Wendy Young
The 51st State of the DLA Poetician
Three grey stooges assessing my case
Cross examining like Soul assassins
My ‘claim’ for cancer and a great big op
Two years before
How elementary there’s Dr Watson
And a solicitor and a mister
Whose names rhyme and whose paradigm is cock!
Fuck me! I’m in the dock: questions like
‘by this time could you cook say an omelette and some peas’
No Dr Watson I didn’t really eat!
‘Was the friend you had staying just for reassurance’
Well Yes! Mister Cock
‘so he didn’t help you in the bath’
I couldn’t get in it!
‘do you have a hand rail?’
No I don’t Solicitor ..OH NO I failed the crucial tick
The trick of these inhuman assessors
Belittling me because
I’m not like them ‘cause
My road wasn’t theirs, straight and up the M1
I’ve had A roads and B roads
Wine-dy lanes and slippery slopes
Inn-clines and declines, my hopes
Dashed ‘cause
I’m not like them
My path is scattered with trying and flying and dying
What with this humiliation and Actors Centre rejection - I am a failure
The devil works for RADA
Brother can you spare a dime?
Brother can you spare a rail?
The tears start to fall
I’m embarrassed with it all
Telling of my ablutions
I plead it’s more than ticking boxes and
I’m looking at the man in the middle
Who tells me they’re not here to give me this
or give me that
I say just give me what I need
To lead a normal life!
And leave before my dignity is tick boxed to D HELL A!
In the corridor my humour’s saved by a man with a knobbly stick embedded with two different coloured eyes, shaking it at the whole establishment…like a shaman, a Druid on Acid – he’s a good he’s a good he’s Ebenezer Good body who flails and rails and he’s still at it on the street…he’s angry they made me cry… But as I wander around the city of hypocrisy trying to find my bus the anger kicks in and I’m...
Swing Low Judas Iscariot
Comin’ for to carry us off
The pendulum swinging above us
Has come to chop off our heads
To make us go
It’s scalped us slow
Sliced at our necks
Swung us high
Swung us low
Jargon junta munchers
(Here they come the jet set munchers)
Waft Business diplomas
Degrees coming out of their suits
More managers than doctors
Meeting after meeting
Discuss over coffee aromas
Our lowly livelihoods
Decapitate our frontlines
Put us into a pyramid
On a PowerPoint chart
Boxed and accounted, neat and smart
No power
No point
Not even a one in 10
We are percentages
0.67 surplus to requirement in fact
I’m one of 6.66
In a sub paragraph
Of an acromyn collective
Is this how a thrithjungar of the West Thryding/wapantake should be treated?
If Remploy are employed no more
What the hell chance have we for
Survival of the death knell of the NHS
Swelled by greed and selfishness
20,000 soldiers aren’t wanted - what hope have we?
How low can you go?
Tick Boxing
The new sport
that keeps me ticking
for the system
and doing my head in
tick for this
tick for that
Tick for my sanity
Tick for my gravity
Tick this box if you’re mad
Tick this box if you’re sad
Tick this box if you’re bad
Well I’m ticking for the whole of humanity
To blow you up
Ticking an explosives box for you
tick tick tick tick boom!
From down below the Miners
Grew into a brotherhood
Formed a Union, strong as blood
Health and Safety was secured
Leaders got them better pay
They watched each other’s backs because
‘you had to or you could be injured,
or even die in an incident’
A camaraderie that’s been blown
By governmental policy
Like the coal dust far beyond
The cleanliness of modernity
‘you learnt to take cover when you felt a little soot
falling like talcum powder, signaling imminent collapse’
From down below the lift cage raised Miners into light
Like escapees tunnelled from capture
But the afters shift took them into
Midnight blue sky
Dotted with stars
From down below where no toilets were
They ‘did it’ where they could
Found a private place to squat and
‘you bare arsed ‘n’ got on wi’ it
‘n’ buried it, and guess you’d call it
toileting down t’pit’
Some did it on a shovel and threw it on a conveyor
Ate their snap and drank their liquids
Now that sounds like Hecate’s lair
So high metal walls now divide
A community that once was there
True Blues are triumphant
The common herd are done
Reverted to the olden days
Squeezed out like comedones
Stamped out like worms of the earth
Pawns in a political mission
Spurned into oblivion
As if no life was lived there
Just stories to pass down
By faithful descendants
Or hangers on to
Our past industrialisation
About people who strived, lived and loved
(As much as was possible in a severed world)
Gardened and dug
(Well it was like a drug - a Face Worker just couldn’t stop!)
Made the most of the fresh air
Before re-entry in the Underworld
From beery nights to early shift hango’ers
Good night with the ‘Turn’
In the Working Men’s Club
Gone with the hub
Of life that built
A society
And fascination of kids
Like us
O’er coal wounds ground
In the skin of their backs
A result of particles
Of coal dust trapped
Under the skin
All the older miners had
A visible reminder
Of a dangerous occupation
Her granddads and my granddad
Most father’s and mine
Backs gouged inimitably with the familiar pit
Blue Scars
[Italics are from interviews on internet with ex-miners]
thistles stretch their prickly arms afar
Wendy Young reviews for Disability Arts Online. She has had a sequence published with Natterjack Press (after reviewing Rite of Passage for DAO and being encouraged by Peter Street) and has also been published in South Bank Poetry. She blogs for DAO and performs quite often (Survivors, Shuffle Festival, Liberty, Together 2012 etc). She also has a page on Creative Future's website. Her most recent collection is The Dream of Somewhere Else (Survivors' Poetry).
Blue Scars
on the faces of miners are sometimes also caused by mine explosions – a terrible reminder of the hard working conditions in the mines
Julie tells me her granddad
Worked on his hands and knees
In the mine ‘not high enough to stand in’
Picks to break the face
From the age of eleven between the coal and his tools
This was the Miner’s drudgery
Julie tells me when her son
Drives her to where she grew up
Next to the pit now levelled
Since the 1980s Strike
She can’t believe that replacing it
Is a Stepford Wife estate
With a high metal wall
And I cynically say
‘To keep the low life out?’
‘They’ve made us into a shanty town and after all that slog
My granddad did for all those years seems to have been for nowt!
It’s like they’ve closed us down!’
And I Mmm and Arghhh
And we’re angry together
‘cause when we grew up
Almost everyone was tethered
And had links to Woolley Mine
And a certain Mr Scargill
I met a woman in Barcelona
A descendant of the original owner
Before Nationalisation
My great grandfather being a farmer
At High House farm - Woolley Edge
I said ‘they may have know each other
Isn’t it strange how times have changed
and now their blood has brought us together?’
thistles stretch their prickly arms afar
Militant Thistles