#119 Macho Hero Welcome Here (Today Only?)

November 27, 2016

Sepia toned CCTV, man leaning
Forward slightly, easier carrying the pail
Of paraffin, petrol or oil to ignite the demeaning
Treatment he received at the end of his asylum trail.

Entering banks, asking for money; not as if they’re short
Muslim from Myanmar, came via the Christmas Isle.
Do the tellers share a sidelong glance – how the nutter does besport
Himself? Knowing his Xmas trimmings will never arrive.

‘All his clothes were dripping off, and skin,
It fell piece by piece on the carpet.’
Dousing the flames, the action man’s a real larrikin
Aussie hunk – not now’days often called upon to flaunt it

Today his g’day instincts are held beyond reproach
Life-saving sees off the more censorious approach

#118 The President-Elect And A Divided America

November 13, 2016

Baby, bawling. Head half-hidden by the hood of an old-fashioned perambulator. Hard to tell whether that’s a bonnet on its head, or a helmet of flaxen hair.

Closing the door of the sweetshop behind him, the boisterous child is suddenly cowed – all but bowled over. So much to choose from, so many decisions to make, so high the shelves; and how on earth do I climb up there? Turning around for advice, the ‘child’ reveals himself as a wizened old man.

And on Main Street, coast-to-coast protests after the presidential election result was declared….

Unlike Hillary’s, Trump supporters wouldn’t know how to make individually hand-written placards which nonetheless retain enough regularity to remain respectable.

Trump supporters might not know how to write lines as good as this: respect my existence or expect my resistance.

Trump supporters don’t seem to have such a highly developed sense of entitlement. If voting patterns had been reversed so that their candidate won the popular vote but not the electoral college, would they be out on the streets insisting that Clinton cannot enter the White House because she is ‘Not My President’?

Plump Trump supporters don’t know how to be Divine; they are merely fat.

Flashback to before the election….

Many who said they would be voting for Trump, also said they did not think he was fit to be president. In one poll (for what it’s worth), two-thirds of sort-of Trump supporters went on to contradict themselves in this way.

To paraphrase: rather the Monkey Man than being made a monkey of; again. Not bad from the Middle America that doesn’t know how to do irony; allegedly.

No doubt there were other factors involved, some of them unsavoury. But there is already enough here to suggest it is their consciousness that needs addressing, rather than dumb-ass stupidity. read more

#117 Advent and Fall, 2016

November 6, 2016

Alveoli of swelling smoke: people in the region round Mosul are glad-ioli, learning to breathe again after ISIS retreats; but it’s a rasping hard coming they have of it.

Oilfields burning: skies overcast by black cotton wool; horizons hidden. Meanwhile many women are lifting the veil from over their eyes.

Coming again to the wider world. But who comes for them, if not in nihilism? No point in denial-ism: here in the West we’ve got nothing for you.

Too busy this election season, chasing swirls of brown leaves spotted with age; and at the same time throwing petrol on the bonfire of our vanities.

#116 Ping Goes Presidential Poll

November 5, 2016

Besides the unexplained ‘ping’ or ‘hum’ coming up from the seabed off Canada’s Baffin Island, as voters go to the polls to elect the forty-fifth president of the United States, the American political class has been forced to listen to an unprecedented pinging noise given off by its disgruntled electorate.

Strange noise trumps known facts; ‘post-factual’ Trump, strangely effective presidential candidate.

The inexplicable noise issuing from underneath the Fury and Hecla Strait between Baffin Island and the Canadian mainland; the sound and fury rumbling up from scorned American voters, understandably heckling all who’ve sailed so long amid the self-serving currents of mainstream politics.

Scaring away the wildlife; spooking the Washington highlife.

Not that the baffling sound of Baffin Island Sound needs a conspiracy theory to explain it. We just haven’t worked it out yet. Not that voters haven’t worked out Donald Trump yet. Just that many of them want this on record: we the people find the American elite more unaccountable than he is.

#115 Refugees At Halloween

October 30, 2016

If there were wounds it would help.
As victims – see, he bleeds – we could welcome them.
Or gashed with plastic and fake blood applied with a make-up brush,
At least then we’d know they really are The Walking Dead.
‘Keep the zombies out,’ we’d shout. ‘Don’t give them a home.’
‘A refugee’s not just for Halloween.’

Instead of ambiguous, they might have made themselves more obvious.
Don’t they realise, it’s the open-ended we don’t know how to hack?

Whether the under-18s kicking a ball about in the temporary territory
Set out for them by French police, will bring with them
The wreckage of their camp – nothing but a plague upon our houses.
Or, supposing they’re allowed to come, perhaps they’ll add
A dash of something different. Not guttersnipes at all,
But popping up in Shoreditch as readily as
They’ve taken to their new container quarters.

We might look at this as the chance to overcome our own uncertainty….
Or not.

#114 What A Waste: 50 years after the Aberfan disaster

October 29, 2016

Thought they’d done all they ought, these men
Re-appearing above ground as photographic negatives
Blackface and white around the eyes.
At the end of their shift – cages for coal monkeys,
Coming up to see children set free by parents’ lives laid waste.

Above the village, the ridge of tippings tips over.
Shale and slurry left over from mining coal,
A glistening sludge licks down the hillside faster than a running man,
Moist and hard like the tongue of Time itself,
Then swallows the schoolchildren whole.

From just before the First World War, fifty years of men hollowed out,
Lives worked out (Not so bad, now there’s pithead baths
And no charge for the doctor), their husks hanging high above the next generation.
Check to see if it’s piled up safely….
No time to waste on that.

#113 A Question Of Consent

October 16, 2016

Sculpted features and lips cherry red against his sombre suit, Ched Evans seething, subsiding, standing next to his solicitor reading a statement, close to the fiancée who stood right by him throughout.

Convicted of rape in 2012, now exonerated after a re-trial, in the meantime the Welsh footballer served two-and-a-half years of a five-year prison sentence.

Three in a bed that early summer night. Hardly enough floor space in Room 14 for three young muckers to be anywhere else. Bedspread’s the corporate colour purple. Legs spread and calling the cum shots, he has always said. Too drunk or drugged (not by him) to have given her consent, she has always maintained.

But how did they end up here, in a scene of well-used furniture and a woman who feels ill-used? The chronology is clear enough: exiting the Zu Bar, dark interior and don’t look at the carpet (now permanently closed); wobbly walk across seaside town well-past its best. And was there kissing in the back of the cab?

Timing is key to the court room. But our line of questioning is of a different order: how is this tawdry scene the counterpart of what we often see, for example, on the football field – flair, determination, even nobility? Aside from who said what or not that night about having sex, if This Is Your Life – the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ LLareggub but spelled the other way round – the wonder is that any of us consent to it.

#112 Hurricane Donald

October 15, 2016

‘Down below, pull the handle.’
Sounds like tomcat Trump’s instructions to his latest puss.
But, no – it’s TV host Billy Bush having to show The Donald how to get off the tour bus.
Easy to laugh when man makes mockery of Man.
But how did that part of us he represents,
Wherefore we doth protest so much, ever get into this parlous state?

Is it that storm force winds have whittled us down to who we really are,
And all that Maketh Man is merely Mannerism? If not,
Then what turned Youth into this cartoon? Pop-eyed and bulging,
Beaverish with a Roy Orbison comb-over, every woman his Mighty O.

Even the apology ’s another mockery in the making.

They’re building a water city: criss-cross canals and houses light as boats.
No, this is one of those towns in Haiti with names like French perfume,
Smelted down by hurricane winds and tides.
Timbers no tougher than the lattice on a loaf of bread,
Ramshackle houses that were bound together somehow,
Now raw and open like patients etherised on operating tables…..

Or America exposed, Hope abandoned, talking pussy and showing all she’s got.

#111 About A Bout

October 1, 2016

Sometimes sponsored by the Meat House (Bar and Grill), welterweight Mike Towell came in at 10st 6lbs 8oz, went out on a stretcher, and ended on the slab (swelling and bleeding to the brain).

Iron Mike molten; away like the cheese – skinny fries or chips with that? – in the 12 hours since his life support was switched off. And the dickie-bowed blokes in the Sporting Club’s hotel venue, who’d come for a full programme of tenderised beef, feeling nauseous at news of his death a day later.

Lissom limbs, lithe torso, tenderness of bared flesh as he steps onto the scales, barely maintaining that give nothing away-ness which goes without saying.

From pinched weeboyface to Presbyterian patriarch, now there’s a full beard on him. Acting up as he climbs into the ring, leveling with his opponent, listening-not-listening to the cheese wire voice of the referee, lecturing both before the bout begins.

Why not simply sacrifice him? Slit the throat of the white-socked ox and mix his blood with wine (Argentinian Shiraz Malbec £24 a bottle in the hotel bar). An answer comes: because he was smart as well as stubborn; because he might have won – the battle against Nature and his own.

Instead, the ritual casualty who shouldered our reality, brutish and short; and made himself its meat and drink.

But its ending with his untimely end: this was never fixed.

#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.

World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Previous articles