About Anthony in his own words...

London’s Dead

 

And so I leave you behind

  sitting in your quarrels traffic jams and downpours

  along with the futility of all this:

With your taxes that grow without need

  and your million naked faces

  your prices and sales of stitched fashion

  that hang in the gallows of blank skulls

  your concrete rats and over worked workers

  that throw themselves from windows

  nameless slaves that dance with needles in their arms

  your educated oppressors with their educated impression

  full of class    

  telling you who you are to be forever

With your galloping dreams that die

  and snap the child in two like the pillage of innocence

  the suicide of youth

With your promises that suffer from amnesia

  your injections of rejection that overlap time

  to hand out madness through purple knuckles of fury and walls

  of slashing violence and alcohol that staggers home

  past broken lifts and hearts and burning bonnets

  to fall asleep on The Sun with hands rougher than bricks

With your perfect smile on everybody’s lips

  never afraid in all colours of man welcoming

  yes we can

  the clandestine whispers in only one colour superior

  you fucking liar

With your bent rhetoric we all bought for a price unmarked

  in V.A.T in insurance in petrol in blood in diamonded happiness

  in the rainy discourse of the homeless prophets that hurl their aching minds

  sitting indigently

  against your underground bibles in black and white and brown and Truth

  in bottles of piss filled with yellow fire

  veins invaded by burnt silver spoons lighters and collapse

  the ataxic pupils that you killed  

  with black nails that constantly delve the reality

  of this liberal ignominy that stomps on blanketed graves  

  and favours the right scholars of the right God of the right epoch

  that saw many geniuses crumble and pour themselves into sewers

  like shit like waste like smoke like nothing you have ever seen before.

 

With your trumpeted anthems and frivolous flags

  red army blue army our army your army

  hanging from white homes and windows piled on top of one another

  containing the screams of the alloyed night

  as his metal fist pounds her lonely eye and then her bulging belly

  and then her drooping head and then the roof of her coffin

  finally

 

With your jobless days

  that barren the soul and massage the pauper with sandpaper and mortar

  all along those sinuous unemployment lines with illegible signatures

  that repeat hopelessly to death

With your digital way rushing forward blinking

  with laptops yes

  televisions yes

  cars yes

  phones yes

  the bigger the better the cock

  and the bull

  the convenience

  the lack of sustenance the loss of flavour and the summer

  and the children playing in the park  

With your flowerless gardens that breathe diesel

  your precious profit and imperilled prophets

  rot together beside the balding wheel of your mighty bus

  and freeze inside fading happy snaps

  of opulent homes and gates that keep you in to keep you out.

 

With the solitude of such inherited despair

  I leave you behind as the final grey swirl

  that ascends from the ash of a burning log  

 

And so I leave you behind

like the loneliest picture in the world.

Anthony delivers 'This is us' 

At Mixed Messages, January 2011