F - My nits are Nazis

Outrage is always hiding something
It is a way of covering up headlice
I was accused by an outrage
in the Bucks Advertiser - I was accused
of trivialising Nazism. No, I'm not a buck,
I said, and I'm not a punk-goth girl, honest
My body is a signal box

My nits are Nazis, a bundle of eager Nazis
Saluting and saluting to be free
They like it when the criminals are caught
They hoot when I tut at all the pitiable men
They shriek when I win a little ground
They're cranking up the ladders everywhere
My body is a signal box

I saw it just now in the butcher shop window
They've run up a whole sequence of flags
The gentle eye considers them rags
but you've only got to break through the code
It's there in my ornaments and hanging baskets
Look, I will list them all for you
My body is a signal box

A comb - cut out the B
A mack - carve out the M, put back the B
A thin pall - knock out the thin P
A kiss of death - stab out the K
plus one of the SS, and all the of death
It's Night of the Long Knives 2: Longer &; Bloodier
Then there's the number 4
Then a red-ribboned gift - cut away the T, the red ribbon
Finally, a fat farmbird - a hen (that's me)
There. There is their fiendish missive.
I told you,
My body is a signal box

Now these Nazis are personal, baby
They are not Hitlerian stooges - too pass?
They haven't got it in for Jews, you see,
Because I never competed with Jews
but if my Nazis had their way
All the poets and artists'd have their day
against the wall - they're in my way
especially every Emily Dickinson prot?g?
They're all too white with the froth of beauty
snuggling the dimwit kitty of poetry

Do not tempt my Nazis, sister!
Yours too are saluting to be free
Don't give them another ladder, lady
I've been hiding all their ladders carefully
Think of them rusting on bookshelves
Rusty like the nails they'll pin you down with
Your body in a black box

You're lepidoptera to them, I tell you
They'll collect you - poeta semi-Sylvia
powdered to death in Liverpool Street station
with eyes upturned to the rack-rattle timetable
We must be careful - we must warn the boys
We must constantly finger through our hair
Or our bodies will be boxes