Poem by me: Up Town

Read this poem recently at an event curated by poet Molly Rowan at Tate South Lambeth Library with the aim of exploring and addressing the theme of Shared Spaces. The last time I read it was at The Bowery in New York, I was invited as a special guess and also one of the judges of a intercollegiate per try slam by Christine Tims, a teacher in a community college in New York, a poet who curated events with poetry and dance. The theme of Shared Spaces struck me as ironic as 80% of the time I think we are in the Matrix and about 68% of that time I wish I’d taken took the blue pill. That poem is yet to be written. This is a poem about a journey through one of the spaces that we share unequally.

Up Town

The club was fairly dull

so I leave early though it has long gone midnight.

I walk past darkened offices

Past a bus stop, there’s an old man sitting with

dirty coat, grey hair, slicked with grease

his life a carrier bags at his feet,

He is smoking a cigar,

Not so dead to have forgotten pleasure then

but dead to me, to us.

Round the corner a white gleaming roller glides by.

On Charing Cross Road a guy supports a girl

who staggers and throws up on her shoes.

Near the square, in cafes smartly dressed couples

talk intensely, while outside

others fall about the pavement tables.

A young lad sleeps through it all in a doorway.

Three Turkish students search for a club

I give them a page from Time Out and

their gratitude almost overwhelms me.

At the bus stop beneath the square I take a light

from a French guy who looks bored.

We stand in silence and smoke in the rain.

A woman next to us mutters in Patois

about cleaning, kids and the rent.

Refuse workers clear up the streets already.

I wonder, if, or when

they go out to play…

Published in Touched 

TheStateWeAreIn: Lucid Dreaming and the birth of love and rage

Wake at the civilised hour of 7am,  the very best time to get up, feeling quite refreshed, look at the clock, close my eyes and next time I open them it’s 8am. I’m not sure if I slept. My eyes are heavy, close them again and next time I look it’s 10am. Now I know I’ve been asleep or rather in a half sleep, lucid, aware of my bed, my room. Curiously my sleep seems to follow the clock as if I have an internal unbidden snooze button.

While in and out of this peculiar state I’m reaching for a story; I’m not sure if it’s one I’ve read, one I’ve been told, or a recurring dream. It is elaborate and has many parts, a succession of unveiling, yet it is a haze. The tentacles of the story are there whenever I’m near sleep.

Something about the unknown being told, perhaps a wisdom tale, something about – then they realised. The story has a narrative voice which I can almost hear. Sometimes I see scenes, but I cannot grasp it or truly know it. It’s like recalling the feeling in a dream without the dream details, so I guess I should surmise this is just a dream.

I only sense that the people, who may be villagers, it appears to be a rural scene, perhaps from another time, realise they are not what they thought they were, they realise they were not what they thought each other were. Is my mind tapping into some great universal awakening? Is there indeed an awakening? Well that would be cool.

Am just soooooo frustrated with the meagre grasp of something which has shadowed yet evaded me for some weeks now. The images were hazy a few weeks ago, clearer now, I neglected to write them down. 

Meanwhile it’s XR rebellion day 2. I’ve had mixed feelings about this campaign: the way they don’t appear to want a mass movement but rather a few committed individuals to do it for us but given almost the entire media and parliament is failing to respond to the IPCC (international panel on climate change) report that suggested unless we keep global warming below 1.5 deg we risk crossing the tipping point into uncontrollable climate chaos. Given the the IPCC have calculated that at the rate of present emission that will happen in 2030…

                   and given actually all of us can’t be there, I for one am still in bed today, in a state of mild mind fog….

                                                               and given we have so many other fronts to fight on, these seem to be the ONLY people drawing attention to this. 2030. We have 12 years according to the report that has rocked the work. It sounds like sci fi. But it’s not.

I hear the super rich are building bunkers and buying up land in high areas away from the risk of sea level rises. This is as foolish as it is selfish. It underlines the fact that there is no doubt already the most vulnerable communities face greater risk and the poorest will be disproportionately affected, if truth be told, they are already. And that is the slogans brandished in a sea of hope TELL THE TRUTH and ACT NOW.

So concluding, I reckon we should all get behind this even if it’s just a click or a share. Also I hear the One Million Climate Jobs campaign, promoting a transition to renewable have a motion for trade unions here

https://www.campaigncc.org/unions.shtml

TheStateWeAreIn: Dystopia and it’s discontents

If I had said say 20 years ago, no let’s say after the miners were defeated in ‘85, that dark time, if I said, “Think this is bad, let’s time travel, in 2018, in 33 years time, 60% of working families will be on benefit because their pay is too low, 55% of homeless people will be in work because rents too high, only 8% of people will have council housing, our council housing will be a fire risk or falling down or sold of to the higher bidder, the nhs will have been cut so bad it’s barely functioning, and social services barely able to cope, while hundreds of homeless people die on the streets and hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people have died due to an unfair welfare system, with an 80% target for refusals that forces those with fatal illnesses to appeal, the prisons will be bursting at the seams and privatised.

Phew that was a long sentence…. All this because we balled out the banks 10 years ago and have been paying for it ever since, yet our rulers still bow down to the god they call “the market” as Hayek pours himself a glass of champagne, and Britain in this state, wants to leave Europe, all this is happening in the fifth richest country in the world but that wealth is held in the hands of an elite few, there are pockets of war and refugee camps all over the globe, the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War and the earth is screaming with forest fires, psychotic weather events, tsunamis and floods, the icecaps are melting and the the oceans are rising and whole of humanity faces 11 years to the Climate change tipping point.”

Would you have believed me? No, I think you would have said “Anne, that’s sci fi, that would make a great movie.” But what is missing from this picture? The resistance. The global resistance. I have no sense of how or if it is linked up yet but it is there. We can connect at least with Extinction Rebellion, we can join our trade unions, community and campaign groups. There are people planting forests, organising for a Just Transition from fossil fuels, see Reel News. The most successful and militant workers in the country are the most exploited, on minimum wages or less, on zero hour contracts, they are fighting back and winning. We are no longer fighting for the future, we are fighting for the now. Another world IS possible: Liberty, equality, dignity, peace, respect, hang this on our banners, hold it in our hearts, unity, solidarity and love is the way, adelante! #ThinkGloballyActLocally #11MoreYears #NowIsTheTime 💜