K.O.G.

Scars and wounds,
black n blue.
Screaming from the worries I don’t choose.
In the headlines, on the news.
I’m a profile
to defuse.
My survival
is no use.
I’m just a commodity
in their view.
You know the reality,
you know the truth,
a phantom enemy
they will assume.
Chains on hands,
chains on minds.
Suppressed, oppressed, institutionalised.
Elements colide,
it’s borderline.
Young ones were taken from mothers and tribes.
Lost identity,
warped reality,
mirages and fables
of deadly voyages.
The souls of men
judged by colour.
I’m here to tell you there’s hope in the future.


Dizraeli.

By a muddy river, in a murky town,
I sit in sirens,
seabirds circle round.
I see a gull upon the rooftop without wings,
I watch it edging to the edge in mad winds,
it’s a mirror for within
in a new chapter,
in a whipping storm,
a cyclone of food wrappers,
a kid is born.
Nah it’s a trace of green,
nah it’s a taste of something strange & sweet.
It doesn’t heal but it makes some peace,
puts a smile on the face of freaks
and it releases from the closet those afraid to breathe
and now we’re wading in an army up against the stream,
‘cos we have seen that there is insufficient day to dream.
One minute Sonny’s deep up in the make-believe,
next minute Mummy’s kneeling at his grave to grieve.
Too cruel.
We are cruel and we’re angels.
We kill life and give life with a movement of the arms,
chase dragons in the crucible of Saint Paul’s,
topple statues in a revolutionary march,
by the Muddy river,
then we chuck him in.
My kids’ll not grow up looking up at him.
My kids’ll not grow up in the ways I did,
watching white mates morphing into racist pricks,
never never,
the muddy river raising up.
I raise a rhythm and a bass-line in praise of us,
I raise my kids in a toast to the courageous ones,
who kill the devil with a hundred million paper cuts,
singing a change’ll come.
In the course of all this craziness
I see my mates parade like they were made for this.
And they grew up facing shit that I never faced.
They’re still turning up the temperature for better days,
still turning up and tracing out the blueprints
for new ways and new architecture,
new movements for new stages.
And you could celebrate the dawn
instead of panicking and Sellotaping doors shut,
instead of gazing gormless
at the gold framed stories of the (slave-made) empire that decorate your walls.
We celebrate the dawn,
we break them ornaments,
we work making structures that we never made before.
I see my children standing with us at this river
so I’ll work until the water comes and elevates us all.