Free Speech

 

You dance with what you’ve got
he shouts, the pub landlord treating
free speech like a football thrown in
‘76 by a Hail Mary redneck – a bomb in
the name of sport – when allowing all
these expressions of honest hate in
The Year of the Trump is not a game.

This place is not a home but neither
is it the land of the free: private and
public more than a line drawn in the sand
or other shifting shit on a floor. We are
all of us renegades if we defer silence
to any allowed noise; as if a room full of these

guys have got the right to speak about and
sign away the rights of much better dancers.

 

Mike Ferguson
pic Claire Palmer

Sources:
Apocalyptic Annunciation – poem by Rupert Loydell
America’s Game: 1976 Oakland Raiders – TV programme
Article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian 24.1.17

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