A carbuncle in the borough of the wealthy:
It stands mute, darkened by the hellish flames
Greed and autonomy rising up its covered walls.
Like dear dead Icarus
Its planners once dreamt
Of melding their way towards the sun
With concrete ladders
And steely thumbs
Forging a way beyond disorder.
Now the charred bodies melt with the burned plastic:
From this citadel, shock and awe
Smote their way across the city.
Public austerity and private greed
Bred neglect upon these walls
That shell like
Housed the migrant poor
Huddled for protection
In the paucity of human planning.
Social media could not save them
Nor could the fire regulations
So easily discarded
In the virtual mesh of commodification
[Rendered as unit costs]
That trellised its way up those girders.
What human scale can measure this human grief:
Missing and unidentified
The wind wails through their particled remains.
Who in government remembers their living?
Underemployed, casualised
Multitasking their way across the fretwork of instability
They are the communal poor
Dickensian
In this land without regulation
Living next door to those affluent hordes
Whose veins flow with Thatcher’s dictum:
“There is no society”.
Grenfell Tower
Tethered on high
Awaited the next disaster
Anxiety buried in its girders.
The monstrous fates
Conspired on high
To teach the gods a lesson:
The moneyed men who rule the world
With nostrums rich and rare
That soon beguile some charlatan developer
To take the auctioned public good
Rinse over it with bankers’ fees
Thence to magnify their private obsessions
Into smirking rectitude, soft bedded on a knighthood.
Gross inequality, retchingly high
Is now like a viral domestic product
That measures our human decline.
Every year the communal expires.
Bunkered, hunkered
The working poor scratch a living
And ache for respite.
Across the globe, Governments privatise their pain
And nimbly best their resources
Until exhaustion becomes the beaten mob
Conservative and compliant.
Even the middle class unravel
Confounded by this mercantile disorder.
As prices compound and wages decline
All dreams are cauterised:
The servant classes are once more sequestered.
When you are the anointed rich
‘The great problems in life
Are not those of housing and food and standard of living”
They are public debt
[the banks must be saved!]
The evil of welfare [such wicked dependency]
And the polished ease of tax breaks
That float the wealthy upwards
Beyond the crush of the burgeoning underclasses.
Nothing is affordable.
The pall of austerity blankets the land.
Insidious insecurity
Stalks the narrow lanes
Beyond the bloated bourse
Where a sea of dividends
Swirls around the black magic
Of voodoo economics
And the trickle down that cruelly parches.
Drudgery has begat anger
Penury has begat desire:
The wind wails through the empty tower.
Will the moneyed men
Vie for its reconstruction
Massaging their cost cutting ways
Into the balm of bitter geld?
Recidivists in business suits
They still command the entrance to the temple
Forbidding the more exacting review
Of why they generate such wealth
In deep religious consortium.
Or does the guttered tower remain a monument
To the consequences those flames so starkly held
When human lives are weighted so shallowly
Profit gouging its deadly way
Across the laws of government protection
Now the levers of care are strictly abandoned?
The tower stands empty
Its dreams vanquished.
The unsettled survivors
Bereft and alone
Now hide in shabby hotels
With their withering trauma
Sprung on the shards of fractured lives:
“Those you see are in the daylight
Those in darkness don’t get seen”.
A carbuncle in the borough of the wealthy:
Greed and autonomy rising up its blackened walls.
It stands mute, darkened by the hellish flames.
Gar Jones: July 2017
It stands mute, darkened by the hellish flames
Greed and autonomy rising up its covered walls.
Like dear dead Icarus
Its planners once dreamt
Of melding their way towards the sun
With concrete ladders
And steely thumbs
Forging a way beyond disorder.
Now the charred bodies melt with the burned plastic:
From this citadel, shock and awe
Smote their way across the city.
Public austerity and private greed
Bred neglect upon these walls
That shell like
Housed the migrant poor
Huddled for protection
In the paucity of human planning.
Social media could not save them
Nor could the fire regulations
So easily discarded
In the virtual mesh of commodification
[Rendered as unit costs]
That trellised its way up those girders.
What human scale can measure this human grief:
Missing and unidentified
The wind wails through their particled remains.
Who in government remembers their living?
Underemployed, casualised
Multitasking their way across the fretwork of instability
They are the communal poor
Dickensian
In this land without regulation
Living next door to those affluent hordes
Whose veins flow with Thatcher’s dictum:
“There is no society”.
Grenfell Tower
Tethered on high
Awaited the next disaster
Anxiety buried in its girders.
The monstrous fates
Conspired on high
To teach the gods a lesson:
The moneyed men who rule the world
With nostrums rich and rare
That soon beguile some charlatan developer
To take the auctioned public good
Rinse over it with bankers’ fees
Thence to magnify their private obsessions
Into smirking rectitude, soft bedded on a knighthood.
Gross inequality, retchingly high
Is now like a viral domestic product
That measures our human decline.
Every year the communal expires.
Bunkered, hunkered
The working poor scratch a living
And ache for respite.
Across the globe, Governments privatise their pain
And nimbly best their resources
Until exhaustion becomes the beaten mob
Conservative and compliant.
Even the middle class unravel
Confounded by this mercantile disorder.
As prices compound and wages decline
All dreams are cauterised:
The servant classes are once more sequestered.
When you are the anointed rich
‘The great problems in life
Are not those of housing and food and standard of living”
They are public debt
[the banks must be saved!]
The evil of welfare [such wicked dependency]
And the polished ease of tax breaks
That float the wealthy upwards
Beyond the crush of the burgeoning underclasses.
Nothing is affordable.
The pall of austerity blankets the land.
Insidious insecurity
Stalks the narrow lanes
Beyond the bloated bourse
Where a sea of dividends
Swirls around the black magic
Of voodoo economics
And the trickle down that cruelly parches.
Drudgery has begat anger
Penury has begat desire:
The wind wails through the empty tower.
Will the moneyed men
Vie for its reconstruction
Massaging their cost cutting ways
Into the balm of bitter geld?
Recidivists in business suits
They still command the entrance to the temple
Forbidding the more exacting review
Of why they generate such wealth
In deep religious consortium.
Or does the guttered tower remain a monument
To the consequences those flames so starkly held
When human lives are weighted so shallowly
Profit gouging its deadly way
Across the laws of government protection
Now the levers of care are strictly abandoned?
The tower stands empty
Its dreams vanquished.
The unsettled survivors
Bereft and alone
Now hide in shabby hotels
With their withering trauma
Sprung on the shards of fractured lives:
“Those you see are in the daylight
Those in darkness don’t get seen”.
A carbuncle in the borough of the wealthy:
Greed and autonomy rising up its blackened walls.
It stands mute, darkened by the hellish flames.
Gar Jones: July 2017