Adrian Mitchell (b 24/10/1932; d 20/12/2008) reading his To Whom It May Concern at the legendary International Poetry Incarnation in Royal Albert Hall, London 1965. For the next 50 years he would add verses about the lies we’ve been told in endless wars ever since.

To Whom It May Concern

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain,
Couldn’t find myself so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames.
Made a marble phone book and I carved all the names
So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

I smell something burning, hope it’s just my brains.
They’re only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies, tell me lies about Aghanistan.
Tell me lies about Israel.
Tell me lies about Congo.
Tell me, tell me lies Mr Bush.
Tell me lies Mr B-B-Blair, Brown, Blair-Brown.
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

If Corbyn’s coat is wrong,
the others’ coats must be right.
The dead cannot see coats.
Day cannot see night.

Hurrah for the warriors of the press!
We know what rocks their boat:
at the sight of a million dead,
they quibble over Corbyn’s coat.

Let us praise famous coats,
worn to mourn the dead of war;
worn by those who lead us
as their bombs slay even more.

It’s not his coat they hate.
That’s not really their cause
What gets up all their noses?
He opposes all their wars.

Let us imagine the day –
or it could perhaps be night.
The politicians start a war
and no one turns up to fight.

_______________
MATHS:
1 wrong Corbyn coat = bad man;
Therefore 1 good coat = good man.
Trump wears a good coat.
Therefore
Trump = good man.

Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same—and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack—
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-gray
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget!

March 1919

Dick Lander

BY CHARLES CAUSLEY

When we were children at the National School
We passed each day, clipped to the corner of
Old Sion Street, Dick Lander, six foot four,
Playing a game of trains with match-boxes.
He poked them with a silver-headed cane
In the seven kinds of daily weather God
Granted the Cornish. Wore a rusted suit.
It dangled off him like he was a tree.
My friend Sid Bull, six months my senior, and
A world authority on medicine,
Explained to me just what was wrong with Dick.
‘Shell-shopped,’ he said. ‘You catch it in the war.’
We never went too close to Dick in case
It spread like measles. ‘Shell-shopped, ain’t you, Dick?’
The brass-voiced Sid would bawl. Dick never spoke.
Carried on shunting as if we weren’t there.
My Auntie said before he went away
Dick was a master cricketer. Could run
As fast as light. Was the town joker. Had
Every girl after him. Was spoiled quite out
Of recognition, and at twenty-one
looked set to take the family business on
(Builders merchants, seed, wool, manure and corn).
‘He’s never done a day’s work since they sent
‘Him home after the Somme,’ my Uncle grinned.
‘If he’s mazed as a brush, my name’s Lord George.
Why worry if the money’s coming in?’
At fireworks time we throw a few at Dick.
Shout, ‘Here comes Kaiser Bill!’ Dick stares us through
As if we’re glass. We yell, ‘What did you do
In the Great War?’ And skid into the dark.
‘Choo, choo,’ says Dick. ‘Choo, choo, choo, choo, choo,
choo.’

Image: detail from Self-portrait with Red Scarf by Max Beckman, 1917.

Wilfred Owen’s most famous poem read by Sam West.

“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”. Are war criminals like Tony Blair, who sent soldiers to kill and be killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, thinking of this poem as they lay a red poppy wreath at The Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday?

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Source: Michael Rosen Blog

These are the streets where we live / These are the streets where we go to school / These are the streets where we work / They shall not pass

The parents of poet, author and broadcaster Michael Rosen had their first date at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when the people of London’s East End came on to the streets to stop Oswald Mosley’s fascists from marching and to defend the Jewish community.

Michael read his poem Mother Father Cable Street when he appeared at #JC4PM General Election Now! at Conway Hall on 16th October 2018. His full set that evening, filmed by W4mediaUK, can be viewed here…

No Pasaran – They Shall Not Pass

You Connie
You Harold
your families working in the rag trade
Hats, caps, jackets and gowns
Hats, caps, jackets and gowns

You both saw Hitler on the Pathe News
You both saw Hitler Blaming the Jews
You both collected for Spain,
collecting for Spain
When Franco came

When round the tenements,
the whisper came
Mosley wants to march
Here, through the East End

So what should it be?
To Trafalgar Square to support Spain:
No pasaran?

Or to Gardiners Corner to support Whitechapel
They shall not pass.

Round the tenements
The whisper came
Fight here in Whitechapel
The whisper came:
Winning here
We support
Spain there.

These are the streets where we live
These are the streets where we go to school
These are the streets where we work

They shall not pass.

You Connie
You Harold
Went to Gardiner’s Corner
You went to Cable Street
You piled chairs on the barricades
The mounted police charged you
A stranger took you indoors
To escape a beating
And thousands
Hundreds of thousands came here
Fighting Mosley
Supporting Spain
Thinking of Germany

And
Mosley did not pass.

You Connie
You Harold
Said, today the bombs on Guernica in Spain
Tomorrow the bombs on London here.
And you were bombed
the same planes, the same bombs
landing in the same streets
where you had said
they shall not pass
And the bodies
piled up across the world
Million after million after million after million
You Connie, your cousins in Poland
Taken to camps
Wiped out
You Harold, your uncles and aunts in France and Poland
Taken to camps
Wiped out.

But you Connie, my mother
You Harold, my father
You survived
You lived
We were born
We grew

You mother
You father
told us these things
I write these things
And today,
I tell you these things
We remember here together
Thanks to you
And we say:
They shall not pass.

Source: New River Press

On 14 June 2017 afire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London, United Kingdom. It caused 72 deaths, including two who later died in hospital. Over 70 others were injured. 223 people escaped. It was the worst residential fire in Britain since the end of the second world war.

THE TOWER OF BABYLON

THE TOWER OF BABYLON IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET
SMOKING INTO THE AZURE OF PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE
WHERE THE UNACCOUNTABLE DEAD NO LONGER SPEAK
A THOUSAND LANGUAGES IN A THOUSAND WINDOWS.

THE CONFUSION WAS ONLY EVER BETWEEN TWO LANGUAGES:
THE LANGUAGE OF THE RICH / THE LANGUAGE OF THE POOR.
RICH MOUTHS, POOR EARS, THEY’RE LIKE CHALK AND CHEESE
POOR MOUTHS, RICH EARS, THEY’RE LIKE CHALK AND CHEESE

‘WE WILL CLAD YOUR TOWER IN SUCH A DRESS OF BEAUTY
IT WILL STAND ON THE HORIZON LIKE A CATWALK MODEL’
AND LO! THE UGLY ZIGGURAT THEY BRANDED AN EYESORE
WAS NO LONGER ANATHEMA TO THE HIGH ONES OF BABYLON

‘THANK YOU FOR PRETTIFYING OUR OUT-OF-DATE ZIGGURAT
BUT NOW WE DON’T FEEL 100% SAFE IN OUR OWN HOMES’
AND LO! THE RICH EARS ONLY LISTENED TO RICH MOUTHS
WHILE THE POOR MOUTHS CONTINUED WITH THEIR BABBLE

THE FLAMES OF THE GODS BURNT OFF THE DESIGNER GOWN

AND SPOKE A LANGUAGE NO ONE THERE HAD EVER HEARD

OF HELLS ON EARTH (OF HELLS ON EARTH) NAKED

AND WALLS OF FUME (AND WALLS OF FUME) BARE-FORKED

THE HIGH ONES OF BABYLON RESPOND IN RICH LANGUAGE
BUT NOTHING BUT NOTHING BUT NOTHING IS DONE
POOR MOUTHS WILL TELL THE 24 STOREYS FOREVER
BUT RICH EARS HAVE ALREADY SWITCHED OFF / MOVED ON

THE TOWER OF BABYLON         IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET
THE TOWER OF BABYLON         IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET
THE TOWER OF BABYLON         IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET
THE TOWER OF BABYLON         IS A BLACK WICKER BASKET

Shelley is Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite poet: ‘We are many, they are few’- even those who’ve never heard of Shelley know this to be true.

Words: Heathcote Williams. Narration and Montage: Alan Cox

Source: International Times  Illustration by cYberbanX

Must we really go to hell in Trump’s hand-cart to the sound of a mad tycoon’s loony tunes?

Held in the restaurant as sex slaves for Hillary Clinton,
Then the candidate for US President.
After his arrest Welch told the papers,
“The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”

Someone quite similar has just been elected
To the office of the United States President –
Someone armed, thin-skinned and unpredictable;
Peddling fables that are unsubstantiated.

Trump is a serial swindler and predatory sex pest;
He’s a pathological liar who’s convinced
That the outside world is unable to survive
Without endless self-opinionated tweets.

His very appearance suggests something fraudulent:
He combs his long hair at the back of his head to the front
Then crowns his orange face with a yellow pancake,
Made from lacquering his hair into a matted lump.

He’s in hock to unsavory Russian oligarchs.
He abuses the Presidency to pay his debts.
His White House promotes his daughter’s tacky jewelry.
He regards America as his marionette.

He’s a big fan of waterboarding as a torture
(“What do I care if the bad guys get snuffed?”).
But hopefully the world may one day decide
That Trump has tortured it for long enough.

While he talks gibberish and twists man’s moral compass
A sickened outrage is all it’s possible to feel.
Some understandably pin their hopes on an assassin’s bullet
For the fake news of the fake President is so unreal.

This bipolar president in a multipolar world
Is now speaking of a nuclear High Noon.
Must we really go to hell in Trump’s hand-cart
To the sound of a mad tycoon’s loony tunes?

The mad President latches onto unproven news
To make himself look decisive.
He won’t admit Syrians to the US, but he’ll bomb them
Thus making himself the foulest object of derision.

After feigning emotion about “beautiful babies murdered”
Trump launches fifty nine missiles in a “measured attack”.
He murders nine civilians and four children
In the countryside of al-Sha’aryat.

In the War Room of Trump’s Florida White House,
Seated in Trump’s signature golden chairs,
The baby-killers gather round their leader
And his son-in-law – his top advisor.

Without consulting the UN or his Congress
Trump sends off his war planes.
The horsemen of the apocalypse speed off 
Unrestrained by any legal reins.

Trump spares no time to study the real news,
Namely that the US Pentagon
Trained those in opposition to Assad
In the use of the chemical Sarin.

But Trump wishes to target Assad
As he thinks it’ll make him popular;
As will his challenging Assad’s ally, Russia,
The US’s old Cold War enemy.

It was a way too for Trump to rid himself
Of the ‘Russiagate’ allegation,
Namely that he’d colluded with Russian hackers
To win the American election.

In a follow-up to his strikes Trump kills a woman
Together with her six children 
But he’s making America great again
With any fake news he can get his hands on.

The idea that Trump can affect mankind’s future
Has to fill the whole world with sorrow.
He’s been called a child, a moron and someone
Who shouldn’t be in charge of a wheelbarrow.

Signing executive orders without reading them,
This maniac President is unpredictable.
He’s killing people to boost his poll ratings
Or to distract the media from a scandal.

Trump owns shares in the arms company
Firing missiles into Syria: Raytheon.
Every day Trump’s company makes $1.5 billion.
Could anything demand greater damnation?

Together Against Trump
National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
More details…
See events around the country…

Grenfell Tower: June 2017

It was like a burnt matchbox in the sky.
It was black and long and burnt in the sky.
You saw it through the flowering stump of trees.
You saw it beyond the ochre spire of the church.
You saw it in the tears of those who survived.
You saw it through the rage of those who survived.
You saw it past the posters of those who had burnt to ashes.
You saw it past the posters of those who jumped to their deaths.
You saw it through the TV images of flames through windows
Running up the aluminium cladding
You saw it in print images of flames bursting out from the roof.
You heard it in the voices loud in the streets.
You heard it in the cries in the air howling for justice.
You heard it in the pubs the streets the basements the digs.
You heard it in the wailing of women and the silent scream
Of orphans wandering the streets
You saw it in your baby who couldn’t sleep at night
Spooked by the ghosts that wander the area still trying
To escape the fires that came at them black and choking.
You saw it in your dreams of the dead asking if living
Had no meaning being poor in a land
Where the poor die in flames without warning.
But when you saw it with your eyes it seemed what the eyes
Saw did not make sense cannot make sense will not make sense.
You saw it there in the sky, tall and black and burnt.
You counted the windows and counted the floors
And saw the sickly yellow of the half burnt cladding
And what you saw could only be seen in nightmare.
Like a war-zone come to the depths of a fashionable borough.
Like a war-zone planted here in the city.
To see with the eyes that which one only sees
In nightmares turns the day to night, turns the world upside down.

Those who were living now are dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.
See the tower, and let a world-changing dream flower.

Residents of the area call it the crematorium.
It has revealed the undercurrents of our age.
The poor who thought voting for the rich would save them.
The poor who believed all that the papers said.
The poor who listened with their fears.
The poor who live in their rooms and dream for their kids.
The poor are you and I, you in your garden of flowers,
In your house of books, who gaze from afar
At a destiny that draws near with another name.
Sometimes it takes an image to wake up a nation
From its secret shame. And here it is every name
Of someone burnt to death, on the stairs or in their room,
Who had no idea what they died for, or how they were betrayed.
They did not die when they died; their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.

Those who are living now are dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower
See the tower, and let a world-changing dream flower.

They called the tower ugly; they named it an eyesore.
All around the beautiful people in their beautiful houses
Didn’t want the ugly tower to ruin their house prices.
Ten million was spent to encase the tower in cladding.
Had it ever been tested before except on this eyesore,
Had it ever been tested for fire, been tried in a blaze?
But it made the tower look pretty, yes it made the tower look pretty.
But in twenty four storeys, not a single sprinkler.
In twenty four storeys not a single alarm that worked.
In twenty four storeys not a single fire escape,
Only a single stairwell designed in hell, waiting
For an inferno. That’s the story of our times.
Make it pretty on the outside, but a death trap
On the inside. Make the hollow sound nice, make
The empty look nice. That’s all they will see,
How it looks, how it sounds, not how it really is, unseen.
But if you really look you can see it, if you really listen
You can hear it. You’ve got to look beneath the cladding.
There’s cladding everywhere. Political cladding,
Economic cladding, intellectual cladding — things that look good
But have no centre, have no heart, only moral padding.
They say the words but the words are hollow.
They make the gestures and the gestures are shallow.
Their bodies come to the burnt tower but their souls don’t follow.

Those who were living are now dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower
See the tower, and let a world-changing deed flower.

The voices here must speak for the dead.
Speak for the dead. Speak for the dead.
See their pictures line the walls. Poverty is its own
Colour, its own race. They were Muslim and Christian,
Black and white and colours in between. They were young
And old and beautiful and middle aged. There were girls
In their best dresses with hearts open to the future.
There was an old man with his grandchildren;
There was Amaya Tuccu, three years old,
Burnt to ashes before she could see the lies of the world.
There are names who were living beings who dreamt
Of fame or contentment or education or love
Who are now ashes in a burnt out shell of cynicism.
There were two Italians, lovely and young,
Who in the inferno were on their mobile phone to friends
While the smoke of profits suffocated their voices.
There was the baby thrown from many storeys high
By a mother who knew otherwise he would die.
There were those who jumped from their windows
And those who died because they were told to stay
In their burning rooms. There was the little girl on fire
Seen diving out from the twentieth floor. Need I say more.

Those who are living are now dead
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.
See the tower, and let a world-changing deed flower.

Always there’s that discrepancy
Between what happens and what we are told.
The official figures were stuck at thirty.
Truth in the world is rarer than gold.
Bodies brought out in the dark
Bodies still in the dark.
Dark the smoke and dark the head.
Those who were living are now dead.

And while the tower flamed they were tripping
Over bodies at the stairs
Because it was pitch black.
And those that survived
Sleep like refugees on the floor
Of a sports centre.
And like creatures scared of the dark,
A figure from on high flits by,
Speaking to the police and brave firefighters,
But avoiding the victims,
Whose hearts must be brimming with dread.
Those who were breathing are from the living earth fled.

But if you go to Grenfell Tower, if you can pull
Yourselves from your tennis games and your perfect dinners
If you go there while the black skeleton of that living tower
Still stands unreal in the air, a warning for similar towers to fear,
You will breathe the air thick with grief
With women spontaneously weeping
And children wandering around stunned
And men secretly wiping a tear from the eye
And people unbelieving staring at this sinister form in the sky
You will see the trees with their leaves green and clean
And will inhale the incense meant
To cleanse the air of unhappiness
You will see banks of flowers
And white paper walls sobbing with words
And candles burning for the blessing of the dead
You will see the true meaning of community
Food shared and stories told and volunteers everywhere
You will breathe the air of incinerators
Mixed with the essence of flower.
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.

Make sense of these figures if you will
For the spirit lives where truth cannot kill.
Ten million spent on the falsely clad
In a fire where hundreds lost all they had.
Five million offered in relief
Ought to make a nation alter its belief.
An image gives life and an image kills.
The heart reveals itself beyond political skills.
In this age of austerity
The poor die for others’ prosperity.
Nurseries and libraries fade from the land.
A strange time is shaping on the strand.
A sword of fate hangs over the deafness of power.
See the tower, and let a new world-changing thought flower.

Happy birthday.
In death, may those aformentioned ‘children of light’
Rise to greet you. In joining the disappeared you move nimbly,
With the patterned menace and sleek of before.
Reincarnated in print, full with your Nineteen Sixties persona;
Your face slightly askance, hard brow troubled,
And your shirt and suit worn like shadows,
You give and gave each step undertaken
And each statement made its sown pause.
At your prime, as a force, you had become a known vapour;
Solid in the streets you once peopled but part of something else
All inhaled; the uneasy feeling that soon what we did not
Want to occur would soon happen,
And that despite past transgressions,
The untested future would, with its promise,
Be drawn and quartered and barbed with other swords
To impale. Certainly, your words were wounds
As the terrified air found your imprint.
Men in coastal retreats, or cramped basements
Were as subject as anyone ever was to vile threat.
Those unsanctioned scenes and closed rooms
Would soon be part exchanged for polemic,
As the poetry of encounter became the political prose
Of the dead.
Even at the age of Eighteen you knew well
What the fight would entail, through pure instinct,
A near divine intuition that flowered and thorned
Through harsh youth. As if a boy grown in war
Was already inured to the conflict, and so, an act
Of Conscientious objection would shape, shade and alter
And cultivate your life’s truth. Your pen was fist, gun
And sword, carving unwanted fat, shaping abstracts
That would emerge as sharp diamonds reflecting exactly
The re-evaluated cost of the real. In these poems, these plays,
These fearsome acts of defiance, the lumbering hordes
You fast breasted were in desire and dream taught to feel.
But not what to feel.
Why?
Because you did not need their influence on you.
The gifts you possessed were God given
If God is the force behind eyes
That consolidates sight and grants whatever is seen
Its true merit, as if all once created
Had to be created again, to be prized.
It has been ten years since your death.
Language and life miss you deeply.
Profoundly too, if we’re honest, those of us who still write
And speak. You took the word home and prepared it too,
For its exile. Your separation renegotiates freedom,
As your rich voice through death’s silence
Is heard today between madness and the present idiots’
Stumble. Your former clarity calls us, those who walk
With your shadow. We are listening now,
And stand, watchful.
And so, these words, sent to Harold.
In this hope for return we pause, ready.
The aspirant and the waiting,
We are the Pinteresque you still teach.

David Erdos 10^th October 2018 

Poet and singer Kate Tempest’s scathing attack on the state of society, directly accusing Prime Minister Theresa May of “dividing the people”.

Transcript

Strong and stable into ruin.
school kids on the hunt for lunch
cut the apron strings
at least it keeps the bastards lean
and gets the scroungers off the crouch.

Murdoch headlines
leeches for the letting of our blood lust
blame it on the migrants
suffocating in containers
blame it on the Muslims
or whichever current favourite
takes the weight
of our collective hate
and keeps the nation safe.

privatise and privatise in private
let the nurses burn,
along with every other resident who voices their concern

and yes, divide the country into will they never learn
and will they never stop
then bring the army out to guard us
tell us these sick-hearted martyrs will not test our liberal values
locked in the panopticon
where volatile and fragile
such stability

meanwhile suicide’s increasing
more rough sleepers
ugly words in public places,
fear and doubt and all the racists
have come out to show their faces.

under May there is a gulf that separates us
and it seems to gape a little wider every day
now watch her prey on every tragedy
divide, divide and frenzy up the nastiness.
the them and us
the human cost
the rising threat
we must be watched
clocked and kept and screened
and blocked
if this is strength then we’re all fucked.
but give them an inch and they’ll set up shop
“I want to create a truly hostile environment”
her words
not mine

Rupert Murdoch. Illustration by Ralph Steadman

MARDUK (neoliberal sonnet)

no loss mars you, winner lord. Babylon exults. the moneycomb sun
flares in your favour, barbed with policy, in the sub-edited days
you issue. your pornography and puns are crude and black as oil
but the massed ranks in your scriptorium work energetically
as wasps producing it, anxious to please their solar monarch.
alas, you’re too busy inspecting sewage of the sky’s imperium
and dipping cuneiform discs into lion droppings
– for pungency – to care about the hacksawing minions
who hoist your red letterhead onto a dawn of optic nerves.
Marduk
your orb is lethal,
your rod is laced
to end the fifth act of your psychodrama in a fall of corpses
while you rise the following day, coiled in American legs.
fire burns to the right and left wherever you have raged.
in the bald oven of your gold aura, Iraq bakes as you bid.

“Rupert Murdoch argued strongly for a war with Iraq in an interview this week. Which might explain why his 175 editors around the world are backing it too” – Roy Greenslade, 17 February 2003 

Jeremy Corbyn in his first leadership speech at the 2016 Labour Party conference quoted the poem I Look at the World by Langston Hughes.

I Look at the World

By Langston Hughes

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

“Langston Hughes has perhaps the greatest reputation worldwide that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and until recently from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read.” – Donald B. Gibson

On buying a beauty spot in Scotland for a golf-course
And for luxury condominiums,
Trump notices some old houses on the horizon
And he orders them bulldozed to oblivion.

On seeing a woman that he desires, he oafishly
Recommends “grabbing her pussy”.
He boasts that, ‘My fame lets me take liberties;
‘My fame allows me to abuse her.’

Trump’s grandfather ran brothels in the Yukon
And to his grandson, people are also for sale.
Trump’s ego tells him he has supernatural powers
And that almost nothing is beyond the pale.

“I will deport 12 million Latinos”, Donald Trump insists –
This buddy of asset strippers and union busters –
A charlatan who papers over his character’s cracks
With bank loans and with megalomaniac bluster.

Trump was a casino owner (a synonym for gangster),
A suitable past for the President of casino capitalism
Who boasts about who he’s been able to shake down,
And who also represents a home-grown neo-fascism.

Trump’s a demagogue who’s prone to magical thinking
With a compulsion to build concrete penises
Upon which his name appears in enormous letters
And whose robotic staff repeat, “he’s a genius”.

He has pretended to be anti-establishment
And to be standing up for the little guy
Yet without Wall Street and the Deutsche Bank
This exhibitionist parasite would die.

He’s a slave to his monumental indebtedness.
He owes 600 million dollars.
But now that he’s President he can pay his creditors,
The mob and their sinister callers –

While doubtless remaining reluctant to pay taxes
For he regards tax evasion as an art.
When challenged about his not filing tax returns
He brags, “That makes me smart.” [1]

He’s risen to power on the magniloquent claim
That he’ll make America great
While representing the lowest common denominator
Of his country’s racist hate.

In 1992 the Casino Control Commission fined him $200,000
For removing African-American card dealers
From his Plaza Hotel’s casino to appease the racism
Of the Plaza’s big-spending gamblers. [2]

Trump would disparage his black casino employees as “lazy”.
“I’ve got black accountants and isn’t it funny?” He’d say,
“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people
“I want are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” [3]

“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino”,
Recalls Kip Brown, an employee at Trump’s Castle,
“The bosses would order all the black people off the floor,”
He told the New Yorker in a 2015 article. [4]

Regarding an African-American President
As an affront to his Aryan sensibility,
Trump became vocal in the ‘Birther’ movement
Questioning Obama’s legitimacy.

Trump failed to disavow the Ku Klux Klan
When they supported his candidacy.
He’d airily pretend he didn’t know who they were
With an ignorance approaching lunacy.

Donald J. Trump has been elected President
Of the US’s plutocratic pornocracy –
A plot twist, and suddenly the whole world
Is having to adjust to his squalid reality.

He believes women should suffer punishment
If they decide to have abortions.
He sees life as conquest and victory and winning,
As if in a childish competition.

In a half-hearted apology for mocking women’s looks
Trump says he does it “to be entertaining” [5] –
Unaware that he himself  is overweight and bright orange
And hardly qualifies as an oil painting.

“I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
Says Trump who advocates torture.
“When I say they’ll do as I tell them, they’ll do as I tell them.” [6]
Is how he plans to overcome any legal stricture.

Fifty billion tons of carbon dioxide fall annually
On the earth, causing deadly climate change,
Yet Trump says he’ll cancel the lifesaving treaties
The international community has arranged.

So more earthquakes will be on the horizon
And extreme heat will now be inevitable.
One man’s hot air will have consequences
As air becomes less and less breathable.

“We need some global warming. It’s freezing!
Trump would joke while he was out campaigning
Then America’s Emperor repeats his strident rhetoric
And his insistence “the swamp needs draining.”

He threatens to attack ISIS with nuclear weapons –
To use a nuclear sledgehammer to crack a nut –
Unable to see that every Trump Tower would be
Transformed into a radioactive mud hut.

Donald Trump is really Donald Drumpf,
To give him his ancestral, and risible name.
It suggests dumbness, even the passing of wind
As well as the merciful transience of fame.

Extracted from American Porn by Heathcote Williams, published by Thin Man Press

Together Against Trump 13 July 2018

National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
More details…
See events around the country…

Notes
[1] CNBC, 26 Sep 2016
[2] $200,000 in 1992 Trump was fined $200,000 for this
[3] John R. O’Donnell, James Rutherford, Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump–His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall, Simon & Schuster, 1991
[4] Nick Paumgarten, The Death and Life of Atlantic City, The New Yorker, September 7, 2015
[5] Pema Levy, ‘Trump Says He Mocked Women’s Looks to Be Entertaining’ Mother Jones, Oct. 6, 2016
[6] Tom McCarthy, ‘Donald Trump reverses position on torture’, The Guardian, 4 March 2016

Read by Michael Rosen. Video by Joe Rosen. Michael Rosen for Adults video channel

Poet, author and broadcaster Michael Rosen on how the perpetrators of bad times blame its victims to control all of us.

Source Michael Rosen Blog

Pause a moment
politician, journalist.
Think of the times you have
hinted or suggested or stated
that the problem yes the problem
is foreigners, migrants, immigrants,
refugees.
Think of the times you have hinted
or suggested or stated
that hard times were caused by the people you call foreigners, migrants, immigrants, refugees,
as if hard times were not caused by
bankers gambling with trillions,
not caused by governments
deliberately holding down pay
and sacking people or cutting
social services public services
and the health service.
Think of those times that you thought you could shore up your position, garner more support,
get more power by saying these things,
using the excuse you are ‘listening to
peoples concerns’
the very concerns you stirred with your headlines and speeches which blamed foreigners for people’s hard times, rather than your own part in the shenanigans that let the bankers run off with billions, or the government say that the people had to pay for that with their wages, and how chasing tax avoiders is too, too difficult.
And just watch what you unleash.
See what voices rise to the surface after your hints and suggestions:
people emboldened by what you said,
People emboldened to put forward plans to dismiss, fire, exile, intern, detain, deport .
And in so doing win and use powers to control, contain, restrict, deprive, intern, detain everyone.
That’s how it works: blame ‘the other’ to control all.
Blame the other to control all.

Source: International Times

“My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes
expressing god-like sentiments.”
William Blake.

Blake would often receive visitors in the nude
Declaring that God Almighty was his tailor;
That he and his wife Catherine were Adam and Eve
And that clothes were a sign of man’s failure.

His penchant for nudity attracted the attention
Of the nineteenth century tabloids,
And a Fleet Street gutter hack called John Timbs
Thought he’d visit the poet uninvited.

Timbs was keen to unearth examples of “eccentrics”,
Those he called “the motley-minded and the grotesque”,
And, determining that Blake fell into that category,
He wished to use Blake to feather his own nest.

Having prevailed upon William Blake’s good nature
And gained admittance to Blake’s inner sanctum,
He asked Blake if it was true he saw the souls of the dead
And that he claimed to hear angels singing anthems?

At Fountain Court, Strand (Blake’s lodgings), Blake replied
“The spirits of the long departed mingle here with one another:
“Moses, and Pindar; Virgil, and Dante; Milton and Homer.
“I once even had the devil and his mother.”

“Do these persons have themselves announced?”
Enquired Timbs or “first send in their cards?
“They come entreating me to produce their portraits,” said Blake,
“And I happily satisfy the vanity of the bards.”

But suspecting Timbs to be hiding a cynical sneer
Blake decided to take him for a ride:
He told him not to sit where he’d just planted himself
And said sharply, “That’s where the ghost of my pet flea resides.”

Then Timbs was made to feel even more uneasy
As Blake moved him around the room,
“No, no. That’s no good. That chair’s for Richard III.
“He’s to sit there today, should he be coming to town.”

“Richard III?” gasps Timbs, sensing a profitable scoop
And now feigning belief in Blake’s inner world.
“How remarkable! Of course I know you have the power
“To see visions of both the living and the dead!”

“Richard III?” Timbs repeats, “tell me now where do you see him?”
Blake answers, “Quiet. It’s his first visit.”
“But where is he exactly? How do you know his name?”
Blake replies firmly, “My spirit…”

“…My spirit recognizes him, but I can’t tell you how.”
“He’s opposite to you, on the other side of the table.”
“What is he like?” insists Timbs, overcome with curiosity.
“Stern, but handsome: at present I see only his profile.”

Then Blake narrows his gaze as if to adjust his focus,
“Ah, now I have the three-quarter face.
“Ah! now he turns to me. He is terrible to behold
“But he’s more than welcome in my place.”

“Could you pose him any questions?” says Timbs, beside himself.
“Certainly,” says Blake, “What would you like me to ask him?”
“The murders!” blurts out Timbs, “the murders!
“The murders he committed during his lifetime!”

“Your question is already known to him,” Blake shrugs,
“He and I converse mind to mind.
“We speak by intuition and by magnetism, you understand.
“Richard and I have no need of words.”

“What is his Majesty’s reply?” beseeches Timbs,
“This…” Blake cups his ear as if striving to listen,
“Only it is somewhat longer than he just gave it to me,
“For you would not understand the language of spirits.”

“He says what you call murder and carnage is all nothing!
“That in slaughtering fifteen or twenty thousand men you do no wrong!
“For what is immortal of them is not only preserved,
“But it passes, you understand, into a better world.”

Timbs’ jaw drops, appalled, and he edges away from Blake
As if regarding him as a monster, while Blake continues,
“And the man who reproaches his assassin is guilty of ingratitude,
“For by this means he enters into a more perfect state of existence.”

“But do not interrupt me; he is now in a good position,
“And if you say anything more, he will go.”
Blake then laid out his pencils and brushes and began
To draw a portrait of Richard from head to toe.

But Timbs is unable to believe what Blake has been saying –
It’s as if the saintly artist has turned into Charles Manson –
Aghast at Blake’s replies he beats a hasty retreat
And later spreads the rumour that Blake was taking opium.

But Blake had effectively got rid of his vampire visitor
And was never to be troubled by Timbs again –
The kind of person that Burroughs warned against:
Someone more of a succubus than a man.

“If, after spending time with a person,”
William Burroughs used to say,
“You feel as though you’ve lost a quart of plasma,
“Avoid that person; otherwise pray.”

In 1865 John Timbs published his ‘Modern Eccentrics’
In which he included William Blake;
Spitefully charging him with an hallucinating insanity…
England’s uncrowned King and God’s rake.

Trump demonises Arabs, wanting to banish them from his shores, unaware that an Arab giantess in New York is welcoming all migrants.

The Statue of Liberty’s Burka

The President is obsessed with deporting Arabs
Although, by a superb comic irony,
It was an Arab who modeled for the United States’ icon –
Namely the Statue of Liberty.

The sculptor’s monument was initially designed
For the opening of the Suez canal:
The original depicted an Arab woman holding a torch.
It was destined for the canal’s southern portal.

His first drawings show “a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant”
With a veil modestly hiding her lips,
The sculptor told Egypt’s ruler she represented “Progress”
A beacon, to light the way for oncoming ships.

Unfortunately for the artist, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi,
Egypt’s bankrupt Khedive couldn’t afford its installation
But undeterred, Bartholdi recycled it and offered it to New York
To commemorate the American revolution.

Its first title had been, “Egypt carrying the Light to Asia’
But now the figure’s veil would be removed
And for his prospective US clients Bartholdi called it,
“Liberty enlightening the world”.

But despite Bartholdi’s tweaking the flowing Arab garments
And his turning them into Graeco-Roman dress,
It’s still a huge stone Arab that occupies New York Harbour,
Making fun of the President’s petty mindedness –

And of the President’s paranoia for far more Americans die
As a result of their falling out of bed,
Or their being stung by bees rather than being killed by terrorists
Never mind their fellow-citizens shooting them dead.

Despite the most worthless President in US history
Wishing to banish all Arabs from his shores
An Arab giantess in New York is welcoming migrants
And giving the lie to his immigration laws.

However much the President may demonise Arabs
There’s one who’s rooted to the ground,
Making a better job of symbolising American liberty
Without her having to utter a sound.

Heathcote Williams – poet, playwright, essayist, lyricist, actor, magician, political agitator… and much else besides – died 1 July 2017.

Video: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka

Words and narration by Heathcote Williams. Montage by Alan Cox. Source: BabylonRoyal

Together Against Trump
National Demonstration
Friday 13 July London | Assemble 2pm
BBC Portland Place | London W1A 1AA
More details…