i had a dream
in which all the villains
the real evil
bastards
had grown old
and ‘armless
and I
was one of ’em
the old
lags
met in a caff
on the old kent road
to plan our next heist
only we had to take
account of me old emph…
…esema… so no… bank jobs
’cause I can’t do
a runner no more lads
in fact when I looked
at our list of villainous deeds
to be done
the first two columns
were empty and the third
just said ‘crisps’
‘the crisp heist’?
No
because then reggie or ronnie
or jack the hat throws some packets
of crisps on the table so it just meant
crisps for the meeting…
so…
we slurp our cups of sugar
with tea and talk
about the good old days
when mad frankie fraser
nailed some poor bastard’s
hand to the table or pulled his teeth
and hope one day the grandkids
we never had will come up trumps
until then we’ll find
a funny kind of comfort
in knowing that in the end
even the monsters those real
evil bastards grow old
and ‘armless
.
(John Constable aka c, 7/11/2026)
COMMENTARY
I was eleven years old when Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his celebrated ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington DC. Although it was not explicitly aimed at a middle-class white boy from the Welsh marches, I instinctively knew which side I was on. In my mind’s eye/ear I see/hear it against an early ‘sixties soundtrack / visual backdrop of armed police loosing their attack dogs on unarmed civil rights marches. For me and some of my generation, 1963 marked the beginning of an age of radical hope. Our opposition to racial injustice quickly expanded to embrace the anti-war movement, feminism, gay rights, psychedelics and, above all, the belief that predatory capitalism / consumerism was in its death throes. A new world was emerging in which we’d learn to live in peace and harmony with one another, become good stewards of our beautiful planet and all that lives here.
In the 60-odd years since, we’ve learned just how wrong you can be. ‘Capitonsumerism’ is still kicking and screaming and doing its ugly death rattle. Those initial modest advances in the treatment of vulnerable minorities or challenging what we used to call “the military-industrial complex” seem to have gone into reverse. We’ve recently seen a revival of racism, sexism, homophobia and “right is might”, with authoritarian kleptocracies hastening the devastation of our environment in their relentless pursuit of money and things. Put country simple: the world is going to hell in a fossil-fuelled handcart.
I remind myself that, in part, this is a classic old man’s lament. Every generation has lamented the passing of its youthful dreams, ideals and aspirations. Only this time, we’re not just looking at our own deterioration and death, but at the possible extinction of our whole world, of humanity itself. Transhumanists tell us it’s foolish to mourn the end of embodied, organic life, that we should embrace this brave new cybernetic world in which we can ‘end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’. 1 Their ‘accelerationist’ allies delight in telling us it’s going to happen anyway, so let’s get it over with. Done and dusted.
But hey, I’m a poet. It’s my job to mourn what we’ve lost – as well as to imagine and envision what, for all that, remains to be discovered – and, above all, to celebrate our humanity for all its flaws and failures. And I do. I do. I do.
I tend to think that any ‘commentary’ on a poem is an abomination. A poem should speak for itself, and beyond itself, pointing to the mystery beyond words or concepts. Modern poetry is too often prosaic polemic, disguised by being broken into ‘free verse’ (a criticism that could be made of my latest effort here) – or, in the case of some self-styled ‘bards’ (with some honourable exceptions), by recycling old truisms in rhyming couplets. We live in an age obsessed with literalism, notwithstanding its tendency to confuse ‘the truth’ with ‘my opinion’! If I don’t make myself clear, there’s a danger that people will read this as simply an old man’s ironic lament for a lost youth.
To me, it’s more (and less) than that. The entire poem came to me, complete, this morning at about 6.30am, in another of those lucid dreams. So even I can’t say exactly what it means. It’s feels somehow weirdly exhilarating – so maybe the dead ‘King’ is not Martin Luther and his dream, but Donald J Trump and the rest of those tyrants and abusers, those falling idols who’ve fed too long on the life-blood of us poor, clumsy, blundering human beings.
And then there’s this…
That perhaps our very imperfections, and the yearning to somehow perfect ourselves, and the ability to keep going even in the face of our manifest failures, that these are the true secret of our humanity. In the words of the prophet Samuel:
‘All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ 2
Perhaps, long after we are gone, the “super-intelligent” transhumans who supplanted us will pore over those words in awe and wonder at what it was “to be human”. (Or even, pondering my own paltry words, ask themselves WTAF!) Maybe somehow, despite all the “evil bastards” we’ve done enough already.
If not. If they’re still puzzling over what we were, and what was lost, the Mystery, well they could contemplate the teachings of the mystics of all the great faiths, when you strip away the bullshit:
‘… when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.” ‘ 3
‘Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… Love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Or if that’s too hard to imagine, how’s about this?
‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to others. That is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary.’ 5
1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet III:1
2 Samuel Beckett, Worstwood Ho
3 Dr Martin Luther King Jr. 1963
4 Matthew 12:30-31
5 Rabbi Hillel the Elder (when asked to teach the entire Torah while standing on one foot)
*
photo by Faris Francis Rashid Khan: 15 year old schoolboy John posing as Che Guevara, May 1968. The following year I would hitch-hike to Sicily, get stoned in a Paris squat, self-publish a book of poetry, drop acid and start the revolution. That went well! ??
CHE LIVES!
C