By the rivers of Babylon (by John)

Blurb & Babel
Gobbeldygook
Commissionese
In bucketloads

Endless streams
Reams and reams
Weighty tomes with
Glossy pics
Little children
Czechs or Greeks

Machine translation
Babelfish;
Much more babble
No more FISH
More gook to be gobbled
In staff canteens.

Fonctionnairres gabble as they gobble
in third languages
About third worlds and second marriages
Comissinglish
Jargon phrases strung in line
Continuous sentences
Cohesion policies
Contiguous concepts,

Not Mighty Nimrud
Nor Nebudchadnezzar in all his glory
Built such a Babylon
No, Leonardo, Erasmus or Phare-oh
Faced such communication breakdown
Neither Breughel's art Nor Bosch's nightmare could
Foresee such horrors;-

Words grow legs.
Letters breed -

EU
EP
SME
ESC
ESF
SME
NOW
ERDF
FIFG
EAGGF
PESCA
REGEN
URBAN
RETEX
ADAPT
STRIDE
PRISMA
RECHAR
LEADER
KONVER
RESIDER
HORIZON
ENVIREG
INTERREG
RENAVAAL
EMPLOYMENT
TELEMATIQUE
YOUTHSTART

Has, ever in the concours of human endeavour,
So little been owed by so few to so many
Social Partners and Scientific experts
Their words going down in history
Down, down,
History grumbles and groans
drowns under vocab
Gurgles below the grammar
Spits and spots
Sprinkles and splashes
Pools and puddles
Showers, and streams
Rivers and raging torrents
Tides, waves and whirlpools
Eddies and ebbs and flows
An old world destroyed in the deluge

No Gilgamesh or Noah ever gooked gobble like these
Stepping into brave new world, Europabylon
Towers, higher than Babel
Not Nebuchdnezzars boastful bricks
Or hanging gardens
But shiny glass
Towering mounds of words
Endless sentences, with no beginning
subject buried 'neath depths
of Structural regional Subsidiarity,
Globalised Relocations
Restructurings and Adjustment funds

Institutions, member States, regional Authorities
Initiatives and frameworks of cumulated and coordinated analyses
Countless commissioners crafting communications for coming councils.
Competing to capitalise on practices and fostering multi actors approaches to change and restructuring via the restructuring forum
QED

Full forests of fine firs and costly cedars
Consumed to enshrine forever the
Wisdom of Babylon's seers
Hymns to Marduk
Songs of Uruk
Cohesive but incoherent
Still prognosticating on the changing weather
Climactic change
Fulsome, unwholesome,
Endogenous, Indigenous, exogenous. Nitrogenous.


John Rubery