This is a nine-minute-beat poem
It's called Storm

Inner North London, top floor flat
All white walls, white carpet, white cat
Rice Paper partitions, modern art and ambition
The host's a physician
Bright bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend's an actress, an old mate of ours from home
And they're always great fun, so to dinner we've come

The 5th guest is an unknown
The hosts have just thrown us together as a favour 'cause this girl's just arrived from Australia
And she's moved to North London and she's the sister of someone or has some connection

As we make introductions I'm struck by her beauty
She's irrefutably fair with dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits, I admit I'm a little bit wary 'cause I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area just above the derrière
And when she says "I'm Sagittarian", I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon when she says her name is Storm

Conversation is initially bright and light hearted but it's not long before Storm gets started
"You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion!"
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon, vis-à-vis some unhippily empirical comment made by me

"Not a good start" I think
We're only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife widens her eyes, silently begs me: "Be Nice"
A matrimonial warning, not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door
Or the window on her second floor

The food is delicious and Storm, whilst avoiding all meat happily sits and eats
As the good doctor, slightly pissedly holds court on some
Anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly insists:
"But the human body is a mystery!"
"Science just falls in a hole when it tries to explain the the nature of the soul."

My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there's a chance I'll be off on one of my rare but fun rants but I shan't
My lips are sealed, I just want to enjoy the meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat
Although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle because like her meteorological namesake Storm has no such concerns for our vessel

"Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency at the cost of the natural remedies that are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed
Why take drugs when herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve it?
I think it's time we all return-to-live with natural medical alternatives."

And try as I like
A small crack appears in my diplomacy-dike
"By definition", I begin
"Alternative Medicine", I continue
"Has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work
Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work?
Medicine."

"So you don't believe in any natural remedies?"

"On the contrary Storm, actually
Before we came to tea, I took a natural remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller, virtually side-effect free
It's got a weird name, darling, what was it again?
M-masprin? Basprin? Oh yeah! Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for down at the local drugstore

The debate briefly abates as my hosts collect plates
But as they return with desserts Storm pertly asserts
Shakespeare said it first
There are more things in heaven and earth than exist in your philosophy
Science is just how we're trained to look at reality
It doesn't explain love or spirituality
How does science explain psychics? Auras? The afterlife? The power of prayer?

I'm becoming aware that I'm staring, I'm like a rabbit
Suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap
Maybe it's the Hamlet she just misquothed or the 5th glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans and the arsehole held back by its stones can be held back no more

Look, Storm, sorry I don't mean to bore you but there's no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds or tea-leaves or star-signs or meridian lines
These people aren't applying a skill, they're either lying or mentally ill
Same goes for people who claim to hear God's demands or Spiritual healers who think they've got magic hands

By the way, why do we think it is it OK for people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Isn't that totally fucked in the head?
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you're in touch with the other side?
I think that's fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify here that there's no such thing as a psychic?

What are we, fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still believe that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson didn't had facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks that we think that the dead would wanna talk to pricks like John Edwards?

Storm to her credit despite my derision keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

You're so sure of your position but you're just closed-minded
I think you'll find that your faith in science and tests is just as blind as the faith of any fundamentalist

Wow that's a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit
Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved
If you show me that
Say, homeopathy works, then I will change my mind
I'll spin on a fucking dime
I'll be embarrassed as hell, but I will run through the streets yelling
It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it!
You show me that it works and how it works
And when I've recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve 'Fancy That' on the side of my cock.

Everyone's just staring now
But I'm pretty pissed and I've dug this far down
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound

Life is full of mystery, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won't be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying 'Isn't life mysterious?'
Let's sit here and hope.
Let's call up the fucking Pope.
Let's go watch Oprah interview Deepak Chopra

If you wanna watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo
That show was so cool because every time there was a church with a ghoul or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide
Because throughout history
Every mystery ever solved
Has turned out to be
Not magic

Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you frighten you?
Does the notion
That there might not be a supernatural so blow your hippy noodle
You'd rather just stand in the fog of your inability to Google?

Isn't this enough?
Just this world?
Just this
Beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world
How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of
Cheap, man-made myths and monsters?
If you're so into your Shakespeare
Lend me your ear
"To gild refined gold
To paint the lily
T throw perfume on the violet
Is just fucking silly"
Or something like that
Or what about Satchmo?!
"I see trees of Green
Red roses too"
And fine, if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu in a post-colonial, condescending bottled-up and labeled kind of way then whatever, that's ok
But here's what gives me a hard-on
I am a tiny
Insignificant, ignorant bit of carbon
I have one life
And it is short and unimportant
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice
As long as my great great great great uncleses and auntses
Twice as long
To live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty at good-looking hippies with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties

And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended
We'd as well be 10 minutes back in time for all the chance you'll change your mind