#We Shall Not Be Removed

i. because a blue badge parking bay is like a 1970s stone-clad fireplace surround

or sick on the pavement

not quite / a shit through your letterbox

or the chalked silhouette / of a corpse / in the street

its splatter of limbs / a contortion of terror

youcould fit a table for four in front of that

dropped / kerb

or an ice cream van / or a skip

outside B&M / they’ve zig-zaggeda socially distanced

line-up space / out

of pallets and orange plastic / tape

it’s a nuisance / killing

time / like dog-foulin g/ or graffiti

but a blue badge parking bay is like a 1970s stone-clad fireplace surround

so / sledgehammer it

rip it ou tafter 16 weeks’ / lockdown

it’s what we’ve been waiting / for

a sliceof / life / sipping latte / in a café

it was a ghost town before

the council / turned the High Street into a

pedestrian / only / zone

now / it radiates warmth like alfresco dining in October

the inconvenience

of independent living indiscreetly // designed out of it

ii. grandstand

And to help you, and to build the platform, to give you the advantage you need, we are now waging a cross-Whitehall campaign to solve our productivity puzzle and to rebalance our lopsided economy. Fixing our infrastructure with investment on a scale not seen since the Victorian – Boris Johnson, CBI Conference, 2021

to build the platform

to give you the advantage you need

to get up and walk because we’ve just tossed 2.6 million

into a titanic new newsroom to brief the nation from No.10

including a true-blue press-podium

with shin high trip step to sift out the walkers from the talkers

we are now waging a cross-Whitehall campaign

to sanction the fact

that a raised stage accessed by steps

is just enough of a leg-up

to guarantee we don’t get any grandstanding

wheelchair-using Prime Ministers

press secretaries or senior civil servants fervent

to solve our productivity puzzle

stage centre step-free access is supplied

via a back-to-normal-narrative removable ramp

a bolt-on bit of kit with a kink in the middle

made of out aerolite-extra aluminium

that folds in half and clips together for convenient storage

to rebalance

our lopsided economy

we’re building back backwards cockeyed

cold-shouldered bare faced

fixing our infrastructure with investment

in foodbanks parsimony segregation

bankrolling bigotry feculence and die-hard humiliation

on a scale not seen since the Victorians

iii. We’ve written our stories in the clouds

We are the party of working people –Keir Starmer, Scottish Labour Annual Conference, 2022

We began in break out rooms.

Sprouted seeds on speech-to text software.

Grew in messenger groups.

We’ve Skyped, Zoomed, Teamed and Hung Out.

With no PPIfor our PA’s. No signing for urgent information. Not enough

mobile data. Used to cuts, we’ve edited accordingly:

We’ve deleted those tired out, tail-between-the legs files

proffering us only peripheral parts

as passive patients, mini miracles and saccharine-sweet charities.

And we’ve dumped that dodgy database

full of folders marked art is not for othered

people like us into the world wide waste bin.

We’re still ill, but we won’t be scribbling nothings

in the margins anymore

while the protagonist, who is always a politician

holds the pen, casts us as tick boxes again

and again in some spurious survival

of the fittest saga set on the side of a steep hill.

We’ve written our stories in the clouds.

And we won’t shut downshut up and listen to

some worn out yarn spun by a suit

who knows naff all about zero hours, daily grinds, life-limiting illness

family care, full-time study, single parenting, shrinking pensions

who couldn’t give a cuss about ourkind of hard graft

and who definitely doesn’t do crafting.