Books and Dead Men

My two loves are books and dead men
Especially when they bite.
Incisive, they feed off me
And I them
An orgy of ghosts who visit by night.

Friendly faces long since reduced to dust
live once more in me while I breathe,
A rotten bunch in whom I trust
For none of them give me cause to grieve.

Though energetic exchanges occur just the same
In the nether worlds of my fevered brain
And just for a moment I manage a kiss
With a congenial spectre across the abyss

Rarer still a switch flicks in my head
And my bedroom filled with the long since dead.
When this happens I invite the shade I like best
To be a good incubus and sit on my chest

But displease me and I'm afraid it's goodbye
Before I'm sucked dry, by psychic succubi.
Though summoning the dead is a perilous feat
I prefer it to reading the modern elite.

This is the result of self-reflection
Occurring at once in all directions.
With them looking forward and I looking back
Stabbed through my Omega point
By a spiritual tack,
Remember, remember the wise Rebbe said.
Just not too hard lest you wake the dead!

Hot Lazarus

I am affronted. Seldom do such archaic, righteous-sounding words pass my plump, over-active lips. I am more than affronted. I am incandescent. My dead facebook profile has been digitally raped. Not only has what remains of my cyber corpse been dug up, dark arts have been employed in an attempt to resurrect it. That evil trader in virtual body parts Mark Zuckerberg has furnished a ghastly set of people based in New Zealand or thereabouts with the key to my sarcophagus. A league of wicked sorcerers called The Profile Engine. How you might well ask, did I happen upon this horrifying discovery? Being of a paranoid disposition I do at intervals Google myself {about once a week}. Ever since I deleted my facebook account on August 25 2011 I have been secretly anticipating this day. One of the reasons I left was because of a deep rooted mistrust of Zuckerberg and his ilk. Confronted with my half recovered profile I felt simultaneously violated and vindicated. I was as thorough as I could be {spent about 4hrs deleting photos and data} yet they still managed to find 26 of my erstwhile Facebook friends along with numerous links and likes. They ask you to sign in and claim the profile in order to delete it. I will not. I know better. What they have now is a carcass, sure there may be DNA but there is no life about it. What they have is my past life. To initiate further contact or furnish them with any more information would be to give them a window on my present. Which I certainly have no desire to do. What am I worried about then? That those ghoulish Frankenstein motherfuckers are going to run enough volts through my digital doppelganger to give it life. Independent life. That the angry revenant will wander abroad in search of the creator who abandoned it, seeking to destroy my future. That my profile will become sentient a la Daniel Feeld's preserved head {brilliantly characterised by Albert Finney} in Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus. One imagines a dystopian future when the Internet will be peopled by the shades of our aborted brainchildren. Mark Zuckerberg allows people to digitally fist-fuck your dead eidolon. To ram their clawed {from excessive typing, gaming and wanking} hands straight up your arse, through your liquefying guts, into your mute, dead mouth and engage in a macabre puppet show. So I've fallen prey to the Facebook body snatchers. Read my epitaph: Fuck You!