Thursday 14 June 2012

Bullingdon - Kubla Cam

I originally adapted (!) this as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his appearance before my Lord Leveson. Apologies to the wonderful Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

I now revise it slightly as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his indebtedness to his fracking friends, and the unrelated £500,000 paid by them unto the fracking Tory Party, and other sundry accomplishments."  

In Bullingdon did Kubla Cam
A stately restaurant destroy:
Where Barf, the lumpy river, ran,
And damage measureless to normal man
Was nothing to Bozzer, Oik, and me

So PR roads in fertile ground
From walls and towers gilded round:
And there was a rose garden with sinuous Clegg,
Where blossomed many a money-bearing tree;
And there were forests ancient as the hills,
We vend to fracking friends with glee.
 
But oh! That deep romantic chasm which granted
Down Cotswolds hills award a certain cover!
A fracking place! As holy and enchanted
By woman editing for her demon-lover
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth no pants were wearing,
An unmighty fountain momently was fracked:
Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst
Little blobs vaulted like rebounding hail,
And chavvy grain beneath the fracker’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river of
Of long wine’d lunches with mazy motion
Chillaxin’ til the lumpy river ran,
Then reached the money measureless to normal man,
And sank into a soulless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Cam heard from far
Ancestral voices punishing the poor
     
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From underneath the jubilee,
It was miracle of enterprise,
A darken'd dome where sleep and freeze
Those I force to work for free!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of asylum hope’d for.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such deep delight ’twould win me
That with music loud and long
I could build that dome in air,
But instead I sent the scrounger home

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His vacant eyes, his flopping hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on money-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise
Then barfed it back into your face.