In the Cruddassic Era
Savage atoms – as seen in the microscope of their Godlessness
playing on the golf courses that keep them out of harm’s reach –
they are still humans, sons and daughters of the Puritans
who fought against England’s evolution as spearheaded by Shakespeare
and co.
and who refused to learn any lessons at the Wooden O,
refused humanism, even as sugar-pilled by the Christlike poet
who has since run rings around the lyrical cosmos, so that
centuries on, these crud-asses must eat humble pie, and join the Bardolaters
even as they suspect he was ‘more likely some aristocrat’.
These days, their speciesist purity has been washed away
by the filthy modern tide closed minds/closed eyes could not see off
who have long since succumbed to Mammon
– money’s pornography –
for which they are willing to pay any spiritual price
though the Church of England remains as a safety-net for sentimentals
with residues of Xtianity. (Neo-Darwinists have more faith in Marks and Sparks.)
Thus they fit in…
ie. with themselves and nobody else:
grey squirrels who wish to destroy the more beautiful, less competitive red.
Of course they have their own rituals, their own Tory Zen,
as their intellectual day begins wth pawing a Mail
– the hymn-sheet they think from, chorally – tuning in
to the Great Mind who directs them in their great affairs,
then sniggering at Botham’s ‘to the right of Attilla the Hun’:
‘What largesse! What a legend! Good old Sir Ian! What a be-knighted high-flyer!’
From their midpoint they know nothing better
than looking up at the Elect, and looking down at the Reprobate
as they squat in the middle, some kind of Redeemed
but Larkinesque toads with it, as their prophet Phil diagnoses.
Even in the 21st century, they are serious primitives:
Cheddar Men in grey suits, middlebrows bulging with hubris
as they prowl the urban and suburban wildlife documentaries
that is their habitat. Davy Attenborough’s another prophet,
and Dickie Dawkins, for these progeny of the Selfish Genesis.
Gamekeepers, they’ve littered the land with booby-traps and snares
whose daily task is to hunt and gather the proteins, the strength
they need, that will see their tribes through any left-wing apocalypses
and/or levelling floods. Haters of the imagination, they take too literally
the crumbs of poetry their spartan diet allows, for example,
the kindergarten magic of Potter, the Mysteries-lite of Dan Brown
and the rebranded Hermetic laws of Upstairs Downstairs.
Who can forgive the original Shakespeare-haters? Not their lineal desecendants
who are far too busy handling stolen goods, and selling them on,
while working out how to get the Malthusian balance right
between having enough people to feed on, but not too many to feed.
The golf club thwacks the golf ball again: this is their naturalism,
the mock-competition where they’re allowed to beat their superiors.
Niall McDevitt