of philistines rubbing their hands at their sales
with cash-kissing glee in their moated, portcullised
towers of power where blandness prevails,
so careers haven’t ever appealed to my palette
(they’re less like a calling and more like a habit)
and, stood with a name-badge by rows of pork pies
where pinstriped clones who don’t recognise
a Russian sonnet from their rectum
assumed I could not count to five,
I’d slaved in order to survive
beneath rosetted robots (I didn’t elect ’em).
Half of my graft earned me windows, a bed,
a light-bulb and bath, before I could be fed.
Landlords grew tanned from the blaze of my labour
until I decided enough was enough.
I ran to the hippy and crusty and raver,
my fellow man, my fellow scruff.
I ran to Bristol, ran where squatters
link their arms as brickwork totters,
where plastic tanks replace U-bends
and toilet chains, where no-one mends
the roof-holes, where huge spray-paint murals
of third-eyed skulls exposing brains
bedeck the walls and window panes,
where crockery piles up like the Urals,
where homes are made of factories,
offices, children’s nurseries.
Such life I’d not seen before landing in Bristol!
With a leap and a bound the swift anarchists thronged
through streets built on slavery, armed with crystal-
clear ideas of how humans are wronged,
such as “Property ownership violates nature,
the Earth’s our master and creator,
not the other way round, so we
won’t toil and stoop for tenancy!
If everyone gandhied their rent or their mortgage,
the dog’s-milk of legal misrule would congeal!”
Not everyone’s tinkering, though, with this wheel,
to airbag the lorry-crash housing shortage.
Society thinks not of abuses of wealth,
it does what it’s told, doesn’t think for itself.
Society sneers, “You there, get out of that building,
you horrible subhuman left-wing unclean
smelly longhaired crowbar-wielding
freeloading parasites! God save the Queen,
God save the rich, God save the bankers,
God crush these unwashed bongo-spankers,
throw the untouchables out on the street
where there’s nothing but bin-scraps and heroin to eat!”
The council puppets swipe their agreement,
ink-stained, stamping on homeless plights
with a rasping “You ain’t got no rights!”,
swazzle-throated, truncheoning, vehement.
They’d rather a man slept on dog’s piss and stone
than a bed in a building that’s been left alone.
I showered each day with a bucket and kettle
after climbing a ladder, a wall
and over an oblong of teetering metal,
defying a fifteen or twenty foot fall.
We dined on crumpets, pasta, custard,
pizzas, cakes and Polish mustard
swiped from supermarket bins
and loaded on laps up to anarchist chins.
Our escape from the car park was once nearly thwarted.
Some bloke lurched backwards and forwards to stop
our harvest of sandwiches destined for slop
and pies whose sale had been aborted.
So adamant was he that we would not profit,
he shunted young Eva clean over his bonnet.
At the party before my friends’ date with the bailiff
I watched a boy, not knowing where he was from,
trigger a fight that gave Tesco’s a facelift,
by shouting about a petrol bomb.
The Bristolian riots of Twenty Eleven
began on a roof, firing threats to the heavens,
the roof of a building that I used to squat,
where I stood wincing at the truncheon-swat
of a buzzing swarm who lobbed concrete and looted
the thirty-first Tesco’s in Bristol, and watched
as stallions galloped and pandas were torched,
all so that four or five lads could be booted
out of a building that no-one else used.
Tory Britain. Sit back, enjoy being abused.
