NaPoWriMo Poem Twenty-One: The Body of the Enemy

You tell me that you're zen
and all we have to do is wait
for the body of our enemy
to wash by on the river.

You tell me that everything happens,
and is happening, for a reason.

You don't know what 'teleological' means,
but when I explain you nod and say 'yeah, cool.'

I sit by the river, where I can see stones
amid the low-tide trickle. I wait.
A shopping trolley rusts.

I turn and walk away, passing, on the bridge,
a man in chinos and an All-Blacks shirt
carrying a cardboard Michael Gove.

*     *     *

Face-to-face (well, almost) with Cardboard Gove! I wasn't going to return to him yet, but suddenly the last verse of this one seemed like the perfect place to put him. But what happens now? Does Cardboard Gove get chucked in the river? Who knows?

NaPoWriMo Poem Seventeen: An Open Letter to a Hollow Man

Dear Mr Gove, I hope you don't mind me writing.
Today's prompt was to send an epistle
to an inanimate object. I thought of you
(I know, I know - we're not supposed to know,
but some of us have noticed, Mr G.
Your Secretary does a good impression
of that preposterous voice you used to do.
His talent for ventriloquism? That was just dumb luck).

It's fitting you've gone 2D. Not only since it's retro,
when even silver screens aspire to ape
our dance through pliant space. When holograms
of dead rap stars play live at Coachella. You were never
even that real, Mr G: a big hollow man
with a fistful of sham, and a shitty line in titles.
Celsius 7/7? We're lucky, I guess,
that the only writing you'll be known for now
is the price tag sticker on your back
and the Property of Rupert Murdoch
which I guess someone from the NASUWT
has scribbled where your arse should be.

Anyway, my mission for today, as I say,
is to write to an object bereft
of consciousness, indeed, of conscience - you, in other words -
and, furthermore, to proffer both a fact
and some form of fruit. So, first, let me take you back

to 1989, a viaduct in Aberdeen, a young man
fuelled by commie rage and Tennent's,
detourning a piece of the state apparatus
- a traffic cone, to be exact -
forty feet from Union Street
into the path of traffic passing
on the road below, then finding himself
bundled in a police van. Did you call them pigs?

Because that was you, of course, when you were still 3D,
before you sat in committee rooms and labelled teachers Trots
for objecting to your choice of Commisar;
before your flatpack afterlife propped in the office cupboard,
where you rest now, waiting, patient, for the morning
when your underlings will drag you out, unnoticed.
Long time to wait. Would you like a banana?
No - fair point. Nothing to digest it with. No matter.
Tell you what. I'll leave the skin down here.

             *                                 *                                    *

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt was to write an epistolary poem - a poem in the form of a letter - to an inanimate object. Who better to write to, then, than Cardboard Gove, last seen in NaPoWriMo Poem Nine?

There were a number of other things the poem had to include: a song lyric (here taken from 'Big Hollow Man' by Danielle Dax);  an 'oddball adjective-noun combination' (in this case, 'pliant space' - not that oddball, I know); a fruit (the banana); a street name and a measurement of distance ('forty feet from Union Street') and a historical fact - in this case Gove's arrest for chucking a traffic cone off a viaduct in Aberdeen back in 1989. I bet it really annoys him, that people keep bringing that up...