New Year, new stylings, old enemies

The third of my first three forays into the world of rap lyrics. The subject matter is one I like to explore, and it's recorded here.

Social surgery

I watched a John Cooper Clarke documentary,
it filled me with something incendiary,
an urge to rip the piss with wit and verbosity,
fight back with words at any animosity
that comes my way from fascists, trolls and haters,
Hitler-lickers and keyboard-masturbators,
it rolls off me like I’ve got a duck’s back,
armoured against it like a jacket of flak.

I was fifteen, and watching the news,
hippies being beaten like Kristallnacht and Jews,
I asked ‘Why? They’re just travelling and staying
at Stonehenge for a summer solstice lay-in,’
I was told ‘They’re not meant to be there’
but that’s no fucking answer, doesn’t anybody care,
now I know it as the Beanfield Battle
and the moment that I realised we’re treated just like cattle.

So Thatcher’s ghost, you made me what I am,
a thinker and a writer seeing through your money scam,
there’s no justice at the end of a baton,
or stealing from the poor and their benefits to fatten
up the rich, already too wealthy
while the 99% get National Unhealthy,
so tax like Tobin and maximum wage,
no more Tory viral parasite bacteriophage.

They might watch me down their fibreoptic cables,
tagged ‘domestic extremist’ or some other pointless label,
but it’s the business-suits you really need to watch,
they’ve got the same school-tie as your chief-inspector-cops,
Earth-rapists, exploiters and leeches,
seeing their selfish, greedy faces teaches
us dissent, to resist should be the default,
ignore the bread and circuses, don’t let yourself be bought

off by promises of better,
they’ll take all that you are and turn you into debtors,
then blame it on the unemployed and migrants,
keep the questioners down with state-sponsored violence,
and no liberty, so take action whatever,
together we are strong, shelter each other like umbrellas,
from whatever’s rained down by warmongers and bankers
then occupy and cut them out like cankers.

UKRAP-rap

Following on from UKIP-mockery Chaucer-style, here's something a bit more 21st century performed for the first time at Punkmas in the Global Cafe, RISC, Reading just before Christmas, and it's recorded too for your listening pleasure...

UKRAP

UKIP, U’re KRAP, you stink like kippers,
packed in a minibus like dead day-trippers
scared of Bulgaria, the Eurozone, Romania,
purple-blazered xenophobes with Anglo-monomania,
the last idiots dancing to Enoch Powell’s tune,
scratched out on violins in a zombie ballroom,
no rivers of blood, just the trickles of piss
that run down your leg when two races kiss.

Nigel Farage, top of all the bottom-feeders,
leading an asylum-break of Daily Mail believers
and Godfrey Bloom their hate-filled preacher,
swivel-eyed loon like the house-elf Kreacher,
he says all women are sluts and all foreigners are criminal
in his tiny-minded world where intelligence is minimal,
the English Channel’s the National Moat
and anyone brown’s off the last banana-boat.

Racists, misogynists, homophobes and bigots,
you wanna get in government you’re gonna have to rig it,
obsessed with Diana and Bongo-Bongo Land,
you worship Churchill like the Pope with a tissue in your hand,
you say you’re common-sensical not wingnuts full of bile
but I’ve trod in piles of dogshit with more cunning and more guile,
so fuck off with your leaflets and your stupid rosettes
and shuffle off to Dignitas, one-way ticket to the vet.

Listened to with rapped attention

I don't rap, or at least I didn't, but I'm open to trying new things and decided to attempt some light-hearted piratical pre-Yule jollity at an open mic night a few days ago. It seemed to go down well, and a few people asked to read it, so here it is complete with nods to the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Cap'n Jack Sparrow - and you can hear a recording here.

The Hip Hop Company of Privateers

We are the Hip Hop Company of Privateers,
rapscallions with hats and fuse-match beards
rhyming and stealing Spanish galleons,
sailing ‘em away through white-foam stallions,
faster ‘cross the Channel than David Walliams,
we kiss the gunner’s daughters but we never marry ‘em.

Flintlock, stock, and one smoking barrel,
we’ll keel-haul Robin Thicke and Pharrell
press-ganged in Southampton, on the run from Stonehenge,
a crew of dub-loons on the Queen Anne’s Revenge
flying the Jolly Roger McGough,
we welcome all the ladies with our tricorns doffed.

Now you’ve heard of women pirates disguised as guys,
down in the hammock-room a big surprise,
but on this ship our opps are equal,
X-chromosomes run thicker than treacle,
when we make port, when we drop anchor,
your sons will quiver like lily-livered… one, two, three, four…

Scowl and cross-words, monochromatic,
swinging on ropes we’re acrobatic,
we climb your rigging, you jump in the water,
all brown in the trousers like Luke Plank-walker,
the Navy chased us from Trinidad to Thailand,
but we’d buried all our treasure on a desert island.

Yo-ho-home is the place where the rum-cask is,
'a gottle o’ grog’ said the drunken ventriloquist,
Cadizzy rascals in the Bay of Biscay,
smoking sixty Silk Cutlass a day,
some fat, some slim, but all are shady,
give an undead monkey to the voodoo lady.

Never marooned or short of gold,
our timbers are shivered, our course is bold,
we’ve got a magic map, so pay attention,
a cross marks the spot where we hid our pensions –
three paces north and fifty west
but you’ve got to join us to hear the rest.

[Repeat] We are the…

Rooms from my oeuvre

Something I wrote based on one of my mixed media pieces.

Hotel

Taking the penthouse, a three-room suite,
homage to that pickled shark,
once YBA enfant influent,
now can’t-paint-for-shit shock-conceptuality,
all dead butterflies and money.

Over in one wing,
crumpled biro sketch for a green man
wrought in silver fretwork,
now etched and hammered, chained
and put up for sale.

Brushed to one side,
an empty blister-pack of brain-pills,
each 20 milligrams
a bitter bite of sweet chemistry,
I'm such a neuromantic.

Tiger balm and beaded lizard
whisper nothings through wood-thin walls,
varnished with intent –
grinning, a brass-balled imp
sits sly on his stack of timber.

Paper-cut bamboo forest,
trees hold onto chainsaw blades,
while triplet queens lie supine
under a celestial arch,
contemplating their paradox.

Faded letters speak of old contests
and hints of science,
print-block songbird
calls the ink down from her serinette.

Fragments of ammonites,
pebbles once shiny and gleaming-wet,
but still interesting in the dry,
unlike childhood holiday gleanings.

Bar-room in miniature
touts ‘beer’ above its rug of ribbons –
next door, ransom-note wallpaper
proclaims the anguish and ego
of the artist.

Of course,
there is a lacuna,
always one empty
among a hundred others,
ghosts of occupants unknown.

This hotel will stay my own.

Marvelling at the mundane

Today, a brief verse about something not normally deemed poem-worthy - gravel and railway sidings...


Of heaps and hoppers

Ballast-mountains aggregate
behind hazy gravel hills,
purpling their way towards the tracks –
unsettled dust
hungry for the hi-vis shovel,
to be held wagon-safe and shunted
chute-slid to cluster under creosoted oak
and snaking steel
with its clatter-rumble
a friendly helm of sound.