Wednesday 10 August 2011

What is this?

What is this?  
What is this that ails us? 
This malady,
This malevolence,
Which infects us easily
When wounds laid bare
Become easy hosts
To societies ills,
This sickness sweeping
Disaffected youth, hotheads,
Pyrexial with adrenaline
Light bonfires, bonfires
That fan the flames of racism,
Burn bright the beacon,
The bloody beacon that
Lights the way to bigotry.

How easy
They succumb to stereotype,
The looters, the arsonists,
The bigot's fodder;
The bigots dream gifted,
Gifted by the very underclass
They wish to further
Marginalise.

Black, brown, white –
The underclass,
United by deprivation,
Divided by difference. 
Hooded they roam the streets;
Pack mentality
Supersedes rationality,
For rationality
Has no business here
As they scavenge
Like hungry primeval beasts
On looted goods
And feed on the
Adrenaline rush of anarchy.

Oh how this anarchy,
This pleasure
Of fleeting power
Runs fast through veins
Infecting systemically
The very body of
Our nation,
Its fever flares
In new hot spots
As hooded youth
Copycat, mimic
The initial opened wound
And light fires to their freedom,
Their awful new found freedom
Where death has become
Its awful victim.

Yet not all this underclass,
This nations poor of hope
Run riot
And watch instead,
In utter disbelief,
As seemingly abandoned
By enfeebled,
Directionless police
And the distant leaders
Of our troubled state, 
They attempt to
Comprehend
The incomprehensible. 

Soon the infection
Will be treated –
Yet the patient
Will not be cured. 
The virus will hide
Under its own hood,
An opportunist,
Watching, waiting
For a fresh new wound
On which to reek its
Destructive qualities,
The qualities of a sick society. 

It will come again.

Anna :o]

11 comments:

Linda (Immortal Alcoholics Wife) said...

I love this. It says it all. --Linda

ADDY said...

Wow. Such a chilling poem. I've got goosebumps!

Frances Garrood said...

Brilliant, Anna!

And where, oh where, are the parents in all this?

Manzanita said...

I thought the same when I first saw the outbreaks on TV..... where are the parents. But where were the parents when these, now adults, were children? Sometimes, it's just too late.
Manzanita@Wannabuyaduck

hyperCRYPTICal said...

Thanks for your kind comments folks.

Where were the parents? Good question - probably at home waiting for a share in the loot?

I agree very much with Manzanita - for some it is too late. I extrapolated the consequences of lax parenting a long time ago - and it makes me afraid, very afraid!

For some it appears we are content with returning to our feral state - primitive in mind and all the chaos that comes with it.

Hope not though!

Anna :o]

Cockroach Catcher said...

Much badness and much sadness.

Louise said...

'Soon the infection will be treated – yet the patient will not be cured.'
Great poem Anna for sure, but the above lines roars, and roars loudly!

hyperCRYPTICal said...

Thanks CC and Louise.

CC - Never truer words said.

Louise - Thank you my friend.

Anna ;o]

Lydia said...

I am not sure if my comment went through. In case not, wanted to say how great this poem is...

Lydia said...

Now I can tell my first comment didn't make it. To repeat:

Your poem is such excellence. This post and the post at Penny Red are the two best commentaries I have read anywhere on the UK riots.

Friko said...

I am so very grateful to you that you didn't use the expressions 'Broken Britain' and 'Criminal Elements' although both would have tripped off the tongue so easily.