Parliament and Socialism
The English parliament is an antidote
to socialism: a vote for Labour affording
respite care for self-destructing Tories
in difficult times.
When Corbyn promised mild reforms
he was rapidly disposed of, not by the Tories
but by the assiduity of Labour’s traitors,
led by Starmer.
Talking of Starmer, was there ever
such a – well, I must watch my words –
here goes: unprincipled, opportunistic
weather vane with all the charisma
of a jam-free doughnut.
But he comes from a line of leaders who,
condemned to inhabit what they called
the ‘real world’, compromised away
promises and plans to affect change.
So by-pass these shallow conduits
for the status quo and think outside
the parliamentary box, uncover solidarity
at work, in neighbourhoods, streets,
third places where people think aloud.
Change will not be the issue of MPs
co-opted by the ‘real world’ of capital
and power, but the progeny of citizen
pain, desperation, rage and conviction
that only the setting cement of anger
on the streets can transform lives.
Parliament is the artefact of a capitalist
democracy, an institution designed
to resist and neuter socialist opposition,
with the aid, in extremis, of the police
and armed forces conditioned to obey
the governing oligarchy that nestles
within the elite club that is Westminster.
The parliamentary system is oppressive,
its police and armed guards repressive.
He Came and He Went
Jeremy Corbyn won popular support
to challenge the status quo,
which so enraged the Parliamentary
Labour Party that they engineered
his demise: Labour’s MPs opted
for a status quo that promised
further austerity and misery
for their members and those
they were elected to represent.
Jeremy was succeeded by the bland
but duplicitous Keir Starmer,
a safe pair of pro-capitalist hands
who exiled Jeremy whilst reneging
on the promises that got him elected;
Keir set about a manifesto for the City,
big business and, an afterthought this,
‘working’, not non-working, families.
Normal service is thus resumed:
the well-to-do can once more light
Labour’s blue touch paper and relax.
Humans and Companion Species
It is self-evident that humans
are but one species on planet Earth;
and that their, our, sense of undoubted
superiority is, even as I write this,
lost on the likes of ants and spiders.
Surely it is no less axiomatic
that these more durable species
will outlast humans’ self-destructive
propensities.
What price human superiority then?
Let’s think it through.
Certainly we humans have reflexivity,
the power to undo the damage
we are watching ourselves doing.
But yet:
ants and spiders and numerous
other known ‘unknown’
under-rated exponents
of Earth’s multiple habitats, seem –
empirically, under, we think,
the illuminating spotlight
of human science –
less endowed,
less cerebral,
inferior.
Inferior? Really?
Different maybe;
different but equal.
Gaza
Word was the revolution would not be televised.
Maybe not.
Did you see those orphaned infants in Gaza?
They were on Al Jazeera, if not the BBC;
they were lucky ones, carried from the plaza
in strangers’ arms, burnt, bloody, eyes a plea
for an explanation for this – this what? –
this – I ask again, this what? – this sadist’s plot
to purge a land of a people the West forgot.
What price the anaesthetic a child foregoes
as her blood-full wounds are lovingly treated
by a doctor whose fatigue, pain and strain shows
in a hunched demeanour and air of one defeated.
Multiply the four-year-old’s lost and fragile pain
by – latest count – ten thousand dead, twenty-four
thousand more left orphans with nothing to gain
from the obdurate corporate-funded geopolitics of war.
Go south, Netanyahu said, clear our biblical way
to be the Nazi’s progeny, the persecutors of a race
whose territory, groves and homes stand to delay
our prophet’s right to usurp, harvest, settle and stay.
But the churning tanks rumbled from the north
shadowing Palestine’s fleeing families, mocking
with snipers’ bullets, damning all from that day forth
to subsist, tented squatters, traumatised, locked in.
As I sit in my grandfather chair watching television
I see these war crimes play out as a serial drama;
it’s as if, as Baudrillard said, each doctor’s incision
is an ‘upsetting’ scene in a prize-winning panorama.
There’s guilt from the safe comfort of an armchair,
impotent, lest it be to rant to social media friends,
warm, secure against Palestinian insecurity, aware
of the theatre of war crimes through a smudgy lens.
Warfare
The properties of war, its modes of collateral damage,
are eternally assured. It is constructed by old men
in bunkers, it deploys young men they’ve conditioned
to kill not care, and it consumes women and children.
Today we’re civilised, so there’s no messy hand-to-hand
bloodletting but rather anonymised devastation by air:
we can murder more effectively and efficiently this way.
Missiles and drones can be dispatched at intervals
at the press of a button, visiting novel catastrophies
on those carefully, expediently pre-identified as enemies
of – well, of whom? – of those with most to lose by peace?
War elides into mass homicide, retributive, collective
punishment casually metred out to people in the way,
people who in their collective innocence have no truck
with Machiavellian strategists, with ambition and greed.
War kills all the wrong people.
Incongruity
When to switch channels
and which option to select?
It doesn’t really matter does it?
Nothing really hinges on it:
pressing this rather than that
is no big deal.
So why the torment?
You are listening to Al Jazeera’s
journalists in Gaza
against a background of rubble
and severed limbs;
and now there’s a three year old
prostrate on the floor
in what was once,
as it were in its previous life,
the hospital’s intensive care unit,
and she’s screaming for her dead
mother as stiches close
the open wounds to her face;
there’s no anaesthetic.
Maybe she’s complicit with Hamas,
but I doubt it.
You can be drained by coverage
of unmitigated suffering
wittingly, strategically
visited on the soft-skinned innocence
of babies and infants.
But change channels seems like
abandoning these many thousands
to pain without end.
And for what?
For the weightless relief
of ‘light entertainment’?
Stay and impotently
endure the political sadism
of the IDF and the unending trauma
of Palestinian lives, habitats
and hope being obliterated;
or, and this is how it surely feels,
turn your back on what matters
and embrace the anaesthetic
unavailable to the Gaza child.
It is not wrong to press the button;
but it may not be as easy to do
as people think.
How Do You Get To Kill?
Let’s go for a kick-start premiss:
we can all be made to kill.
It’s painful but it would be remiss
not to climb this forbidding hill.
We all covert the acceptance
of our neighbours and peers
and are inclined to repentance
if tempted by guarded steers
from whispering consciences,
preferring a quieter life
without the consequences
of standing apart, of strife,
of being nudged to the edge
of those precious relations
that comprise a solemn pledge
to recognise our station
in the secure community
to which we must belong
if we are to have immunity
from each and every throng
that berates and threatens us,
melts the glue that binds us
and like a cruel wind scatters us.
So it seems we kill to belong,
to face down and dispatch
those we have othered, a wrong
we make a right, a latch
on the door to resist the wind
that would blow us away;
but there’s no way to rescind
the awful truth, to keep at bay
the bluntest of blunt facts:
it’s people just like us that we kill
when we sign those chilling pacts
to rate the lives of others at nill.
Human Jigsaws
First gather all the pieces
and store them carefully:
torsos, limbs, heads,
an odd finger or toe;
try and work out
which parts belong
with which jigsaw,
then sort them
(with an infinity
of loving delicacy and care)
into piles: outside pieces
here, inside pieces there.
You will have to mop
your tears
and hold your noses.
These bits, these precious
remainders and reminders
of lives now blitzed
and shredded
by weapons
delivered for profit
by the civilised
nations of the Global North
to re-arm and defend
their fortress
in the Middle East.
Along with feeling,
thinking is best suspended;
nestled among the bloodied
jigsaws are bits of babies
and infants
and echoes of the dreams
they never got to have.
Every jigsaw is incomplete.
‘I Wish I Was Dead’
‘I wish I was dead’
the little boy said,
not at first,
but when it burst
right through
and he knew it was true
that his world had gone,
the light his family shone
had dimmed and died:
and he wanted to hide
in the homely bubble
now lost in rubble;
a martyr’s tomb
had replaced the womb:
he was no longer curled
in his loving world
but cradled in arms,
shielded from harms,
by an unknown man
without a plan;
parents, siblings lost
at such a cost
and this little boy,
was victim of a ploy
by a sniper with a gun
just having fun.
‘I wish I was dead’
the little boy said.