Trump

Halloween, 2016

This Halloween, I shall dress as the year 2016
and emit a frightful, fulgent sheen
from my orange-pumpkin-Donald-Trumpkin head.

I shall adopt the gait of Theresa May’s Living Dead,
and howl like a slithy Gove under a waxy moon.
My chest will be scarred with Brexit wounds.

I shall visit all doorsteps across this haunted land
with a leer on my face and a beer in my hand,
like a phantasmal, sharp-fanged Nigel Farage.

A dagger will be sticking out of my back
(the Severed Hand of Boris will still be attached).
And there, trailing behind me, poor fools,

will be the ghosts of the heroes you’d pinned to your walls,
all those pop stars and comics and actors
who filled up your lives with music and laughter.

Alongside them will be the bombed and the drowned,
the beheaded, the starved, the blown-up, the gunned-down,
from American nightclubs to Syrian towns.

So Trick or Treat! Happy Halloween!
If you’re not in when I knock, no fear;
I’ll be here all year.

Pigs

Truth had it coming, if you ask me.
All those drab facts,
that dull insistence upon
looking at things as they really are,

shoulder-barging
the stories we would like to hear
out of the way like that.
It’s a surprise it lasted so long.

Far better now
that we can wrap ourselves
in untruth, and emote our way
through the days.

I like to tell one untruth
before breakfast,
then three more by lunch,
with a further seven by bedtime.

No, I never said that.
Yes, I did declare all my income.
Yes, I know exactly how you feel.
No, I did not eat the biscuits that were in the tin.

And should any so-called ‘expert’
point at the crumbs
which nestle in the corners of my mouth,
my bottom lip shall tremble,

and I shall say, pity me –
for, since my neighbour moved in,
these crumbs represent
all I have left in the world.

Every night I hear him
sneaking into my home
and helping himself
to another handful of biscuits.

And I shall say these words
with such passion
and such conviction,
over and over and over,

until the pigs
begin to sing in the trees,
and my untruth
becomes a kind of truth itself.