IN ANOTHER TIME

The old King agreed to entertain
The Empress. He stroked
his short beard
and worried the country
would come to grief

as if shook from a dream.
The old King slept.

Someone off stage shouted, 
"Get on with it!"
and a floorboard creaked.

She bowed. The Empress said,
"I have come for your Kingdom,
your jewels, your pearls
and your people.
I wish to break chains and unions."

The old King gave some crumbling pages
his signature. A castle wall collapsed.

"Take what you can," he sighed,
"but spare my feelings.
We who came before made the world
you want to make afresh.
We fought the same way.
Do not tread the battleground again."

The Empress conceded with a curtsy
and crossed fingers.
She knew better than this old sod.
Off with his head!

Somewhere in a foreign field,
a corpse
in bloodied armour grinned.

AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

It is evident that Christ and his cult
of veneration, that held sway
over everything from coronations
to making cups of tea is on the wane.
Just as superstitious as these Egyptian
tools for removing the brain
through the nose, or these crude Greek
figurines of Eros riding wolves and Aphrodite
spawned from shell. In the Japanese room
the tour guide talks them through
a miniature cabinet of lucky gods
and a fat, gold–plated grotesque that promised
wealth. It puts one in one's place to know
this earthenware bowl once carried water
for religious rites two–thousand years ago.
The thumbs can't have been no different
as they wet the infant's forehead.
I can smell the incense on his soft,
priestly fingers. And his voice, murmuring 
the sacred prayers over burnt sacrifices,
echoes through the museum 
like a drop of oil in a deep vase.

HUDSON COUGHS IT ALL ON TAPE

It wasn't Nixon on tape in the White House over Watergate, but JFK
doing the voices, and wasn't shot in the Dallas motorcade in '63, Please!
He held two marbles and half a glass of water in his mouthto be Nixon. His impression
of Jack Ruby, who didn't shoot him or his doppelgänger (Ladybird Johnson's
illegitimate brother in prosthesis and wig), was legendary. Some said
he could be him, but I never believed them. Lady B J's brother was shot
by none other than Marilyn Monroe, the bombshell assassin, who overdosed
in Soho, England, seven years later than thought. Judy had been dead donkeys'  
and they couldn't keep up the carousel of drag queens who played her in shows.
They were damaging the brand. Of course they removed bones, the femurs,
to make Monroe fit. A stray Gitanes by the corpse almost gave the game up.
Judy smoked Lucky Strike (DO YOUR HOMEWORK BOYS!). That fag, Ruskee, Deans,
had to be silenced, "retired" to a haunted mansion in Cleveland. Princess Diana?
You mean you haven't figured that out? It was Mohammed Al-Fayed who drove
the white Punto through the Paris drizzle that night. It was jealousy and whiskey
that fuelled him. Nothing to do with me or Prince Philip, whatever you think.
There was no shotgun wielding motorcycle outrider, whatever you say.
Just a man and his grief funded by MI6, who class him as a double agent.
They played him. Which brings us to September 11th and Nixon again, with a beard
in an arid cave, crying for Allah, on videotape, his voice all marbles and water.