#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.

#69 Ascending and Descending

January 17, 2016

There was a great artist from Brixton
Whose son said he’d lately passed on.
He left us his work
The rest is just pork
And death shall have no dominion.

Along with handshakes at the podium, where in the time of Camelot there was theshooting of cuffs (thin white stripes and matching handkerchief), now the teeniest hintof a hip-swivelling pose – itsy-bitsy echo of a lad insane.

On Tuesday 12 January 2016 in his last-ever State of the Union address, as now he enters the final round of his second term of office, the President presents himself as Lazarus, called back from the twilight zone for all those Young Americans who need him still; to sugar the pill.

That’s too bitter. Politics in pursuit of the best we can be, promises he. And innovation and global leadership without having to be the world’s policeman. As if.

Yet here there’s also truth of sorts, and meaning – many meanings. Abundant as angels’ heads on pins. Hope enough for all ye who enter here.

Let’s dance, sings the President prancing with democracy, voguing the Enlightenment. But to the essential issue in modern politics – labour, POTUS is as Wall Street derivatives are to the substance of value.

By 9.00 GMT on Saturday 16 January his White House performance video had been viewed less than 60,000 times, while David Bowie’s deathbed selfie topped 21 million.

Men who fell to earth include Carlito Vale (d. 2015) and Jose Matada (d. 2012). Stowaways in the wheel bays of aeroplanes bound for Heathrow, they dropped throughthe sky as the undercarriage opened above South West London. Photos of Vale at home in Mozambique show he had bought a London T-shirt: he came in search of thereal thing. Another man who stowed away with him, managed to survive. These three African men appear here as the footnotes to which they have been consigned. read more

#67 ‘Terrorism’ Is An Ergo Sum Game

December 8, 2015

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.

#66 Face Off

November 22, 2015

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.

#63 Alienation Across The Mersey

October 17, 2015

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.

#60 Migration Watch (4): What A Carry On

September 15, 2015

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.

#56 On The Beach

July 6, 2015

Relentless light hitting the white sand without mercy. Pink-tinged Brits like lobsters waiting for the water to boil – but this only with hindsight. How could you know, Mr Smith, that on this North African beach, killing an Arab would come in at No 39?

With nothing to be done for the dead (by definition), what else should we be doing? Walt Whitman, poet, says that the role of the father, standing on the beach next to his child when darkness rolls in, is to point out that ‘the ravening clouds shall not long be victorious’, since they ‘devour the stars only in apparition’.

Another night on the beach, but this time standing alone, Whitman further reports that ‘a vast similitude interlocks us all…all nations, colours, barbarisms, civilisations…all lives and deaths.’ For those like Whitman with the confidence to see the common ground, no one is out of reach.

Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, on the other hand, is a story of human beings becoming untouchable. In this novel of Cold War paranoia, published in 1957, fatal radiation sickness is on its way South from a Northern hemisphere already destroyed by nuclear war. Even in Antarctica and the Antipodes, there is no escape from the death-dealing apparition which we ourselves created.

Who knows how Seifeddine Rezgui arrived at the choices he made? Especially if his motives were anything like the haphazard killing spree he embarked upon. In theaftermath of the massacre on the beach of Sousse, however, we can be deliberate about how to react.

Whether to affirm the ‘similitude’ and keep our Whitmans about us; or fall prey to ‘apparitions’ we ourselves have created, and let it all go down the Shute.

#53 Cargoes 2015

April 19, 2015

Rubber boat from Libya en route to Malta
Butting in to winds and waves of wine dark sea
With a cargo of Africans
Crammed in, jammed on
Hopeful helpful Europe will set them free.

Loud colours, cotton print lifeless in the water
Floating not yet bloated from the wine dark sea
With a cargo of cadavers
Waived quietly on their way
Who cares what colour dead turns out to be?

Scooping up survivors is a white man’s burden
Face masks and boiler suits, colour coding’s clear
With cargoes of Africans
Still more cargoes of Africans
Healing and helping hands giving way to fear.

(with apologies to John Masefield)

#39 Remembrance

November 9, 2014

Pace Wilfred Owen, it’s not an outright lie – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Remembrance ceremonies, such as the ceremony taking place this morning at London’s Cenotaph, enact the ‘sweet and noble’. A ritual of dulce et decorum, but not necessarily hollow. The falsification comes in the change of tense – not ‘to die’, Horace’s old line would be straight and true if it read: ‘to have died’.

On Remembrance Sunday, in the primary composition of former combatants, thesecondary role accorded to politicians and other civic dignitaries, and, above all, in thetwo, silent minutes of concerted contemplation, decorum is restored to all those who have died in bloody chaos.

In the moment, bodies broken open (more ghastly than grave robbing), bereft of sense and sensibility (only sensation, agonising sensation). But now they are people again, re-assembled in orderly progression.

The solemn procession, at its head our idea of the dead.

Take this, we say, for we do it remembrance of you. Which may be only partly true, but what else….?

Whichever side. Besides the Cause. There is nobility in having died, now it has been entered post festum.

#28 Big Pharma

August 11, 2014

Forget Jesus – the Resurrection goes by the name of Saa Sabas.

Sabas is a 41-year-old West African pharmacist who contracted what turned out to bethe Ebola virus while nursing his father, who may have been a former nurse in theFrench colonial army.

Unlike Sabas Snr, the son survived. Now nicknamed ‘Anti-Ebola’ and ‘the Revenant’ (who comes again), he volunteers to tell the tale to superstitious villagers as scared oftreatment centres as they are of the disease itself.

And why not? Although at 60 per cent the death rate of the current outbreak is lower than earlier episodes which topped 90 per cent, most incomers into Ebola isolation hospitals still go out through the morgue.

In this context, superstition need not be ‘ancient’; all it takes is a dodgy connection – entirely spurious but almost logical – between the likely demise of the hospitalised andthe medical procedures designed to improve their chances.

For example, nurses and doctors, during the one hour at a time in which they are allowed to work directly with Ebola patients, are swathed head-to-toe in prophylactic plastic – a straightforward measure to stop transmission of bodily fluid and so preventthe virus from spreading. But this might not be the only way it is seen by those on thereceiving end.

Yikes!, cried the emaciated man (10 kilos lost to high fever and dysentery), in between violent hiccups characteristic of the disease, either I strayed into a vintage episode ofDr Who or death is already occurring and I have climbed onto the set of my own autopsy. Dash it all but I should never have come to this terrible place!

(Of course, it is the hiccups – gulp! – which are making him talk like Billy Bunter.)

Thankfully, Saa Sabas was granted immunity from any such syllogism. Having worked at the pharmacy in Gueckedu hospital, medical procedure was in his blood as much asthe Ebola virus. When he fell ill only a few days after his father died, he immediately presented himself for diagnosis and treatment. read more

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