#121 Diverse Drivers

January 14, 2017

You
Don’t know me, my name is Dave
A
Trucker like your brave husband.
At
Three, forty-five the GPS
Says there’s been a change of driver
No Way! Like
Someone’s just learning to steer……
Not
Di’monds on my windshield
Now
My steel train bears down on your sweet Jesus
Nor
Ever home at last, never my home at last.
That
Someone who does not know us
Has
Done such a terrible thing to us
That
Someone who does not know us
Has
Done such a lovely thing for us
His
Fam’ly just couldn’t believe
The
Driver’s folks could not believe it.

Polish trucker Lukasz Urban was stabbed and shot when his lorry was hijacked and driven into a crowd of Berlin Christmas market shoppers by Tunisian terrorist Anis Amri, killing 11 more. Dave Duncan is the British truck driver who raised £200,000 for Lukasz Urban’s widow and family.

#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.

#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.

#96 Tragedy Sweeps Down On Another French Town

August 1, 2016

Two youths reciting their catechism in the parish church.
The old priest on his knees; their knife at his throat.
‘It was like a sermon around the altar in Arabic’,
Recalls the nun from Rouen who got away.
‘The horror,’ she went on to say,
The priest ‘given the knife’ as she ran for her life.

Teenagers infused with what they claim is righteous anger –
Even if one of them is flinching from the camera-eye throughout his video manifesto,
Praying that the blood of this holy relic of a man will give them a new lease on life.

Did he have to die to release them from boredom?
Deliver them from nothing in particular – that is,
From the fact that they are nothing in particular?
If only they had managed to look up at the gory scene already
Taking place only a few feet above the tableau they created.

Family and a few friends gathered round the busted body of Jesus,
Suspended in time, extended for all to see. Hands nailed, legs broken,
Close to the drawn-out climax of his public execution.
(Crucifixion: the first thing you learn is you always have to wait.)

The one set higher than the other; though on different planes,
As rituals these two seem much the same. Again, seeking to
Substantiate themselves our two teenagers set about slaughtering an old man
Who repeatedly drank the blood of his own Saviour during more than half a century in Holy Orders –
That elevated state which allowed him to transubstantiate.

Unable to ‘do this in remembrance of me’,
Perhaps they do it because they have no remembrance.
Traditional, ritual enactment of life and death,
Describing the self-serving alongside selfless sacrifice,
Reference points for the elevation of everyday life,
Tried and tested ways of moving beyond the banal,
They don’t get it; they just don’t get it. read more

#93 Words Over The Body Of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel

July 19, 2016

Embed from Getty Images

Though I can’t condemn you more – no one could

I’d gladly understand a little less

But in anger way past anger, bitterness beyond bile

I too might fail to wrestle the beast in me.

Yet it’s one thing to see la bête humaine

Another to explain quite how you came there

Relative poverty and petty degradation –

Backstairs in hotels where smoking’s a misdemeanour,

Airless in apartment blocks where the sun makes no concessions,

Arrested for small crime and once upon a time

Driving asleep at the wheel,

These count for little against you playing

Space Invaders – carry on le camion,

Bleeping the lives of others like dots on screen.

And what about the sex you used to fix yourself?

The dating app, the roving eye, a bare

Chested selfie shot against the salsa sky.

Scenario for an Amy Winehouse song, already awry.

‘Holy warrior’, how could that be you?

Whichever one you were at any time, the other came too.

The parts don’t match, p’rhaps that’s the only point.

No single mode makes sense of your existence.

For this poor patchwork you brought Perdition to the Promenade?

When you’re the only one, Bouhlel, who should be on the road to Hell.

#92 After The Truck Stopped In Nice

July 16, 2016

Forty-something man sitting on the ground: cross-legged; a little lop-sided. Hair receding, cut short (not shorn) to minimise. Shorts, t-shirt, hooded top; sandals scuffed – they’ve schlepped a few pavements, not just the beach. Wrists resting on bended knees, fingers interlocking.

The position his hands are in seems one stop short of prayer, but this man has already reached a moment of quiet contemplation; perhaps hundreds then thousands of such moments throughout the warm moistening of a Mediterranean night.

I have stopped short of saying what he’s contemplating. Because I don’t rightly know. On the one hand he is not directly contemplating the thing under the pink beach towel within touching distance of where he is sitting, because the pink beach towel is covering that thing so that no one – least of all this man – has to contemplate it simply as a thing, no longer a human being. On the other hand, the man is only there because the thing is; the thing that is, that used to be human.

Maybe this is how it works: sitting but not quite touching the thing that is, this is the closest he can get to the being that was; and if he sits there long enough, he may even be able to reconcile himself to the fact that ‘is’ and ‘was’ are irreconcilable.

Or perhaps it’s nothing of the sort, and he’s only there, looking with infinite tenderness upon the hidden corpse of a lost loved one, because he can’t contemplate being anywhere else.

#77 The Ones That Got Away

March 25, 2016

(1) Salah Abdeslam, captured in Brussels four months after terrorists killed 130 people in Paris.

Pizza en famille for the Belgian-born French national of Moroccan descent.

Italy-Belgium-France-Morocco: already enough national toppings for a Multicultural Mega-Feast. But instead of Buy One Get One Free from Boy On Moped with cool box for pillion, it was the Brussels robocops who rang for Salah Abdeslam, pinned him down and delivered him into custody.

Nearly as many days on the run as the number of people killed in the shooting-and-bombing in Paris on Friday the Thirteenth (November 2015).

Salah of the somewhat salacious mouth – small but full. Intelligent eyes, don’t you agree? Looking at that photo – if not issued by Europol, we’d most likely say ‘metrosexual’ and move on.

So was it sexy, trafficking a carload of suicide bombers before divesting yourself?

DNA of your sweat matching moisture in the bomber’s vest subsequently found abandoned. How did that happen? Instead of going forward with the backpack, did you back/drop out at the last minute, shrivelled and incapable, wracked by failure to fulfil your god-given destiny?

Or maybe-just-maybe you were humane enough to be horrified at the death and destruction already wrought upon others?

Secretly, you might have planned it that way all along: double agent known only to himself; loyal only to your own narcissism; keen to betray as many people as possible.

Every which way, surely some sort of Gethsemane around midnight in Paris; through the wee small hours a Jacques Brel of a night of soul-searching, while you tramped the streets of the eighteenth arrondissement, waiting for a car to pick you up at 7am in Boulevard Barbes, and on to Belgium.

And is it true you didn’t tell your friends at first, then threatened to blow up their car when they demurred at driving you to Brussels? 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.

#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.

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