Political Sickness

This is a satirical ridicule played out by hocus-pocus jokers, proletariat pricks,
who have their eyes on the honey pot and hands on their dicks.
Cutting support for the paupers and desolate fools
who should have just behaved themselves and "tried harder at school".

The retrogrades and renegades are fighting: tucked up in bed
or sat fiercely with their hands held firmly on their heads.
Dumfounded, desperate and belittled by this constant source -
suffering a degenerative standard of living - dished out by the Conservatives, of course.

So we're baffled... numbed...
and pretty soon (with these cuts) the lowest of the low, doing their sums,
discover their worth pittance to this country. And to top it all,
now a third child won't be a thing of joy at all,
so baby making is stalled.

Government, take a bow: for destroying the simple things we hope for -
comfy homes, a loving family, a hot meal a day and knowing we're safe behind a locked door.
Take a bow: for corruption and lining the silky pockets of your velvet suited friends
and comrades in power - to this greed and monetary gluttony, sadly I see no end.
Take a bow: for the neglect you seem intent on inflicting
on Health, Education and Welfare - pillars of the community we once lived in.
Take a bow: as more and more desperate people struggle with their own reflections,
their decisions and the urge to tip the bottle and succumb to a life of liver infection.

The utopian vision seems a childish whim
as we listen to the Budget cuts that Osborne ushers in.
Dystopian Orwell society drawing ever closer make us question if it's fiction:
a gloomy, muggy future is one artistic depiction
of the results of your catastrophic changes
(as everyday grows ever stranger)
and it leaves us wondering how far we are from real danger.

Posing as a saviour, you hold up your policies
like trophies -
a win we find it hard to share in.
And your proud, wolfish grin at each announcement
makes the common man shudder.
Then you slam us with another and another and another.

Then finally - the pièce de résistance, the card up your sleeve -
you're 'giving back to society'. Surely this will make us pleased:
"we're raising the minimum wage to £9 by 2020" you say (blow me down,
hold the phone, and all the other clichés around)...
I am sure you've made the 2.5 million people low paid workers' day!
(apart from with everything else, they'll actually be worse off year on year. I'm dismayed).

So this election manifesto, the one you acted out in May,
turns out to be as sour grapes as I anticipated on results day.
It turns my stomach and makes me sick
to think about which decent folk gave your their voting tick.
Who put their blind faith in your dirty, grubby hands?
Who carelessly (or naively or ill advisedly) is now stood shaking their heads trying to understand?

I voted Green, but that's not the point,
and I won't be worse off, but that doesn't oil my joints.
Childless, working adults are some of the winners in this policy change test
and the upper, earning elite who got us in this mess (again, they're treated the best).

A society of ambitious loners, in swanky cars, one-bed homes and loveless sex,
of companionless managers, unattached bachelors and successful bachelorettes
or suffering swarms of abandoned, uncared for, forgotten family makers,
children below the poverty line. No room for benefit fakers,
not in this Conservative paradise, where you work for what you're worth
and you get what you're given (or not given), if you've already money in your purse.

Now, before I get into senseless exaggeration, hyperbole for effect you might say,
my pain and concern is very simple really, despite this poetic essay I've typed today.

It's simple because I don't lack the capacity for empathy or sympathy for others;
I climb right in next to those you beat down to understand how and why they suffer.

They're suffering because you're lying to yourself and the whole of the United Kingdom,
because you don't care - you're not charitable, and are lacking in basic wisdom.
You're mugging my neighbour, my friend and strangers in broad daylight
and you want me to keep my mouth shut? To put up? Well, I want a fight,
I want to put this injustice right!
I want to shout with all my might!
I want to drag minds into the light.

So, I sit tucked up, typing poetry in bed,
or sit fiercely with my hands held firmly on my head.
Dumfounded, desperate and belittled by this constant source
of ill thought - prompted by the Conservatives, of course.

Forgetting

Subtly slithering through my fingers
like sand slipping through the fishing net.
Washing you away.

Like a whisper of wind that whips one last time,
in and round and through and up and past.
Whisking you away.

The dripping tap tips the tick tock of the clock
down the drain - small droplets at a time.
Running away with you.

Fading memories gather dust like the photos
and cards folded now and settled somewhere.
Slowly greying you away.

A sharp breath.
A shock.
A stab to the heart and stomach.
Back again; day one.
Desperately not wanting to let you go -
not wanting it to be true, or you, or us,
or me, now, here and you there.

I crash into the surf and cast my net wider and further,
waist deep in stormy waves, grasping at the frothing tormentors.

I leap into the air screaming silently - trying to inhale your name
again and again: gasping at the gusts that choke me as I strain.

I tighten my grip on the fittings; twisting and turning, wrenching
with these contentions that mock me as they wash away my tears that sting.

Where has the time gone?

Tugging sharply on the binding I lift your image and polish your portrait,
holding it to the sun for a rebirth, a regeneration, that never comes.

Just pain.
A hollow, terrible, shaking loss.
Just the same pain,
yet somehow worse -
now.

Falling away secretly, unseen, unheard, by us all.