Wednesday 10 April 2019

I Try Out Different Ideologies


At breakfast, I become a communist.
It starts off well enough. The revolution
is bloodless, swift, decisive, strong. I storm
the fridge and liberate its captive contents.
I redistribute them about the house:
the orange juice and almond milk are poured
into the bath; the royal gala apples
are placed on window sills and mantelpiece;
I put the mango chutney on a stair;
and smear tahini on the bedroom ceiling.
The vegan sausages are strung up on
a coat hook pour encourager les autres.
By half-past nine, the paranoia starts.
Utopia has not arrived. I look around
the house: if anything, I must concede,
things have got worse. Someone must be to blame.
I ‘uncover’ a plot: the vegetables
have been conspiring with some foreign agents,
and, after spending time inside a meat-
grinder, confess to their nefarious deeds
during a show-trial in my living-room.
Impatience grips me as I realise that
the Workers’ Paradise is further out
of reach than ever. So, I try my hand
at fascist ideology. Step 1:
I make a bonfire of my books. Step 2:
I make my train set run on time. Step 3:
I gather all my troops (just me), invade
the spare bedroom, annex the airing cupboard,
and daub the walls with poetphobic statements
declaring my superiority
over ‘the lesser poets’ (any poet
who isn’t me). This all feels great until
the fire alarm goes off because of all
the burning books (perhaps I shouldn’t have used
the garage as my ‘place of intellectual
purification’?). Fortunate for me,
I have a fire extinguisher to hand,
and when the fire brigade arrives, I tell
them that the clouds of smoke the neighbours saw
came from a really massive piece of toast.
Left to my own devices once again,
I undergo religious revelation.
The flames were clearly Flames from Hell, a sign
from God that I must put my house in order;
recant the day’s godless ideologies;
repudiate the false hope of their claims;
and thus, embrace the one true faith of
religious ideology. But whose?
The Catholics’? Muslims’? Jews’? Sikhs’? Buddhists’? Mormons’?
I save time by believing all of them
at once (this surely can’t be any more
confusing than the contradictions found
inside their holy books) and spend the final
hours of the day in silent contemplation,
a bit of meditation, and some prayer.
When I awake, I see my prayers have not
been answered. Chaos, chaos, everywhere
I look: the house is like a vandal’s playground;
the garage needs a dose of demolition;
and all the food has vanished from the fridge.
My ideological experiments
have failed. Tomorrow, I shall try philosophy.

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