I have now performed these two poems at several events and they seem to be picking up both the mood of disability destruction now unleashed in the UK, one helping to highlight this inhuman media manipulated attack on the disabled and the other the human need to awaken our inner world and provide the space and creativity to we need to grow. Not changing is not an option any-more.
It might be one step forward two steps backwards, but with your help it can be one step forward no steps backwards.
Always at poetry events I feel the need to recite at least one poem about the active and outrageous attack on the disabled being carried out here in the Eng Ger Land, started by Blairites, and now championed in gold meddling position, by the apparently Joseph Goebbels inspired Ian Dunkin Smythe, Minister of Big Lie Propaganda.
Yesterday Lemn Sissay dropped into the 'Wicked Words', the first open mic night for 2013 and a special night it was too, with a sparkling array of poets.
Here are my 2 poems. Read and Live!
BLUE
BADGE DENIAL
Blue
Badge
disability-denial,
is now cranked up,
all the way to 11!
But it is no joke!
Will 'you'
all be
not-talking
about
‘the Disappeared'
soon?
“Where have Doris and Arthur gone?”
“Oh I don’t know, they had to be moved because they had a spare bedroom”
“No, I’ve not heard from them since, still, probably for the best eh?!”
The talons of the Government’s ‘joy-through-work’ rhetoric
cut a deep-ploughed furrow.
Layers of our minds lie exposed.
The bed-rock of our morality cracking
under steel-toed echoes of the Nazi-Flag led
social-solution for the ‘unproductive’ and ‘inferior breeds’.
The call to hate repeated through the Media Empire.
……’and the ways to make life impossible for the ‘unproductive’ are so
varied’…..
We, the disabled, are
functionality-tested and emotionally undressed.
Intimately exposed.
The insect object of these powerful
nameless
arbiters
and their bureaucracies;
“all questions will be answered!”
Showered by their computer scripted
‘exclusion tones’.
Scrouted by those non-medical gate-keeping
‘professionals’,
the successors to the railway clerks of the ‘Transports’,
Just ‘filling in the forms’ to move this very different cargo.
Our intimate knowledge of our health and ourselves ignored.
Examined and Re-examined and re-examined
for observation purposes alone,
our inabilities and impairments repeated
a liturgy, a prayer of hope
uttered as much to ourselves, alone,
as to these banks of public and private ‘partnerships’
who wait for us to fall down, to be tripped up,
To be sent back to the end of the queue, with all benefits cancelled.
We are repeatedly turned-inside
out,
Like the innards of slugs salted to an exploding death,
or like a snail, eye-hooked from its shell for the 100th time
to be told to get back into it,
“stop complaining”
“learn to live a work-justified life …….!”
or else what?
The Pall of death of our lives is hanging
over all of us disabled; right now!
............we can smell the pyre and hear its muffling approach..... …
bushfires …………………………of the darkening night of discrimination.
For the
Government’s ‘Scrounger War-Mongerers’
peddling their pre-set health-scam re-justifications,
people like myself with M.E
are some of the first to fall-foul,
are the easy target to out-run and smother,
down-graded to lesser and lesser persons
in their pursuit of ‘Their’ defined ‘Equality’.
We,
the victims of discrimination, have the right to define equality; Not them!
“All will be rounded up and tested for fitness!”
That is the order,
that is what is being done now
in this En ger land.
all will be placed into the public’s redefined
and media created
money-saving work-shy group!
I can feel the station platform under our feet
hear the clank of a steam engine as it stands waiting for our departure,
today’s plain-clothed troops
in their anonymous business-centre,
making it all seem ordered and unthreatening
to those that by stand.
The orders have been issued
only no-one can ever trace the words to the leaders,
their smiles denying that they can be seen as deliberately cruel,
merely rational
in these times of “hard economic……………..
choices.”
“pursuing justice for the tax payer”
for you and you and you.
Waging a war on the redefined and growing ‘undeserving’.
No command for the ‘Final Solution’ was ever recoded,
Just fulfilling the ‘Will of the People’, it seemed.
….and some will be declared ‘the worthy’
and can have charity done to them,
by corporate sponsors, or supermarkets of choice,
so you
can choose
to whom
you prefer…..
to give……………
if you
like.
Charities queuing up to help to appease.
….and some may be pulled from this war-carnage of envy and spite
but what of us others,……………………………………………….
what of us others………………………..
what of us?
***
Birds in Your Heart
Have the birds
of your heart
deserted you,
gone away and left you?
Have the songs of your heart been silenced?
Do not fear.
If asked
they will return; These
heart birds need
only to be asked.
Create a space;
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Call the birds to the aching
and one day they will return to you,
and sing in the morning
and through the day,
and at night,
and even at times,
Call the sun,
the moon,
and the stars;
To shine
for you.
Jonathan Eyre
September 2012