Book 1
The Proposition, the Invocation, and the Inscription. Then the original of the great Republic of Wokeness, disclosed as the eponymous Demon slumbering in a shallow lake of her own filth, until awoken by the advent of a plague of oriental provenance, although whether ’twas of Nature’s making or Man’s artifice is moot. Then the poem hastes into the midst of things, presenting Wokeness revolving the succession of her spawn and the changes to be wrought. The moveable College of the Goddess Wokeness, first at a renowned school of the liberal arts, then at Berkeley and Paris, in particular her Philosophers Ms. Butler the doyenne of illiteracy and Mr Foucault the pederast, and finally at Albion her hot house for scholars, rioters, vandals, Maoists, snowflakes, baiters of Hebrews, and the genuflecting kickers of bladdered gas. Wokeness fixes her eye on Master O___ J____, a scholar of Oxon, to be the Instrument of that great event which is the Subject of the poem. He is described prostrated upon a bed of woke books, atoning for his Whiteness, bewailing Albion’s vulgar aspirations to independence, and also the fall of the profitless Jeremiah. After demeaning himself all night at fetish roleplay and despairing thereat, he raises an altar of literary classics, and (making first his solemn prayer and declaration) purposes thereon to immolate himself together with all his scribblings in the Guardian. As the pile is kindled, the Goddess, beholding the flame from her seat, flies and puts it out, by casting upon it an inferior poem by Mr Dunthorne. She forthwith reveals herself to Master J____, unfolds her Arts, and initiates him into her Mysteries; announces him Woke Laureate, carries him to Churchill College Cantab, and to the woke luminaries of that place, being Professor G____ and certain of that estimable lady’s colleagues, proclaims him her toyboy, and they rejoice and give thanks, before getting drunk at Formal Hall.
Of new religion, and its hierophants,
Their fluent gibberish and soaking pants;
Of prancing unicorns, iconoclasts,
Of women’s jails filled with male pederasts;
Of educated people burning books,
And Twitter’s poison darts and baited hooks;
Of Black Lives Matter thugs attacking Jews;
Of Antifa and of - dear God! - the Trews;
Of these, and people of the alphabet,
And lastly of a Demon and her pet, 10
The chav’s defender and the gammon’s scourge,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, before I lose the urge!
Back in the day, when speech was unpoliced,
There lurked Wokeness, an atavistic beast
Mired in a slough of her own excrement:
A vile chimera formed from sentiment
Admixed with proud and purblind ignorance,
Unnatural selection, lewd mischance,
Some ill-digested Leninist extracts,
And theory disembarrassed of the facts. 20
Her face was formed from young boys’ severed dicks,
A forked tongue spat her ill-considered sick,
Over her brow a blue mohican jagged,
Wings and a tail like punkawallahs wagged,
A gut capacious and surpassing wide,
In which Truth, swallowed whole, had choked and died,
Attached two mantis claws and several feet
Which, facing backwards, tended to retreat.
Her throne usurped by the Enlightenment,
Beyond the civitas’s pale, she spent, 30
Deprived of fink and fudge and foisted fake
Some decades hibernating on her lake.
One day from Wuhan came a deadly plague
Of portent grim though provenance quite vague:
Some blamed a bat, and others as they list
A pangolin, or else the communists.
The dropsy spread from lung to lung by breath
And caused a nasty cough, and sometimes death.
Flagellants flailed themselves with nettles green
And droned their epithet: “Unclean! Unclean!” 40
The hospitals filled up with choking souls,
And curfew sirens clanged their ghastly tolls,
Stirred by the clamour of the pestilence,
Wokeness awoke and snarled “this represents
An opportunity! I’ll now reclaim
By subtle subterfuge my former fame.
From Reason’s body Logic’s head I’ll twist
And leave the corpse for the postmodernists,
Decree that two and two is henceforth five,
Up’s down, true’s false, left’s right, and dead’s alive. 50
I’ll topple statues and I’ll loot the malls,
And scribble filth on war memorials,
I’ll bowdlerise the Holy Decalog,
And smash the windows of the synagogue.
My squads of gents in frocks will go among
The ladies’ cubicles to drop their dung,
And win the prizes in the ladies’ sports,
And stop them meeting to express their thoughts.
My regiments of crazed millennials,
Pumped full of ill-digested testicles, 60
Will all the schools and colleges infest
With specious, canting, spurious protest.
Nor shall the businessman resist my law:
My writ shall run upon the bourse’s floor,
and corp’rate HR mavens shall bewail
The male, the stale, the hideously pale.”
Wokeness flaps now her pterodactyl wings,
And dislodged faecal fudge around her flings,
Then rises dripping from her rancid sty,
And like a rabid bat takes wing to fly. 70
Her journey’s first unto the USA
Where lib’ral schools the adjective betray:
Here Aristotle languishes in chains,
And hemlock flows through Socrates’s veins,
And Russell, Quine, and Frege are forgot,
For Chairman Mao, Heidegger, and Pol Pot.
Alighting first at verdant Evergreen,
Wokeness anointed is their Sovereign Queen,
With regal eye surveys the portal doors
Whereon are writ th’inverted Jim Crow Laws: 80
The black exalted and the white debased,
Falsehood promoted and the truth effaced.
Behold the gorgeous golden toilet seat
On which enthroned, and drawing up her feet
So Wokeness squats, is crowned, and defecates
While Erinyes exulting masturbate.
Now neither washing claws nor wiping arse,
Wokeness takes wing and flies South business class.
Where Berkeley’s Judith Butler plies her trade,
Her torch of idiocy casts its shade: 90
Gender performativity’s her thing,
A stinkpot full of greasy ink which stings.
Let Logos wither now, deprived of light,
And all of Oakland bathe in blackest night.
Watch Butler tie up Sense in tangled rope
Of subclause pendant from embedded scope,
See Preposition yawn over chiasma’s void,
Neologism coined, curdling, and cloyed,
See Sentence butterflied upon the wheel,
And Meaning, drained, in agony congeal, 100
Poor Common Sense, imprisoned and ignored,
Naive Intelligence, traduced and bored.
The smiler with the knife under the woke,
Who patronises ordinary folk,
The sugared pill, the blandness and bromide,
The utter bollocks never once defied.
With awful majesty writ on her brow,
The cold sarcastic stare of moody cow,
Wokeness presides over the crazed tumult,
The warped psychotic nonsense of her cult, 110
The Jonestown Kool Aid of which she’s the cause,
And chews the lib’ral writhing in her jaws.
She tarries not, but spreads again her wings,
Spangling the welkin with brown stinking things.
This time the demon’s course is Eastward set,
Faster than snail but not as quick as jet,
O’er snow-capped mount, o’er desert vast and numb,
O’er palace, project, piggery and slum:
Terra incognita between the coasts
His ignorance of which the wokist boasts. 120
Wokeness now glides over Miami Beach
Where wellness gurus pseudoscience preach
To geriatric dentists and their wives,
Those wan asthmatic martyrs to the hives.
As whale road supercedes the prairie fields,
The nimbus builds and vanquished Helios yields.
Aeolus loosens now his knotted bag,
And the Anemoi from their prison drags.
Mild Zephyr cedes to Boreas the stage,
And Auster vies with Eurus in his rage. 130
Zeus flings his bolts and furiously raves,
And Lord Poseidon’s trident moils the waves.
Wokeness remorselessly through wind and rain
Grinds o’er first Lusitania then Spain,
Where Helios in triumph late restored
Is by his sky-clad acolytes adored,
Then left at Benidorm and up the coast,
Where basting nudists on the playas roast.
Over the Pyrrenees to soaked Camargue,
The hinterland of France’s nouvelle vague. 140
Next Paris, pantheon of po-mo spells,
A shrine to Foucault and to Foucault else:
The Tunis Gary Glitter, Humbert of
Bedouin boy, the freshman’s Nabokov,
White polo-neck, bald head, perverted grin:
Glans penis peeping from its peeled foreskin,
Wokeness’s Baptist John or Salomé
Traducer of epistemologé.
The demon lingers not, but soon is gone
Across the Manche to faithless Albion. 150
Here Wokeness is most gratified to find
A seemingly pervasive loss of mind:
The snowflakes melt, the hipsters lick their toads,
Rhodes scholars vote to topple Cecil Rhodes,
Watch morons paid to chase the bladdered sphere
First “take the knee” while bored spectators jeer,
See Luddite activists trash GM crops
And Bristol’s rioters shit on the cops,
The dark imagining sprayed on the walls
Of rampant knob and swollen pock-marked balls, 160
The colleges prohibiting debate,
The blue-haired Furies, scowling and irate,
The gender benders in the Tavistock,
The children with their puberty be-blocked,
The Jew-baiters in cars on Finchley Road,
The new left’s acolytes of Roderick Spode,
The people, cowed and muzzled in their masks,
Jumping through hoops and doing servile tasks
Who face the sack for saying what they think,
A raised eyebrow, a back turned, or a blink, 170
Offence insisted on though never meant,
Nor e’er forgiven if they should repent.
Wokeness observes it all, and is well pleased
To see the body politic diseased.
And yet one element eludes her eye,
One piece is missing from the jigsaw lie.
“It wants,” she snarls, “a useful idiot,
Some naive kidult who resents his lot,
Some milquetoast bellend, wet behind the ears
Some thirty summer suckling prone to tears. 180
His name is Legion, though, for he is many,
His kind’s superfluous and two a penny.
I face acute embarrassment of choice.”
Just then is heard a chafing, peevish voice,
The whine of angel fallen into Hell,
Not so much ringing as to crack a bell.
Wokeness looks down to see who harshly moans
And fixes basilisks on O___ J___.
Half Oxon scholar and half stream of piss
A Gaveston unsponsored by Marquis, 190
Vile parcel of caught dirt from Shoreditch pub,
A chrysalid which hatched a writhing grub,
A scribe who now the noble chav defends
And gammon now with fierce polemic rends.
Today, quite out of countenance, young J___
For his oppressive whiteness thus atones,
Reclined like Chatterton without his looks
Upon his bed of anti-racist books:
‘Why I’ll No Longer To Pale Cracker Talk’,
‘A Dozen Recipes For Curing Pork’, 200
‘On The Fragility Of Mr Snow’,
‘Laugh At The Tears Of Mrs Wypipo’.
A hundred other tomes haphazard spill
O’er unwashed coffee cup and unpaid bill.
While J___, this farouche starveling Jabba Hut
Troubles deaf Heaven with his scuttlebut.
“I mourn,” he lisps, “the gammon Brexit vote,
That suffrage be extended to the scrote,
That sweaty yob in white acrylic socks
Should profane thus the sacred ballot box. 210
It seems unreasonable to give a choice
To glottal, estuarine, unlettered voice,
Who disobeys his betters when they scold,
And does the opposite of what he’s told.
No more shall Jean-Claude’s lips on cheek resound
And Toynbee’s Tuscan manse is out-of-bounds.
Who shall serve us our Macchiatos now?
No Slovak ballet dancer. Some fat cow
With mottled flesh bulging from Primark pants,
All blackened teeth and missing consonants. 220
These lewd Neanderthal Brexit baboons
Should know their place and stay in Wetherspoons.
And that’s not all,” he sobs, “for I lament
Profitless Jeremiah’s force is spent.
Allotment Cincinnatus in your shed,
To you I sacrifice the sourdough bread.
Yours was the PM-ship, your rightful prize,
Until by Rabbi Sacks’s devious lies
The stupid gammon and the honest chav,
Who reads his Mirror in his outside lav, 230
Are both infected by the Tory pox.
Now buffoon Boris with his flaxen locks,
That dilettant’ beyond all vexing vague,
Negotiates the treaties, fights the plague,
And makes unfortunate off-colour jokes
Which don’t offend those not already woke,
While Magic Grandpa languishes exiled
And by the profane vulgus much reviled,
For petty things which anyone might do,
Like saying ‘Zionist’ and meaning ‘Jew’.” 240
Now in despair Wokeness’s paladin,
Fuelled by recourse to hipster wanker gin,
Logs into a lewd fetish role-play site
And there pretends to be a pup all night.
As dawn insinuates its sickly glow
J____ logs off sickened with himself. Now, low
Though be his brow, he still maintains a shelf
A simulacrum of his better self,
On which some literature gathers dust,
Bookended by Karl Marx’s scowling bust. 250
Though justly famed, on J____’s shelf ignored,
Here languish Lawrence, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford,
Jane Austen, Conrad, Waugh, and Henry James.
“I will decolonise these dead white names,”
Cries J____, “I’ll build a sacrificial pyre,
And fling myself in suttee on the fire.”
Now Clio sighs and Calliope weeps
While J____ piles all the classics up in heaps.
Some Guardian articles by his own hand
Torn into strips serve as the kindling, and 260
Some smegma squeezed out by Novara too
Describing how Wall Street’s controlled by Jews,
Serves as accelerant. And lo! The flame!
A tribute to the suffering of BAME.
Wokeness aloft on gentle Zephyr’s breeze
Above this bonfire of the vanities,
Looks down in some disquiet at the blaze.
“The fashion’s not for sacrifice these days.
What price the Jupiter whose martial boast
Commemorates the burning of the toast? 270
I want to jerk my puppet on a string,
Not barbecue him like a chicken wing.”
Wokeness in winged dishonour now descends,
Her steps to J____’s bedsit straightway tends,
And finds the conflagration in full blaze.
“The remedy for fire’s a nice cheap phrase,
The squalidest epitome of lame
Is what serves best to extinguish a flame,”
So Wokeness roots about for a cliché,
Some stale quatrain with meter gone astray, 280
Some rancid ode with meretricious rhyme,
Sifts through Victoriana, beatnik, grime,
Discards McGonagall, Bukowski too,
And finds that Ferlinghetti won’t quite do.
The Staggers moulders in the bedsit bog,
Which J____ peruses when he drops a log.
This more in expectation than in hope
Wokeness scans thereof each abusive trope,
Between its glued-together pages finds
The jizzmop of Joe Dunthorne’s tiny mind, 290
The slimy pus of an inflamed abscess:
‘Poem In Which I Practice Happiness’.
What editor would publish this affront,
Of she-hyena’s womb th’aborted runt?
Dunthorne ‘loves pigeons when their claws are stumps’
And 21 more lines of Forrest Gump.
Apollo groans and crumples up his wreath,
And sage Athene’s rusting spear is sheathed.
“Res ipsa!” Wokeness cries, “the very thing
To extinguish a fire or block a spring.” 300
Wokeness takes up the mouldy paper sheet
And lays it like some barbecuing meat
Upon the conflagration of great works.
The fire becalmed, young J____ springs up berserk.
“Most noble goddess! My eternal shame’s
That my self-immolation in thy name’s
Not worthy in thy eyes. A cis white male
No matter that he does the work must fail.
Oppression’s apex is the silent pique,
Where Whiteness must shut up and no more speak.” 310
Upon him Wokeness now inflicts a smile,
A rictus diabolical and vile.
“Silence is violence, apart from which
My plan is to appoint you as my bitch.
In words of condign dignity, your fate
Is that you’ll be my first Woke Laureate,
A Faust without the learning, ignorant,
And filled to bursting with my heinous cant.
In online column and on TV screen
You’ll broadcast lies, hypocrisy, and spleen, 320
Be self-abasement’s gurning posterboy,
The Maoist’s tool and the race-baiter’s toy,
Wash sweaty feet of righteous leukophobe,
And learn to love your daily rectal probe,
Your sure reward an ill-starred fame, which we
Call by the mystic name ‘Celebrity’.”
Enraptured, writhing like Uriah Heap,
As crystal stream from pants begins to seep,
Young J____ ecstatic cries, “I’ll be your boy,
All waxed and oiled for care bears to enjoy, 330
And when the work begins to seem too hard
Bathe in the ocean of my self-regard.”
Wokeness next flourishes a document.
“Behold: the contract which I now present
Which specifies the duties of your roles
Uniting in this project both our souls.”
J____ takes his pen and sits down at his desk,
Repudiates in cursive Arabesque
All rights, all appanages, and his fee,
And his pretensions to integrity. 340
“And now,” says Wokeness, “mount upon my back.
You’ll find some jagged ridges and raw cracks,
Encrusted with Swarfega and Deep Heat.
Insert your hands, and grip with knees and feet.”
J____ jumps aboard and Wokeness flaps her wings,
And “Doors to manual!” in falsetto sings.
Out through the bedsit window squeezed like pus,
Bed-wetting melt and demon venomous,
O’er verdant meadows, pastures green and gay,
O’er retail park and busy motorway, 350
At length the concrete and the asphalt yields
To serried ranks of cabbages in fields,
And these in turn cede to the dreaming spires.
J____ the Obscure with galvanised blood wires
Cries out as they touch down in Churchill’s Quad
To see the gathered pantheon of gods:
Professor Gopal, Brahmin demiurge,
Of cringing servant and cowed porter scourge,
Professor Andrews, the woke Brummagem,
Of anti-racist cant crème de la crème, 360
And Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu,
PhD, MBA, and IAQ,
And LLM, MA, and LLB,
Who by acquiring letters came to be
The alphabet chimera, nemesis
Of mansplainer and white supremacist.
To these, the sybils of her facile cult,
Wokeness announces J____ as fate’s result,
Frog spawn of dialectic, Hegel’s toy,
The Karl Marx Brian, her anointed boy. 370
“Woke Ganymede!” her luminaries cry,
“Your column full of woke philosophy
Will make grown adult shed a bitter tear
And pink-faced gammon choke upon his beer.
Each straight white cis undeconstructed man
Shall be cast out by the woke Taliban.
No curator of Heritage or Trust
Without a rainbow lanyard on her bust.
Let teacher thank us that she now can teach
Without the crushing burden of free speech, 380
And let the scowling huge woad-painted smurf
Expel from academia the TERF.”
Now prating profs update the Twitter hordes
And fling into the air their mortar-boards,
And, wrapped in gown and enveloped in guile,
With research postdocs form a crocodile
Proceeding solemnly to Formal Hall
And the prospect of port postprandial,
Where toasts to the Woke Laureate are drunk
And Fellows fill their Meerschaum pipes with skunk. 390
And now beyond the candelabra’s glow
Primordial Nox insinuates a toe.
The porters pick up all the hardcore porn
Composting on the College Master’s lawn,
And jowly Fellows yawning stretch their legs
And drain the Tawny down to its last dregs,
And mouldy Stalinist and Maoist creep
Leave off their quarrel and retire to sleep,
And soon the quad resounds with gurgling snores
Of rat-arsed monomaniacal bores. 400
Richard Craven
Gent.