It's Work (Banjamin Zephaniah)

As a kid, Zephaniah was the first person i looked up to as a proud Brummie in the public oi. On being offered and rejecting an Order of the British Empire (OBE), he said: "I get angry when I hear that word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised". 

I've already sung his praises as a working class hero of Brum on this blog before, so won't again as i have nothing new to say, but he died this week so i thought i'd share a poem of his.

I could hav been a builder
A painter or a swimmer
I dreamt of being a Rasta writer,
I fancied me a farmer
I could never be a barber
Once I was not sure about de future,
Got a sentence an I done it
Still me angry feelings groweth
Now I am jus a different fighter,
I sight de struggle up more clearly
I get younger yearly
An me black heart don’t get no lighter.
I will not join de army
I would work wid malt an barley
But here I am checking me roots,
I could work de ital kitchen
But I won’t cook dead chicken
An I won’t lick nobody’s boots,
Yes I could be a beggar
Maybe not a tax collector
I could be a streetwise snob,
But I’ll jus keep reciting de poems dat I am writing
One day I’ll hav a proper job.

Circling the Square

I hoped that by cutting enough corners
I could make a circle of a square
Just something to take the edge off
Smooth over the difficult angles

 

But before I could count to a round number

I had whittled away all the substance

With my many well intentioned little cuts

And had to make do with a hole

Childhood Memory 5

Part I 

My family and I were on holiday in Belgium and we needed petrol. My dad had recently passed his driving test and so my mum, having previously been the sole driver of the family, was able to take the passenger seat for once. My mom was the more confident driver, not only as a result of her years of experience, but also due to her demeanour. In a tight situation, she was the one more likely to take the bull by the horns, whereas my dad was flappable and prone to fluster and frustration, a disposition reflected in his blood pressure and the stents implanted in his heart. Huffing and puffing from behind the wheel, as boy racers tailgated and wrong lanes were navigated, was therefore something the rest of the family had to get used to.

Having my dad drive in Europe, on the "wrong" side of the road and with its alien road signs, brought such flappability to a head, and so the atmosphere in the car was already a little tense as we rolled into the petrol station. My dad got out and struggled to pull the pump over the other side of the car, having instinctively parked in the position suited to British cars, eliciting a snigger from my brother as my dad grunted and cursed.

Having eventually got the nozzle into the fuel flap, dad couldn't get any petrol out of the machine and stood there dumbfounded, his eyes darting from fuel flap to pump, relentlessly squeezing the pump lever to no effect. "C'mon..." we could hear him muttering. "C'mon!", but no fuel would flow. The man started to gesticulate with his hands, uplifting them, supine and almost biblical, then letting them drop to his sides with a clap. "What do you want me to do?" he strained, continuing to plead with his hands. He had become a living cartoon.

Inside the car, my brother and I were really enjoying the spectacle of the patriarch trying to reason with an inanimate object. Even my mom was chortling away. My dad was soon in full meltdown, huffing and puffing, panting, flailing his arms. "What do you want from me!? What do you want me to do!?" he howled. Inside the car we also howled at the surreal dialogue that begged the petrol pump to speak back. Finding a time I've laughed more in my life without strong drugs is a struggle. This wasn't just laughing, but true belly-aching, helpless guffawing; thigh-slapping, hand over the mouth, tears running down, gleeful i'm-not-supposed-to-be-laughing. 

Someone had to put this man out of his misery before he got an aneurysm. But no one was going to. The pump was never going to answer my dad's call, so on it went. I can't recall how the farce resolved itself, but it's a story our family retells with delight. The pathos was deep, man.

* * * * * 

 

Part II

When I was a kid - between the ages of around 8 and 12 - my dad took me fishing. I'm a vegetarian these days but my dad was a bit old school in that respect. He never met his dad, but an avuncular neighbour had taught him to fish as a teenager and it was, in his middle age, still one of his favourite pastimes; one that he was keen to pass on to me.

I had my own little pike rod and I learnt to spool my reel, set up my bait and tackle, plumb my depth, and attach my float such that my hook would hang just a little above the lake floor. This was coarse fishing, rather than fly fishing or game fishing. We weren't particularly trying to catch big fish. I could cast and I could control a fish back to the shore so long as it wasn't above about 5lbs. Later, dad bought me a whip which didn't need the reel and I'd fish in amongst the reeds, which became my favourite. Dad would try out different bait: corn, luncheon meat, his own homebaked fish mudpie, the recipe of which had been passed on like an esoteric scroll from a guy who swore it was the only bait worth having. Mostly we used maggots though. Sometimes casters but mostly live maggots. I half liked them, half loathed them. They were both cute and creepy in equal measure.

One of the more difficult bits of the operation, other than getting snagged on reeds and dropping split shot, was hooking maggots. There were other options, but for a long time I was convinced that maggots were the superior bait and the only way to catch fish, which was, after all, the name of the game. I'd watched TV. I'd seen the worm on the hook. Everyone used maggots. Maggots were best. That's what I wanted. However, they were tricky to manipulate because they were alive and would writhe with activity when handled. You had to hold them quite firmly so you could hook them appropriately. At one end, they had a sort of rudimentary face, above which hung a small fleshy translucent hood, where it was ideal for the hook to go in. If you missed a bit and went through the face - that was still ok, good to go, chuck em in - but if you hooked them through the middle, they would ooze and quickly die. 

While I can't speak for them all, fish are - to make a generalisation - less interested in the shrivelled shell of a maggot. You're not catching any fish that way. It's that they're still alive, wriggling, doing the morbid death dance on the hook that appeals to the fish and gets them interested in the first place. With any luck, the fish isn't going to give it much further thought and will gobble the maggot whole, along with the concealed hook, thus embedding it in the lip or throat of the fish and allowing it to be pulled ashore. It was all pretty savage, but it was also pretty cool doing what the older guys were doing, and everyone sure was impressed when that guy caught the big one. It was smokes all round.

But it was difficult work. I would sometimes get through several maggots before I had hooked one correctly and could finally cast my line. Sometimes I would talk to them, trying to get them to co-operate, reason with them that it was going to be better for both of us to do it this way or they could end up being hooked through the stomach by accident, and that's a horrible way to go. You'd get maggot juice all over your hands and there'd be nowhere to properly wash them, just reeds and pond water. This was man country, you see. Just wipe them on your trousers, shut up, and eat your cheese and ham sandwiches. I resented having life in my hands. It stank. Sometimes when the wind died down you would hear the maggots dry-rustling in the box next to you as you sat and waited.

I would later avoid maggots altogether and opt for sweetcorn or the homebaked fish mudpie, but this oft repeated struggle with the maggots really stuck with me. The desperate - personal - violence. The perverse sense of frustration. The miserable anger that something would not cooperate under my thumb, even when I had almost total control. The spilling over into madness, humour trying to work its way into the situation. It's nothing. It's funny, actually. I would try to hook their ugly (or was it cute?) little face as neatly as I could, but they would squirm and try to avoid being hooked in the face, so you had to be tough with them. Sometimes they would burst inadvertently under the pressure of my grip and their insides would spurt out in a truly awful manner. I would scold the maggot for being so repulsive and disgusting and getting on my nice shirt. "Come on you little shit. Don't be like that. Just do it." All they had to do was co-operate and we could avoid all of this mess, but no. They had to make it difficult.

* * * * * 

 

Part III 

My frustration with the maggot was manifold. I didn't really know anything about maggots other than they're like, pre-flies, or something (gross). I perhaps had even less of an idea what went on in a maggot brain than a fly brain. I had no understanding of the thing I was trying to manipulate. the interaction was "all my will", and yet the frustration was projected solely onto the living thing I was controlling. On reflection, of course the maggot only wanted to be left alone. But not only was this maggot not human, but as an insect larvae, it was "barely an animal". It was at the very bottom of the us/them hierarchy, about as "other" as a living thing can be. It was almost as if they were to be conveniently reduced even further, to the role of object. 

The odd thing that struck me is that so often, to feel the same level of frustration with an actual object, you have to anthropomorphise it, as per my dad's petrol pump. An inanimate object wrongs you and your desire is to personify it. There doesn't have to be any malice in popping a berry between your fingers for fun, coz, you know, it's just a berry. Until, perhaps, some stray juice goes in your eye, at which point it becomes "you little bastard". You trip over the lip of a carpet and it's suddenly "this motherfucker just tried to trip me up!". When an object hits us like a subject and it stirs our anger, we anthropomorphise it in a desperate attempt to reason with it. Here, the effect can be comical. Classic slapstick: man walks into lamppost, man angrily kicks lamppost thereby stubbing his toe, man shake fist at lamppost. 

When the opposite occurs and we treat subjects like objects, it conjures up our most sociopathic tendencies. The way I treated the maggots happened partly coz i was a kid and partly coz it's a maggot, who I cared little about, coz I don't really have any affinity with them. I had all the power and no one was going to tell me to do otherwise. It wasn't like I was enjoying being mean to the maggots, although I started to resent them more over time as our relationship soured and i resented the messy work. But mostly it happened coz that was the name of the game. I was more or less conducting myself in a manner that was required of me. I'd already got to the lake, rod in hand; what else was going to happen? Some maggot faces were inevitably going to get hooked.

I think this goes some way to explaining how police might feel when they're brutalising a detainee who perhaps doesn't respond in exactly the manner demanded by the brutaliser. Even when they have been granted a monopoly over violence and a license to use force, they dehumanise the squirming detainee who resists subjugation. In fact, precisely because they have a monopoly over violence, a license to use force, and a societal expectation to use it, are they in a position conducive to enacting dehumanisation. They crush the worm that fails to submit to a hook being forced through the face. I think some of the worst behaviour occurs when in attempting to force a subject into the role of object, the object speaks back and defiantly resists sublimation. When a victim squirms, they must be crushed, turned to mush, beyond recognition, or else we would have to face the horror we are inflicting.

Wedded

With faith we dive 

into the other
stream, making waves 

of ourselves,
in summer's busy dream.

Your wise sine 

and my cosine,
as unarming harmony 

of the oscillating field.

What will it yield?
In this magnetic light

that makes day from night.

To the daily herds
we do not hear,
but the songs of birds
with their honest words,
unlearned these ears.

For when we wed 

for love, like peasants,
we shunned the shine 

of blood's fluorescence.
But still a piece of bark we keep.
But still we walk among the sheep.

All four, my fingers lace 

with yours, like sapling roots, 

till there be fruits.
A wooden ring for every year,

I give to you, my love, my dear.

How can I know that I am not free?

Because I can't even go out into the street and do what I want with my own body without needing a contingency plan for confrontation.

...and until there is freedom, there will be confrontation, there will be a fight. freedom will not land on us from above, as power concedes nothing without a demand. we cannot wait for the safe spaces. we become free through fighting. we fight for free spaces.

GPT3 generated Fable

what a load of horseshit...

Once upon a time, in a dense forest, there lived a wise old owl who was famous for his knowledge and wisdom. One day, a group of young animals came to the owl and asked him to teach them everything he knew.

The owl agreed to take the young animals under his wing, and he began to teach them about the forest, the creatures that lived in it, and the secrets of nature. The young animals were eager to learn, and they listened intently to the owl's words.

As the weeks went by, the young animals learned a great deal from the owl. They became more knowledgeable and wiser with each passing day. However, there was one young animal in the group, a young rabbit, who was always the first to arrive at the owl's lectures and the last to leave.

The other young animals became jealous of the rabbit's dedication and began to plot against him. They decided to hide the rabbit's books and notes so that he would fall behind in his studies and be embarrassed in front of the wise old owl.

The rabbit was devastated when he realized his books and notes were missing. He searched everywhere but could not find them. He was so upset that he thought about giving up his studies altogether.

But then he remembered the wise old owl's words, "Knowledge is the most valuable treasure of all. It can never be stolen, but only given away." The rabbit realized that his determination and passion for learning were his greatest assets, and he could never let anyone take that away from him.

So the rabbit continued to attend the owl's lectures, even though he had lost his books and notes. He listened carefully to the owl's words and committed everything to memory. In the end, he became the wisest of all the young animals, and the owl was proud of him for his determination and hard work.

The moral of the fable is that true wisdom and knowledge cannot be stolen or taken away. It is something that comes from within, and it is up to us to cultivate it through hard work, dedication, and a love of learning.

...and that is why students who lose their notes and have their books repeatedly stolen have such great memories, are super smart and walk around smugly their whole lives, levitating above the rest of us

the baggy tumbleweeds are now listless across the tarmac

Carried by the death-rattle of god's cluttered trachea

in a crooked civic neck that can crane no longer,
  the baggy post-modern tumbleweeds

  that were spun of the hydrocarbon barb

  and hooked our hands and carried our shopping so conveniently
  for decades and minutes
    now blow listless across the reticent tarmac
    through streets of naïve cement, and down

    down into netherworld gutter grills and sewage river mouths.

Laying thick the plaque and lint
of tomorrow's impossible forever floss,
the sediment of our invented flesh confetti
scleroses in the lining of life's improvised plumbing.

How we heave and marvel at the great hubristic fatbergs
of sloppy pop and engorged engineering. Heave
and marvel at subterranean monuments to failed rebellion,
failed catharsis, failed purgation,
as inadvertent plastic statues sink like Atlantis
under the collapsing gravity of their own production.
Statues that masquerade 

as progress on the goldfish treadmill of ideas and impulsive half-imagination.
We the top feeders. We the litterers,
trying to improve upon the ages of stone and bronze.

And so to the hard mistakes we hold within us:
these immortal particles of wishful thinking,
clogging the free-willed bifurcations of our collective vasculature.
These ubiquitous, crystalline shards

of the Snow Queen's black molding mirror,

that cling to our lung, sporulating wildly,

and whose warped reflections,

make even the loveliest landscapes look like boiled spinach.

And the self-professed heroes of our generation choose 

the microscopic spectacle of clandestine war

and the fleeting gore of a glorious broken-nosed fist fight

that bleeds onto the world like boiling amber.
While terraced batteries of clucking neighbours,
sit in concertinas of chaste little English castles, crumbling
like sand under the risk of precarious capital, or imploding

in the vacuum of absent community, amid circular pecking orders and
the auspices of opportunistic ring leaders,
that parasitose from the pointed comfort of pyramid peaks.

We half-live, with the rippling pectoral threat of the long arm
and the droning remote controlled little blue men,
who fast-track the intoxicated visionaries to the dumpster
and work to force the exploding seeds of searing truth back into their boxes,
containing the madness that rises to the occasion,
when the only way we may make our mark on the world,
is to make scars of ourselves and reject
the endless plugs and sockets and the babbling rubber voices
between our ears, in our heads, planted there by lifeless buds.
Anything but drip-dry-compliance.

With the dust of dirty centuries
still thick in the air, we choke newly
on the opaque decadence of Teflon and Gore-Tex;
juvenile and mythic protectors against earth,
water, wind and fire. We choke
on the ethereal insolvents of perfluorotributylamine
and sulphur hexafluoride, clear as an injury,
and wait for a new hero to arrive with a mop and bucket.
Wait for the angels or the demons to arrive and take us away.
Instead, only the reassuring dead end of mortality
and no conclusion. Not even a full stop.
Not even an altar at which to scream.

And then the plughole says to me
"when all walls are mirrors, the world takes on a kaleidoscopic shape"