Under the Wall

To play the game, to dance the tune,
To give up for a ghastly boon
The sweetness of the soul which wore
The lineaments of dread before.

They smile yet cannot feel, their hearts
Replaced with facts and trading-charts,
And in their brains, where once was joy,
There's avarice and things that cloy.

They're lied to, they're deceived each day,
They live as though it's fair to say,
'You've but one life, now sell these jeans,
You need not know what all this means.'

And then they wonder why it seems
Mankind today pines, weeps and dreams
But that some facile love should bloom
Out of quick fame, to kill the gloom.

For nothing changes, days pass by,
The promises rotate, things die,
And everywhere, in every face,
Woe rankles in a silent place.

We're chasing will-o-wisps, one fades
And five more come - out in the glades
Of purposeless ambition, where
The dullest soul seems the most fair.

The dome of life explodes, glass falls,
Blood flows in crimson waterfalls,
And finally the cheated see
The smiling face of Trickery.

They've come for me, they've come to take
The only thing they could not break,
You must not let them call again -
Wake up! Wake up, and break the chain!

Fragment on Politics

A year or so ago I fancied a career in writing, I entertained gross notions of immense delusion by which I would transcend the dull shells we inhabit. Yet I am no longer a believer, and why should I be? It is not just a matter of ability but appetite. I realise that I used to write with no expectations, I used to really channel my innermost spirit without wishing to mask it in verbosity. Now I refrain from writing lest I produce some abomination. Yet the following was a necessary creation, it rankled with me. 

Whenever I explain that I am studying politics, I am invariably met with the idiotic rejoinder of, 'Ah, going to be a politician then?' which remark upsets me in a way words cannot quite support. The implication is that politics is somehow reserved only for politicians - in many ways the word 'politician' is a terrible name for the profession. It should be 'executor' or 'servant', for they are the administrators and curators of the public will. They do not - or should not - dictate. Then this plague of questioning is almost diametrically incorrect - politicians are the last people who should have political opinions. As individuals, of course they deserve the same right to partiality which we all exercise. Yet as a class, an unbelievably privileged minority, their beliefs should be of no significance. They should not blot the public will one iota, and yet they evidently do. Politics is for the people, it is a mode of self-governance, it is the last bastion of freedom in a shattered world. That it has been reduced to a selfish, cabalistic golf club is a matter for deep repine. We vote for an increasingly homogenous group of parties, and then the victors tyrannise us for five years. Such thinking as, 'Ah, going to be a politician then?' has hollowed out democracy, it has destroyed self-determination. It is these fools who wear the manacles of oppression not just irrevocably but willingly. It is they who have allowed horrific injustice to roam unchallenged, they who would chain the stars to one another if it meant they might be better relieved of the terrible weight of individualism.

I like to tell myself that, beneath a coarse veneer of intolerance, of cold-heartedness and spite, I harbour some humanity, some hope, some idealism. Yet I venture still further and find but another level of blight. This world is so unbelievably, inconceivably broken as to be almost beyond repair. I used to enjoy writing of our collective plight, but it now merely depresses me. I have been made to understand why young writers are the real Writers, the real Poets of the world. They recognise the hideous nature of this place, yet they do it wide-eyed and hopeful. They bear a kind of indomitable hubris - yet hubris without the hubris. It is something unique. They simultaneously see themselves as fit to assay the world whilst maintaining that we are all dirt, even themselves. The old, they bear real hubris, a real vested interest in sustaining a vile state of affairs. The young have a similar arrogance, but it is a sincere arrogance for which I do not believe a word exists.