We live in a world of make-believe
day after day after day after day.
I raise a tired fist and feebly say
Hello, hello. It seems that things
are getting out of hand. Herodotus said
a number of interesting things, he pings
on the Ancient World, the BC bit,
long before the AD slice we live in,
being a dangerous man for opinions
altogether. So-o-o-o hard to decide whether
he’d be telling the truth. In a booth
not far from Birmingham I met a man
living in a world of make-believe
who told me something I still remember:
Listen to Herodotus, ya prick,
So I, being young and thick
listened to the man coming over the airwaves,
fading in and out from 350 BC.
It didn’t help or relieve, just sought to heave
the same old problems around, to shunt the cunts
as it were: was Melpomene your suffering mother?
She was young, you know, in the early Nazi days
and thought it was all very fine. Berlin in the sunlight.
Her summer frock. Bathing on the Wannsee with SS boys,
No notion the Fuehrer was out of his mind.
I wish you would go away,
no longer linger no longer stay:
your language is offensive!
Listen to Herodotus.
The defensive part is not the art
that wins a War: toujours, toujours l’audace
lands you dead or else a cripple.
Yes, I enjoy a little tipple
now and again with friends, it makes amends
for the other crap I end up doing.
I have had my fill of war.
You don’t know what you’re fighting for
after the first year runs into the second.
A fecund lady has always been my dream,
broad hips, big tits, something to grab hold of,
but I always end up with slight little girls,
little waifs who slit their wrists, have problems,
who arouse my protective instincts, and who,
if you get that far, are not a very good fuck.
I need a blonde beaming girl who doesn’t read books,
who doesn’t speak in connected sentences,
who understands money .... !
Girlfriends are one thing, wives are another!
I was told that by my mother: she said, may God
direct you to the Right Woman, young idiot, etc.
My little Chinese girl has left me. Of course she has.
She was so cute and young and smart and elegant:
no doddering chav is allowed these things …
if but only for a while
and so my creaking heart still sings. Dangerously.
I smile. A sunny smile. I know, I know it is all a game
and other sweet girls will flutter along
like moths to murder in the flame. They want
a certain something. And so, dear God, do I.
Herodotus was saying, before you interrupted
that different people behave in different ways
and he was fascinated by this: he writes, whenever
the Persians had something seriously to decide
they went about it twice. Initially, they were quite
sober and rational, questioning, very very open to advice,
but then they went off and got totally drunk or stoned
and listened to no-one, to see if feelings would coincide.
As I stare, as I glare at my iPhone 5 today
this still makes sense in every way.
