The madness comes and goes. Today it came.
It came in with the breakfast diners’ news.
There was a war so far away it seemed a game
or a tragedy, depending on one’s views
of humans and mortality. It gained hues
of horror: someone has stumbled on the heads
of children allied pilots and their crews
collected as war trophies for their beds.
Our enemies are no longer just the Reds.

Our flags! Their colours—red, and blue, and white—
are arranged in different patterns so we know
which ones of us are holy, whole, and right
and who the evil others are who go
attacking out morality with slow
corrosive thoughts, and, when they’ve the chance,
with bombs destroying our most special glow.
Dear gods, give us the tools and strength to lance
the lungs of those who mock our stately dance.

The reds, or Reds, were whom we learned to hate.
With the Nazis gone to Hell or Argentina,
our teachers needed foes to subjugate
not them, but us, the growing concertina
of hopefuls who—like dear, young ballerinas—
stood poised for hope and beauty on pained toes.
We were their marrow; they, a large hyena
devouring our attention while they froze
us into copies of themselves, selves hating foes.

We died for them, and killed, in Viet Nam
continuing North Korea’s domino
effect—that’s what the teachers called their scam
that turned our cheerfulness and libido
into the massive weapon they can throw
against their foes both foreign and at home.
Brainwashed to think Jane Fonda was our foe,
we marched to tunes our teachers had composed
and we voted in the tsars that they proposed.

We, heedless of our doom that Eisenhower
had warned us of, marched on into a light
that made us think of eagles, wealth and power.
As if these could be ours, and were our right.
The light was Hell. It was so clear and bright
that we thought our own shadows must be gods
or, worse, that one was God, and we must fight
to erase the other shadows. Silly sods,
we gave up making music, for iPods.

The age of advertising sprang upon us
but answered to our teachers as before.
Our teachers worshipped as their own Adonis
the rulers, while the ruling class got more
concerned how bright the light was as days wore
themselves and us out. Hell requires a sun
and there were more of us now than before
so the rulers told the teachers ‘Sell them fun’
and we bought into this, most everyone

of us, except those whom we marginalise,
a butter-smooth term meaning we neglect
those few who tell the truth. We ostracise
those seeing that we’re each up to our neck
headfirst in sand an ostrich sees is dreck.
The rulers of the ruling class are known
to very few, with those few at the beck
and call of forces stronger than our own.
We are taught that we must leave such things alone.

The news—the shrunken heads found in bunk beds—
confuses us so much that we ignore
new enemies more dangerous than Reds.
We are easily distracted by the gore
Fox News concocts: it titillates us more
than serious and consequential news.
Our teachers taught us text news is a bore
so we riffle social media hypes and choose
to overlook the danger posed by Blues.

Red, White, and Blue are the colours of The Flag
that we worship blindly, and of the flag of France,
and Russia’s too, and you know who. Ours wags
its fabric at us, and our heels tap dance
and click together, gleeful at the chance
to be saluting something. That’s the way
we are programmed. We automatons advance
upon the autonomies who then sway
and all of us dance all our thoughts away.

The Blues have brought us popcorn, porn, and God,
each packaged in appropriate profit plans.
Each is fundamental, heavy as a hod
of bricks, and appealing to our monkey glands.
They combine to blind our morals, tie our hands
and ensure that, should a rogue one of us think,
then the rest will crucify him where he stands.
We may skate in freedom gaily in the rink
the Blues constrain us in. Or we can sink.

Wild bees collecting nectar from a bloom
are joined by a large and hairy fly.
The fly disturbs them, taking precious room
and spreading germs collected where men die
and where the fly returns to by and by.
The bees—contaminated, unaware—
continue as they were, and when they try
returning home, the tidings that they bear
make honey, and diseases that will share

their larvae’s lives, and the lives of honey eaters.
We buy our pots of honey at a fair
and marvel at the freaks, and flakes, and cheaters
the shop windows mirror to us when we stare.
But it is when we eat the honey that the mare
of night comes out and neighs us out of bed.
Black fevers fly us through the night and share
with us the shapes of everything we dread.
We each wake clutching a dead baby’s head.

The news is good today: our pilots strafed
a wedding party of another tribe,
our only casualty a seat that chafed
one flyer’s butt, a word our duty scribe
will expurgate before the pundits bribe
our heroes for exclusives they will combine
into the background bumph that we imbibe
with coffee and croissants or rosé wine.
There will be precious little mention of the dying.

The groom survives. He misses but a hand
and also, when he wakes, his bride to be.
It was our evil empire, understand,
who strafed her into blank eternity.
He had not understood, nor could he see
himself as widower upon the night
the calendar had marked as being free
to consummate their love. It was not right.
But no one here at home will see the site

of where his nubile-then and now-dead lover
lies strewn across a sand pit stitched with flies.
Embedded correspondents with a glove or
rake will ravel edges, and the cries
of four grandparents, and the silent sighs
of now-won’t-be-born babies will not reach
the news in any land of which the size
is large enough to interest those who teach
us how to keep our heads down when gods preach.

The madness goes and comes. One time it went
on holiday, and we saw clearly then.
We realised our craziness was sent
by a Provenance that makes us blind to men
and women and their children being skinned
by bombs we drop to recompense our god
for having been affronted when theirs pinned
some blame of those who rule us by the cod
and peace and piety. We saw we’re scrod.

‘Oh, Providence,’ we prayed, ‘provide us blinkers
protecting us from seeing what we do.’
So Providence made some of us gin drinkers,
or porn consumers, and—a pious few—
the worshippers of churchy gods, and sniffers of the glue
you make of molten skulls when you are done
with who their minds were. Watch the curlicue
of smoke from towns we liberate. Have fun
and zap a thousand channels, one by one.

We live too long to think our lives have meaning
while others die believing that theirs did.
We seek our sanity in news, which is like gleaning
for pearls in sand where oysters never hid.
Our chance is like that of reading all El Cid
in the random mess of alphabets from tins
of vermicelli spilled when lorries skid
off cliffs and kill whole families bringing guns
to kids weaned on computer games. Our sins

stack higher. We’re not bothered. We can drink
all morning if we need to to eclipse
our suspicions this is real. We need not think.
We see our sins as simply random pips
of pinball games, and focus on the hips,
or lack of same, of Paris, or Posh Spice,
who draw, by being drawer-less, viewer blips
to advertising for a brand of rice
or for a faith that says our life is nice.

We all agree we’ve had a splendid lunch
and we stumble off to bed or seek a glade
to lie in all alone or in a bunch.
We are born again in righteous cannonades
that show how bombs make proper lemonades
from the lemons who were other, lesser peoples.
We salve our souls till tea supporting Live Aids
and take up funds for razing foreign steeples,
and, finally, go sweat in bed. Sleep ill.

We wake up ill and take a pill. OK.
The Reds and Blues are history, we learn.
The Whites are whom we have to hate today.
We’re told the only good White’s one we can burn.
‘Whom, whoosh,’ we chant. We give the screw a turn
defining Whites as people who turn pale
when we point them out as pansies who should earn
the noose or gas. The thinkers that we rail
against as Whites include all men in jail.

We learn that there are people who deserve
to die to make more room for us, the good.
We label Whites the next group we will serve
to the sun of Hell, as hydrogen, or wood.
Or flesh and blood. We burn everything they should
have been, and all their mothers hoped they’d be.
We fantasise how stringing Whites up could
be all we need to usher in a free
and holy empire just for you and me.

Our teachers teach that killing all the Whites
serves higher goals, and most of us enlist
to give Whites just desserts, and us the rights
our teachers say are ours—if we assist
in smoking out remaining minds they’ve missed.
We lack real focus till a tall, thin man
the teachers tell us God Himself has kissed
soon has us kneeling where one time we ran.
We believe him when he says he has a plan.

The plan is simple: There will be no crime
once we kill all the criminals. ‘God knows,’
the thin man quietly tells us, ‘that this time
we will not fail, and should someone suppose
that this is madness, well, he’s one of those
bad Whites that ipso facto ought to die.
His theme sounds half-familiar but it grows
upon us till we vote to go and try
to execute the Whites. The plan is shy

on detail, but in short, we’ll empty jails
of all the convicts, by the simple ruse
of telling them they’re free, and that this entails
their boarding trains, each fitted with a noose
on gallows mounted on a black caboose.
Recidivists will cease to exist the day
we pass the laws that let the adders loose
on first offenders. Widowed mothers pray,
as Red and White and Blue dissolve to grey.

The news today is horrid. I am mad.
Not angry. I am crazy as a loon.
We all are, for we’ve learned that we’ve been had.
The pap ladled to us rots upon the spoon.
Disgustingly, the lullabies we’d croon
revealed themselves as lunacies and we
are disenchanted. No more Lorna Doone.
but facts, and all too, all too, credibly,
with our blinders broken, and defenceless, we 

see that we are our own teachers, our own rulers.
We see that the evil reigning in our world
exists because we want it to. Even crueler,
we see the coloured phantoms we thought twirled
us are in fact our wishes. We have squirrelled
away each other’s fortunes till the ground
it pocked with poxes. Galaxies that whirled
us actually turn out the other way around:
it is we who make our habitats unsound.

Before our lunch, brand-new computer games
are wheeled out so we can forget the news.
For therapy, we are set to putting names
to the holographs of animals from zoos.
It’s an easy game: few species left to choose.
One level higher, we are given slaves,
or holograms of same. We’re to abuse
them in novel ways for bonus points and saves
that are handy when we’ve used up all the graves.

Diversion works. Birdsong dispels the sadness.
As singing the blues can make a soul less sadder,
so can the torturing of avatars blanch madness.
We are cured enough to want to clasp the adder,
but, thanks to sloth, we wait until that badness
gives place to lesser vices that we’ve honed
for years, like gluttony, and tests of bladder.
A pint a piece ensures we’re calm and zoned
by the time the butler tells us God has phoned.

As visible as fleas on furry cats,
some times some truths get spotted by the press.
Reporters turn from tracking lovers’ spats
and they ponder less which royal will confess.
Then, like black specks in orange fur, and given stress
and a slow-news day, an insight will emerge.
The news is good this evening. There is less
endorsed annihilation, and the surge
of recent patriotism seems to merge

in with the milder, saner, softer strains
of reason, goodwill, charity, and love.
Though madness comes and goes, it’s taking pains
to seem good tempered. Come to push and shove—
and crasser rhyming—we see a hand and glove
of a higher, kinder power than ourselves.
It takes the helm and guides us from above.
It banishes bad things to padlocked shelves.
At the bottom of each garden there are elves.

Today’s bad news—there are no elves and fairies,
and, by extension, no gods and no meaning—
depresses me, and ricochets, and carries
its echoes over mountain tops where leaning
brown buzzards praise their own gods that for cleaning
up carrion, sharp teeth are not required
for birds with beaks and claws. I find I’m gleaning
a sense they need a bird-brained faith inspired
by fears I guess they have. They don’t look tired,

nor do these buzzards seem to be aware
that they will die. Nor fearful they will not.
In other words, my thoughts that they need prayer
is like all human thinking: simply rot.
We have too many brain cells, and a lot
of them run riot clouding nature’s glass
with theories of teleology that squat
among our dendrites letting nothing pass
that’s worth a crucifixion or a mass.

When the real west ends is when the Westerns start.
We make up meanings to describe our acts
in the hope that stories might make actions part
of something with a purpose, but the facts
give our self-congratulations the axe.
The curtain falls. Not far enough. The sight
we see: ourselves. Our bickering attracts
attention of the predators who might
be and are ourselves. There’s no more light.