Iain Banks Rip

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