Bastard Brady – was born out of wedlock, y’know
Bastard Brady, rot in hell! Wot you did, done broke the spell

Shadows on the moor – there’s more out there, y’know
Shadows cross that herbivore world: Mods and Minis,
Long legs and Twiggy, in England’s pleasant land.

We could have believed in it, that’s how we conceived of it
Till you came along and bared your rotten teeth

In the back of a car like a rock’n’roll star
Your cherry red lips are unmissable
Still kissable even in black and white

We value human life for what it is
But even more for the possibility it contains

‘Total possibility’ is how you described it
But better dead already than soaked in your atrocities
Boys and girls, begging unheeded; their lives shut down, unplugged
And, of course, your own

Never more the wee boy still as the deer you saw deep in the forest
No longer even the VIP prisoner neighbouring the Krays
And twinned at chess with a disgraced Labour minister.

Inhuman quantities of salt, spewing and shouting; hand hits wall, fractures (not the wall), only eight stone on a six foot frame. Was this when you wanted to be transferred to a secure hospital, or when you went on hunger strike in order to be sent back? Night time snacking, nurses reported, and who knows if it was full blown mental illness or a personality disorder fit to be contained in prison?

Either way, never anything but detained: lucky to have missed the rope; only by a matter of months.

Fifty years of a locked-up life
Brought down to where the sun don’t shine.
Room, no view; and all this time never exercised in the open air.
Box not much bigger than the one you went out in – unless you’re still there.

We’re not talking ’bout lead in pencil
But strip down base graphite to a single layer of atoms –
It can be done – and a new world of possibility opens up.

Honeycomb hexagons fine enough to sieve the salt out of water,
Now there’ll always be a drop to drink. Graphene,
The thinnest material, turns out to be the strongest, too.

Strong enough in what we do
To face the traces of a brace of Ian Bradys.