JUMPING JACK FLASH

    He's a hoodo mambo
    strutting a rumba
    white Africana
    junglishly primal
    his undertones glottaly
    South London, Dartford.
    Cool in a tiara
    or mink balaclava
    he's made up and trashy
    to strut it on boards
    like a bashy pasha
    or Berber bellydancer
    his undertones glottaly
    South London, Dartford.
    He's a symbiotic
    Diaghilev, Nureyev,
    finger-wagging exorcist
    mean-eyed mesmerist
    coming on vatic
    his undertones glottaly
    South London, Dartford.
    He's uncontestably
    freeze-framed 1960s
    gender-antagonist
    bitchy svengali
    swatch-tongued and counting
    his riches like Dali
    his undertones glottaly
    South London, Dartford.
    He's a voodoo instructor
    who won't let you in
    a class infiltrator
    a snappy alligator
    in-concert contortionist
    raunchily prurient
    but with a limp wrist.
    He's a bluesy avatar
    runway infanta
    a right to the roots star
    rock epic exponent
    his undertones glottaly
    South London, Dartford


    KEITH RICHARDS

    So laid back, living where his dimension
    touches on inner vision, that far gone
    he wouldn't notice a black spotting fly
    settle on a cheek and a second one

    glint as a double beauty mark.
    Heroin as an embalming fluid,
    a cellular rejuvenator, he's
    like Burroughs, a human experiment

    in survival. Fortified, whiskey-shot,
    the music lines are always tight, the nerves
    feel into that non-committal control;
    the man lives for the chords he generates,

    and is a kind of latter day Crowley,
    an adept of a deathless state, someone
    who guards somatic knowledge, most alive
    confronting stadia; knee boots,