Lines for the Landless
Land rights are human rights. Dispossession is deliberate disenfranchisement. Have we noticed how it encloses us all?
I started my pull away by giving the quiet finger to my ‘online discount’, Said ‘kiss my ass’ when offered to ‘open an account’. Said a quiet ‘fuck you’ to premium content, gave myself permission to be a human malcontent. Then they dropped bombs on apartment blocks, and I wouldn’t scroll away. The sickness swamped the clustered screens with the shock and awful play. And where were the resistance when the old men got their way, posturing freely as on any usual day? Of course, violence is OK if it’s packaged and produced, directed and promoted to knot you in the loop. You can silence the dissenters and entertain the troops, daily fill the bloody troughs with state supported scoops. Yet is this something new and haven’t this road we travelled? But trite is never right when the warp becomes unravelled. The soma of the screen gives us looped and meagre dreams, grasping fingers weave. It seems hard to still deny the fact that profit pulls the wagon, And you and I must trail with dirty shoes as coffers swell and fatten. Evicted from the fields to learn the lines of rough religion, our exclusion practically a tradition. See Ancien régime sitting bloated in his pants, See his bloody hallways prettied nicely with Rembrandt’s. Say a quiet ‘fuck you’ to claims of superiority, the myth of his entitlement drapes thinly on mendacity. Still, his ‘think’ tanks share me messaging and tell us we’re to blame, We’re all just a little bit too idle and we really can’t complain. We must forget pretence or duplicity, just listen to our betters and signal cowed complicity. So, stop and count the ways we’ve been pushed out to the margin, Marked as just a footnote in the ledger of sacked fortune. Whisper ‘fuck you’ to this claim of superiority, the empty claim of title drapes threadbare on mendacity. I’m drifting from permitted paths and steering clear of crowds. Rebecca riots. Luddites smashed. Captain Swing marched south Enclosures to the fields, hawthorn scratched partition, your striking from the record a sanctified tradition. I’m using words to trespass where the ragged roam untamed, What was taken without asking is yet for us to claim. What quaint superstitions we believe whilst the stricken are forced to flee, But I recognise how wide the walls and deep the ditches fall, How sharp the wire, how great the greed that fund dumb bombs that maul. Enclosures in our thinking will guarantee partition, the squander of the commons, a fiercely held tradition. Without a language of fierce kindness how will we find the way, When midnight doors still come ajar to seize those that disobey? Look around and clip the barbed wire fence, your land is yours to roam in spirited dissent.
I’m reminded of Ferlinghetti’s poems, but with a sharper edge!😎