It is written that Our Lord spent the night in a garden
Praying
Pleading for life
Asking God the Father to find some other way;
‘Take this cup’ he said.
It is also written that Our Lord gathered with his friends
In an upper room
To eat
Drink
And share life;
‘Take this cup’ he said.
The family of a man who starved to death four months after his benefits were cut off has called on the government to reform the way it treats people with mental health problems when it assesses their eligibility for benefits.
Mark Wood, 44, who had a number of complex mental health conditions, died at his home last August, months after an Atos fitness-for-work assessment found him fit for work. This assessment triggered a decision by the jobcentre to stop his sickness benefits, leaving him just £40 a week to live on. His housing benefits were stopped at around the same time.
United Kingdom, 2014
.
He works in a shop in order to spend money
In another shops.
.
Some weeks
After the rent is paid
And the meter’s appetite sated
He buys a lottery ticket
(Because you never know.)
.
Yesterday someone starved to death
Four months after ATOS
Pinched tight the withered umbilical.
.
Nanny state
No more.
.
And I can no longer escape the impression
That it is not the money that matters –
(It is not as though it will ever be enough.)
Rather it is the hole it makes
In everything.
Last ferry leaving
I used to laugh at the Holy Hooverers
Those for whom God is an
Escape pod
From this sinful slough we live in
Called Earth.
But why would you ever want to leave the light
Through spring leaves;
The translucent skin that barely contains
What babies will be;
The gentle rain falling,
Falling?
But days like today will force a revelation;
I could do with a distant angel trump
If he will have me,
I am rapture-ready
I would wait
By some crystaled sea
For the last ferry
Leaving
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about a woman in hospital that I visited. I was thinking about her recently, and reworked some of my words into a poem- as part of my on going ‘protest poetry’ project. This poem still has more of a narrative quality but here it is.
Squares
The ward squeaks disapproval at my
polluting presence
The hospital is brand new.
There she is.
After 40 years of patience.
Something went wrong when her husband died.
She was swallowed whole by the grief of it;
Captured in a concrete cocoon.
She was the recipient of all the best psychiatric science;
drugs greyed out her vision;
electric shocks blew holes in her memories.
They even tried psycho surgery in a futile attempt
to scrape grief from her brain
with a scalpel.
And here she remains – toothless, but given to scratching.
Occasionally abusive, but with sense of humour
largely intact.
They say she has behaviour problems, that she is manipulative.
Who wouldn’t be?
She was once a worker, a wife, a mother.
She wore a white cotton dress to picnic once
She loved to dance
Today we meet to stitch bureaucratic blankets for her next bed.
I clear my throat and speak out care-clichés
whilst people in a hurry to look busy
shuffle paper and steal glances at the time passing.
She looks up at the crisp suspended ceiling and cackles.
I hate those bloody
squares.
Everything is so square in here.
Put me outside next to the hedge.
Just put me
outside.
I follow her gaze to the brown beech hedge.
Out through the square window.
Last year’s dry leaves still rattle on close cropped branches.
And I want to wheel her out there
sit her under the winter sky
wind waving her long grey hair in a curve of protest
against all those bloody awful
squares.
Activist, interrupted
.
I am caged up by comfort
Degraded by constant distraction
Drowned by this deluge of information
that leaves me knowing nothing
.
Once my world was monochromed
In the dark lay corporation, empire, profit
Freedom, justice, peace – they danced in the light
And though the duality was naïve
I knew my enemy
.
When did I sign the armistice?
Was it the career?
The mortgage?
Either way I am defeated
Wheezing still from old mustard gas
.
But tonight
By the light of hooded flashlights
There will be a small Revolutions
North wind
Weather sun shines or snow falls
Sometimes the old house lies cold
Containing a kind of chill that three pullovers
Cannot keep at bay
It seems impervious to
Obvious external influence
Mercurial
Like me
But both of us are vulnerable
To the direction
Of the wind
Things have been a bit slow here recently- this is mostly because I have been doing a lot of work editing poetry for the up and coming Proost Poetry Collection. I am really excited about this project now- after huge amounts of work it is finally coming together.
One of the things I have been doing is writing chapter introductions. By way of a teaser here is one of them;
Imagine one of those wet-into-wet Chinese landscape paintings in which
a flower holds your gaze to the foreground,
whilst line after line of mountains
climb and bleed into the distance.
It seems like there will always another ridge line,
another high corrie to cross.
I walk into the rain and the mist
Forced to trust that
there will be other flowers
in places beyond.
There was a time when everything felt permanent, or so we are told. Communities were solidly built around stratified social class structures. People began work at the age of 14 and spent their lives in the service of one employer; the chances are that this was where your parents also worked. Whole towns were organised around the shift patterns at mills/shipyards/mines. We worked together, then drank together afterwards. On Sundays we went to church together.
This was no utopia; there were always those for whom this kind of life felt like a kind of prison. They longed for adventure on the high seas, the promise of the New World. They felt thirst for distant spice filled forests, for tropical islands lapped by warm green waters, for feasting on strange beasts around a pioneer fireside and above all for freedom. Freedom from the tired old ways of doing things, freedom from old obligations and paradigms, freedom from the drab dull monochrome lives lived by their parents. Freedom from things that always remained the same and from the kind of religion that insisted that was how things should be.
Should I stay, or should I go? Perhaps we humans always have to make this decision. The going and the staying are not necessarily geographical concepts. Do we stay with what we know, or do we dare to imagine something new?
As well as putting up the stone buildings that anchor us to place, our faith can also be a mode of travel. Our history is littered with people who were convinced that God was telling them to go somewhere, to do something. These people have acheived amazing things.
I heard a story once that really helped me to understand the flowering of faith in different parts of our history. Revivals hit us from time to time, usually associated with people who are inspired to go to new places and dream of better things. These revivals can be like an erupting volcano, spewing out molten rock that flows out into the cracks and crevices of the landscape. Nothing can stand in its way.
After a while, the flow cools on the outside but it remains hot and plastic within, still moving slowly. However, eventually what is hot cools and solidifies. It can no longer move, but becomes solid rock.
It is from this rock that we build our Church, our religion.
The truth is, we need both those who go, and those who stay. The rocks that form the walls of the old cathedrals are beautiful.
But the mountains are calling me again…
A wee poem I have been working on following a trip to Islay. Uncharacteristically optimistic and upbeat by my usual standards I thought… call it an antidote to a really crap day.
.
The horizon rises rust and golden
There is mild steel in the sky
But the curl of the sea still smiles at me
This light falls kind upon the eye
.
A cold north wind unfurls these coat-flags
Slapping like a laugh at the side of your face
Peat smoke clouds my watered eye
Our ship lies soft in harbour embrace
Angry
He stood in the door of the temple
And saw red
.
The beautiful ones
Stressed up like sharks
Creases sharp enough to cut
Hunkered down over their spreadsheet scriptures
Their holy bottom line
.
These beautiful creatures
Who can never have enough
Who are blind, but for the glint of golden things
Their altars slickened with the substitutionary sacrifice
Of the poor
.
Tear a rib from me Father
Make them anew
Turn over their chemical tables
Snap the twisted strings of their DNA
.
My blood boils
bright
red
There are parts of the UK that operate like some kind of holding tank for radioactive waste. Except that the waste is made up of people.
Some would call these people skyvers, wasters, people who live on the edge of criminality and addiction. They are the bastards of the welfare state; half lives created out of the fissive heat of market led capitalism. They are gathered together where the housing is cheapest, closest together. Even when new, it is housing no one wants to live in.
And because it is irradiated, those who live in these places become defined by it, cursed by it, captured within it.
What to do?
This has been the subject of study in sociology for decades- ever since the slums were replaced by high rise flats, which in turn were torn down and replaced by housing association faux-villages with their ragged green bits and broken picket fences.
The problem is not welfare even though there are problems with welfare.
The problem is not worklessness even though work is next to impossible to find if you are irradiated.
The problem is lack of hope.
The problem is caused by abandonment, by casting outside, by removing worth, by categorising as ‘other’, ‘less than’. By the death of dreams.
Today the Chancellor announced cuts of £25 Billion to welfare budgets and I want to scream out loud with anger at it all.
But who knows what to do with the radioactive waste? It is too expensive to clean.
I turn to writing as this is the only way I know how to scream. Here is another one of the poems that I am calling ‘protest poems’.
Cowboys and Indians
The wagons circled in that wild place
Under the kitchen table
Brambled by spiders’ webs
Stalked by wrinkled peas
He always wanted to be a pioneer
To ride the range, and
Eat beans beneath the wandering star
But no-one ever leaves this place
His cowboy became Red Indian
His range a reservation
In the streets below roam no buffalo
The distant drums
Lie silent
this fragile tent 