The greasy oil barons and the greedy gas companies
making dirty electricity that’s priced beyond reach.
Like a sucking leech on the poor: they drain them
of their last coins to maintain hidden pots of gold,
and like beady eyed predators they watch and grin
then spend their ill gained lolly on another new sin.
Startled by swiftness of the grievous downturn,
he stood looking at his terraced house, once warm,
once welcoming and in his hands were bulging bags,
and his children playing their games on tech screens.
Weary from work he held the bag from the Foodbank,
and felt again the creaking of a body underfed and
——-
prayed the government would not abandon them.
——-
Entering the cold hall, no cooking smells to warm him,
his children already huddled in their coats and blankets,
watching their hour of the tele, all computers traded
for cash to pay dark electricity for a moments necessity
and his wife gone to hospital for a long awaited treatment
her beautiful body broken by the corruption of cancer.
——
Bubbling beans filled the damp smelling house with joy
as the children ran to collect clean plates and cutlery
tummies rumbling with juices racing to collect goodness,
and send it tumbling around their cold wasting bodies,
He set out their meals of bread and beans and craved
his own stomach shrunk by the steely, power grabbers.
——–
Sitting together in the dimness of street lamp lit room,
he held her frail hands in his own brick roughened,
and together they calculated what was left while
a smart metre tricked them and became a liability,
she besought him to eat bread and beans to be able
to continue to have the means to avoid their liquidity.
The knives are out and the dissection started,
Each knowing and set their direction signalled..
Tax cuts or higher tax to quell the over wealthy
as they lean in and offer or finger their purses.
Each one turning the tory vice on their victims:
a family, school children, refugees and workers,
the struggling overwhelmed by rising prices and
now the neglected climate heats oppresses so.
—–
Meddlesome politicians, manipulating tories,
baking the populace while they turn their backs,
letting strings be pulled by influencing hacks, who
push the line that all is fine when many will die,
because experts are marginalised and lies
carpet the halls where ignorance is encouraged
as long as the money is kept going into their off
shore accounts and the founts of wisdom dry up.
——-
They laugh at us while babies and children die,
and the power of a few is consider wisdom,
and its wielded incoherently, and the many
have yet to ‘awaken the dawn’ and become
a force for change and a flaming torch for
justice, equality, the common good and a
wonderful welcome for wanderers on the shore.
——
They come to our shores desperate, fleeing
terrible things only to be sent away to an
evil regime that rules by terror and so they
travel worn, war torn, cry in their pillows
where there are no rights. but another
Tory ally who sheds blood, greedily rakes
in the cash and buys shameful sorrows.
——
Stand up, do not fear for we are of saving
the lives and opposing those who shackles
the prisoner rather than freeing them from
a despot’s chains. who blinds the seeing
with blatant untruths and deafens the hearing
with insistent noise, with words without meaning,
sounds that continually violate hoping we will
grow numb, turn away and crave inaction.
He looked into his wallet and then into the face of his children.
Oliver looked out from their faces, thinned and paled by hunger,
Their sad eyes looked at under woolly hats and coat covered arm hugs.
—
His eyes watered and his empty belly grumbled as he opened
the last dull can of beans, cut the crust of curling bread into two,
watched the food disappear into hungry mouths opened like nesting chicks.
Not far away, plates were full with succulent salmon, rare steak,
beef, chicken vegetables, fried potatoes and mashed spuds, followed
by golden custard, french named cakes, apple pies and salted chocolate ices.
—-
Somewhere a mother scraped small crumbs from her sons bowl, sucking
them from the poor plastic spoon. In her head imagining the eggs tomorrow,
when the reduced Universal credit arrived, a meal, heat, then rancid bin search.
Not far away, a kitchen door ajar, while out of date food is thrown away,
in the waste; while far away, the icy hearted are having a party at number 10,
half eaten rich food slipped in a bin. They take from the poor to give to the rich.
—-
Clean, loved children crying themselves to sleep, hunger gnawing at their vitals,
holding onto the hope for tomorrow they’d be in heaven, food galore at the FoodBank,
bringing home food in plenty to be eked slowly to cover the schoolless, foodless weeks.
Miles away lives a callous rich man who can choose to give them enough or kill
them slowly by starvation and a rich woman minister who chooses to treat them as
alien pariahs, ignores the council of the wise, ignores deadly hunger, abuse and trafficking.
—–
Truth may come, but already the lies hold sway, the government culled the media.
So, how will the hungry children have their voices heard? The starving, the weakened
the oppressed, hidden from sight, are crying out, lost in the lies trumpeted out by Tory press.
======
Yes, minister, the numbers in poverty are atrocious
but we are doing what we can, watch us.
We’ve paid the rich and they are wealthy too.
Tis tricky, the trickle down effect?
‘It won’t.’ A lie from long ago.
The poor are always with us – but they
don’t
donate
to
our
party.