Tag: Social problems

The World of Charity

A television A TV
Advert Advert
A parade parades
Of harelips children’s

Children with no harelips
Upper lip
One face
Upper lip at a time
Ribbonated like
Bulbous broken pots
Protuberance on little
Shoulders
Eyes in alleyways
As young as five by walls
Eyes in empty rooms
Of shock
Granite faced discarded
Cracked harelips

They express painless horror like fires in glass orbs
Of a poor family with bare skinny arms
Motherly hope, squatted on a floor

Where are their tears? Imagine for yourself
The night, the fears, the tears out loud
Uncontrolled in the darkness

The anger said – why me?
Why was I born with a misshapen head?
No tears, the cameraman shows no tears

The cameraman the cameraman shows
Shows little children little girls
No bigger usually
Than a wooden spoon lugging
Carrying gallon bottles
Plastic bottles home
Of dirty water across the wilderness
From a pool
To grandmother
Then they drink who is toothless
From a saucer
Water and thirsty
That washed babies
Big bad animals and laundry
Drinking and pooing hanging over logs
What do they think
They’re doing and drinking water
Big bad animals the colour of dry bones

Take out the kettle full of spiders and eaten flies
Take out the bowl full of grass seeds and beetles
Take out the yellowed cup uncleaned since last year
Take out the flowers in the grave withered and dry

The cameraman the camera man
Shows the faces was paid to show
Of little girls on film
Living in squalor that have to yield
Under road passes
Abused to the monster master
By spikey men inside a man
Who come again with a road-curb mind
To the hollows and a stain in the brain
And the shallows crawling in pain
They grin who does it again
And bare it like a train
They sin and the little girl
And repair it doesn’t understand
With pins and tins the orphan
And prayers the reject
To wandering cows that gets no respect

And I bet it’s easy in a country with so many
Thronging the markets and the cemeteries
Where they burn bodies to the nice deity
But forget that they are thin and broken men

Someone would have you dead

Someone would have you dead
At any cost
They would destroy your family
Destroy all that you love
To get to you

And when you realize how evil
They can get
Don’t you feel as if your heart
Has risen into the rainclouds

There’s a highway of your sorrow
Trudging across the sky
wailing with grief
That you do not – even if you tried –
Prevent from proclaiming your broken heart

Oh those Mafioso, those greed sick flightless ostriches
Fattening their golden eggs on the misery of ordinary people
That thrive on hearts swollen with tears
Whose threats alone are worse than knives
And how you hurt to know
You have lost those you love
And soon
And soon
They are coming for you

And where Is the justice
They are justice
They are the justice of the land
The shadow behind the throne
The bloody blade left in the alleyway

They are the business behind governments
That destroy what was beautiful for gold teeth
Who scrape at the eyes that see
Who dig graves in the darkness
Where they can’t

And it starts a little like this
You lose a memory
Then you find it crucified on a hill

Please, please don’t bleed

Tears that scream inside
In executions of the mind

Welcome to my mental health
Cannibalised by black belt Celts

Oh sweeping brain with disinfectant
Polish neuronic cells of madness

With laboratory spins and washes
Squeeze all that sadness out

Storms of anguished brain patterns
Spongified and lacking vitamins

A Dalek monster in my head
Ordering everybody dead

But please don’t step on my blue suede shoes

The heart is an organ nothing else
The brain is mighty in power
All academics tell you so
From their ivory tower

The heart is left alone
With its veins and arteries
It only wants to antagonise
All our pure thought processes

Feelings are for fools
We align ourselves with strength
We analyse and work out wise
In this great world of events

The heart is crucified within
The heart is an ancient thing
A fossil remnant in our skin
It is not worth bothering

Brains don’t bleed, brains don’t grieve
Brains don’t feel a thing
We want all brains to take over
To our brains we cling

Our mental health is more important
We grow it in our heads like wheat
Keep our air weather mind-set gleaming
And our bookshelves on their feet

Love is not a feeling either
Love is explained by sex
An hour or two in bed with someone
Helps sweep the decks

Your mental health needs more than cleaning
Your mental health needs a new version
Your mental health is a crustacean
You have not the soul of a real person

Go back to your tinkering with thinking
Go back to your laboratories for brains
Stir your brain cells round and round
For all you believe has gone insane

You teach a woman to think
Who has work giving birth to children
What use is thinking in the throes of labour
And this is why women are not welcome
In the dusty book shops of universities

Well they are less welcome than boys
Who then experience mental health issues
And think they can rule the world
That they have the mental health to do so

But such fools are bound to fall
Even as they rise above the metropolis like angels
They fail because they’re sucked dry of love

No universities must restore love to their programme
They must learn to feel again
And like adding water to dry food powder
Success will float like balloons across the land

Love verses academic kill
Love verses mental health
Love verses madness
Love verses world conquest
Chose love which belong to summer

For love is universal
Without love, God would not create a thing
He would have left mankind to ruin
Long before Christs suffering

What is evil
Is it mental illness
Or is it the heart depraved
What is best a picking needle
Or a man born normal
Turned into a monster to fill the grave

Selfish thoughts they call them
A thing that cools the blood
But even selfish people feel better
When you spend upon them love

When the hero leader gesticulates
He stirs up emotions like fire
People are motivated t hate
By the actions of a liar

Those nations who were broken
By power and the lust for wealth
Those nations have been played
That dug a pit deeper for their enemies

I started writing in the sunshine
Now I can hardly see because of darkness
I wish the darkness would go away
But it strips me down to starkness

But don’t step on my blue suede shoes
Please don’t step on my blue suede shoes

The siren blared
Out in the street
Some kind of trouble
Attract the police
Leave the area
Someone calls
Another tries
To reassure
A dog is barking
On a leash
Get you gone
Kapesh
With no attempt
At forming ques
Dispersants thrown
Cuts and bruises
Please please don’t bleed
Please don’t bleed
On my blue suede shoes

Just after midnight
Cry you hear a cry
Some one stabbed him
In the eye
A cruising car
A smoky driver
With a crazy
Lady Godiva
You race outside
To the scene
It all seems
Like a dream
Carefull not
To mix up clues
You try to help
You think its news
You record
You tell your view
There is nothing else
You can do
He’s is in shock
He calls for Sue
In his stains
Of yellow and blue
You say
Please please don’t bleed
On my blue suede shoes

It was a disturbance
It was quite a din
They had to call
The army in
There was shooting
In the street
No-one had
The time to think
It all started
Over a little thing
Yet it set off
Some kind of spring
There was no time
To negotiate
No one felt like
Trying to wait
You run with the crowd
You hold no views
Except
Please, please don’t bleed
On my blue suede shoes

Notes
A lot to get off of my chest about how the authorities think and condescend to people. The system that makes arbitrary laws and then tries to enforces them.
and of how lovingness is seen as a weakness by some. I’ve tried to write each section as if for a different character like in a play or monologue.

Invest in a horse

My new neighbours are arguing just like my old neighbours
She raises her imperial voice and he growls like a bear

These ground level flats are unlucky flats
I believe they’ve kept the past trapped

They are flats for the poor built a hundred years ago
Built on a flood plain and guarded by embankments

There’s a rising tide in more ways than one
Invest in a horse it the best way to run

Homelessness Is a Black Feeling

Homelessness is a black feeling
And written on its black page
Are memories so incomprehensible
That they twist you up inside

The letter to move out came
At a time when you were comfortable
You had managed some feeling of security
But now that letter had destroyed all that

Against the thoughtless demons from your youth
From whom you tried to escape –
“This is my home, isn’t it,” you yelled
As if reliving a former crisis of long ago

Next, I saw you attacking your room
As if, you had no right to your own things
Things that brought you pleasure
Things that represented love

You had packed them into bin bags
You were going to throw them all out
Such was your rage against your insecurity

Then you felt angry at your friends
Out of desperation and in pain
You told them you didn’t want to see them anymore

Yes, all your life you’ve lived as if falling
As if falling through the air without wings
If only you could learn to fly above it all
But it’s not easy, I know, I’ve tried

1999

Poetry & Poverty in Londons East End

Introduction!?
(For David Kessel, poet, original member of Approach poets. About 1996 or so David Kessel asked me to write a manifesto, titled “poetry and poverty in the East End”. I’m not a political person and I wouldn’t know how to write a manifesto so I wrote it this way, unedited, never before shown to anyone, does it work, or does it not?

The Approach Poetry was fine poetry group meeting in the East End, that lost its venue due to local changes, and loss of the older east end community; with David Kessel, Steven Watts and others and presided over by Brehoney a very extrovert Irishman).

Litter, spit, dog ends, motors. Wind from the far corners of the seasons helping offering deities of bread and poetry floating down the drain of a grain of spheres (and televisions) in the sun gun fun of a woman with her hat in the soap.

Poetry and Poverty passes by the wind from the four seasons of hell and the soup kitchens of cemeteries where dead poets in foetal positions read to the worms who pass by their thoughts that have no breath. Sitting in the ground selling her eyeballs to the business men in red plastic suits who carry briefcases full of dynamite to the office. Shoppers leave a penalty area around the drunks who sit in the market where the dirt from the train stations create a latrine of lovely sanctimonious zipper sleuths who slipper the bottom of secretaries in the moonlight.

Poets under their blankets in milk bottles cascade through dormitories in hostels where v2 rockets hide the cupboards of Highlanders who crunch the legs of bulls in the midnight orgies of constables in vestibules of sin and the comets of Jazz monasteries in the fag end filled sleeping bags of a Sonnets mother.

Poetry and Poverty walk hand in hand like zebras by the libraries of the Jews who polished the grenades that tumbled down the stairs from the high offices of comedians who fly through the bricked up windows built by road sign workers who lie about the red lights that shine a million times across the fan damaged churches of oblivion.

This is the only manifesto possible, of the moment, one of a crumbling forgotten history in the gardens of gnome officials where I stargaze at the changing face of Blackfriars bottom rolling down Ludgate Hill.

I try to come up with a worthy manifesto of trial and error but all I see are rats with their testicles crushed by traffic jams that gush out the new air of poverty and where poetry sleeps like a man strangled by handcuffs in Whitechapel bar. The women on the streets are happy now that the college has polished the shield of the pilgrim knight and broken his teeth into gruel to give to hitchhiker who wander into the East End looking for lover boys on speed chain heroin bikes of stupendous speed alarm mysticism’s. Gone are the songs of the hippies and the black power panthers whose front rooms saw a whole generation waking up to the star that lulled the fish in aquariums of the Landlord who drove wellington boots across the bomb sites of Stepney.

Poverty is like a song of truth in the ever changing fashions of the tide that comes and goes like a policeman on his beat around Spitalfields where the wind blows eddies of litter in the stone washed denim sunlight of a dead dinosaur on the back of a Roman centurion who hands out white pebbles to the starving children of Britons who collect blue skies between copies of the Blue Star of Love.

Here is an attempt at a manifesto whose page begins in oblivion and ends in the bottom of the sea where gold and spices from the sailing ships are stained with the blood of the East End. That poverty is to become King Death in the dungeons of the music halls and that poetry should be loved for its shameless undercurrent of river ruined words of honesty.

What do you have in mind but the trampling feet of the masses collected in a police cell of materialism where so many now spend their time. What do you have in mind but the red flag fluttering in the knickers of Kremlin gremlins who adorn the dead churches of Bow. What do you have in mind, is it to ignite the youth into mass demonstrations in defense of the injustice done to poets by the fat cats of the industrial revolution. What poem, what words can help this world like a fat man clinging ot he fingertips of a child lying flat on a cliff-top.

Take a glimpse at this poverty that a poet in a roundabout of love on an island of dust in a network of bulls noise nose to nose from Parliament to the North Sea, that this poet dressed in salamanders, roses and corn grass on his sea of liquidation across the smoke of women and childhood in an eye of emergency services that appear like a pack of cards in the gutter afternoons of prayer and milk drenched sweet-singing to the prostitutes who are spent at the penny arcades of the gangsters and women constables who dance together on the deadened spotlight of the moon.

Here comes the bull from the dark universe there comes a letter between his teeth that unfolds and opens out so readable in the night. See how the poor poet collapses in a sea of tears as his grey hairs glow like neon lights. This manifesto is made up of chalk with words of black iron upon it, it reveals itself like a dream you forget to remember , it turns into sugar and salt and dissolves into your bloodstream. The poets manifesto of poverty rides the railways of summer through the train wrecks of yesterday, how you sense the smell of train engines on your blood, the steam and oil of that warm railway station on the edge of time.