#110 Advice To A Daughter Lamenting Her Late Father, Keith Lamont Scott

September 25, 2016

Occasions when your father saw the rising in your eyes

Watched you coming in to the light.

Reading it all like any canny kid

Caught him catching you coming up,

Coming on, coming into it

And the impression this made on you both.

Such are the contours; so is life handed on.

Maybe slower this year after his traumatic brain injury (car crash).

Slower and perhaps less often.

And all the while you’ve been raising your game:

Higher, faster, further.

Still, you and he; sometimes the stillness.

Camera’s in free-fall – you’re feeding to Facebook live.

Frenzy of shouting, screaming, shrieking

Did you ever have stand-up rows like this?

But here there’s no side to take

’Bout boys or clothes or staying out late

Only your shock and awe, hearing your father is no more –

No more than a parcel of flesh and as many police bullets

As failed to find their way out of his fat, black body.

Take all the noise you need for now, any number of decibels

To shield you from the quiet of the grave.

Only recall and return one day to the still of the light,

And the lively look in a father’s eyes, upon his daughter bright.

#109 Clowning Around In Camden Town

September 18, 2016

Phone video footage is circulating of an altercation between police and a young black male car driver in North London.

It’s ridiculous – the fresh-faced police officer acting like a juvenile delinquent, except the term itself’ s too old for his tender years.

First pulling at the car window then hitting it; stepping back screeching before taking his truncheon to the windscreen.

A dozen blows to smash about a quarter of the screen; a tantrum that shocks because it’s bathetic.

And all because the kid behind the wheel won’t get out of the car; ‘kid’ because the 25-year-old driver who’s locked in and refusing to come out, still contrives to speak youth so the grown-ups can’t comfortably understand.

He needn’t have bothered. On this showing, the adult world just isn’t there to hear him.

Never mind misread him.

#108 Thinking Behind Mindless Killing

September 17, 2016

The Catholic church around the corner is dedicated to a Portuguese peasant girl whose visions of the Virgin Mary prompted the following declaration of her faith:

My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love you. I ask pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love you.

These words are addressed not only to God himself, nor are they simply an intercession on behalf of those who lack faith in him; the girl’s prayer is also a personal statement of her self-belief.

Our Father who art no more nor ever was.

They would say that, wouldn’t they? I mean the teenagers who’ve been hanging round The Stow, the post-war shopping precinct in Harlow, chalking up plentiful police reports of anti-social behaviour (month after month, and for so long the original cohort must have moved on and grown up by now).

Surely they would say something like this, if disposed to speak of the faith and the self-belief that’s been disposed of (behind their backs, without them knowing, despite them trying to appear all-knowing all the time).

Are you kidding? Is this a gang of juvenile Kierkegaards, struggling for belief in a God of Uncertainty. Nothing could be further from theological discourse than the killing of 40-year-old Polish factory worker, Arkadiusz ‘Arek’ Jozwik, who died in hospital two days after he went out for takeaway pizza….and took a blow to the head instead. The only Sorens are the ones who were arrested.

Or, maybe that’s how they vented it – their aggravated sense of loss, and hating themselves for failing to locate, locate, locate anything other than their own paltry existence.

Chunky chap, low centre of gravity – can’t have been a complete pushover. Four years in the meat factory since he came over from Poland, whereas you’re not sure you’d last four minutes before running a mile. read more

# Pointing Towards Syria

September 11, 2016

Honey on the elbow – try sucking and you’ll see.

Though even this prospect ‘s worth more than you or me.

Yet we are here, present and correct, while peace in Syria’ s

But a sweet smear; a smudge on the lens of war-past-war.

Was it ever thus? Is this still politics continued by other means?

In Geneva the protagonists play on, much as they always might

They are the high and mighty, after all.

In Aleppo young men with mortars play out their immortality to the last drop

You don’t have long, lads; aged 27 it turns sour, anyway.

But who knows what the people think? People more partisan

With every falling shell…or past caring whatever it was they once cared about?

Man in gown, transgender pink, not in the ballroom as you might think.

Admitted to hospital suffering from the effects of chlorine inhalation,

Brought on by a barrel bomb – no barrel of laughs in the swimming pool.

The hospital has moved above ground again. Back to normal? Only that the ground floor and basement are now full to overflowing, forcing the reclamation of upper storeys where the ‘walls are open’. Intentional or not, the Syrian doctor’s turn of phrase is undoubtedly poetic. She says again that ‘everything is not enough’. From her lips this is by no means a statement of infinite entitlement. According to another doctor, a Syrian-American who recently returned to the United States, they don’t even have painkillers. In which case the miracle is that people keep on coming.

And the point of pointing this out? The point is to point. Addressing atrocities in terms other than the immediate, means calling to you, dear reader, across the wasteland. It’s important, you see, to retain the capacity for we, renewed by reference to things more important than you and me. And if this makes us ambulance chasers or even vultures whose collective existence feeds on the dead and dying, let’s hope the true nature of our dependence, depends on what we go on to do with it. read more

#106 Slippery Customer

September 7, 2016

O Vaseline! Were you never true? Seems you’re always slip-sliding through.

Keith Vaz MP has resigned as chair of the parliamentary Home Affairs select committee after the Sunday Mirror showed him consorting with male prostitutes. For two days following the tabloid revelations it seemed that even this story might not stick to the ‘Teflon politician’: Vaz, a former Labour minister also known as ‘Vaseline’ for his ability to slide away from successive financial scandals, maintained he was entitled to a private life and he had not done anything illegal. But on Tuesday 6 September he bowed to pressure not least from members of the Home Affairs committee who were threatening him with a vote of no confidence, and stepped down.

Was it just another move for you to make? From family man (wife and two children) to punter with poppers and boys on rent. In and out of Teflon-style hotels, bills assigned to the owner’s personal account. Glass, chrome, marble, so nothing soaks in.

Moving through, is what you do. Before the portly, bald guy (59) with lemon ties, there was smiley Keith, plenty of dark hair but already it’s wispy, whose first name had even been Nigel (had to go), radical lawyer, one of the first four black MPs elected in 1987 – that’s what non-white meant back then. But it was only skin-deep, this radicalism, soon to be peeled off when you learned how to operate in the Palace of Westminster.

Pleased with your progress up the proverbial? You’ve been singing Sade to yourself all these years, haven’t you? Suits you, Sir. Tones in with the anodyne dinner you ate before one of your assignations: lemon sole, still water and a J&B Rare (not so rare), signed for by the hotel owner.

Staff were told Mr Vaz was using the room upstairs to ‘wash’, allegedly. But it won’t wash, will it, Keith? For all your former usefulness as a go-between, going between cricketing Cambridge and cricket with the Indian Workers’ Association, between Bernie Grant and Hugh Grant, from the social conflict in politics proper to a simple case of snouts in the trough (with all the complications that entails), now you’re just the goner whose family hails from Goa: the Anglicised Indian via Aden (still a British colony when you were born there); compromised and not only in ways expected of you. read more

#105 Mothers’ Day

September 4, 2016

‘Gentle as a dove, cunning as a snake.’

Popeye for the ‘poorest of the poor’,

Saint Mother Teresa was canonised today.

She played her innocence impeccably, implacably.

Now her vow of poverty is upended in papal pomp and ceremony.

Beautifully…he went home to God,

She said of the beggar who’d told her

(Quoted in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize),

‘I lived like an animal in the streets but I am going to die like an angel.’

I know it’s churlish of me to ask,

But does it have to be ambrosia?

Is there no mezzo soul food to sup?

Neither scraping and foraging

Nor brutalised then flipped into blind faith.

Away from playing Mother to the Squeezed Middle,

The Other Theresa is hanging on in Hangzhou.

Despite the measured tone of her contralto voice,

At the G20 summit Britain’s position is vulnerable:

She could be squeezed until the pips squeak.

This Mother Theresa must forage in foreign affairs,

Calling in favours, hoping to scrape by.

Closer than she’d care to think

To the man of the streets who reportedly died in a state of grace.

Note that neither Mother has so far managed

To speak to us in a language we could call our own.

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