By Nick Moss
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
– Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times Are These?” (1991)
But vain is now the burning and the strife,
Pangs are in vain, until I grow high-rife
With old Philosophy
And mad with glimpses of futurity!
– John Keats, “On a Lock of Milton’s Hair”
Those who engineered mass murder
Add mass starvation to their skillset.
Malnourished doctors attend malnourished children
And food runs are turned into IDF Chicken Shoot games.
In detention centres in Florida
Detainees eat with their mouths from Styrofoam plates,
Bent double, handcuffed to chairs.
The toilets are caked thick with shit.
When an ICE guard says “housekeeping is coming soon”
You’d be right to fear what “housekeeping” means.
In Epping and Canary Wharf, wannabe pogromists
Circle run-down hotels, sniffing out blood,
2nd time around.
These are the sifting days,
When the partisans of inequality
Seek out untermenschen
To feed the flames.
Pseudo-Keats spews out another ode
To birdsong, magic, cricket, jam jars,
Sea spume, phone boxes, cut grass, home
We are out of time for all that shit.
Too late for anything except to write
Of how to organise to strike,
To strike back, to recover History
And redeem time lost.
Mosley’s watchword was “Britain First”
Fascism wrapped as ever in a Union Jack.
Beaten back by bricks and coshes
Jack on the Spot, the 43, the 62.
Not wistful singing of “Bella Ciao”.
And is it time now for
Salt, vinegar, bine
Skorps, and G-locks
Jigsaws and kickbacks?
No choice but resistance
When they line us in their sights.
Pseudo-Keats vomits up another ode.
Returns to eat it.
Pukes up another.
(The butt of sack can make you queasy.)
Laughter, stars, cartwheels, long grass,
Rivers and moonlight, wind dance and white- caps.
But never streets full of sewage, 80% tree loss,
Corpses in the Wadi Gaza, charred sunbirds
Falling dead from the sky.
Retches Christmas bells, angel blue, wild horses
Popcorn, apples, November airs and carnivals.
Poetry as caprice in a world on fire.
