Poetry

Ronald’s in the driver's seat, staring straight ahead, S-S-SWEATING through acrylic gloss of yellow, white, and red. The Mojave Desert heat beats down, a blinding midday glare, With matte-grease beads of liquid salt through neon-crimson hair.

Lost upon Route 66, the frame begins to GLITCH, A cel-shaded clown buffer-locked inside a digital ditch. The empty California sky is over-saturated white, A low-res, pixel-dusted waste of blinding, heavy light.

He grips the wheel and ACCELERATES his candy-apple red machine, A hot magenta streak against a cyan-yellow scene. The chrome-reflective, lacquer gleams, a high-contrast spark, A pop-art splash of vinyl plastic roaring through the stark.

[SYSTEM_MELTDOWN: VISUAL_DISTORTION] The highway melts to liquefied cheese, the horizon starts to bend, As giant floating sesame seeds like meteors descend. The rearview mirror fractures into psychedelic dough, While polka-dot mirages dance where billboards used to grow.

[ERROR: HUNGER_DETECTED] // Oil-slick dreams of toasted buns, He craves a char-broiled phantom burger driving in the sun. The modern synth-wave music plays, a grainy, tape-hiss beat, As distorted, VHS-blur tremors shake his driver's seat.

No drive-thrus rise on the horizon, just a broken space, With smudged, air-brushed pollution on his iconic corporate face. [REBOOT_LOOP] // The rasterised road will never, ever end, He's McDrivin' through the technicolor desert, without a single friend.

Donald the Orange sat on his wall, With spray-tanned cheeks and a golden hairball. All of his hairspray and combs couldn't then, Fix up his comb-over structure again.

📜 ACT I: THE RE-ENGINEERED MENU

Served daily until cardiac arrest.

🍗 The Megabucket of Mass Destruction

The Description: Twenty pieces of laboratory-cloned, antibiotic-infused avian tissue. Battered in a top-secret blend of eleven synthetic chemicals and floor sweepings.

The Side: One tub of lukewarm industrial paste (formerly known as gravy).

The Warning: Consumption may cause glowing skin, existential dread, and immediate arterial cementation.

The Price: Your dignity, plus £19.99.

🥣 The Famous Sludge Bowl™

The Description: A structural layer of instant potato flakes, topped with frozen corn, rubberised cheese shreds, and popcorn-style meat-substitute fragments. All drowned in the secretions of our broken gravy pump.

The Eating Method: Best consumed with a plastic spork while weeping in a dark car park.

🍟 Cardboard Spears (Large)

The Description: Potatoes sliced thin, bleached of all natural nutrients, fried in 200-degree vat-liner grease, and left under a heat lamp since last Tuesday.

The Texture: Exactly like a wet shoe box.

🥤 THE CHEMICAL FLUIDS

🥤 The High-Fructose Firehose

The Description: 1.5 litres of carbonated, tooth-dissolving brown syrup. Served in a cup so large it requires its own seatbelt.

⚠️ THE LEGAL FINE PRINT

By pulling up to Window Two, the customer agrees to waive all rights to a functioning digestive tract. KFC (Kloned Food Corporation) is not responsible for spontaneous mutation, loss of hearing from Cassandra's window slams, or the sudden urge to yell compliments to executive chefs.

📘 CASSANDRA'S MANUAL FOR APATHETIC EXCELLENCE

Document Ref: KFC-HR-001-2026 Property of Kloned Food Corporation. Do not leave near the deep fryer.

SECTION 1: THE DRIVE-THRU GREETING (THE "WHAT WAS?")

When a customer approaches the crackling headset, do not use enthusiastic corporate greetings. It sets expectations too high.

The Audio Protocol: Ensure your headset volume is set to maximum distortion. The customer must feel like they are talking to a submarine commander in a storm.

The Verbal Attack: Open with a flat, sigh-heavy, "What was?" or a blunt, "Yeah?"

The Scripting: If they attempt to order the Famous Sludge Bowl™, you must immediately interrupt them to announce that the gravy pump is deceased. Do not offer sympathy. Offer lukewarm cardboard spears.

SECTION 2: THE WINDOW TWO TRANSACTION

This is the danger zone. The customer has seen the glowing screen and is now approaching with high blood pressure and crumpled fivers.

🍟 Standard Operating Procedures:

The Hand-Off: Deliver the bag while it is actively leaking grease. The structural integrity of the paper brown sack should be at roughly 15% when it hits their hands.

The Legal Disclaimer: As you hand over the twenty-pound bucket of mass destruction, look them dead in the eye and recite the mandatory safety warning: "Please don't sue us if you choke and die."

The Eye Contact: Maintain a completely vacant, dead-eyed glare. Think of a Victorian ghost who has been forced to work a minimum-wage shift.

SECTION 3: EMERGENCY PROTOCOL – THE "CHEF COMPLIMENT"

Occasionally, a customer will experience a grease-induced psychotic break. They may roll down their window, crank up tragic opera music, and shout: "My compliments to the executive chef!"

🛑 Action Steps for This Scenario:

Do Not Respond: Do not smile. Do not acknowledge the joke.

The Physical Barrier: Instantly slam the sliding glass window shut.

The Force Required: Use enough force to render yourself completely deaf to their further mockery.

The Reset: Turn back to the kitchen, sigh heavily, and prepare to ruin the next customer's day.

SECTION 4: THE EMPLOYEES' PLEDGE

“I promise to wear my paper bucket hat with maximum dread. I promise to let the fries go cold. I will never fix the gravy pump.”

The headset crackles, screaming static fuzz, A tired worker sighs and asks, "What was?" Her nametag reads Cassandra, filled with dread, A paper bucket parked upon her head.

"I need a Famous Bowl," I yell out loud, "And Popcorn Chicken for the glutton crowd!" Clarissa groans, "The gravy pump is dead, Enjoy some lukewarm cardboard fries instead."

I roll the tires through the narrow lane, Past toxic sludge and deep-fried window panes. The Golden Arches gleam across the street, Where sadder clowns cook even weirder meat.

At window two, Clarissa reappears, With heavy bags of cardiac-arrest fears. "That's twenty quid," she mutters with a sigh, "And please don't sue us if you choke and die."

The Colonel mocks me from his cardboard throne, I chew the engineered flesh off the bone. With high blood pressure building in my skin, I wipe my greasy chin and start to grin.

I crank the volume on my radio, And cue a tragic opera for the show. I roll the window down, I burp, I stare, Clarissa watches with a vacant glare.

"My compliments to the executive chef!" She slams the sliding glass, completely deaf. The curtains close, the brake lights fade away, Another masterpiece of cheap decay.

A hyper-inflated bladder wrapped in legal robes and spite, He struts across the television, squinting at the light. The jawline is a shovel, digging up the ancient hate, A carnival-barker screaming at the lock inside the gate.

The mouth is a distortion, spraying venom on the floor, A bloated frog that bellows for the theatre of war. He waves a flag like bunting at a cheap, sadistic fair, While kneeling captives shiver in the cold, unmoving air.

He plays the big-mouthed bully with a playground-level mind, A childish, stunted tyrant whom the decades left behind. He pokes the hornet’s nest to watch the fragile peace ignite, Then hides behind his bodyguards and flees into the night.

He thrives on cheap, performative and viral online stunts, And taunts the bound and helpless on his manufactured fronts. “We are the landlords now,” the screaming megaphone declares— A schoolyard gloat inflicted upon serious world affairs.

He clings to colored fabric as an abstract, holy shield, A jingoistic weapon that he worships on the field. The classic scoundrel’s refuge is the anthem and the cloth, To hide his moral hollow and to fuel the tribal wrath.

TALONS! Grip tight to stolen keys. An insecure provocateur who brings truth— CRACKED— To its bleeding knees.

Behind the sweaty forehead sits a hollow, tin-pot mind, That views the world as property and leaves the truth behind. A caricature of power, leaking malice from his pores, He locks the gates of Europe while he manufactures wars.

SHADOW. Shouting. On a landscape torn apart. Poison in the belly. STONE INSIDE THE HEART.

A dome of skeletal wood and heavy felt, stands stark within the gallery’s white square, a memory of where the ancestors knelt, now catching only modern, sterile air.

Built by the hands of women through the ages, who wove the walls and packed the heavy load, it stands trapped like a creature in a cage, a monument to survival on the road.

And inside dwells the poet, out of place, enacting exile on a public floor, this staging ground becomes his sacred space, perpetually rootless and alone.

He aches to find the hearth, the shared accord, where tribes once gathered for the closing day, but modern ears are severed from the word, and static drowns the songs they cast away.

A collective amnesia blurs the ground, as primal wonders quietly dissolve, yet here, within his circle, he is bound to let the ancient mysteries revolve.

He watched the cyclical seasons come and go, and read the cold, indifferent stars for signs, but received no oracles to ease the blow, no spark to guide his solitary lines.

Through age and ash he saw republics fall, and watched as blind, modern empires collapsed, imploding slow behind a concrete wall, their fragile neon histories elapsed.

For words are tents that temporary rise, shook by the winds of exile and of doubt, the prophet watches with displaced, clear eyes, forever looking in from deep without.

He breathes the raw, oil-scented wool and twine, where sun-bleached cords and ochre fibers thread, this felted cosmos, quieter than a shroud, where the eternal nomad rests his head.

(Inspired by For the Love of God, Damian Hirst, 2007)

A platinum jaw, a frozen grin, eight thousand diamonds gleam, A flawless, blinding monument to mankind’s final dream. An ancient skull from Aztec soil, now stripped of flesh and decay, Is wrapped in high-society wealth to keep the dark away.

True human teeth still bite the air inside this silver frame, A stark reminder of the ghost that once possessed a name. The pink laser-cut diamond sits upon the forehead high, A multi-million-pound display of how the wealthy die.

We stare into the empty eyes, completely hypnotised, By death repackaged as a prize, pristine and idolised. "For the love of God!" we cry aloud, to shield us from the tide— You cannot take your riches down, nor buy a place to hide.

(Inspired by The Last Supper, Damian Hirst, 1999)

A stark and sterile white expanse, like clinic walls or snow, Thirteen prescription boxes stand in one hypnotic row. The graphics mimic Pfizer’s font, clean-cut and sharp and fine, But chemical compounds are swapped for cafeteria dine.

Behold the Saviour: Liver, Bacon, Onions served in gravy, Flanked by Corned Beef and Sausages to heal the blind and wavy. Twelve pill-box disciples wait in rows of pristine gloss, Trading the blood of holy saints for Steak & Kidney sauce.

With blind devotion to the drug, we swallow down the cue, The pharmacy our tabernacle, corporate greed our creed. For Hirst has rearranged his name to print the toxic cue: We pray to tablets, not to God, to see the supper through.

Up in Britannia, the pocket is cash-tight, Under a grey, surveillance-state sky. Tap your phone at the turnstile, pay for the night, As the 35 bus and the takeaway delivery bikes go by. Tents pitched in the rain by Loughborough Junction station, While the high-rise executives look down on the pain, Brooding over the ledger of a bankrupt nation.

I can’t take no more from the pick of the night, Where the algorithms choose who to corner and cite. Where the blades flash in shadows out of facial-rec sight, And the teenagers bleed on the cold paving stone. The social order is fractured, the safety nets fail, Neon rust bleed out. You either hustle for pennies or you end up in gaol, Left to rot in the dark on your own.

Many people will say, "With him, multiple choices," Passing judgment from warm, gated worlds in the sky. From the comfort of wealth, they filter out voices, And look away as the ghosts of the pavement walk by. But it’s only the dynamic of a different way of life— When the hostels are locked, you survive by the knife, And the street is the only instructor you find. A silent siren fractures the glass.

So you watch your own back in the neon and grit, Where the city accelerates, piece by piece, bit by bit, And you have to look after the compound of your mind. Keep your thoughts locked in tight, keep your head on a swivel, Past the Angell Town estate where the cold wind blows, Where the living is hard, and the mercy is trivial, And survival is written all over your face.