From my East London to West Coast San Berdoo
Where biker Angels flew with Hunter (Thompson) in pursuit,
Armed police in SUVs log them as SVEs:
‘Spontaneous Violent Extremists’, see?
Right enough, the bruv’s no Muslim
Today they call it terrorism
When the quiet ones go Gonzo and Taxi Driver, both at once.
’Cos all they are saying ’s
Make Me The Story, The Power And The Glory
I’m trending now you’re ‘looking at me’; therefore I am.
In the same week that the infamously anonymous executioner known as Jihadi John was reported killed in an American drone strike, news was also released of a seemingly successful operation in which the full face of a New York bike mechanic and messenger, who had died two days earlier in a biking accident, was transplanted ontothe head of a former fireman from Tennessee, whose face was burnt off while fighting a fire 14 years ago.
So farewell, then, Jihadi John, faceless face of Isis.
The implacable role you dressed for, merits elegy or epic
But men half grown are not worthy of that part, and comic
Is the mode that captures best your adolescent crisis
Vented on tragic, headless victims, their lives fully formed nonetheless.
And so this is a sonnet, renowned for doing dialectic
The running gag – you make me sick – between death in the desert aesthetic
And ‘Little Mo’ covering nose and mouth when schoolgirls scorned his halitosis.
Dead man’s face pulled tight, tacked on to another’s head
Capillaries tied together, prick his lip and – phew! – he bleeds anew.
There are ‘things in life worse than dying’, the former fireman said
Whose first face melted along with the mobile home he tried to save.
No more stops, stares and ‘monster’ – only the question ‘I am who?’
Now his death mask is behind him and new life starts instead.
‘There was a huge red ball in the sky above the centre of the city. I turned to my mother and asked “what’s that?”. And she replied: “that’s the cathedral”.’
A few days before the seventy-fifth anniversary of the blitz on Coventry in November 1940, an elderly woman was asked to recall that night of her girlhood when her home town burned down.
From early evening until early morning, more than 500 German aircraft dropped bombs on this Midlands city. Coventry was sent to pieces. Forlorn attempts to save themedieval cathedral came to nothing when the water supply ran dry.
Our eye-witness spoke in the voice we reserve for memories we revere – resonant (we hope), redolent (we’d like to think), little short of sanctified; until the last phrase, when the reverential tone was flattened into matter-of-fact.
Whether she was echoing her mother’s lack of intonation, or whether the change oftone was all her own; or perhaps it’s part of the Coventry city psyche – any road, ‘that’sthe cathedral’ was delivered deadpan, without any saving grace.
No more tripping the light fantastic for those good ol’ cops charged with murdering a six year old last week.
The dead boy was a passenger in his father’s car when it came under fire from Louisiana law enforcement officers.
Taken before the fatal shooting, Facebook photos of father and son make you think ofa beam of light between them.
A long way from luminous, the officers’ leaden mug shots suggest graceless lives lived on a flat earth peopled by perps, victims and law enforcement; and barely a human soul among the lot of them.
Maybe with partners and families they managed to enter into the spirit of the thing (thething spirited, spiritualised because people have entered into it); or perhaps prison-style purgatory is where they’ve been living all along.
Half-way between the bombing of Coventry and the recent recollection of it, in theearly 1980s the same flat tone was clearly audible in the singing voice of Terry Hall, lead vocalist in Coventry’s best-known band, The Specials. He set about using it to deliberately poignant effect, even if it was also part of his personality (the singer’s persona who previously worked in a stamp collecting shop).
A gift to be able to turn it on and off. But what if you can’t give it back?
Life among the graceless must be a crying shame,
They called it a turkey shoot but you wouldn’t stuff this carcass at Christmas.
It is the charred man, crisped to ash and bone when a convoy of conscripts was strafed by Coalition planes in the closing stages of the ‘video game war’ against Iraq (February 1991).
The posture of the burnt-out body told photographer Kenneth Jarecke ‘how precious life was to this guy…trying to get out of that truck’.
Head and shoulders framed in the windscreen, hands pushing down on the dashboard,the human remains that Jarecke froze on film had been ‘fighting to save his life to thevery end, till he was completely burned up.’
But ‘Crispy’ didn’t tally with the preferred, purposely blurred image of ‘surgical strikes’ against Saddam Hussein, dictator of Baghdad. When it mattered most, most newspapers demurred: they deferred printing until the picture was already its own archive.
Head tilted, teeth bared, shoulders bunched forward, the charred man of nearly 25 years ago is precursor to the pose struck by a previously charmed man, fighting to save his public life in a recent interview with CNN (the rolling news channel which first came to international prominence during the war in which Crispy was incinerated).
Flesh turned to ash would have toned in perfectly with Tony Blair’s grey suit and matching tie. Likewise, the former British prime minister also bares teeth, tilts his head, and bunches his shoulders forward as he gazes intently – too intensely – at interviewer Fareed Zakaria.
Dried out in an instant, how Crispy would have envied the merest smear of sweat on Tony’s upper lip. But would he be duped by his doppleganger’s verbal delivery? Oh-so deliberately casual, with prepared pauses in the, wrong places – as if words are simply springing to mind and not always at a regular rate, when really their spontaneity has been repeatedly rehearsed.
Something twisted this way comes,
Male voice mixed with metal
Iron in the soul – mirror shades without the wearing of:
No way none of yews is coming through to me.
Out on the rob with a one-armed bandit – scally lad (18) and an older man (30) with only the one hand. Broke into an estate agent – that will get you a house and a purposeful life of paying for it, as if.
Stolen cash, stolen fishing tackle (people pay good money to perform their solitude), and a stolen Mitsubishi pick-up that’s red rag to a pig. Police car chase through Wallasey in the early hours, racing past the use-by dates of late Victorian streets.
Forty minutes on, local cop throwing down a ‘stop stick’ (tire deflation device).
Not stopping, the vehicle ploughs, mows, drives off. Three days afterwards Clayton Ronald Williams admits causing the death of family man PC Dave Phillips (34). In courtthe charge against him is read out: murder.
A jury will decide. But who decides when adolescent alienation may be integrated into society? And please don’t define this attitude as ‘testosterone’, as if modern Man is only age-old monkey glands.
On different days this could have been Mercutio, inviting death by Tybalt with irony in his soul. Or Johnny Rotten pantomiming the Anti-Christ. Or first across the wire and into the enemy trench. All of them shielded by the same conviction:
No way none of yews is coming through to me.
People were climbing on top of one another just to breathe.’
At temperatures pushing 50, more than a thousand Muslim pilgrims died – either crushed to death or suffocated – in a ‘crowding incident’ shortly after 9.00 local time on 24 September, the last day of this year’s Hajj.
Bodies of the barely living; remains of the already dead. Bare flesh, brown skin, white terry-towelling; dress code (male), dead or alive.
Minutes before, being with other people was very heaven.
Millions of pilgrims following the path of piety in the footsteps of the faithful: blessed is this way of all flesh, walking together to fulfil our bounden duty and service.
Then without warning the wave coming the other way and there are people drowning in other people: that’s what hell is.
Only a few make it over the high railings; many more manage to squat down and survive. Where everyone can do this, no one is trapped without air. But there are pockets – it’s a huge crowd with big pockets – in which this proves impossible.
And afterwards, the argument. Seeking to close down Iranian and African criticism ofSaudi officials in charge of the Hajj, the Grand Mufti declared that ‘as for the things humans cannot control, you are not blamed for them. Fate and destiny are inevitable.’
‘Tautology’ is Greek rather than Arabic or it could be his middle name: Saudi Arabia’s highest cleric has hereby pronounced that the inevitable…is inevitable.
But is there also an iota of insight in what he said (if not how he meant it)? Thestreaming millions, looking from afar like outpourings of a heavenly shredder, or a case-in-pointillism, have willingly entered into a situation where the volume of other people also entering into it means they must all but suspend their individual will.
Accordingly, as pilgrims become part of the righteous crowd, so the suspension of free will becomes the substantive part of righteousness – the path to piety.
Miss Havisham is walking up the aisle. Strange, but no more out of the blue than Red Jed’s victory in the Labour leadership contest.
On 12 September 2015 Jeremy Bernard Corbyn was elected leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition with nearly 60 per cent of first-preference votes – more than Tony Blair’s majority when he was elected party leader in 1994.
‘Jez We Can’, came the jubilant supporters’ chant, echoing Barack Obama’s slogan when he first campaigned for the US presidency in 2008.
Some hope.
History has turned him down a hundred times before. In frequent defeat – repeat, repeat – Corbyn was always dignified: no storming out of meeting rooms into what turns out to be the broom cupboard; nothing but quiet determination to maintain a principled position in defence of organised labour…….
……..in support of a workers’ movement that just isn’t there.
Even if he makes it to the altar, our bearded bride* is barren now; scarred by three long decades without issue.
Thirty years ago, miners dusted with coal and brushed into the pedal bin for human waste; 20 years ago, Irish Republicans canned into processed peace, then popping out as tinpot parliamentarians.
And so it came and went; all strength now spent.
Insides scraped clean and empty during the long march of Labour halted, the-leftist-lady-not-for-
*Corbyn was already the Fisherman back when hipsters were smooth as Kojak.
And what are reporters for?
Without the need to know of far-flung dominions
To formulate opinion, acting in unison with decisive effect.
Goodbye to all that. But haven’t you said there’s more for journalism to do?
Something about a drowned boy and a moment of integrity
Constructing what we have in common.
Doubtless you didn’t mean for it to draw a virtuous circle of patrons and their profugees (refugees deemed worthy protégés by Western benefactors);
Minus the mucky migrants not much mourned.
Nothing more to be said, then. Even ‘fail better’ was said better the first time.
In the end there is only blind determination to keep on looking;
Seeing as we are the sum of how it doesn’t add up.
O what a carry on – migrants for carrion, is this all you can do?
O what a carry on – migrants for carrion, this is what I do.
1. East to West
Swaddled in tin foil, stranded on the seawall straddling Italy and France, refugees from 1970s glamrock, obviously. Or perhaps Gregor Samsa’s younger siblings: insects already; further metamorphosis forbidden.
Salt-blasted and skin peeling after days at sea in an open boat, the girl’s face is patterned like a leaf.
Three proud women on the beach at Kos, pointedly not looking at the photographer. Mother suckling her baby, then grandma in the middle; at her side the younger daughter with film star’s pout. All told, three pairs of lips pressed firmly together in a silent snub – thumbing the eye of the camera.
The logo painted on the side of the refrigerated lorry shows slices of ‘Hyza: honest chicken’ (pretty in pink), twirled round to resemble a rose. By any other name….. Butthe cooling system had died, and putrid liquid was seen dripping from the back of thevehicle. Next morning, the ‘coffins’ sent in to contain human remains were more like sealable sinks.
2. Wessies to Essies
A warm welcome they made of it: the German townspeople of Oer-Erkenschwick setting a precedent, greeting their coach load of migrants with cheery sunflowers; among them burly bloke in hi-vis vest – Westphalian version of white man van, standing firm against what’s expected of his xenophobic type (supposedly)
3. West to East And Back Again
Zahera Tariq and her four children had exited England via London City, the upmarket airport designed for business travellers. But they were brought back in through thebreeze blocks of down-at-heel Luton, where Burger King counts as fine dining. Alleged to have been migrating to IS before she was stopped and detained in Turkey prior to repatriation, Mrs Tariq may not have noticed the difference. Appearing at Camberwell Magistrates’ Court charged with child abduction, piety was her paramount concern: she refused to stand when Judge Susan Green entered the courtroom, saying her religion required her to sit. Speaking of child abduction, the four smaller Tariqs have been taken into foster care, even though the husband and father was the one to blow the whistle on where they were going.
May you never lay your head down, face down in the wine-dark sea. May you never lay your head down in the hold.
You’re just like a great Big Brother to me, the Secretary for Sending Me Home. You’re just like a great Big Sister to me, the Minister for Beating Me Back.
So what would you, what would you have her do? Send in the clowns – a hand to hold instead of the strong arm of the state? Meanwhile, Britain’s home grown working class – feeling the pressure of the next wave, ‘white trash’ under fire from incoming – would be left out in the cold, presumably.
On 20 August UK Home Secretary Theresa May signed an agreement with French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve setting up a new centre from which to command joint operations to control migrants seeking to cross the Channel into England.
During a tour of the Eurotunnel site in Coquelles, Mrs May explained that the control and command centre will prioritise the relentless pursuit of people-smuggling gangs.
Her emphasis on trafficking may have been designed to draw attention away from the plight of the migrants themselves. Thousands are currently sleeping rough in a camp outside Calais known as The Jungle.
Many of the migrants making their way to Western Europe have already borne the brunt of civil war and economic collapse following the long wave of failed Western foreign policy interventions stretching from Africa to Afghanistan. Mrs May chose not to suggest that events which served to put migrants in the hands of ‘callous’ people smugglers, were often made in the West.
May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold.
May you never make your bed out in the cold.
(with apologies to John Martyn)