POEM - The Tawdry Reaping

In a time requiring judgement

for it to end in profanity, 

is a defect of my soul-searching 

but these are the cracks 

in the crazed pavements 

we walk upon

this is a time that is deluded

about its own delusion

it is the smelly slime

from a pond, aggressive jack boots

have stamped in, dredged out, 

then renamed it clarity, 

I swear, I do swear, it is the swearing, 

that I do, in order to release the constraints 

upon my tongue, the nervousness of lips

out of a charitable need for my mind

to speak free of polity, off message,

frankly, I cry out fuuuuck, far too loudly,

too often, with a rage ignored

by the la la la of eardrums

so I doubt these caustic words, 

their construct and cognisance

their sentences, can they ever match the mood

or capture the collective geist 

of a succulent stupidity 

already presenting itself for crowning 

what is it, that we think we are doing

hunting down the scent of a putrid lure

across wild clawed countryside?

nothing as laudable 

as an altruistic urge exists here,

I am left smoldering in regret

for we will be so double crossed

by the mean spiritedness

of their tinfoil minds, 

dressed soberly in pastel blue suits

those arsonists who point

at the fires they've ignited

then shake their moralising heads 

at the descent of England

as though they themselves

had nothing to do with the inflammatory fury

that they are merely pointing at

all destruction prefaces a future creature

and I fear the beast now being let loose 

to ethnically poison then cleanse the soil

preparing this land for the tawdry reaping

of a mutant political harvest.

Written June 2026
by Stephen Lumb