Poetry

CREATE YOUR OWN SYSTEM

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Steve McAuliffe 

Is it just me or does the shit seem to flow one way?
Holy Thursday into Black Friday
And who’ll clear out the gutters in your 2.3 million pound terraced house in Peckham Rye?
You know, when push comes to shove.

Maundy Monday and someone let a fart go on the cattle-train transporting us from the suburbs to the processing plants of Old Holborn and Chancery Lane.
The economy took a hit when some geezer hung himself in a tunnel during rush-hour.
He was hoist by his own commuter-belt.

Christ, I must create my own system.
Coz according to the Daily Hate, one in five Muslims now back the caliphate.
And the hate spreads outward,
But the shit still flows one way
-Always one way.

Then the City within a city took a bigger hit.
Seems the bankers dry-humped the market too long without mercy, and now everyone’s pissing their pants:
Is this the trickle-down effect in actual action?

Listen, William Blake never sheltered from the volcanic ash,
He never holed himself up on the banks of Lake Garda,
Imagination was his salvation – and ours too – if we’d only trace the echoes down through time.
And so we return to Peckham Rye,
Where the angel’s perch in the trees
Paying no heed to the
Over-inflated
Ill-fated
Ever-expanding
property bubble.
No, there was no Grand Tour for poor old William,
And how was he to know his Arcadian Jerusalem would be appropriated
By fat-faced Tories in their elite drinking clubs up in Oxford?
Those heirs to the Satanic Mills he so abhorred.
They flipped the mills for a profit before the bubble-burst,
And floated mythical Albion on the market
as Jerusalem PLC.
I must, I really must…
I must create something.
Democracy is just a bunch of hand-picked people asking all the wrong questions of all the wrong people –
We are indeed led by the least amongst us. Lions led by donkeys and all that.
And the Mail is getting bolder.
Arab refugees as Mufti’s: rats dropping from their foreign robes, scuttling between their smelly sandaled feet.
Swarms and deluges, threatening our identities…
Whilst the heirs to the dark mills sell the power-stations
to the Communist Chinese.
And I tell you what, I’ll tell you this –
If that fucking Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t prostrate himself next year at the Cenotaph, I’ll… I’ll fucking…
Ah!
The shit still flows one way and I seriously, I seriously need to create my own system and divert the flow, or I will, I will be enslaved by another man’s; I will be engulfed by another man’s shite.
And when the IRA bombed London, no one blamed the Catholics:
No blacks, no dogs, no Catholics.
They bombed the barracks and the bandstands,
The pubs and the shopping arcades and we stood firm, year upon year: folded our arms, resolute.
We will not talk to terrorists.
And we didn’t. One decade turned into another
We will not sit down with terrorists.
Sure enough, we didn’t: bomb after bomb = resolute, steadfast.
Then they bombed the City within a City and suddenly everyone’s round a fucking table.
Lesson being:
You can drown us in a sea of blood, but don’t interrupt the flow of dirty money son.
Ah.
Ash Wednesday as the volcanic clouds that block the sun dissipate.
Trust me now, one more war son, that’s all.
And then we’ll privatise the fucking lot – one last hurrah.
Chilcot’s climbed into his spider-hole for the duration and Blair’s on Andrew Marr again – the longest courtship in human history.
Intervention, air-strikes, boots on the ground.
Meanwhile Turkey buys the oil
The oil that funds the bombs that buy the bullets that load the guns that launder the uniforms of the men who drive their Toyota courtesy cars across an air-brushed desert –
Ah fuck this!
-Enough.
Let the lions take down the donkeys.
And let us venerate the Lamb.
Let us re-nationalise Jerusalem,
Here and now, in England’s green and pleasant land.

This poem, among others appears in Steve’s book, Thamesmead.

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