Beard, leather jacket, hair like a blown hen’s nest <br />Bespectacled socialist, grey-beard-sprouting Banks <br /> <br />Some visited his interstellar anarchic-communist world <br />He called ‘The Culture’. Others were stung by The Wasp factory. <br /> <br />His grandfather, trades union activitist <br />Gave him his gritty gene, his skating mother <br />Supplied the facility to flow into bizarre regions <br /> <br />Boy Banks produced homemade explosives <br />While little peers played with toy cars <br /> <br />After uni he hitched round Europe <br />Jobbing as clerk, porter, dustman <br />Wrote of murder, mutilation, insanity, sadism <br />A charnel house of very Gothic Horrors <br /> <br />Consider Phlebas, walk down Espedair Street <br />Join the Player of Games, sail with Canal Dreams <br />Decipher Feersum Endjinn, its Scots and textspeak. <br />Look to the Windward with Whit, <br />Open your mind to the Song of Stone and the Business <br />Dead Air on the steep approach to Garbadale <br /> <br />He always knew that the State of the Art <br />Would end in the Crow Road, <br />Where all men go, against a Dark Background. <br /> <br />Complicity with humbug was never one of his faults <br />He escaped the Calvinist smit, a lifelong Humanist <br />Graduated from cocaine to whisky, Raw Spirit of his forebears. <br /> <br />From Banks’s Grey Matter attend to Surface <br />Transition, which is certain to happen <br />What form it will take, he already knows the answer <br />Keeping us in the dark till our own ending.<br /><br />sheena blackhall<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/iain-banks-rip/
