In times of national demise, speaking historically,
the mulch of crumpled dream and culture is a laboratory,
that breeds outrageous saviours and monsters without warning;
Cromwell, Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Jeremy Corbyn –
emerging from a broken world to find a hole they can fill,
cometh the moment; cometh the Mandrill.

This greed and gore emporium is not how life was meant to be,
its franchises and fads reheated from a previous century,
with nothing new, a neutered future on the retro record deck,
that’s stuck and endlessly repeating in a firebombed discotheque.
Your TV’s in a coma and you can’t get it to wake up.
What you need is a dictatorial baboon in makeup.

Overstated, aggravated and horrifically mutated,
here to see that you’re berated. What’s the last thing you created?
All those logos on your raiment, brand-name badges of enslavement,
drip-fed passive entertainment. Was this your intended statement?
When you have nowhere left to stand then you must take one.
If there’s no culture in the land you have to make one.
Psychopathic, charismatic, I could go on but don’t need to:
as the higher primate it’s my long-awaited fate to lead you.
There is no choice but me, so please do not suggest so.
Hear now the poetry of my Mandrillifesto!

The light of burning corporations will repaint the sky in grenadine.
There’ll be billions of banners and Art Nouveau butterfly bombers like this world has never seen before.
We’ll march on ugliness and stupidity.
We’ll make loveliness compulsory.
And the roar of our orchestra engines will soar evermore in a glorious annihilating symphony, for the tyranny of beauty is our God-given duty.
Every child at birth is to be issued with a ukulele,
given their own flag and granted absolute and utter sovereignty,
and so long as it’s coloured in nicely and has an old woman on, make their own currency. Then we’ll turn every urban address into a dripping Rousseau wilderness, and we’ll keep advancing until there’s nobody not dancing.

We’ll put politics in the pillory,
put the art back in artillery.
We can weaponize wonder
and our voice shall be as thunder.

From times of national demise arise new apes like me,
within our leopard-scaring eyes, manifest destiny.
I’ll lead you to a fluorescent utopia if you’ll let me:
love me, worship me, obey me – but never pet me.
If we can’t build a future then we’ll be its human landfill.
Cometh the moment, cometh the Mandrill.
(Repeat until indoctrinated)