More Ranting from the Bum

a collection of poems by

Steve Cartwright

Cover Painting by Steve Cartwright

Contents

Do not be Afraid of Death

Fuck Father’s Day

God Rest Ye Merry Fucking Gentlemen

Have you not Learned

I Remember Me

The Taming of the Shrew

Do not be Afraid of Death

Do not be afraid of death
Yearn for it bring it on.
Kill yourself now, you and your offspring.
Dig them a mass grave.
Throw yourself in.
End the charade.
It is infinitely preferable to the death you breathe and eat
in the supermarket hell
Spewing shit and death by music through their vein factories
Killing you like scurvy
With their mucus blocking,
Stapling you to their café floor
And bombarding you with pretend fishmongers and
bakers with their hired props and their pantomime
uniforms eternally grinning, as the mother Tesco goddess
squats in her birthing and squirts another sticky egg
from the slime of her proboscis
Violating the old cinema, the billiard hall, the working
mens club, the corner shop.
Swallows them whole,
Then pukes them back up homogenised into the new
hygenic fantasy factory
Demolishing the old buildings and revamping them
tweely as sepia photographs hanging in their gallery,
Glorifying their heritage,
Celebrating their allegiance to the working class,
Announcing their dedication, their servitude, their
loyalty, their union.
‘Your supermarket’ they deferentially proffer, after the
carnage.
Overseen by the sacked miners
Scourged of their manhood
Boiled and poured into security guard neatness, sharply
seamed.
Vacuous cardboard effigies, mindlessly deployed,
advertising orderliness.
In their terror-brown uniforms they draw you in to the
scraped, plasticised, hair netted, showered, hosed-down,
clingfilmed, shrink wrapped servers, guiding you gently
onto the treadmill,
Ushering you in,
Winding you through with their here-to-help stickers and
have a nice day.
They are our maties, they love us, want us to give birth to
their babies.
We’ll soon wear their t-shirts.
Like football club fans we will parade our preference and
state our allegiance,
Lost in these death markets eating their sadness
Overwhelmed by their cleanliness and conformative decency
Screaming for more and drugged by their additives,
celebrating promotions.
Proving our loyalty.
Hating their competitors.
Beating their fans up in the street,
And kicking their fucking heads in
Like religion.
Herded in our monster cars by the brown shirt sharp suit
robot ex-miners
Into team ASDA or Sainsburys Morrisons Waitrose
The super league of death mongers
Hosed down, checked, security coded, fingerprinted eye
retinaed, ATM’d, pin coded investigated
Laminated.
And feeding their happy to help, have a nice day, time
murdering sanitized matey matey call again see you later
shit pop music dripping, ‘your supermarket’ bile ridden
slime of sham eternally in to your dead lives.
Rail against it.
Shit in their sink.
Piss on their watercress, infiltrate their delicatessen with
huge doggy turds pull down their promotion panties and
pull out their plug.
Wake up now.

Fuck Father’s Day

Fuck fathers day,
Fuck mothers day,
What sham is this, what patronage that we demand a
celebration of our titles.
Seek praise and recognition for the role of mum and dad.
For things it is a privilege and joy to do.
What honour could there be in this?
Its everything you’d tell your kids that they should never do.
Don’t seek the approbation of the world, don’t do things
so folks will think you’re good and praise you up. Don’t
let anybody know. It spoils it if you do.
Do things for love, privately and with patience.
And because you want to……because you care.
Now they’ve made it like a war
Best mum or daddy in the world
Celebrate it you little shits or I’ll go mardy, belt you
round the ear, refuse to cook you dinner for a week.
And what about the parents that are not so good
Well should we expect our kids to lie?
There’s dads and mums out there that may not get an
Oscar for their performance.
What should we do?
Ofsted them perhaps?
Why not?
Maybe we should have a load of cards made up?
Could do better!
Dud!
Motherfucker!
At least there’d be an honesty in that
Shame or praise them with a coloured hat or badge.
But no
We know that what’s behind it all is profit
It’s just a way to sell more shit.
More chocolate, more flowers, more stinking candles,
Or cards with cuddly bears and cats at twenty quid a throw.
Just so the bankers get more cash
Or politicians claim their policies are working,
Inflation’s down, the economy is booming.
But really it distracts us from some other heinous crime
they’re planning
Goody icky parents
Looking after our kiddiwinkies.
They do not give a fucking shit.
Anything to shut us up
To keep us acquiescent.
Its just the same as when the bankers pronounce
themselves proud sponsors.
My arse they are
Don’t give us that you lying grovelling heap of shit.
We know that you’d do anything…yes anything to
wheedle yourselves into our shitty little bank accounts.
If you’re so proud don’t tell us that you’ve sponsored this or that.
Keep it to yourselves and then we just might believe
there’s a higher motive.
The supermarkets feed us with the same old crap.
Proud to be ‘your’ supermarket they ingratiatingly pronounce
O.K. mate well if you really are my supermarket I’ll be
round with the artic and fill the fucker up
Nice one Messrs Sainsbury, Waitrose, Tesco, Morrison and the rest
See you same time next week.
Proud you grovelling bastards proud?
You’d sell your Granny into prostitution if you thought it
would raise you in the public eye or shove you further up
the stock exchange.
Want some pride and recognition?
Earn it then.
Don’t carp on about your gracious deeds, who you sponsor
Just give your staff a better deal, better wages, etc.
And pay a better price to those you buy things from.
But no you can’t do that can you?
Your pride is just like fathers day
Like you
Its full of shit.

God Rest Ye Merry Fucking Gentlemen

Christmas is
Fat people eating dead animals
Sitting around the heaving table
As conversation flags beneath the glare of the T.V.
Pouring its shite into the mouths of babes who gobble up
the blue slime and refuse to come to the table
Caught by the P.C., the Xbox or the Playstation, killing or
mutilating innocents in their games of war
Or throwing women out of cars
And smashing their heads brutally into lampposts
And savagely raping them.
Satan’s claw has slithered red-garbed down the chimney
during the night
And loaded up the poisoned chalice.
Now begins the orgy of receiving, screaming out the
blandness of it all as presents break and wrappings mountain
And the giving becomes a nightmare of discontent and
More, More, More screams from the mouths of the awful children
As they belch their neediness.
And parents pander
And find nice things to say to placate these tiny thugs.
Meanwhile the face of the filthy monarchy stares out from the T.V. screen.
Removed by wealth and power, the majestic one gushes
out the platitudes of her station
Grinning with her aged and lizard features into these
dead lives as they celebrate the birth of Christ with sex,
violence and vampire zombie movies that now dance their
malice into living rooms across the land.
The run-up to these celebrations has been a crushing of
bodies into half-staffed shops surrounded by giant car
parks in shopping malls that proliferate and spawn at
the end of motorways that jam and bottleneck and spew
carbon monoxide.
And people stand in queues despising their neighbour
and the shop assistant at the till counter
So that anger, hatred and frustration gather on the
queues and belch forth from the malls and motorways
A vile infection
As if the Angel of Death had unleashed the frogs and
locusts and rivers of blood and boiling sores from the
stinking heat of the first layers of hell
Deny it,
There will be those who rage against this rant but they
are the oppressors.
The Johnsons, The Thatchers, The Camerons, The Cleggs
The four horsemen of the Apocalypse
Reigning up their steeds to force you in.
To feed you into the T.V., consumerist, money-fed ogre of capitalism.
And obligingly you go
Lemming-like
Over the Christmas cliff
Onto the jagged knives of hell.
God rest ye merry fucking gentlemen.

Have you not Learned?

Have you not learned?
How come you did not know?
How come you did not feel it resonate within your
conscience deep within your soul?
That with each agony we make,
Each pain we cause,
Each life we take,
We move a little closer to the jaws of hell.
Did you not know that on your soul there’d be a mark
For every time you failed to register a hurt for all those children’s pain
For every time you did not flinch as blood and sinew spurted out of these young babes whose agonies you caused.
For every time you did not wretch or tremble at the gore and at the awful fear that you alone had made
Did you not sense that you were digging your own grave
Did you not know that there would be a stain
Not from the hand of God but from the karmic laws that
actions trigger into play.
Did you not sense A God of Love
[to whom you one day surely will return to beg
forgiveness for the vile and awful things that you have
done]
Would never celebrate atrocities committed in his name
Could ever be a God of Love and yet ask us then to kill
and murder and to maim
Was there not something in you knew that this could
never never never be the way?

I Remember Me

I remember me, just.
There’s a glimpse now only half remembered.
Somewhere back, way back, way way back in my memory
Before marriage before fatherhood before the years of
forced conformity got me
And clad me in a heavy heavy dusting of doubt and forgetfulness.
I can just, only just, see me now in the shadows of the half life.
Clinging to the man that I was meant to be.
Ringing songs from my guitar,
Chucking rubbish on the bonfire,
Growing things,
Watching the stars,
Walking in the holy snow,
Paddling on the shore line,
Gathering the sea and sun-drenched driftwood and the
dead seaweed dried and crunchy,
For the beach fire,
Laughing in the rain,
Eating fish and chips
And feeling Janet up in the hedge down the back gitty.
The wondrous swell of her soft and nubile breasts
And the thrill of her moist knickers
Releasing God in the salty fluid of my sex.
Belching joy at the ecstasy of living
Wild like the warrior
Free like the wind
Revering the Celt
Hating the Roman
Wielding swords with the Saxon
Hacking the Norman
Despising the monarchy, the rich, the oppressors
Screaming filth at the taxman the screws and the vicars
Shouting cunt at the government the dead legislators
The judges the bankers the vile politicians.
Bring down the system.
Sucking our blood, stealing our life force
As they feed our desires and big up our vanities,
So we barely remember the gods that we could be,
Feeding us shit through their robot the telly,
With its soaps and its sitcoms the lure of the lottery,
Stopping us thinking and stopping us talking,
Wrecking community keeping us walled in,
Feeding our children their shit on their screens.
Turn us to fodder to bow to the monarchy
To bring up a family, to get a big salary
T0 buy a big home, or a second in Brittany
To kill in their armies, to toil in their factories,
To live out our lives like we’re fucking machines.

The Taming of the Shrew

I could say I hate dogs but its not true.
I don’t really.
It’s what we’ve done to them I hate.
Pampering the twat things on bouncy wouncy or shitalot.
Wrapping them in doggy coats and doing their hair.
In my garden I hear them whining and yapping every
minute of the day.
Demanding to be let in.
Demanding to be let out.
Demanding play.
Demanding food.
Demanding walkies.
Demanding doggy treats.
The demanding twat things,
I could say I hate cats and actually mostly I do.
Cat hair, asthma, allergies, wet eyes, blotchy skin.
Soppy twat things mewing and cuddling up.
Demanding fuss and attention, begging, getting in the
way, needing, having to be fed.
Dopey, prattish things that share people’s beds.
Pussy wussys.
What happened to cats that ran wild, feral, free?
I don’t hate budgies, canaries, snakes, rabbits, mice or
hamsters but their owners must
Animal lovers shutting them in cages, stealing their liberty.
Then rubbing their cute little noses in it with their who’s
a pretty boy then or give auntie boo boo a ickey wickey kissey wissey.
Complete arsehole twats playing mummy and daddy with the lives of the once wild
Fuck sake.