It's hotter than July, it is July, the season of mutts
and Brillo fortitude; outside the drill is drilling
for DIY oil; a gusher is predicted sometime soon
in my room in which there is no room to room
which I blame on the behaviour of Iain Sinclair
who did everything he could to fuck me over
and still a trick or three is up Freddy's sleeve
for this master of card-play and the triple-entendre.

Beloved of the fringe, enough colour supplements
to paper his romper-stomper room in Laura Ashley
yet the tang of the shit on his boots still lingers
a man of principle guaranteed by a multi-millionaire,
a pillager of unpublished manuscripts, who took
my only chance, my only career creation and
slapped his name on the covers of the cookbooks
made fucking sure I got no credit no nothing.

A friend of the London working-class, rememberer,
a purveyor of snuff movies to people who like snuff.
His sneering countenance has blighted all my crops,
the reredos torn asunder when he enters a Church
but for some reason his designs are overlooked
a power tool with stolen attachments, his sacraments
offer suicide to doubting members of the flock.

Woe, woe, Sinclair's got his grubby paws on what you loved
making a mockery of everything you cared about
for the hand-clapping pleasure of trendy journos
ersatz culture-leaders from way back yesterday
queer fish from the stagnant pool of Cambridge
it's enough to provoke nostalgia for Beryl Bainbridge
all these back-stabbing backslappers on the road to payday

Iain Sinclair is the booby-prize of cultural pundits.
He should have stuck to flogging dodgy signatures
or his own, the guarantee of his word, of naught.
He speeds past the rude mechanicals in his Volvo
always an antique wardrobe strapped to the roof
stuffed to the mirrors with other writer's thoughts
written in the bloody margins of gazelle gazettes he's bought.

How much longer can this king of liars go on?
Forever, I expect, because if he has prospered
a wider culture has no meaning, satire's needle is blunt,
requiring only a nib dipped in bible-black ink.
This murderer's a saint, the pleasant Jew turns out
to be the keeper of the wisdom of the Hasiddim,
she's gibbering on and on in butcher's backslang
he's the demi-mage of an oracle of chicken giblets.

Cold-hearted thieving bastards, robber baronets;
people who attach themselves always to East London,
slumming toffs on the lookout for a word-shag
serving up other people's misery with Brick sauce
(except his sympathies are largely with the dead
who don't drop their litter in the park, of course.)
Iain Sinclair, lover of the dark Russian beers, lover
of the sound of his own voice, his own genius.

Why doesn't he follow a ley-line over a cliff?
Why doesn't he do us a favour and top himself now?
Why doesn't some precipient advance-hoarder
of literary heritage, dig a big hole in the ground,
a sort of culture-silo, and persuade him to jump into it
along with his back-handed chronicles of thus
and stamp the earth down over it with big diggers
until he's not there anymore, without a fuss!
I send these verses as my message to the future
as a necessary angel. For they will forget his books.

John Muckle