Connecting Through Corona

ANOTHER KILLER Sixteen people have died from domestic abuse Since the lockdown. The Covidian Age, like the Ice-Age Has started to chill blood and mind. A 700% increase Has occurred across the various helplines, as Corona’s Brutal accomplice slides into the fear trapped hands And divides. This is a difficult poem to write, With words reflecting those who are cornered, Not only with their own private monster, possibly Raging now while you read, but also the fact That there is nowhere left they can run to, As doors prove as brittle as assaulted skin When it bleeds. What frees the monstrous in us? Opportunity, or containment? While some lose Jobs there are victims beyond any hospital Granted bed. There are the women and children At home, near cannibalised through frustration, As rage and fear fill abusers who can only Make their point through the dead. This is not A silent panic at all, but with the doors And windows closed, who can...

BETWEEN THE NUMBERS                                     Between the fatal numbers we’re told and the people I know who don’t have it, there now rests the question Of how to even out all these odds. As I sit and write, Think and call, I discuss this issue with others, But no-one of course can quite settle on whether This has been organised or slipshod. Then there are the moments of silence That fall, caught between the noises of others. At around five or six in the evening, a stillness of sorts, Sits complete.  Thanks to the day’s inscrutable heat, I am getting my vitamin D straight from sunlight, As the skin on my Mediterranean arms moves From chicken to a kind of slow roasted beef. It’s a bewildering moment, for sure, And one which can’t quite be held in a photo; This strange peace that has fallen as the world Divides behind air. The s...

THE URBANE SPACEMEN   Vivian Stanshall With the sad death of Neil Innes this year We have lost one of comic song’s finest tunesmiths. And while Innes wrote The Urban Spaceman , Viv Stanshall of course stayed urbane. And suburbane too, in his Crouch End home, Fled from Finchley, in which he would burn, But before that, he taught sophistication And flair, language games. One of the great English Eccentrics, alone That eccentricity led to exile. And yet, On his Bristol boat, Viv was happy, And productive too, let’s be frank. Creating His musical Stinkfoot and more, his hands Shaped ukuleles, and painted ornately, Before parts and sections of surrendered Sanity walked the plank. Buggered by booze all too soon, While addicted to his regular valium chasers, The vital Viv so embodied the kind of soaring Spirit we need; for he could laugh at the dark And then swallow it whole with his cockles, With whelks and strongwater...

SONGS OF LIBERATION There are other liberations of course, And not all of them fruitful. This second side Remains bitter, as domestic violence amps up. Its volume deafens and roars through the silent Screams of its victims, who unliberated now suffer Through the torture and storm of trapped cups. This is a direct counterpoint across the world To Bella Ciao as its singing across the Italian Squares, for elsewhere, circles shatter as plates And families bare the bruise that comes all Too soon or too late for the face to heal Beside spirits that are spiked while still rising For the good and the ill of the news. But always liberation contains the history It has suffered. In Italy the song of those Paddy field working women said ‘Goodbye To Beauty,’ just as a face will do once its struck. From the poor women of Mondina in the North, Echoing the slave’s dark blue roots in the American South, came this music; A Nineteenth Century...