This Unelected Leader

A poetic response to recent words by the British PM

This unelected leader

warns of extremists

in a condescending tone,

eyes blank as stone,

to a public who never endowed him his throne

(with as much human charm as a CGI clone)

voice a drone with robotic demeanour.

As he speaks,

from the cosseted hub of his Westminster clique,

it’s been months since our sleeps have been dreamless.

I wake short of breath

from nightmares steeped in sweat, death and screams.

Weeks pile onto weeks -

anguish on phones seamlessly seeps to the mind’s inner screen.

Wreckage of homes bombed to rubble and dust -

pictures of dead children

layered with quotes espousing feverish bloodlust.

Enough blood has been shed to fill streams

uploaded worldwide via digital beams

and it runs through our heads as we work, as we wake,

as we hurt, as we shake,

as we turn to each other and try not to break

and ask ourselves: what will it take?

When will it stop?

What words or which phrase must one say;

and how much must our human race ache

for the penny to drop?

This unelected leader

warns of an invisible mob

in a flailing attempt to hold onto his job,

for the cards not to topple

as he teeters at the top.

Encased in black railings

keeps his teeth sunk deep into our state

popularity failing,

assailing the news to stoke hate.

Time to tighten a fist

around this population whose pain can’t be bottled,

love and hatred run hot as the sun

and it’s too much to hold.

In more ways than one,

this winter’s been cold.

Now he fights to squeeze cries and pleas

grief that won’t look away from the horror it sees

into a compliant, quiet mould.

Tries to swaddle us like he’s been coddled,

to sit down and do as we’re told -

un-obstructing his clutching at gold.

When we march on the streets

with a vision for peace,

We do so with prayer

for this dark night to cease.

We are Jews, we are Muslims, we are Christians too,

folk white, black and brown,

people who look just like you.

We are young, we are old, we are gay, straight and trans

with signs against genocide clasped in our hands.

From diverse social classes,

of disparate stories and colour,

to which cabinets of Tories stand demographically duller.

We are parents and siblings,

students and teachers,

sharing frayed and desperate hope

as far as it reaches

from London’s grey glass hulk

to Gaza’s battered beaches

from these hearts, in which peace is,

to humanity’s shattered pieces.

We are loud and soft-spoken,

healthy and disabled,

crowds embodying the democracy

that your rhetoric rends fabled

whose significant features

are protest and free speech;

whose structures your corruption

serves clearly to breach.

Now we stand at a junction

staring into destruction

and democracy seems to be ceasing to function.

We are fractured and knackered,

combining our voices,

calling leaders to make

more compassionate choices.

Though you’re partly a joke,

another unfit prime minister,

your tenure’s trajectory

also reeks of the sinister.

A puppet who’s never stood up for a cause

allied to the doctrine “protect you and yours”

reading off cue cards

with a palpable lack of conviction,

fanning the flames

of factional friction.

Boarding-school diction thinly veils

the fact that there’s no captain manning the sails

just a quest for ambition,

that’s brittle and frail.

People pawns in the games

that you play in your tower

inhabiting a land of fiction

where points are more money, more power.

As snipers aim bullets into children’s heads.

As mothers are murdered while queueing for bread.

As babies suffocate, starved, in hospital beds.

We have run out of language

to honour the scale of dead.

Eyes twitch and burn with oceans of tears,

maddened by how history refuses to learn

repeating the traumas

written into past years.

This unelected leader reconstitutes soundbites of language

inept to address tides of righteous anguish,

protecting privilege in which he feels entitled to languish

feeding us against them

establishment ousting the other

hangovers of empire’s missions to vanquish

though the snakes lie

underneath number 10’s covers.

This unelected leader

preys off existing suspicions:

“you can protest but only on certain conditions”.

We must ask his permission, it seems,

to speak against obliteration of lives and of dreams.

A stain on time’s book, pages scarred and marked;

days lighten, but still, it feels dark.

I am questioning what it means to be a person

in a system which sooner sees suffering worsen

than healed

definitions so slippery

losing grip on what’s real.

I cradle an ancient whisper

of tikkun olam

the intent of repairing this world

a road we can carve

in the midst of despairing,

know that each human face reflects back

the being I am

a kinship apparent

ripe with more truth than the lines that they parrot.

We cannot meet cruelty with more of the same

won’t move forwards sinking down to contempt,

down to shame.

Light must be our addition

to attempts to incite societal partition,

to frighten and silence,

segregate us into atomised islands.

Both gunfire and words foster violence.

And though some would wish to see democracy stifled

just as breath is cut short at the butt of a rifle

there’s a pulse in the core: a soft, loving heart

despite every force that would tear us apart.

Let it lift and guide;

let us plant brighter seeds

in thought and in deed,

in protest and presence and meetings and art

as we weep for these wounds, watch them bleed,

footfall not to recede

nor to drift back to sleep

trying to fathom empty spaces

unresolved, gaping, deep.