The Crystal World

It grows in wartime radios:
a heart of comedy
beset by songs of cancer, sung
in the shelters, deep, dark
and bomb-proof. The metastasis
of both Maxes - Miller
and Bygraves - proves that 'popular'
is no fit prognosis
for survival. As The Archers'
theme evolves and becomes
progressive, so that laughter is
beyond our ken, the books
he writes describe sheer goonery
as something bi-polar
and more sinister than humour.

While the post-atomic
proliferation of nuclear
families gathers pace,
the half-life of marriages sets
geiger counters ticking.
In the fallout, children are still
fighting Hitler: meantime,
their fathers play at dominoes.
Kopek watches flowers
in the rain, where once weeds grew round
a crater. His boyhood
is a slum clearance project gone
terribly wrong. Concrete
blocks like Snickers bars, with corpses
in the place of peanuts.

Everything is instant: nothing
lasts longer than Warhol's
attention span. Apotheosis
in replica soup cans.
He travels on a velvet lined
tube train to the stations
of Kings Cross, where bombs keep on
exploding in the war
of God's divided self. Both Laing
and Leary have theories
that fail to fit the facts: Turn on,
tune in, drop the pop psych
mindfuck in favour of a catch-
phrase more Dadaist: I
am the egghead, goo goo g'joob.

There are new worlds, sideways
through international space/time,
in which imagination
is eclipsed by litigation.
SF: the ECT
of the new, is to literature
what George Best is to Bay
Rum, if not the Bay of Pigs, where
red shirts are not Star Trek
uniforms, but no less targets
for heat-seeking missives.
The summer of assassins fast
approaches. He sharpens
spikes on running shoes, ready for
the race war yet to come.

Waits for the starting gun.