odourofdevonviolet.com
The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
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or to the various credited sources © 2014
...To forensically excavate suspicious-looking correspondences
Amid commonplace brown DWP envelopes, ripe pickings
For steaming open under the kettle’s whistleblowing steam –
Paper trails that indicate the chains of epic fall from Grace…
Motes and beams, motes and beams, it’s all motes and beams;
Ends and means, ends and means, it’s all ends and means;
Votes and memes, votes and memes, it’s just votes and memes…
XLVIII
These days, even the weather behaves figuratively, not so
Much meteorological as metaphorical, contrapuntal to
The brassy ebb and flow of popular mythologies,
Hypnogogic pogroms, persecutory opinions, and violent
Fluctuations of Social Attidue Surveys, for, in the thick
Of the Scroungerological Consensus, on the morning
Of 28th October Twenty-Thirteen, England –especially
The true-blue South-East– is whipped up in a monster-
Storm, a veritable blue funk of fomenting zephyrs
Spiralling into typhoon, stripping slates from the roofs,
Ripping up trees from their roots, the wind is throwing
A monster-tantrum of almost biblical Grand Guignol,
God-gusts of moral indignation, the most indiscriminately
Muscular since the hurricane of ‘Eighty-Seven –and
What have the weather people called this mega-gale?
“St. Jude” –after the Patron Saint of hopeless cases,
Of things almost despaired of, or, more poetically,
Patron Saint of the Impossible –epithets attributed
By Roman Catholics in veneration to the rumoured
Brother of Christ, whose benevolence for underdogs is
Invoked through prayer: Saint Jude, worker of Miracles,
Pray for us, Saint Jude helper and keeper of the hopeless,
Pray for us –and surely this prayer is never more in need
Of an answer in this time of imposed despair and
Destitution thrown at the afflicted, sick, unemployed,
Exploited, tramp and pariah, in plagues of rhetorical
Locusts from the Houses of Plutocrats; what have
The victims of cuts and caps, the dignity-stripped
Coupon-customers of food banks, supplicants of soup
Kitchens’ ladeled-out bowls of stigmatic broths spiced
With soupcons of Scroungerphobia, the pellet-pelted
Pheasants of fiscal consolidation and deficit reduction
To lose in the absence of compassionate auspices and
State assistance but to make appeal to higher powers,
And who better to patron their causes but Jude of hopeless
Causes, soterioloigcal granter of capped Angelical Aid…?
XLIX
But if St Jude is a judgement on the consequences
Of “scrounger”-rhetoric which has no compunction
In shutting the door on itinerant outsiders travelled
Far by knee-knocking donkey, “something-for-nothing” stable-
“Squatters” asking for a shelter for just one night, until
The storm blows over, then it’s a cryptic comeuppance,
Since the No-place-at-the-Inn proctors are the propertied
(And multi-propertied), the Buy-to-Bet collectors of stucco
Empties, who forgive no trespassers, are safely tucked
Under douves in their posh maisonettes and penthouse suites,
Snugly ear-plugged to the angry gusts St Jude throws against
Their unChristian intransigence –while the hurricane
Claims its only victims among the shelterless rejected,
Street-ejected, limpet-clinging to the slippery rockpools
Of shop porchways; religion is always deeply mystifying
In terms of rational comprehension, so, strangely,
It almost seems inkeeping with God’s mysterious ways
That St Jude’s own constituents should have to be half-
Drowned in order to be saved, while the antagonists
Of this benefactor of the poor and dumped-upon appear
To blithely ride the storm –but ours not to reason why, ours
Just to witness in sprung rhyme, for there’s little doubt
That such riddling ironies ring of the double-speak that
Enigmatically oils the Bible’s slippery proverbs, particularly
The aphorisms of the New Testament’s compassionate stings…
L
So, it’s only fitting that the weather in these eschatological
Days behaves figuratively, one might almost say, politically,
A meterological interpolation in a debate which has long
Gone past any reasonable phraseology or acceptable
Packaging, but has spiralled into a storm of recrimination,
Stigmatisation and dysphemic pathology whipped up by
The hate-inducing currents of Tory and red-top winds,
Gales of stigmatisation –and as the pugilistic late October
Gusts muscle in and pull no punches as they swing
And spin the rattling sign outside Mike Weatherley MP’s
Constituency keyhole surgery, did he think at all on all
Those would-be “squatters” evicted from the empty gaping
Properties of crumbling honeycombed stucco, shaken to
The roots on that late autumn morning, ground like organs
To the tumbling bellows of stormforce through-drafts,
And of where they now might delve out some frantic shelter,
Or, if they cannot, just how far the winds might sling them…?...