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