The Grayling Damnation

The Grayling Damnation
It was a misunderstanding:
someone had seen too many
1950s prison movies, taken
it too seriously - the old stool
about a cake with a file in it.

Celebrity cookbooks were the first
on the hit list. Then anything
with a tang of the culinary:
A Moveable Feast. Cakes and Ale.
A Clockwork Orange – too close


to a Terry’s chocolate orange
for anyone’s liking. Poetry
was a definite no-no: too much
to taste and savour. The classics
were hauled in and interrogated:


The Count of Monte Cristo,
The Prisoner of Zenda, several
slabs of Russian miserablism
about crime and punishment
and the state of prisons.

The decision was unanimous:
this stuff was dangerous.
Never mind the Victoria sponge
with its jam and cream and hacksaw
filling, words were the whetstone

on which minds could be sharpened.
© Neil Fulwood

Prison Book Ban

 

 Neil Fulwood runs the film review blog The Agitation of the Mind (misterneil.blogspot.com) and is a member of the Alan Sillitoe Committee, a group dedicated to raising funds for a permanent memorial to Alan in his hometown of Nottingham. Neil co-designed their website www.sillitoe.com.

Environmental Intercourse

It’s just a little tremor.

It’s just a weeny shake.

It’s just a teeny tiny itty bitty earthquake.

There’s no need to worry,

and no need to protest,

it’s merely experimental fundamental stress. 

Environmental intercourse,

procreating wealth.  

We’ll sell hydraulic power

by contaminating wells. 

Gaia likes a jet inside her

moistening her shale,

hungers for our filthy penetration;

loves to get a fracking

from a whacking big drill;

ejaculating methanol, we give her crack a thrill.

Environmental intercourse,

procreating wealth.  

We’ll sell hydraulic power

by endangering your health.

This public negativity

about our new technology

is poisoning the people’s hearts and minds;

so the air’s a little murky

and the water’s looking dirty

and we took without consent from Mother Earth,

so what?

Environmental intercourse

will make our wallets fat.

We’ll cock up all your fundaments

then sell you back the gas.                 

We don’t care about your children

or your future or your health

cos we’re busy wrecking Gaia

to increase our massive wealth.

Yes we’re busy fucking Gaia

and we’ll please our fucking selves.

Study of oil wells highlights dangers of fracking.

©Laura Taylor

My biog is as follows:

Strident yet curiously engaging, Laura Taylor is a gobby Northerner with a penchant for upsetting apple carts, and she never knows quite when to shut up.