokeness Morozov, Quisling as kid,
Pique twink, the apex of woke’s pyramid,
Apple-cheeked elf, the woke Jimmy Osmond,
The vanguard of Red Terror and Woke Fronde,
A git more aggravant than O___ J____,
Who’d pass as one of that poor thrower’s clones.
With beadle eyes he scans the doomscroll feed,
Checking that every ally’s up to speed. 1420
And this is how he comes to learn the news.
Even in tweets or - God forbid! - the Trews,
With some events you can’t equivocate;
When most have mobiles, all are up to date.
Now Ursa Major’s stormed Minor’s redoubt,
The time has passed for CRT for Scouts.
The clown wipes off his pancake and departs,
Leaving behind the perfume of his farts.
Scorbatic grit now clogs woke’s nonsense mill.
No more Teiresias or Jack’n’Jill. 1430
The news passes like Covid through the crowd.
Tell it in Bath, and publish it in Stroud.
No more shall special snowflake rule the roost,
But lose the privilege to which they’re used.
No longer shall their tantrums be appeased;
Instead they’ll just be mercilessly teased.
When Tsar drops hyperbaric bomb on serf,
It seems jejune to shrink in fear of TERF.
Microaggression or misgendering
Begins to seem a nugatory thing. 1440
Yes, you with your ridiculous man bun
And your antipathy to everyone,
Explain unconscious bias and its harms
To an old woman missing both her arms.
For news to reach the ears of Ganymede’s
A drawn-out process, very slow indeed.
There’s no intelligence of a revolt,
Of wiser heads who’ll firmly call a halt;
Only the echo chamber’s parakeets
Parroting back and forth castrato tweets. 1450
The storm gathers outside the palace door;
Within, court toadies backbite all the more.
Nought doth the bunker’s bubble shell assail,
Its carapace of ignorance de-scale.
The inmates of the woke asylum vie
To win acclaim for their woke purity,
To nail the Rainbow to its splintered mast,
Each new theory absurder than the last.
Withal, thermodynamics’ second law,
That all reverts to mess and nothing more, 1460
Applies in analogue to culture’s tropes,
Wherefore we have our Alexander Popes,
The wielders of wit’s scalpel, to dissect
The wokely ignorant and incorrect.
And thus someone eventually lifts the lid.
No asking who or what it was they did.
A morning dawns, sullen with bleached defiance,
No shouted orders nor mumbled compliance.
No zombie chants his brainless catechism -
Silence is violence! or some such jism. 1470
Each corridor is quiet and each cell
Where woke’s novitiate endured his hell
No more with mobbed denunciation rings
Only with rodents and their scuttlings.
J____ wanders lonely as a cancelled cloud
Through halls where lickspittles once cringed and bowed
And chambers where the Woke Lords sat in state,
And Twitter’s Atropos determined fate.
Justly neglected in an outhouse squats
Wokeness’s gorgeous golden chamber pot, 1480
Now lifting gingerly the ornate lid
J____ views the filament of arachnid.
Thus nature’s crocodile who loves to feast.
Upon the bluebottles or wildebeest
Who o’er Wokeness’s slurry flock or buzz,
Whereon there now congeals a genteel fuzz.
Now just as gingerly replace the lid,
Try not to think about the arachnid.
Reversing quickly from the damned purlieu
Of Wokeness’s abandoned unflushed poo, 1490
J____ tramps anew the silent corridors.
What shagpiles, laminates! What parquet floors!
Coming at last to where once Wokeness, throned,
Worshipped by managers as workers groaned,
Dispensed her judgements with malign caprice:
A place to be taped off by the police.
And here where as Her Dauphin he once sat
Upon this throne on which a pigeon’s shat
There lies, addressed to him, an envelope.
The letter speaks of “money for old rope. 1500
Nice while it lasts, but always comes that phase
When rope runs out and folk weary of craze.
I shall arise and go now to my lake
And doze again in that huge faecal cake.
You’re quite at liberty to keep the flame,
Or hire an agent to exploit your fame.”
See J____, floored by the cynicism, sigh
Deflating like a punctured pastry pie.
Now finally this vacuous arsehole
Experiences darkness of the soul. 1510
There’s those who, in relation to his pain,
A mirthful Schadenfreude entertain.
That’s not how decent people like us think,
It’s only that the nose wrinkles at stink.
For J____’s plaint is scarce a pretty thing.
Therein no noble sentiment takes wing.
Instead a rancid stream of fucks and shits
Deprives the listener of half his wits.
Don’t vex yourselves with J____’s actual words;
You might as well be polishing a turd,. 1520
Despite preferring not to bowdlerise
- the well-hung game oozes with filthy flies -
We will discreetly now adopt the veil
And not indulge poor taste beyond the pale.
Wherefore good gentles we thus represent
His tantrum as a classical lament.
“Oh weep! Wokeness is gone with all her prose!
How triste the blight’s departure from the rose!
How are the snowflakes fallen, and the woke
Become the butt of vaudevillian joke. 1530
Have mercy on us wretches, we beseech,
Cursed with the crushing burden of free speech.
If freedom’s slavery and war is peace,
How shall we cope without the thought police?
Muffle the pipes and muffle then the drum,
And try to look appropriately glum.
No more the thrill of following the crowd,
No woke scold shall determine what’s allowed.
Instead we’ll exercise our flabby will,
Although the thought of it makes us feel ill.” 1540
No woke choir sings in the Woke Dauphin’s praise
No fem castrato trills pastoral lays.
No mutilated hijrah vents the urge
To rend their robes nor rasp their squalid dirge.
Only the tumbleweed blows through these halls
Where Wokeness preached complete and utter balls.
There’s nobody to cheer, nobody claps
Except flies flapping broken wings, perhaps.
So finally he knows the game is up;
No last gasp intervention by Fred Krupp. 1550
When Domesday’s bank is calling in its loans
The U.S. Cavalry won’t rescue J____.
He finds his thoughts now dwelling at long last
On sepia-tinted recall of the past.
There was in some dank suburb once a room
All re-used teabags and low wattage gloom.
Here from the shelf the bust of Marx glared down
At cod Byronic prelapsarian clown
Slumped on his bed of antiracist books.
Fed by boiled kettle the pot noodle cooks. 1560
On radiators clothes heroic pose:
The rubber corset, pouch, and autre chose.
It had a certain dignity, you’d think,
The hard scrabble of fetish on the brink.
Oh for lost innocence, he pines and grieves,
Fond memories flutter like Autumn leaves.
Cursed be indeed that fickle false fraud Fame,
Midwife of calumny and lifelong shame.
Thrice cursed the baubles and the tasteless bling
That only grief and desolation bring. 1570
Disdain the limelight and embrace, beyond,
The humble pleasures of the demi-monde,
The simple life of stoic fortitude
Leavened with a libidinism lewd.
Gird then thy well-waxed loins, Woke Ganymede,
And go, before you’ve gone too much to seed,
Back to that bedsit to squeeze out those turds
For subs to polish into canting words.
“I’ll go!” lisps J____, “but if it’s all the same,
I think I will stay guardian of the flame, 1580
Make of the gimp hole that is henceforth mine
A place of pilgrimage, a martyr’s shrine.
And thither shall flock untold multitudes
Of disenfranchised race-baiters and prudes.
And I’ll hold court, the sacerdotal scribe
The Venerable Bede of woke’s lost tribe.”
Forthright he stands, with purpose in his eye
To raise the flags, and see which ones will fly,
Which grape ripens, which withers on the vine.
The true believer through the slow decline, 1590
Amid despond, for hope there’s always room;
Let just one cornflower on the midden bloom.
So J____ with oils his gleaming loins anoints,
And GoogleMaps consults on certain points.
The world is all before him to abuse,
Water to muddy, clarity confuse.
He hefts his worldly goods into a bag,
His household gods, his gimpsuit and ballgag,
And bag-in-hand, with mincing steps and fey,
Through Neasden takes his solitary way. 1600
FINIS.
Extremely impressive! Vivid, insightful and full of marvelous wordplay.