#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.

#104 Sketches From The Silly Season

August 31, 2016

By now his foot is in the rescue boat; his Europe starts here. Part-lifted, part-pulling himself out of the overcrowded inflatable. Fine features, full lips, corkscrew hair. Eyes closed perhaps out of modesty – no self-respecting young man should be seen succumbing to the embrace of the broad-shouldered Spanish coastguard. No worries, though. Only the same as hand-on-head whenever a perp gets into a police car.

Still sitting in the dinghy that’s just far enough off the Libyan coast for a credible distress call, among the many, far too many tightly packed in, two men next to each other, one grinning, the other grimacing as they watch the younger man going aboard the Spanish vessel. There are hundreds more migrants to be carried over before their turn comes.

Sitting, squatting, hardly anything to eat, doing nothing except trying not to get sick. For the ones that didn’t get away, every wasted day in Libya’s internment camps, surely seems interminable.

Would-be escapees hidden in warehouses and farm buildings. Valuable human cargo, although from the smugglers’ handling, you wouldn’t think they’re worth more than 10 cents.

Perhaps a quarter of a million trying to get in; or maybe as many as 800,000 (least conservative estimates from the most conservative sources). Either a Carthaginian army set to invade Rome; or the population of a small city, lying listless in the sun like elephants with their tusks removed.

Blocks of seats in the civic sports centre painted in different shades, giving the fleeting impression of a stadium filled with spectators sporting opposing team colours. But this is China’s New Ordos, rich in resources including rare earth metals, the ‘ghost city’ built for a million Mongols to live in but only a hundred thousand turned up. read more

#103 Approaching The Earthquake In Italy

August 29, 2016

The room has been turned inside out

As if all set for a well-made play.

But this is a scene from Amatrice,

Venerable town unmade into rivers of rubble.

Only a handful of party animals

Heard the ‘evil murmur of moving walls’.

Most residents were asleep in their beds

Until the beds rose up and cast them out into chaos.

Things we had thought…that ought to stay

Put, striking out on their own behalf

Implacable as toys turning murderous at midnight.

But must we resort to fables and nursery tales?

Or shall I compare thee to the movement of migrants,

Relentless as dust, or the Euro-Border-Crats

Careless of casualties, dismissing fatalities,

Tossing back refugees like so many sticks of furniture?

#102 Memo To An American Police Officer

August 27, 2016

Was there a moment of shock when it came to you?

A sharp intake, the rasping breath of realisation?

Or simply relief at surviving your rookie shifts,

Then boredom and danger cocktailed into queasy routine.

So you wanted to be a police officer.

Protect and serve; defend and provide for.

If it’s not changing the world, you said to yourself,

At least I’ll be putting the bad guys away.

Instead all you Blues were recruited to the war on drugs.

In designated neighbourhoods your new assignment is to enter

As many perps as possible into the judicial process, if only

For possession, leaving little time for traditional policing priorities

Such as catching killers. In these districts nine out of 10 killings

Now remain untried and unpunished, unless you count

The unlawful acts of recrimination which have all but replaced

The intervention of the state in the expectations of local people.

Of the three guys on the corner, you’re the only one

That ain’t got his own. Dealer knows his job. Users, too,

Have a particular role to play. But you’re the little lost boy

Whose dotted line went off in unexpected directions.

Within your ranks there’s a hard core who might have done it

Anyway, at any time. But the not knowing who you are,

Not exactly sure what or who you’re there for

Must have been a factor in some of your folks not knowing

How to react, therefore emptying the magazine as if that means

Rubbing out a few pages instead of tearing into the flesh and bone

Of a fellow human being. Who knows whether all those ID checks would have

Gone so badly wrong if the policeman’s lot had not been re-cast without telling him?

#101 Drowning In Aberdeen

August 22, 2016

Mother and her six-year-old already on the slab, their lives

Laid out in tribute to the granite sea. Outside,

Shrieking wind and white stripes of sunlight, nailing slates of cloud

Late that summer’s unforgiving afternoon.

Above the beach along the boulevard – some locals have the front

To call it that – the flotsam and jetsam of emergency response:

Extra ambulances, police cars and people in uniform, washed up here without

Purpose, now all’s been said and done, and said and done again.

Why in the world do they come, these further bods and plods?

Why stand in clusters not talking, dark mirror

To earlier frolics on the sand, solemn projection

Of processions to follow the procurator fiscal’s report?

If not gratuitous nor ghoulish, then keen to offer order

Perhaps to supersede the senselessness of drowning in sunlight

But the dead are beyond our ordering: nature trumps character;

Their bodies brought inside is as far as we can bring them back in line.

#100 Mo Farah: Poetry In Motion

August 21, 2016

For each swift step along the Rio track, a full training day away from home and family.

So many miles on the clock, if he were a car you’d have to scrap him.

But work, work, work means Mo owns the starting line and the finishing, too.

Though low key on TV, his interview persona masks a desperate man.

Desperate to win, is desperation still. Now another medal’s near promised

To his youngest, Farah’s just another father with something yet to prove.

When victory comes, biting on gold as if Olympic medals are the chocolate coins

Other kids must be content with. And the door of his Home Counties home

Chiming ‘Westminster’ in a silly suburban echo of Big Ben.

Out of everyday particulars, close to banality (even if it’s rude to say so),

This way comes the sublime, attacking line that is Mo Farah on the move,

Defeating all contenders and condemning these words to doggerel by comparison.

#99 Inconsistencies Shroud Ebola Survivor

August 19, 2016

Features the same – no new pockmarks or Gothic cavities,
But her face looks different in almost every photograph:
Soft and smiling in a maidenly way;
Plain, drawn, dunned;
Professional poise – jaw set firm to produce the seeming smile;
Suburban respectable complete with regrettable hairdo;
Puffed up with pain;
Epitome of relief (visibly tired but no longer pitiable).

The many faces of Pauline Cafferkey are also expressions of the Ebola virus passing through her body and brain after she contracted the disease while volunteering as a Save the Children nurse in Sierra Leone in 2014.

On three separate occasions during the past two years Nurse Cafferkey has been confined to the high-level isolation tent in North London’s Royal Free Hospital. On two of these occasions her condition was designated ‘critical’, i.e. likely to die.

Strict protocols – in theory to prevent Ebola entering Britain,
But in practice these were applied inconsistently:
Returning volunteers muddling in with everyone else at Border Control;
Belatedly siphoned off separately for medical screening;
Reading their own thermometers because not enough staff;
Allowed to proceed even if reportedly running a temperature;
Hugs all round the baggage carousel – no more ‘no touch’ policy;
Home on the Tube or next plane to Glasgow – told to avoid crowds afterwards.

In keeping with these inconsistencies, the public profile of Nurse Cafferkey is suitably ambiguous: on the one hand a medal-winning hero whose dedication to the lives of others nearly cost her her own; on the other hand a risk to public safety recently charged with ‘allowing an incorrect temperature to be recorded’ on her return to Heathrow, and ‘intending to conceal’ from public health officials the raised temperature which turned out to be the first sign of haemorrhagic fever. read more

#98 Desolation Angels (1956 & 2016)

August 18, 2016

Jack Kerouac atop a mountain, exactly 60 years ago
Turning off the two-way radio to write, he said
Though not much to show for it and no fires started neither
Only six months after his descent, new found
Fame chasing him down so fast he burned up.
Angel of the Road less desolate in solitary watching for fires.

Fireman said lady, lady don’t lay there.
Leave now or we’ll both die in this wildfire.
Cremated in his Californian home, husband
‘Bob and my animals who can never be replaced’. On TV
The widowed angel speaks firmly through a well-kept mouth
And clear blue eyes where desolation has yet to set in.

#97 Moulded Yourself Into A Soldier

August 7, 2016

On 21 July 2016 Dean Carl Evans (22) from Reading died fighting with a Kurdish People’s Defence Unit attempting to re-take the Syrian city of Manbij from Islamic State. Afterwards another British volunteer praised Evans for having ‘moulded himself’ into a soldier during two tours in northern Syria.

Unprepossessing

Unfit for the Army
Asthma let you down
As your undershot jaw would lower
The score on Take Me Out

Unprepossessing

Less of the specified failings
More an awkwardness all round
That question remaining unanswered:
Just what to do with your mouth

Unprepossessing?

Yet you took hold of yourself
Flying out twice to Syria
Now killed in action
With the Kurds against IS

Fatal self-possession

Put paid to any personal
Doubt or insecurity
Though odd if for your counterparts
The motives were much the same

How strange if for your foes
The motive’s exactly the same.

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