#100 - Thatcher's Fucking Head

comes shrieking out of the mist,
a havoc of papery skin stretched tight
over chitin and doom. The hull
gongs like a dungeon door;
in the empty skull a slave galley
drives the infernal engines below.
Fell lights glow in the occular cavities,
black smoke trailing
from a trepanned scalp.

She clatters out of London, chewing through
the Midlands, steaming North;
her breath like coal and soured milk.
She is iron and brass and the gut ropes of the Forever Lost.
She salts the earth and makes birds drop from the sky.

And still, the lash cracks somewhere deep in her throat.
Bronzed men pull on oars.

She advances, seething.

#99 - The Tinfoil Hat That Saved My Cat

Chemtrails left his Whiskas with a metallic aftertaste;
the output of HAARP set his fur on edge.
Oh, he had heard the 'explanations' of counter-intelligence agents,
the crackle of static and backmasking behind
their every utterance and, yes, what with the flouride
in the water he had once believed them,
curling up by the hearth like a hairy prawn,
docile, obedient.

But lately, he has stiffened like a croquet hoop,
hacking up listening devices:
thick wet balls,
                         bristling with antennae.

#98 - The Untying Of Rodney O'Flanagan

His legs were in a Flemish bend
His spleen was knotted end to end
Unmesh his whiskers? Hell forfend!
            Untying Rod O'Flanagan

His tongue was in a granny knot
His arms had mostly been forgot
Was Roddy kinkless? He was not!
            Untying Rod O'Flanagan

His veins were in a rolling hitch
His brains unspooling in a ditch
His hair was, frankly, quite a bitch
            Untying Rod O'Flanagan

#97 - Down With Victims!

'How many times must I show you?' barks Ranulph,
a rhetorical question but honestly felt,
'it's stab and then drag and then twist and then drag,'
and his dagger withdraws as he peels off the pelt.

'But uncle!' cries Spedwin, distressed by the violence,
'o must we slay paupers and harvest their skins?'
'You are stupid,' says Ranulph, and guts his drab nephew,
'did nobody tell you child? He who scares, wins.'

#96 - The Reaper's Lonely Pint

With the cowl pushed back from his bowling ball scalp,
he didn't look much of anything.
His talon tinked on the rim of the glass,
and as he sank his suds
the note dropped.

On the ceiling above,
there was a scythe just like his,
but sharper.
He saw his future in the horse brasses.
He brushed crisps from his robe,
for a moment entranced,
by that briefest of novelties:
a lap.

#95 - Before The Aftershow Party

Lewis drove his Citroen Saxo through the plate glass front
of a Cash & Carry, and later claimed it was all part of the show.
He drank Tennants Super two cans at a time,
punching blowholes with screwdrivers - told me God was alive
but in hiding, a wild-eyed old man
with thunder in his digits and no place to go.

When he stepped onto stage, Lewis looked like a bull:
red, unfeasible, snorting with karma.
The audience shutterbugged, rippled and popped -
they lapped that shit up; they were rapt.

#94 - How To Break An Owl

'Don't fuck with me.' The barn owl pulls a luger
as she backs towards the door. 'I shit mouse skulls.'
The owl has a head that winds like a clockspring.
It is cruel and delightful; a porcelain gallows.

Every year the same routine; the stand-off,
the armed escape. She wears her beak like a ventilator.
Sometimes we applaud as she leaves.
Today, she puts a bullet through the signed photo

of Lonny Donegan over the fireplace.
'For Eric,' she whispers,

                                      confusingly.