by Alan Morrison
Our souls in bondage to the shadow of the Baby Boom,
Playground of gray-haired children, incubi in silvered bloom—
Harangue them through a megaphone, protestor’s spittoon,
Expect a hoarse voice, rattling ears to the hackneyed tune
Of mocking laughter from every metropolitan poltroon,
They’ll pillory you as a contemporary Peterloon—
You are the unappointed poet of the streets, protestor,
Your amplified philippic a spleen-vent in pentameter,
Your passive weapons: placard, whistle, woofer horn & banner,
Tins of glue & paint & soup, squibs of orange powder—
O roadside radical, rabble-rouser, tent-pitched objector,
O slow-marcher, road-sitter, car-blocker, pop-up occupier,
Dayglow Digger, Rainbow Ranter, rain-or-shine Picketer—
But our right to protest is being torched by authority
To whom a new Act gives extra powers to arbitrarily
Decide what is ‘disruptive’ (though protest is supposed to be)
& grade types of disruption by ever-shadier degrees
Apportioning proscription & punishment accordingly:
You’ll get banged up for hanging a banner from a gantry
& distracting traffic—for locking-on to object or body,
Chaining yourself to railings—that suffragette agency;
If ‘risk’ is weighed in the gravamen then a swift sentence
Of up to ten years with extra built-in intolerance,
The antiquated charge of causing ‘public nuisance’
Replaced by a more nuanced, multifaceted offence
Of causing ‘serious distress, serious annoyance,
Serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity’—
So, if you must protest, you must do it very quietly,
‘Noise’ will not be tolerated but be met exponentially
With truncheon, handcuff, taser, horse charge, pepper spray,
Kettling, cordoning, tagging—English democracy
Does not accommodate bleeding-hearted Robin Hoods,
Wat Tylers, John Balls, Jack Cades, Jack Straws, Herewards,
Winstanleys, Lilburnes, Bamfords, Paines, Pankhursts, do-goods—
The English are free to express dissent in spit-hoods,
Unruly minors in soundproof booths, bolshy shrubs in Wormwood
Scrubs, climate whistleblowers in Belmarsh, precarious
Poets in open prisons of impecuniousness—
Philistine society spits on its poets with pittances;
& none are spat on more than the street poets, protestors,
Lumpenpoetariat (among Karl Marx’s monikers:
‘Poet of commodities’), pamphleteers & agitators,
Uncompromising spirits undampened by poetasters
Of spite, petty Harpies, counterintuitive provocateurs,
Spikers of the principled, free speech poisoners of the pool
Of public opinion—dip of red-top spoon-fed floccule;
O protestor you are poet of the streets spouting political
Penillion—kerbside Hed Wynn, shepherd of chant & heckle;
Pavement minstrel of mounting complaint—hecatoncheiral;
Red Shelley of the shell-likes & the heart’s lightning recital.
This poem is taken from Rag Argonauts (Caparison, 2024)
