Head of state

There was a sense of liberation at the announcement that the Queen sucks Nazi cock.
The announcement came from Poetry Chick Abby Oliviera during Pride Week in Derry. Sharp intakes of breath from mums and dads gave way in a beat to broad grins, the exuberance of the language supplying a license to feel free.
The content of the “cock” claim proved a slight disappointment. The Nazi in question was only racist Prince Philip. I’d been hoping for Max Mosley, if not the necrophiled corpse of Hitler himself. I am not sure that the Queen sucks cock anyway. More likely, she just lies back and thinks of Germany.
This year confirmed Pride as the social highlight of the north west season. The grand opening in the Great Ballroom of the City Hotel was a glittering occasion, the crème-de-la-crème of the elite of Derry society assembled in dignified array, classy citizens one and all, none of the rowdies you’d find at a Chamber of Commerce dinner.
I not only had the honour of declaring Pride open but was granted the accolade of being insulted loudly by name on my way in, by the Wages of Sin set assembled outside to proclaim Iris Robinson a rational human being.
It was during An Evening with the Silver-Tongued Devils – in which an unfeasibly brilliant selection of us neat local narrators annually incants a selection of gay-related poems to a conviviality of literati in the sumptuous surroundings of the Void Gallery – that Abby delivered Manchester poetess Chloe Poems’ profane paeon of disillusionment with the ermined idlers of Windsor.
“My England/Where the blue-bloodied Hanoverians/Are the true blue barbarians/Who rule over this stagnation and rot/How could they not/When the head of the highest family in all the land/Our Mother Protector/Her Royal Heinous the Queen/Sucks Nazi cock.”
Chloe’s own version (check it out on http://tinyurl.com/6fnbjk) comes close but not quite to Abby’s raucous and rollicking amazing recitation, which you can catch anywhere you see a Chicks’ gig advertised.
The Silver-tongued devilment also included Abby’s wry ruminative remembrance of herself as the Scots girl who, try as she might, couldn’t summon enthusiasm for the fey cult of Rabbie Burns, including the tragical tale of being chosen for the sweetness of her voice to take the stage at school assembly on Rabbie’s Day (or whatever it is daft Jocks call it) and in her nervousness inadvertently reverting to the street version of the auld song, and so beginning, ‘Hooer of Scotland’; and a harmonious four-part rendition of Wilde’s aching evocation of a condemned man circling his own soul as he ’waits the hangman, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol; and Julius Guzy and Frank Rafferty declaiming exquisite pieces by Ginsberg; and Goretti Horgan chant-singing Patti Smith’s angry cry against the Raytheon-sponsored massacre of ‘Qana’; and James Smallman with reflections on affection by his former St. Columb’s teacher, the late Paul Wilkins; and two almost-lost beautiful poems by Housman; etc. and so forth: golden words gushing in cascades, art and love and beauty all around. Really, you should have been there.
And another thing. People should read more poetry.

Mediocre mid-fielder Frank Lampard has become the English Premier League’s highest-paid player, having been persuaded to remain at Chelsea by a contract worth £151,000 a week. That’s £3,775 an hour.
If he’s worth that, what was Jobby Crossan worth?
Meantime, a survey by the Institute for Public Policy Research reveals that Chelsea, Spurs, Arsenal, West Ham and Fulham are paying the minimum wage of £5.52 an hour to cleaners, kitchen porters, cashiers and bar staff.
Would any jury convict these workers if they opted for a pay-negotiating strategy of skulking hob-nailed in the corridors and giving the likes of Lampard a good kick on the ankle when he swaggers past?

Condoleezza Rice was taken aback the other day when she rushed into the Oval Office and told Bush that, “Three Brazilian soldiers have just been killed in Iraq,” and saw the colour drain from the president’s face. Bush then collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, and only recovered some minutes later to ask in a whimpering voice: “How many, exactly, is a brazillion?”

Cindy Sheehan says: “I am incensed that hundreds of thousands of people are dead, dying, wounded, displaced from their homes or being imprisoned and tortured by the sadists that reside or work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the approval of their accomplices down the road in Congress. I am furious that I buried my oldest son when he was 24-years-old for the unrepentant lies and the unpunished crimes of the Bush mob. I am steamed that the working class has to, once again, pay for the excesses of the capitalist criminals that feed its rapacious appetite with the flesh and blood of our children and won’t rest until it owns every penny in this world and has all the power.
“In my opinion, every citizen in this country should rise up in anger and demand that George Bush and Dick Cheney not only be impeached and removed from office, but be tried and convicted for murder and crimes against peace and humanity.”
In 2005, Ms. Sheehan camped outside Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch to protest at the waste of the life of her son, Casey, in Iraq. I came to know her a little, sharing anti-war platforms the following year. A quiet-spoken, middle-aged mother, extraordinarily inspiring. Now she’s gathered the signatures needed to get on the California ballot and challenge supposedly left-wing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who blocked the impeachment of Bush.
A glimmer of hope as Obama continues his slide towards the swamp of the capitalist consensus.