Land Grab


The smiling students laugh and joke.
Their skinny jeans

well filled
with the fat of freedom.
Lizard green t shirts

scream the slogan.
STOP LAND GRABS NOW.
And they hand out leaflets
Explaining
Exactly how
land is grabbed.
And they seal off the city square

with tape
and confused zeal.


Land grabs,

as it happens.
Are where companies take land from local farmers and push them off it
because subsistence farmers make little profit.
With leaflets about this happening

in Uganda,
and Rwanda,
they patrol their little bit of land
dressed Nike and Burberry,
mobile phones in hand.


Their leaflet has a bar code on it,
to scan in to your blackberry
and they continue to stroll
and sing their little sonnet.
STOP LAND GRABS NOW.
As their conga line of high held banners
wanders in and out the picket
I wonder
if they wonder in what manner
they got their shiny toys and gadgets;

Labour doesn’t put itself to work.
Land doesn’t volunteer
its very minerals and sand.


And they continue their giggling chanting.
Under the Union Jack over the city square
an old mans cock in the limpid air.
Athletes dance and pop stars scream
on the twenty foot screen
flashing behind their incanting.


I wonder if the children of the LRA
will see the heroes of 2012
above the sights of their rusting rifles.
Plastic tape can’t hold back the future.
A conga never changed the world.
People lift the boundary and walk on by.
The students don’t care,
they’ve done their bit.
While in the dust
Ugandan children die.


World News



Underneath the CocaCola sign stands a man.
In his suit of silken armour.
Idiot lit deep sea fish neon
illuminates his upheld shield
of tailormade sweatshop ignorance,
and he speaks on a new phone.
Like his old one.
But newer.
While a line drew through him
through our rotting core
skewers a black heart, caged in the fishbone ribs
of a child picking through shit for corn.
A woman weighs out fruit
each bag
each breath
one step closer to her death.
A housewife decides pink is so much more her
as a teenage conscript grips his bloodied knife grinning
severed genitals held aloft, his trophy
and a homemaker takes her purchases to the till.
A dog toy, though he’d be ecstatic with a stick.
A set of tablemats,
to match the new chairs.
A decoupage sylvan scene,
a plastic doorwedge, shaped like a mouse.
all the way from China.
A Chinese mouse no less.
and a woman cries raped in the dark
for her murdered husband and son
an Iraqi boy bleeds
while shelves are stacked
with things that noone needs.
Hard hats holding men anchor horizons with steel and glass
to hold more people
to buy
to weigh
and have space
to live,
to love,
to create.
If they find the time,
after saving for Chinese mice
and mobile upgrades
and paying debt on money they never borrowed
and a Kenyan man cries as his skinny cows die in the dust.