I
Scream, scream to the wind
and cry. Batter closed doors
and cry.
The innocent sold for silver,
the needy for a pair of sandals.
The heads of the poor trampled
and justice denied to the oppressed.
Your wealthy are full of violence;
your inhabitants speak lies,
with tongues of deceit in their mouths.
Rulers give judgement for a bribe,
priests teach for a price,
prophets give oracles for money.
Enacting unjust statutes,
writing oppressive decrees,
depriving the needy of judgment,
robbing the poor of justice,
making widows their plunder,
and orphans their prey!
They covet fields, and seize them;
houses, and take them away;
they oppress householder and house,
people and their inheritance.
Vineyards eaten up,
the plunder of the poor in your own houses,
the people crushed
the faces of the poor ground in the dust.
You who hate the good and love the evil –
who tear the skin off people,
and the flesh off their bones;
who eat the flesh of people,
flay their skin off them,
break their bones in pieces,
and chop them up like meat in a kettle,
like flesh in a cauldron –
should you not know justice?
Like cages full of birds,
your houses are full of deceit;
you have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.
Your evil deeds have no limit;
you turn justice into wormwood
and cast righteousness to the ground
because you tax the destitute
and exact from them levies of grain.
You do not promote
the case of the fatherless,
do not defend the just cause,
the cause of the poor,
the cause of the just.
Scream to the wind
and cry.
II
Hello! We are the shallow people,
reflections of our fitness ratings,
shining the surface of our existence,
selling our lives to seek significance.
OK! we are on heat, on fire,
hyper cool, yet full of desire.
Bad and wicked are terms of approval.
Bums and tums are there for removal.
Narcissus is our role model;
made in Chelsea, such a fit young man,
lightly tanned and with a wicked four pack,
we know that he is Essex!
We are pissed off, falling over,
stumbling in the dark.
Drunk on celebrity chardonnay,
technology sated, intoxicated.
We think we are such foxy ladies
sexy, sultry sods.
We are hung over, hearing voices,
kissing the porcelain god.
We are off our heads,
out of our skulls,
out of our minds,
we decline.
III
Today the ‘Daily Star’ proclaimed its three stills
and a story from a Disney film
printed week by week as a comic strip ‘historic’.
I wonder who will remember
their histrionic hyperbole
in another year
or after next week’s bag of chips.
We wildly fling words like some crazed mudslinger
desperately hoping that some will stick.
Today we mix Reagan and breasts, Beirut and divorce.
Princess Di with a famine, the IRA with a horse.
Babs breaks a marriage and makes front page news,
her friend takes the money as the truth must be sold.
Our words are exaggerated, emotive, declamatory;
words that are angry, words that are sad,
words that are loopy, words that are mad.
The charge was verbal manslaughter,
the defendant admitted rape.
The judge, an illustrated dictionary
said the case would have to wait.
The conscience of the Nation
was still asleep in bed
as the defendant went scot-free
and his circulation spread.
This poem’s a libel
and self-destructs like a bomb.
We shadow the bags under our eyes,
cover our paleness with rouge,
enliven our lips with another shade
and sew up our sagging breasts.
We are society as a matter of course.
On a matter we matter of course,
on a matter we curse,
onomatopoeia.
IV
We live on the edge of chaos,
Everyone we know is two-faced.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Everything we have found has been misplaced.
We live on the edge of chaos,
All we have believed has been a mistake.
We live on the edge of chaos.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Avoidance of pain is the name of our game.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Insulation from life is our aim.
We live on the edge of chaos,
We feel fragile, we feel maimed.
We live on the edge of chaos.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Our homes are our prisons.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Our lives are television.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Our relationships are divisions.
We live on the edge of chaos.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Only therapy holds us back.
We live on the edge of chaos,
With spiritual hunger, an aching lack.
We live on the edge of chaos,
With no means of changing tack.
We live on the edge of chaos.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Every day we balance on the wire.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Every day we flirt with fire.
We live on the edge of chaos,
Any act could ignite our funeral pyre.
We live on the edge of chaos.
V
Convicted, conflicted, the beast slouches
full of passionate intensity, leopard body,
ten horns and the seven heads of a man,
orange complexion and yellowing slicked-back
hat hair, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
slow thighs moving roughly.
Oligarch loving, elect deceiving,
fathering lies, fostering newspeak,
the art of failure, fired apprentice
uttering haughty and blasphemous words,
lion mouth, worshipped as Big Brother,
bearing a healed death-blow to the head.
Authority over tribes, peoples, languages
and nations, making war on the saints, conquering.
Who is like him? Who can fight against him?
For a time and time let those who have an ear hear.
If taken captive, go. If killed, know it is fated.
Chaos loosed, anarchy invoked, innocence drowned.
VI
I see the bare chest and bone idol
resting as he crosses from the garden to the grave.
I see the rest sleeping in life
and waking in death.
I see the passage of years as a river’s run.
I see the traffic flow driven
along the Embankment to Blackfriars and across.
I see the flow with no ebb.
I see the sweep of the bay,
the rush of the wave
and no barrier operating.
VII
In the smoke-filled splendour
of a now empty restaurant
lit by dwindling candles,
at a small table
in a shaded corner
with his head in his hands
bowed to an empty wineglass
sat man.
VIII
We are the survivors of the accident.
We who arrived after the damage was done.
We silently circled the butt end of the crashed car
seeing the grey suited man, car door open,
one foot on the ground,
motionless as a model in a police reconstruction,
relentlessly staring glass.
The other man in the other car
head bowed in a religious attitude, unreal.
No one had arrived.
The police had not arrived.
The ambulance had not arrived.
The crowd of spectators had not arrived.
The two cars had arrived and met.
We had arrived and left.
Passing telephone boxes,
confident in the knowledge
that someone would have phoned,
we arrived, we saw, we left.
The scene was still.
No sirens sounded.
The police had not arrived.
No crowd of spectators had gathered.
We are the survivors of the accident.
We who are still alive.
IX
Our wound beyond our understanding.
Our flesh requiring healing.
No doctor with an answer can be found.
Our lovers turn away disgusted.
Having used us they abuse us.
Desire evaporates as morning light
reveals our hideous bruising.
Our pressure groups and charities
that held us in the public eye
have dropped us, their hands burning.
No one to plead our cause.
Our sins are piled like mountains,
smelling thick like slurry on a breeze.
They choke the nostrils, bring bile to the throat.
Now will I come, even now, without stinting.
Take you in my arms with surgeon skill
to scrape, clean and heal, closing impossible wounds.
Great weals of prayer like shots of lightening
ripping, riving darkened sky
and light shines through gaps and cracks
and rips and tears prepared by prayer.
X
She screamed
with the intensity of silence.
Her body pounded.
Her face contorted
from the inner turmoil.
She screamed.
Nothing moved.
Nothing answered.
Still.
Peace.
Rest.
She writhed.
No time to think,
react.
No time to relax,
react.
No time to reflect,
react.
No time to react
No time
No movement
No voices
No pressure
No schedule
She screamed.
She could not cope.
In the silence she heard
God.
.
Jonathan Evens
Picture Rupert Loydell
.