My free stumbling foot
disturbed your treetop dining
and you took flight,
vivid yellow talons
gripping a glut-plump
summer rat
in best of health if not for
inches of claw
****** through chest

I see that carrion
is not your only meal
as I’d believed,
discounting your size
as faux majesty
by a flamboyant opportunist

But now I see you better
and in proving to pick your battles,
know you more

Emptinesses
framed by inequalities
that sew the disaffection,
throw the disenfranchised into
blues sharp relief,
stark contrasts of
black and white
rich and poor
needful and needless cries

There should be no politicking
or filibustered unkempt bluster
in the emptiness of children’s stomachs,
nor grave injury from
the ignorant knuckles of authority

Hunger of all kinds
in guts and minds
brings pain
and a shame to even voice,
for there shouldn’t be cause
to have to

Hunger has a way of spreading
to hearts and minds
and when hurting enough
will drive change

But not alone

The comfortable,
careful, silent,
the full,
must give time,
use voice,
use currency,
and fight

Glimmers in the hinterlands
as I begin to settle
into reaching my Old Ben days.

So rage reshapes, tempers
and can be passed
to the compassionate and energised youth

Torch will still be borne
and saber swung
but I’ll pay in aches and pains
in coming days
and likely collapse to
sage blue spirit status

My anger slowly feels
like an elegant weapon
for a more civilised age
while the streets call
for the bluntness of a blaster

I’ve mastered thinking round and round
and missed chances to parry,
but my force will be added
to the great wave of change

This empire is dead

Sometimes words fall out
vehement, blood high,
incendiary,
meat thought chained
like sausage link
or metal hard train cars
yanked by emphatic engines

Other times the pool swirls
and breezes blow
oppositional
and as lungs slow labour
thoughts drift and slip from place
languid fingers trace ripples
that may mean nothing

The mind needs time to breathe
and holler equally
so we can feed and be fed

Exhausted
kneeling so grit is driven deep
and the sneer and shove
of those robed in a fake love
harries

The smug, paid for fists
of sanctioned thuggery
inflict blows that go beyond
contusion and haematoma
deep into a world soul,
and scar

Solutions are there
if we bring a whetstone
to the keen edge of care
and weaponise kindness

Because something that has
been a mess for generation upon generation
can’t be ignored to fester more

It is time to exercise rights
and excise

If you did, then you would
but you don’t, so you won’t,

to pretend otherwise
makes an *** out of you
and a corpse out of me

Let’s think
of the sunk cost fallacy
whereby
the sweat, tears and cash
you’ve ****** into your endeavours
means you never let go
of your burning ambition
so you beg borrow steal
to stave off the immutable truth
that you’re wrong

Then let’s think
that instead of a business
or crazy high jinks
you invested in the sense that
some humans outrank others
at birth
and hidden behind the privilege
of that thought you ignored
what was often in front of your face
or at your work place
or fatally jogging through your neighbourhood
til it shone straight in your eyes

and your beg steal borrowing
does nothing
because lies and filthy ideologies
can’t stand the light of day
so grasp as you will at
the pictures and voices of shills
who defend the grotesque
and try to mess up a people,
a nation,
with fat cat, fat handed,
fat tongued oppression
your fingers *****, but empty

The lesson:

it’s ok to be wrong

it’s ok to draw lines
under ugly pasts
so futures can be brighter,
you can apologise,
learn
and make right