Monday 13 January 2014

Kubla Cam. Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment.

I originally did 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." 



Kubla Cam. 
Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment. 


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, me, and Oik.

So 10 Downing Street is fertile ground
From walls and towers gilded round:
Outwith were gardens with sinuous drills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And there were forests ancient as the hills,
We vend to fracking friends with glee.

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A fracking place! As holy and enchanted
By tory wailing for her demon-giver
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was fracked:
Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
And chavvy grain beneath the fracker’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks once and ever
It stank up momently the sacred river. 
Five miles meandering with mazy motion
Throught wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the money measureless to normal man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Cam heard from France
Avaricious voices Totally prophesying cash!

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 flashman eyes, his floppy hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on you and me hath fed
And fracked the milk of Paradise.