So anyway, this guy from somewhere behind the former Iron Curtain
is giving me lip in a chat-room for my disparaging comments about Uriah Heep's
1980 opus of shit, namely Conquest :
I explain that even though I'm open-minded
and resist musical snobbery, there are some things that
need to be nuked or sealed in a vault, preferably both;
he gets more colourful in his tone and expletives,
and in the blue-aired threatening haze
emerge underground tunnels where fathers and husbands called Pavel
said do svidaniya
to their stoic wife and shivering son,
and I think maybe he was one of these sons,
his universe beginning and ending
behind a blood-stained biscuit-tin lid;
Pavel
clung one handed to barbed-wire fences,
one-eye glazed and half-open,
his rain-mac concealed in a tributary of West-dribbling blood.
He looked like Warren Clarke staring towards God in Firefox,
starlight and teardrops
a cocktail his boy Oleg smashes right across my face - right now -
Ken Hensley
raising the flag at Iwo Jima
and me stricken at half-mast.
"Bollocks to good taste then!"
I sign off, and hear the German Shepherds'
howl echo through scattered unconquered-starlight,
the mucky squelch of KGB feet
trampling a biscuit tin like it was a Romanov rib-cage -
a falling copy of Conquest at the mercy of their cocked and loaded grins.
Shit; sorry Oleg
John Doyle became a Mod again in the summer of 2017 to fight off his impending mid-life crisis; whether this has been a success remains to be seen. He has has two collections published to date, A Stirring at Dusk in 2017, and Songs for Boys Called Wendell Gomez in 2018, both on PSKI's Porch.
He is based in Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. All he asks is that you leave your guns at the door and tie up your horses before your enter.
