Imagine This Scenario (Part One)

First published at 18:59 UTC on March 4th, 2021.

Imagine this scenario. For centuries, millennia,
your ancestors have ploughed the fields of Britain, milking many a
moocow, pulling many a lever, scrabbling at many a coalface,
been frogmarched off with bayonet, rifle, sword, to stop the whole place
from caving in, as they were told by those who owned the silos,
who fattened up the empires, whipped the natives, shot the rhinos.

Your ancestors were Irish slaves, Welsh miners, English shepherds,
they laid the pipes, they pumped the sewage, dug the roads, were peppered
with German bullets, choked on mustard gas, built ships and lorries,
stoked engines, mixed cement, fought off a million mortal worries,
fought typhoid, smallpox, polio, Napoleonic trouble,
kept calm and carried on while Hitler smashed their homes to rubble.

Your father drives a minicab. Your mother feeds machinery.
Twenty-storey tower blocks make up the local scenery.
You’re still a baby when the marriage dies of green-complexioned health,
so no-one teaches you to swim or cycle or protect yourself.
No master shows you how to be a man and grab reality
by the balls. He’s busy watering his popularity.

You grow up in a ghetto where a third of all your neighbours
descend from those who lent this land millennia of labours,
and in those dreamy years after the darts of death had withered,
before the towers crumble and the planet starts to shiver,
your streets become infected by a viral form of preacher
proclaiming that their foreign dogma is your country’s future.
For thirty years, while Islamists grow smug on housing benefit,
no-one notices that your attention has a deficit.

The rest of your community’s a round hole to your square peg
and all your creativity just lies there like a spare leg,
you’re not turned on by television, drum and bass or football,
and nobody is going to let you set foot in a good school,
so there you sit with pigeon-brains concocting plans to hurt you
and parrot lines of French ’cause there’s no other choice but Urdu,
where using proper English means you think you’re some flamboyant king
and means that you’re a poof, a queer, a raasclaat batty-boy and ting,
a pushti pezevenk, a shishna-sucking gora gandu.
Que devez-vous faire maintenant? There’s not much that you can do.

One night, in a graffiti-smothered pit of social atrophy,
a pack of boys with fewer brain cells than a pickled anchovy
pursue you down the high road swinging poles and pipes and batons.
Their gleaming metal cracks your head. Their rubber sportswear flattens
your face. They swipe your empty wallet and your tatty mobile.
Here launches your revolt against the virtue of the docile,
as further down the road you run, just focused on surviving,
bleeding on the windscreens of grown men who keep on driving.

Your bookish tendencies propel you into university
where pyramids of dark politically-correct perversity
entomb Kureishi, Wordsworth, Austen, Ishiguro, Chaucer,
where almost everyone’s a liberal-leftist law enforcer
from some pristine Landrover-clogged boulangerie-crammed village,
some prissy solicitor’s sproglet who’s scarcely set eyes on a black or brown visage.
They’re worldly wise authorities on racism, apparently.
Half their conversations are parades of moral vanity.
For three long years you’re yawning at some puffed-up bumfluffed ponce who
says all humanity can live in Ipswich if it wants to.

This doctrine-camp’s a struggle with your deficit disorder but
you scrape a cape, some motto-blotted paper and a mortar-board that
doesn’t fit, then wander in a zigzag back to London where
comparing Laurence Sterne and Salman Rushdie’s a redundant flair.
You stare into a void with no idea of how to find a
career, and tuned to glimpsing glory, all you want’s to bind the
severely-wounded, limping, out-of-action art of poetry
to the powerhouse of electronic music, though it be
as likely that a record-label oligarch would favour
some bitter anti-globalist class-conscious rant-and-raver
who shouts in Sapphic odes, ballades, rondels and Russian sonnets
above a Mockney berk recalling how his best mate vomits
on thirteen pints of piss or a Jafaican bint who prattles
in sanitised opinions just like all the “edgy” cattle
as a publisher would dare to shake a ten-foot bargepole
at verse that’s not the cryptic nothings of a tedious arsehole,
and so you stumble by and buy biographies of Byron by
nibbling on a nabob’s nob, by tightening a tyrant’s tie.
Your top job’s in a workshop, as you see the dreams of youth crushed,
scrubbing mud off scraps of Roman porcelain with a toothbrush.