Thatcher Free Zone

THATCHER- FREE ZONE

Can you hear me Mrs Thatcher,

will you listen to my words?

Cos if you don't go pretty soon

 it's gonna get much worse.

The city streets they're burning,

the youth ain't got no work,

your plastic bullet policies-

you know they just don't work!

And in your nuclear paradise

time doesn't fly, it dies-

I see it in the poverty

and, in the people's eyes.

Well they murdered Prosser

in Winson Green

He let out a few yells-

the shouts of the cops and

the screams of a man must have 

rung round those prison cells.

How can you love justice

if you are so unmoved

at the rights of an ordinary man

being so flagrantly abused.

So I'm lookin' for a Thatcher-free,

thatcher-free zone,

a thatcher-free,

thatcher-free zone.

The old folks they're freezin'

after all that they've seen

while bankers drive around in 

chauffered limousines

So I'm lookin' for a Thatcher-free,

thatcher-free zone,

a thatcher-free,

thatcher-free zone.

RIP MARGARET THATCHER 1927-20013

Margaret Thatcher dies aged 87

Well it will set the chattering classes off as we are regaled with the various paeons to the New World she ushered in.  However my own feelings about Thatcher are somewhat different-I consider her vile government and her pernicious impact to be one of the great disasters for British and European society in the twentieth century.  But I also consider her to have been a lame duck and incompetent politician saved by a momentous concatenation of events mostly reliant on two factors provided by two different very stupid men, both of whom suffered from tremendous hubris allied to an astonishing lack of strategic insight.  The first was Arthur Scargill, an egotistical communist with an agenda so hopelessly out of place that to see him lead the brave miners who so faithfully followed this strutting martinet was heartbreaking.  The other was the gold braided thug General Galtieri who invaded the Malvinas Islands as a means of stoking up his political capital at home which was ebbing as a result of his almost complete political ineptitude.
The result was that the lame duck was transformed into 'The Iron Lady', and a fantastical Catherine The Great type character was manufactured by the Media and the myth was born of the Lady who was not for turning.
The asset stripping of the country's natural wealth and housing stock from public ownership into private hands at knock down prices remains one of the great grand thefts of history.
The death of manufacturing to be replaced with parasitic financial service industries remains a huge social and national disaster whose grim effects continue.
The narrative that transfigured the great socialist objective of equality into a lie about laziness, and the 'ill man of Europe' continues as a myth underpinning greed, selfishness and the chronic cult of the individual at the expense of all else.
The legacy of Thatcher is the mentality of greed and selfish individualism over collective responsibility.
To call it Thatcherism lends it an intellectual coherence it never actually had as a set of ideas based on gut feelings much like a political system founded on the letters page of The Daily Mail.
Yet there is one thing that can be said for Thatcher as she performed in the House surrounded by her yes men-there was no doubt who was wearing the trousers!

Easter Sunday 2002 - Pontins

EASTER SUNDAY 2002 Pontins



The past? It's a frozen, foreign land.
A labyrinth of tourmaline-a dream
of black horses flowing out to sea.

Breaking the chains of memory
that tie us to the static of the land

The past? It is a strange and twisted tongue.
I cannot bend these chords to utter it!
Cannot find the rhythm in the line.

While fools found gold in crystal streams,
I rooted, ankle deep in mud, braying:
Who are you? Why are you here?

The past? That coldly-calculated joke.
Those idiots fell about the place side-splitted,
While I looked for help, for meaning, for a sign.

It was not that I didn’t understand.
It was that I would never understand.
Because... I seemed to be a stranger there.

The past? It is shapeless, blind, mute.
No road maps or strangers passing with news.
The very idea seems cruel!

And is it not cruel, this vile thing
set loose around the houses? This abusive
heart-skewering fear.

Nightsounds are lonely in the vale.
Smoke-rings of obliterated joy.
Oh these losings of familiar things!

These losings of familiar things.
These tales of the three rings.

And the first...shall be:

Of Despair.

Next:

Of Spirit and Healing.

Then:

Of Transformation!

Words for Steph

 

Words for Steph

 

from the Dougans

 

Well Steph, we’re going to miss you not least because you’re just about the best babysitter in the World, and you do it all for a Chicken Korma from Marks’s!  Ben says any other babysitters would just be ‘pants’ and Jack says ‘Stefna’s the best!’

Seriously though we are all sad to see you go but happy for you too.  You have been a good friend and we will miss you.  We all wish you every happiness in the world and we’ll keep in touch through e-mail.  Hopefully too we’ll come and see you next year by which time you will no doubt be talking in a languorous southern drawl and referring to the rest of the population as ‘them damned yankees!’

Meanwhile yippety dang and howdyeedoodee, keep a weather eye out for rustlers and liquored up commanches and watch out for Evil Eye McNeevil one of the wickedest meanest outlaws in the whole South.  And if, while wandering around the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains you should come across a small boy shouting ‘Shane!  Shane!’  Please strike him several times about the head.

Lots of love,

Tony, Ben and Jack.

We never saw her again!

The Kitchen-The Soul of the house!

The problem is not with the World.  The problem is with me-in that I cannot bear it and what it sees as important.
TD.

It's a Popup Pallet Modular Shipping Container Office of the Future : TreeHugger

It's a Popup Pallet Modular Shipping Container Office of the Future : TreeHugger

Those moment's of impending transformation.

BROKEN GLASS

I’m stuffing all the sheets in the machine

When, reaching for the detergent, I strike

A gentle, glancing blow against a glass,

Which topples and then smashes on the floor.

A curse is gently breathed, and then I stoop

To bring some healing back into the day.

Then I slice my thumb on a sharp shard,

And pull back quickly-cursing once again.

Struck then by the nature of this glass-

This new glass of a hundred razor shards;

None could hold a drop of the dark blood

That even now is leaking on the floor.

This glass is nothing like it used to be;

Not vessel, container, chalice or cup.

This glass has embraced chaos with a crash-

A moment of transformation has just passed.

As if a sign’s been written in the sky,

The essence of the moment is revealed-

Just as the glass is falling-does it scream:

‘I did nothing wrong! So why me?’

Or does it smile into the falling day?

Knowing no power on earth can intervene

Beyond the hit and miss.  It sings, ‘I go

                                                   With all my glassness! I say yes to this!’

Ernest Hemingway with substitute phallus.

Happy New Year to all my lovely readers! Success and Peace to you and your loved ones!

If you can see it, Poetry is to be found in the most unlikely of places!