Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Tuesday Poem: Lament of a couch revolutionary

You are the new dangerous class, it is said.
Bah, you are whining pups
sucking on the paps of Mother Consumer.
You have the vision of a myopic meerkat,
balls of a gelded goat, solidarity of a cess pit.

‘Occupy!’ you cry. Que?
If that’s your mantra, you are truly clueless.
Where is your Manifesto,
your strategy for the long march,
your handbook of hand-to-hand?

Where are your precariat peons, your shirtless,
your barefoot, your les misérables?
Making shirts and shoes in sweat shops,
planting Monsanto’s seedless plants,
paying the mortgage, that’s where.

You picket buildings, but fail to spike the spokes
of those who peddle in your penury –
the poverty-trap profiteers,
the political-party pocket-liners,
the income-gap insouciants,
the bloated banksters and flash boys,
the obscene salary-packaged CEOs.

So, mobilise your brigades of bloggers,

your troops of tweeters, your para-hackers,
your financial system saboteurs.

Storm the trust funds and slush funds

of the feckless, taxless, cartel carpetbaggers
and their coat-tailers and gravy-boaters.
Siphon their vaults, hack their accounts,
unemploy them, evacuate their credit cards,
benefact their bonuses, perforate their perks,
axe their automatic cost-of-living adjusted,
non performance-related pay rises.

Sentence them to twenty year’s detention

in a slum landlord rental

doing crew work (plus two other jobs)

on a zero hours contract

all for the minimum pittance.

It’s time to sound the clarion,
beat your brass razoo cymbals,
exact your pound of carrion!





This poem is from my just released new collection, Felt intensity (Submarine poetry).



Felt intensity is being launched by Dinah Hawken at the New Zealand Poetry Society's Conference on Sunday 15 November (details are on the immediate past post).

Visit Tuesday Poem for more great poetry. This week features the poem That girl, by Heidi North-Bailey from her first collection Possibility of flight, which is being launched at the same time as Felt intensity.

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