WHEN A TOWER FALLS:

I:

ON THE SEPARATION OF SOULS

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When a society falls, what you notice first is the rubble,
Seen on TV, ghosted buildings give way to dust
Through bomb blast. Through the sudden heat and the haze,

You will see only the print of lost towers, fading with age:
Time’s fragmented, and your first tasted moments
Clash and mix badly with the afterburn and the bitter

Of what could well be your last. Of course, the world has seen
Towers fall through man made event, false god sanctioned,
But we seem to have made no true effort to rebuild or renew

What was lost. What we lack has been leased and sold again
To new builders who continue to falsify all around us
While tapping us still for the cost. We will not see what they

Erect, or decry, as they move to allow rack and ruin.
The shock will still sting us as we wake to forget all that was.
All we will retain is the smoke that seeps from souls

Set to burning. We will forego the hearts we should fight for,
Because of the definitions that stain us when all options
Expire and we comprehend the full loss. Certain men

Sought our death, if not of flesh, then of spirit.
They used the word ‘Immigration.’ They preyed on us
Nazi style. ‘Give us the illusion we like.’

‘Give us the pretend sheen of England.’
And then in two years destroy it,
So that the very word England breeds laughter,

Derision too; tear stung smiles.

Brexit wounds. Brexit burns. Brexit breaks
Golden moments. Now, only wreckage

Will recreate currency. Forget the golden standard,
Or mean. Forget the free flowing market,
We will simply keep paying for all of the things

Once thought free. The NHS. Dignity.
Even a balanced rate of perception,
Fucking ignorant England, your eyes

Have been blinded by mediocrity’s fluency.
Now simple celebrity seals your lack of hunger
For knowledge. You’ve become the ravaged of Weimar,

Awaiting the mad little despot’s dark trains.
For today’s would be rulers loom large,
With their stretched Etonian shadows; Boris Johnson’s

Tiring lust for power making him Martin ‘Bore’man,
Breeds pain. His only interest; dominance, while subterfuge
In all senses rivers through him like sewage chasing itself

Along drains. His game is to charm, but there is no charm,
Just the charmless; false self deprecation until the next
Ill-timed insult resounds. A new Prince Philip perhaps,

With his lack or care of decorum, privilege passing for prowess,
As his speeding bicycle wheels knock us down.
Does Boris secretly drive late at night?
Revving black smoke into darkness, safe in the knowledge
That the near cancerous sky masks his pains? Or perhaps
He’s at home, laughing in faux Lederhosen, as he preens

And poses, moving portly pieces through some dark dictator’s
Sick game? Popularity wins. Its the public seal of permission.
We invest, it seems, gladly in Politics’ slick Ponzi scheme,

Only to lose and lose big, as the holes in our pocket
Are achieved by the stealing of once gilded coin and belief.
Its all in the numbers, they say: ‘We’ll be better off, don’t you worry..

Trust in us, we’ll protect you..its all so very complex,
you see… Afterall, you elect us to choose, and we know
what’s right for the people..’ Who should they approach,

Or condemn you will doubtless be shot in an alley
After being dragged from the street. ‘Oh, Boris’, they say,
‘You do have to like him,’ an affable oaf , whose part lumber

Could hide the jokey goosesteps of yore.
And shall we not mention pigs, having first referenced poultry?
Or the diplomatic dog’s dinner he fashioned

From his time as Foreign Secretary’s messed chores?
Why should we like him? His rise has made a farce out of falling:
You can be held to task then freed quickly. You can be tested

And fail, yet still pass. You can walk down each street
And pretend that you represent everybody.
You can steal Livingstone’s bikes as your notion

And smear every sticky seat with your arse.

Public tit, private shit, I remember the way
You took Uxbridge; like a sweat stained bra,
My home borough became your sagged booby prize:

What you wanted, Bore-is, was the streets of Chelsea
And Kensington only, your home parade, your tight kingdom,
Millionaire frames, and enclosures that only represent cartoon lives.

But you’re not the true despot. Not yet. You’re just our Mussolini.
A tubby twat, talking loudly, enacting the same unholy gestures
And pomp. Keep your hair in distress as Benito covered his baldness,

Make your comic moves, protestations that drag morality’s mass
To the swamp. First we leave, chests thrust out, as you suck yours in,
Billy Cunter, eyeing the thin vines left to you, you snip at the idiotic

Wheat-fields of May; Her helplessness powers you, even if at first
She manouvered, by keeping you close in her cupboard, she thought
Her cabinet might display a successful balance at last, just as politics

Faltered. She would embrace all her critics to show her steadfastness
As sense slowed. But even if you do see the snake you can never
Of course stop it biting. And as you bit her, the swiftly passed poison

Made the Thames’ streams a gorgon, soiled waters surrounding
Everyone’s keep and castle with an acid infused pool or moat.
That infection will spread even if this topicality stumbles,

By the time people read this, Theresa May be replaced,
By you, or Gove, the Bill and Ben of the pisspot,
Planting aniseed in each raindrop or chemical waste within soil;

No outlandish claim feels too false, as neither care
What will happen; all you wish for and dream of
Is the continued power that fuels you and money to flow

Like struck oil. Brexit breeds from this ire,
he politicians’ thick smokescreen. Replacing the London fog,
All of England and Backstop Ireland too’s cloaked by mist.

The people were given a chance that they were fooled
Into making. It was only on realising the extent of the lie,
Judas kissed. For each modern age elects Christs

They believe May just lead them, only to be led past
Golgotha to their own separate place on the Hill.
But these are not carpenters mindful to create

Lasting structure; instead their shade taunts us,
As the contract remains unfulfilled.
We take their place on the cross as they run and hide

All too quickly; keen to quit his commission, where is
David Cameron now; in the cave?
Those fat cheeks will not rise, as Lazarus did, that’s for certain.

No doubt, its a hoodie that he hugs and hides to save face.
He’s the latest example: people follow TV as they once
Followed music. That former joy’s been corrupted

By the fast fellatio of the screen. It goes down on us all
And sucks the spunk from our spirit; by which I mean
The pluck of the thirties, not the seminal stuff; Energy.

The means to resist, and more than that, yea; to question.
Now TV does that for us, more than it ever dared.
What were options before have now run close to dictates.

The Great British Bake off is just a microwave for the soul:
Nothing’s spared. And the soul curdles in heat,
The sweated heat of confusion, whether that is

‘Whither Coalition?’ or,‘Why am I watching this crap?’
We no longer know how to think, let alone what,
That’s the problem, and that’s when all Johnsons’ have us;

Its – analogy fixed – the prick’s trap.
The Hitlers’ too, come to that; or Trump the cunt,
The Korean; the contemporary jesters who replaced true

Commanders and forfeited us all to the joke
That plays with the life and even the times we once valued,
By treating us all as the punchline which will always be

About reaping whatever bitter harvest is sown.
We do not know what to do, and so let them do to us,
The entire thing’s enforced marriage, like those catholic mothers

Of old. Where are they now, as their children lapse,
Like cards falling, and too many Paedophile priests
Run for cover as the protective cassock unfolds?

Something has happened to us, Some fatalistic, dark totem.
A kind of necromancy that Newsnight still blithely attempts
To reclaim. What is the process of change?

When did the sense of disillusion distill us?

To become bored by Brexit after its mess is no aim;
Instead its the state that the corrupt would rule over;
One in which Orwell’s sibling is not about

Shock but love’s death. We grow too tired to care,
Too cynical and too jaded; so they descriminate and act for us
As doomsday winds mark our breath.
Do we blame Thatcher? That witch first introduced the blurred ages.
They were not bright enough to distinguish from the black of night
To my eyes; Instead she raged a dark war of soul scorched

Interference, stripping the actual value from values,
Until pure personal gain was the prize.

People are not as they were.

Walk down any street, you will see it.
Nobody sees anybody. This is pavement road rage
In cheap shoes. Nobody now meets your eye.

All around is suspicion. Live beyond forty and to those
Who are younger you are not even a peripheral sign,
Seal or clue.
We play our awful music on phones

And no longer care who can hear it.
Young men lease their trousers, defying gravity itself
With their balls. Men sit legs apart. There is no courtesy

In a carriage. Talk to a woman at a bus-stop
And the mace and alarm greets your call.
Margaret started this, but we cannot place it all

On her shoulders. It is only when the stones have been
Loosened, that the avalance is allowed. Community died
And most of us along with it. When the front doors were

First locked to our neighbours, true friendliness faltered
And the conversations that came fused with doubt.

When a society falls, it falls in stages.

First standards, then buildings, and morality too,
Amidst dust. Blair showed us that, even before the deceptions.
The socialist dilute was a tearscape that those who fought for us,

Took to their deaths: betrayed trust. Michael Foot. Tony Benn.
Relics, perhaps from this viewpoint. But these were at least
Politicians who epitomised both the state and the crowd,
Free from shame. John Smith, too, if he’d lived, even if he was
More astute, and more sanguine. What a perfect PM he’d have
Fashioned for the once UK, with his name.

But Tony Blair saw the bucks. He literally followed the money,
From Bush wiping his dick on dollars, to the after dinner circuit,
But more; he saw the way it would go: Perfect for the time,

He was Pop star, not just in his part-time past life,
But because, young and handsome, Media soothed courted war.
There would have been a Churcillian air blowing

Through his window and bouffant,
Even if the nodding dog of the TV ads for insurance
Is the only version of bulldog his American friends

Would have led. He was destined to fail, as was Gordon Brown,
In reaction. Heart in his wallet, he kept his personal worth
In the red. No-one could escape the strange mouth,

So they missed the specialness of him.
He would have been a true leader but for a different time
And age, now deceased. Without Blair’s (Bob) Monkhouse

Style sheen, the reality of Brown lost all colour,
And thus a chance to return us to a more insightful day
Was released. The sense of discernment was gone,

Banished by the simple need to keep earning;
What Thatcher started was to turn each fresh year’s
Snow into slush. That is, if snow is a form of renewal

For landscape, the re-writing of white on blotched paper,
Bled into black, soon enough. But Thatcher only wielded
The pen that Rupert Murdoch passed to her,

And now he copies us all in his image:
From the so called God of sky, to newsprint.
We are what we read, or don’t read. What we eat’s not about us.

That’s just their means to control us.
To sugar us all to the brink. Our bodies fail, fat,
As we comfort eat to distract us from death’s patient practise

And the weight of the state’s force fed trust.
Pharmaceutical companies seek our deaths.
Retail wants our children. Politicians want nothing other

Than personal furtherance, shit or bust.
Look at how they resign when they can’t get what they want:
It condems them. Cameron, Milliband, both friends to the pig,

Even Kinnock, who at least tried for something,
And yet such faithless mouths foresake gumption;
That’s what hurts, that’s what palls.

It is only Brexit that’s shown how proper discontent
Truly gathers. It at least lit a fire under the slow barbeque
Of the soul. When Grenfell did, that become a true totem.

Suddenly, London’s Structure, and England’s too, was provoked.

Pull out the pin and the explosion approaches.
Something within was corrupted and as those bodies died,

All souls broke. The Apocaplyse Horsemen each stirred and rattled
The doors to their (un)stables. They smelt the wind,
Sensed the danger, and readied themselves for the ride.

Foundations forged long ago had been put to flame, scorched
And squandered; one more totem pole toppled, the horrors
Of which none can hide. It was a lesson for sure,

To do with the decisions made for us. As Brexit divides us,
Even if we survive, we’ll be crushed by the removal from sense
That was once public charter, to an age in which money, shared

By precious few outweighs love. That is when the soul will be split
And what’s left of us falls dissected; the bounty of beauty
Will be more than ever before, one of flesh.

With no-one to save, we have witnessed the proper decay
Of the Angel. But unlike, Mishima, Migrants have become
National hate’s prime suspects. Our own Wings, once outspread,

Provided the world means of welcome, but now those wings
Are rescinded, polluted they say from the beach.
Even Notre Dame caved: Look at what has been done

To our image: If the French can keep falling
How can we once more avoid Dunkirk’s reach?

Brexit has brought all that back. Now we chart and search
For resistance. No recognised system now helps us.
Only art it seems wields attack.

But now, low bass notes pulse beneath,
As the shrill topline is screaming;
Winds scratch the nerve strings as the lumpen learn

Violin. The villains of sound and sense now appear,
Enemies as they are, to all to music; they seek separation
And discord as their harmonies coarsen

And threaten the song of hope we’d all sing.
And yet it forms, anyway, fruit from a lost Generation.
Orpheus, in his stirring has shaken the cracked Underworld

And as the surface too splits, sounds can be heard
Through the spaces, shifting streets; calls and chorus
And the wrenching of a different flag to unfurl.

The young do not care, in the general sense,
As they once did. If it is each generation that fails
To make the change they don’t see that beyond the bore

Of grey hairs raging separate wars across ages,
Theirs is the future that will finally fail history.
In a digital age, the analogue remains human.

It alone was hand crafted. It alone granted worth.
A poem scrawled into sand, or a claypot made
For a lover. A painting poured onto paper,

Or an album pressed and passed into grooves.
These were the methods and means by which we saw
And felt the connection between the small thing
Constructed and the larger thing that so moves.
The disconnect wifi’d back and started to create the inhuman,
Virtual worlds are now favoured over the one we destroy

To feel free. Technology’s not the point, it is all to do
With the users, and of course, the abusers as they push us
Further from our USP to an anonymous USB.

Brexit is the gate to a new ring of fire. Its a door to the Ark
That’s now closing as our proper destination’s truncated
And the seas to conquer and claim all recede.

And yet above us, a bird translates a frequency sourced
To their language; the wind dips. The song rises
As fragments and form strike a G…

Flat or sharp, we can sing if we only wished to;
And at a pitch that’s groundbreaking or at the very least,
Shatters glass. We have only to try and open our mouths

As we question, and not accept the starved feedback,
Or the ignorance raised above class. Smaller rooms resonate,
As the mighty halls lose their focus. Souls still can clatter,

If they supercede their constraints. We need not be
As we are; the symptoms leading to ruin. Natural intelligence
Is the palace that the working mind comes to paint.

Here is the warning sound from within as the body becomes
Its own speaker. Amplified now, freedom’s music has only
One lyric; No. A simple word, from which strength

And a sense of revolution is broadcast. Learn it fast and keep
Playing. The right wing is ascending, while the left one is folding,
As if in the flying, it was no longer sure where to go.

II:

OVER TO YOU OVERTURE

The country now lies in state. As will the Queen when she leaves us.
The Russians watched Lenin for any signs of life, and Gandhi too
Was love-glared. Differing pains will be felt, as Brexit or not,

We’ll be ruined. The laughing stock the world over, because
We did not know how to care. Or what we wanted. Oh, Liz.
You’ll leave too late. Party’s over. As the soul sticks while rising

Your sense of representation is lost. All we have left is the bones,
The sounds of ghosts, empty tea-shops, stale scones, congealed
Butter and wasps that die atop cake. People march. They protest.

But the elite still ignore them. As the entirety topples,
We’ll finds sliced hearts on the pavement and poems, burning,
Denouncing the lack of love, that impotent, we can’t make.

When Politics breaks as break it has, where’s the system
To contemplate what has happened and attempt to locate curatives?
For true opposition today can only be aimed at small houses.

The great appeal takes in millions but there are millions more
Who persist. For Great Britain today has become Grating Britain.
Brittania’s crown; Cowell’s tiara as the media’s processed cheese

Burns through toast. Mobile Phones rule our lives.
Game of fucking Thrones is religion. But let someone like
Dame Joan Bakewell ‘Queen’ us, free her from the seaside art

And remember that what she represents is still close;
A former reasoning for the world that once honoured
The age of the question: We need a Jacob Bronowski as PM,

To lead and reveal what means most!
Let the past pensioners rise to show a youth fed age
What must matter! Come back Harold Pinter!

Heathcote Williams, please, heed the call!
Bronoswki, Benn, Smith, and all the Dames for that matter,
Dame David Bowie; Starman come! Starman fall!

The tent is wrenched free and when the true ones leave
We’ve no shelter. With England wracked, from the ruins
If we remember you, we could sow..

For there are still forces. They grow. And art can still answer.
Especially the art of those mentioned, now stretching back
Eighty years. For it is these heroes and more, who should influence,

If not lead us, the writers and thinkers devoted to displace
Social fears. Although music cures most.
Truth’s equation is music. In its mathematics and structure

Lays the limitless release of deep space.
In the vibration and beat, music leads evolution.
Twelve notes underpin us and soundtrack too, all we’d face.

One such solution’s been found. Hope hailed the horizon.
And so we turn to what’s written all in the hope to wrench free,
Sailing on borne by song and the chord of fate chiming

You must seek revolution in the records
And thoughts hearts release.

III:

EXIT MUSIC

When the first Horseman approached Kensington, the flame
Scorched even more than the victims. That call for fire was clearly
Our own call to arms. It was a foundation fucked, rocked,

For when a tower falls, we fall with it, and in the danger
Of remaining there, with the buried, Community at last, restored calm.
It was the first human day that we have seen in this country,

In the general sense, since the miner’s strike, or the sixties, or maybe even
The peasant’s revolt. And yet how many there would be leavers now,
Or remainers as the departed were charted and the remains

Of their loss met the cold? What survives us is love,
As the poets said and it does so, and yet it also divides us
When we talk about what feels right for ‘our’ land.

Theresa May at the scene did not talk to the victims.
That chill will haunt her as we claw apart her decisions,
Who here with a heart, or any unhoused (of) common sense

Understands? Tragically, there has always been a detach
Between the lead and the bulldog. In heat, the dog ambles
But suffers of course from closed air.

Now the stale stifles us as a rejected Europe condemns us.
Climate change’s condemnation as a further act of revenge,
Pleads for care. The prevailing threats form a queue,

Whether they be Isis or cancer, each one of them eating
Into each daylit fear and nightmare. The mutated systems
Close rank to form a duplicitous river,

And if we believe in dark rumour, it could be poisoned water
In bottles that is kept with the foix grois in the basement
Of those Fallout victims living on the rusted baked beans

They won’t share.
So, what are the means to resist?

Surely, the means to resist stem from reason
(and not necessarily reasoning);

From reviving it somehow in the irrational age that’s now grown,

Rather like an absess or cyst, (that suddenly blooms
Into flower) or bewildering form of treason, as Trump dumps
On the White House, staining everything the West owns.

That he is allowed to continue is key, and the simple question
Unanswered. Shooting him makes him hero and surely,
No-one wants that man ‘Kennedyed.’

Not that the martyrs in death were ever a part of salvation.
The Cuban Missile Crisis and Marilyn’s death are Jack themed.
Trump’s another emblem, a badge, representing just how

Far we have fallen. We used to think Shadows moved us,
But now we know no-one knows – what to do, what to say,
Or how to frame that stark question:

The sad answer stops us, because we have to quantify
What is true.
Grunt Britain is currently a parched,
Ransacked farm full of singed headless chickens.

Political Coprophiliacs now chase after, persuading
The rest of us to eat shit. They spread it over our toast
And across each newspaper. Trump’s face on the badge

Bites the wearer as each soul is sliced bit by bit.
When you move to say what you think – be careful I’d say
As small acts of ignorance feature. If you are not informed

Of the detail it is easy to feel out of sorts.
But is the truth of things found by the selected statistics
We’re given? And does Jacob Rees Mogg become prophet

As he proudly slams shut Huxley’s doors?
Has anyone seen that man’s hair? It is a totalitatian advert.
A raised subliminal roaring from this animal’s tight,

Bloodless gut. The oppressor’s collude. Apparently,
They have already stored offshore money.
They’ll be stashing more in their cave space,
In order to maintain their trim Hitler cuts.
There will be more than butter and beans
In their personal mountain. Marble bunkers await them,

As well as mouth braced pigs, that’s for sure.
A Third Reich decadence taints their chaste pursuits
Of abandon, as they abandon us, they’ll doubtless

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Recline with the Donald, in gold lined, flesh stretched bunkers,
As desperate pornstars allow them to contemplate Malthus
And a curse, or possible cure, for the poor.

Today’s Politicians, not us, are the real Thatcher’s children.
Comprised of all ages, they still maintain the remove
From both common sense and from care, especially if it is meant

For the common, the worker bees who make honey for their
Voluptuous Queens and Hive broods,
who could be in Kensington,
Holland Park or exclusive hideaways in the country,

While the beleaguered Classes chase money, the sweetest thing
They can savour when looking up, is an arse. Repression’s alive,
And not just in a Catholic Priest’s predilection,

What we’re seeking is something greater than this.
That’s the laugh.
That is why belligerant fools still believe

Their false illusions of England;

That somehow it matters, but even with our glasses on
We can’t see, for we allow the Rees-Moggs, the Mays,
The fat toad Farage and the Johnsons to shed their skin on us,
Bathing us in the ordure that they filter and cast without lease.
The grime grows on us, as the true slime is traded,
Above and beyond any counter, we are marhshalled like sheep

Through closed fields. And so the sad search goes on,
Especially if we don’t listen out for the music
That will strive to remind us of a time when no-one

Could yield? Did it truly happen? Which year?
Was all we were ever given illusion?
Where is the message and who is it who now fights?

I wish I could see, or even hear through the bleating,
But I’m being branded, as steak for Tescos, or no doubt
Simplistic as I set down to write.

Where to turn? Who to trust? When Corbyn blocks talks,
Is he doing so for a standard that we should accept
He believes in, as someone with whom Brown could rhyme?

For they are at least socialists, even if that now means
Socialista; as when communism meets coffee
In a Starbucked world, it declines. Seemingly, the great dilute

Rivers on, and they we all are, flowing through it,
Grasping the banks as we do so, but handfuls of sand
Make no beach. So paradise heads for the crisis point ever faster

And the hard current swallows any special place we might reach.
I don’t believe Labour hates Jews. Israel is the issue.
There is a vast difference between condemning a corrupted state

Image

And a Jew. For what Israel has done to Palestine is the problem
And it will allow future Holocaust haters to do what they like
To the truth. The hysteria the media’s made is fit for satire’s master

Chris Morris to pick apart and throw at us, but of course,
Corbyn’s style doesn’t help, for, as with Gordon Brown,
He is not a man of this moment; men of his ilk weren’t ever,

They were built to last longer and to manage what happens
With every losing card that is dealt.
All we want now is NOW.
We have no hunger for detail.

The quick fix. No foreplay, Let’s just motor on, to the fuck.
But with the sensitive lost the sensual suffers with them.
Knife crime’s penetration is the latest sensation replacing

Excitement with random happenstance and bad luck.
We become our own murderers, reaping the scythe
Across ruinsthat we all have levelled or have allowed to fall far,

Because we did not question, in time. Our Question Time
Is a showcase, that those with the answers turn off
While sipping decanted human blood in the bar.

Hope dies, hourly, but music occurs in the moment.
And within that seed there’s still something to reinvigourate
A doomed heart. It resides in our chest. We can feel its sound

Moving in us. We each hold the soundtrack and the signal gun
For fresh starts. The song A Very British Coup calls for that.
It is in Mark Stewart’s lyric. In Jah Wobble’s music

And in everything Pinter wrote. Heathcote Williams, too,
Whose work and life was resistance. Brian Barritt. Lee Harris.
And every charged confrontation in every musical note.

An imagined alphabet.
A new song for Europe,
That only proper brotherhood

Organises, so that the deafened English
Can chronicle clearly the steps towards
True Progress:

Let the skies find new tone as fires
Scorch a bright ending
And unified voice through ‘crowd-chording’

Ascends and resists hate’s dark smoke.
Stir your soul. Find a mix,
And then prepare the solution.

Play your part. Find the rhythm.
Sounds from the sewers
Can be sweeter than birds.

That’s the hope.

 

 

 

David Erdos, April 2019


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3 Responses to WHEN A TOWER FALLS:

    1. Bloody amazing David

      Comment by Robert Lundquist on 28 October, 2019 at 7:21 am
    2. Let’s get this printed and handed out – everywhere. Talking points fail better where there’s a smidgeon of hope.

      Comment by Cy Lester on 28 October, 2019 at 4:41 pm
    3. […] Continue at IT: Internationall Times to read the entire poem. […]

      Pingback by David Erdos in His One-Man Show About Lenny Bruce | Straight Up | Herman on 7 December, 2019 at 9:56 pm

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