Come on Everybody

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Come on Everybody Page 3

by Adrian Mitchell


  Make a note of that.

  New film. Now look, now he’s fourteen.

  Work out the energy required

  To make him grow that tall.

  It could have been used

  It could have all been used

  For the good of the firm and he could have stayed small.

  Make a note of that.

  Age thirty. And the waste continues.

  Using his legs for walking. Tiring

  His mouth with talking and eating. Twitching.

  Slow it down. Reproducing? I see.

  All, I suppose, for the good of the firm.

  But he’d better change methods. Yes, he’d better.

  Look at the waste of time and emotion,

  Look at the waste. Look. Look.

  And make a note of that.

  Ode to Money

  Man-eater, woman-eater, brighter than tigers,

  Lover and killer in my pocket,

  In your black sack I’m one of the vipers.

  Golden-eyed mother of suicide,

  Your photo’s in my heart’s gold locket.

  You make me warm, you keep me cool,

  You cure the terrifying dream.

  Nature and art await your call.

  Money, don’t lead me to milk and honey

  But a land of drambuie and icebergs of cream.

  The Palm Court Planet’s orchestra whines

  The Money Spangled Money

  And The Red Money. In my silver chains

  I always stand when I hear the band

  Play Money Save the Money.

  South Kensington Is Much Nicer

  London, you hurt me. You’re the girl

  With hair fresh-permed and every curl

  A gold ring in its proper place,

  But spread across your poker face

  A net of scars. A dress of smoke,

  Your body an unfinished joke.

  I love you, but I cannot sing

  That money-splendoured hair is everything.

  For I’ve walked through the alleys of Poison Town,

  They led me up, they led me down.

  The colour of the air was brown.

  Reply to a Canvasser

  Cats are spies for something dark.

  Rabbits are wiped out.

  Captain Cousteau scares the shark

  With an underwater shout.

  Snakes slide over jagged ground

  Making the same sound as grass.

  Elephants are pushed around.

  Fish are hooked, or circle worlds of glass.

  Hyenas have a nervous laugh,

  Corruption is their only need.

  Worms get fat, then cut in half.

  A dog’s a footman on a lead.

  I’d rather be a stag at bay

  Daubed in colours brown and gory,

  Or any creature any day

  Than be a bloody Tory.

  Look at the View

  Like the memory of a long-dead clerical uncle

  Reclines St Paul’s Cathedral

  In the blue smoke from London’s frying-pan.

  Climb to the dome, and then you can

  Watch the dull length of Blackfriars Bridge.

  See the flat girl approach the edge,

  Jump, fall, splash, vanish, struggle, cease.

  Do you bet she’ll be saved by the River Police

  Who ride the tides in a humming launch?

  Or an oil millionaire without a paunch

  Will dive and take her wet to lunch?

  Save her and leave her, and she’ll be seen

  Next day on the bridge near that tarnished tureen

  St Paul’s Cathedral, glowering in the rain.

  She will take off her shoes and fall again

  The Observer

  A tattooed Irishman still

  Shaking from his pneumatic drill.

  From his mouth

  Saunters sweet talk

  As he stretches the chained spoon

  To his mug of tea again.

  Talk as sweet and warm as tea

  Floats in bubbles from his mouth.

  As he counts fivepence he’s reminded

  That his working life has ended.

  Bubbles burst. His tongue’s light tune

  Stumbles and does not rise. Deep in his belly

  The molten tea solidifies.

  His tall face lowers slowly

  Like a red wall collapsing in the rain.

  A young Guards officer

  Shaking with long-imprisoned anger.

  From his mouth

  Marches, in step, his conversation

  As he taps a silver plate

  With his menthol cigarette.

  Talk as white and soft as smoke

  Pours from his educated mouth.

  His Colonel claims that the Brigade

  Might well recruit the unemployed.

  The young man’s facial veins inflate,

  His talk moves at the double, sweating,

  Mad keen, but disciplined at that,

  As his whole face opens letting

  Free a smile bright as a bayonet.

  In the café and the mess

  A liberal hears what each man says.

  He notes the navvy’s imagination

  And he smiles.

  Notes the Guard’s well-drilled conversation

  And he smiles.

  With memories of Wimbledon

  He says under his pleasant breath:

  ‘Why don’t both men just jump the net,

  Shake hands, and say the class war’s won?’

  He lights a Woodbine from a Ronson.

  His eyes bulge, large with vision,

  Seeing both sides of every question,

  One with his left eye,

  One with his right,

  The cross-eyed, doomed hermaphrodite.

  Song About Mary

  Mary sat on a long brown bench

  Reading Woman’s Own and She,

  Then a slimy-haired nit with stripes on his collar

  Said: ‘What’s the baby’s name to be?’

  She looked across to Marks and Spencers

  Through the dirty window-pane,

  ‘I think I’ll call him Jesus Christ,

  It’s time he came again.’

  The clerk he banged his ledger

  And he called the Cruelty Man

  Saying: ‘This bird thinks she’s the mother of Christ,

  Do what you bleeding well can.’

  They took Mary down to the country

  And fed her on country air,

  And they put the baby in a Christian home

  And he’s much happier there.

  For if Jesus came to Britain

  He would turn its dizzy head,

  They’d nail him up on a telegraph pole

  Or he’d raise the poor from the dead.

  So if you have a little baby

  Make sure it’s legitimate child,

  Bind down his limbs with insurance

  And he’ll grow up meek and mild.

  Meek and mild…meek and mild…meek and mild.

  We Call Them Subnormal Children

  (FROM The Body)

  They are here, they are here,

  they are very far away.

  Perhaps they see exciting visions

  in the hollows of their hands.

  Perhaps they can hear music we are deaf to

  but I think their hearts trudge

  and that their days trudge

  for the way they sort of stand

  the way they sort of speak

  laboriously expresses one word only

  wounded wounded wounded

  We are taking a deep breath before the long slow dive through space to Mars.

  We have not yet explored these island people.

  They are here.

  They will not go away.

  In Other Words, Hold My Head

  ‘Capitalism – ,’ I started, bu
t the barman hopped out of a pipkin.

  ‘Capitalism,’ he countered, ‘that’s a flat and frothless word.

  I’m a good labourman, but if I mentioned capitalism

  My clientèle would chew off their own ears

  And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage.’

  ‘All right,’ I obliged, ‘don’t call it capitalism,

  Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty.’

  ‘Exploitation – ,’ I typed, but the Editor appeared unto me,

  A spike in one hand, a fiery pound note in the other.

  ‘I’m a good liberal, but you’re going out on a lamb –

  You don’t catch Burnem Levin writing about exploitation –

  A million readers would gouge their eyes out,

  Think of that, like two million pickled onions in the cornflakes.’

  ‘Hold the back page,’ I surlied, ‘sod exploitation,

  I’ll retitle it The Massimataxis Incorporated Supplement.’

  ‘Oppression and mass-murder – ,’ I opined straight into the camera.

  ‘Cut!’ yelled the director, cutting off his head with a clapperboard.

  ‘I’m a good fascist, but if you use that language

  Half your viewers are going to

  Tear the lids off their TV sets,

  Climb inside, pour Horlicks over their heads

  And die of calculated combustion.

  Too late now to balance the programme

  With a heartsofoak panel of our special experts

  Who are all oppressors and mass-murderers.’

  ‘You know the market,’ I wizened,

  ‘Oppression and mass-murder are out this year –

  I’ll christen them Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular.’

  This was my fearless statement:

  The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

  Mattiboko the Mighty,

  The Massimataxis Incorporated Supplement

  And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular.

  Audience reaction was quite encouraging.

  A Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Burial Party

  SPOKESMAN:

  Already our government has enforced the four freedoms:

  Freedom to speak if you have nothing to say.

  Freedom from fear if you stay in your shelter.

  Freedom from want if you do what we want

  And freedom from freedom.

  But yesterday we, the British Government,

  Detected, thanks to our spider’s web of sundaypapers

  And bloodshot radar traps,

  Two mutineers scowling from your moderate ranks.

  POLICE CONSTABLE BOOTHEAD:

  At two in the morning I found the accused,

  A man and a woman, both unclothed,

  Sprawling across their mammoth bed.

  (The mammoth is being held in custody at Disneyland.)

  Their eyes were shut, and they grinned

  Like a couple of pink grand pianos.

  When asked why they were smiling with their eyes shut,

  The accused informed me (in song):

  ‘We are happy.’

  I made a note of that at the time.

  JUDGE:

  What was that word again?

  PROSECUTOR:

  Happy, milord,

  An expression common among delinquents.

  It means – irresponsible.

  Extensive chromosome and corpuscle counts,

  Exhaustive spiritual testing

  And a touch of the old Doctor Scholl revealed

  That the male and female citizen were both addicted

  To one of the most dangerous drugs on the list –

  Exhibit A – Love –

  Highly addictive, producing hallucinations,

  For example:

  Fats Waller fornicating downwards

  At the wheel of a purple-striped cloud

  To play The Resurrection of South America –

  This love-drug can remove

  The user’s interest in moneyandproperty

  And in killing in order to defend

  Moneyandproperty.

  JUDGE:

  Stop it, I can’t bear it.

  SPOKESMAN:

  The lovers were found guilty of not being guilty.

  Their obscene craving was hard to cure

  But a succession of secret licemen did their best.

  They can hardly be blamed if the gasping lovers died

  After ten days apart, ten days apart.

  They died with their grins on, both of them drowned

  In the same daydream,

  The same degenerate lagoon.

  Freedom to speak if you have nothing to say.

  Freedom from fear if you stay in your shelter.

  Freedom from want if you do what we want.

  Freedom from freedom, freedom from sanity

  And freedom, finally, from life.

  IT IS LIKELY THAT DURING THE NEXT TEN YEARS

  YOU WILL BE CALLED UPON TO DIE FOR FREEDOM.

  Old Age Report

  When a man’s too ill or old to work

  We punish him.

  Half his income is taken away

  Or all of it vanishes and he gets pocket-money.

  We should reward these tough old humans for surviving,

  Not with a manager’s soggy handshake

  Or a medal shaped like an alarm clock –

  No, make them a bit rich,

  Give the freedom they always heard about

  When the bloody chips were down

  And the blitz or the desert

  Swallowed their friends.

  Retire, retire into a fungus basement

  Where nothing moves except the draught

  And the light and dark grey figures

  Doubling their money on the screen;

  Where the cabbages taste like the mummy’s hand

  And the meat tastes of feet;

  Where there is nothing to say except:

  ‘Remember?’ or ‘Your turn to dust the cat.’

  To hell with retiring. Let them advance.

  Give them the money they’ve always earned –

  or more – and let them choose.

  We could wipe away some of their worry,

  Some of their pain – what I mean

  Is so bloody simple:

  The old people are being robbed

  And punished and we ought

  To be letting them out of their cages

  Into green spaces of enchanting light.

  Now We Are Sick

  Christopher

  Robin

  goes

  hippety

  immigrants hoppety

  bring down

  the value of

  property

  Involvement

  QUESTION (from the London Magazine): In most European countries, and in America, writers are becoming involved, one way or another, in public manifestations of protest. As an English writer, do you feel that working on your own terms is more important than taking a practical part in organising public opinion?

  In other words, in the continuing debates – about race, class, violence, war, financial priorities – that crucially affect our lives, are you for the writer in any way as polemicist, or do you believe that his instinct as an artist is ultimately the real test of his integrity?

  ANSWER:

  SCENE: an alley.

  (A MAN is being beaten up by TWO POLICEMEN. An ENGLISH WRITER approaches.)

  MAN: Help!

  ENGLISH WRITER: Well, that may be what you think you want. But I’ve got to work on my own terms.

  MAN: Help!

  (TWO POLICEMEN put the boot in.)

  ENGLISH WRITER: Look, I don’t like this any more than you do. But I’ve got to follow my own instinct as an artist

  MAN (spitting teeth): Yes, well that’s ultimately the real test of your integrity.

&nbs
p; (The beating up continues. ENGLISH WRITER pisses off to write a poem about ants.)

  CURTAIN

  Divide and Rule for as Long as You Can

  Glasgow.

  Trade Unionists march through the Square

  Towards the City Chambers.

  Police. Police. Police.

  And in the streets leading off the Square –

  Scottish soldiers with rifles.

  Live ammunition.

  They may be ordered to shoot into the crowd.

  And behind the Scottish soldiers –

  English soldiers with rifles.

  Live ammunition.

  If the Scottish soldiers refuse to shoot into the crowd

  The English soldiers will be ordered

  To shoot the Scottish soldiers.

  Oh, but that was long ago.

  That was in the future.

  The Ballad of Sally Hit-and-Run

  A train pulls into town and a woman jumps down

  Her leathers are shining and her eyes are shining

  With the body of a goddess and the cool of a nun

  Everywhere she goes they call her Sally Hit-and-Run.

  She moves down the street with a shuffle and a beat

  Of her feet on the concrete – she’s a creature

  With senses that respond to every sound in town

  And a hit-and-run habit when the sun goes down.

  Sally Hit-and-Run on a barstool perch

 

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