London’s Dead, Spoken word by Anthony Anaxagorou

London’s Dead by anthonyanaxagorou

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.

____

Skype Q&A with Anthony:

Q1: What is your life history in one sentence?

A: I have been angry and I have been in love. The latter did me far more favours.

Q2: What made you think spoken word was the way to express yourself?

A: My work really only encompasses one voice. I don’t really think that I deliberately write a piece to be performed as spoken word, well at least I don’t think I do. I tend to just read out the poem as it was in my head at the time of writing. I find this gives it another dimension which people can become a part of and relate to.

Q3: When did you realise the world wasn’t how it is taught in schools and institutions and how did it make you feel?

A: I had a pretty rough time at school. I was hyperactive with a short span of attention, which made me a teachers nightmare. Most of the time was spent either getting thrown out of lessons or sent to the headmaster, I was also in nearly all the bottoms sets for every subject. When I left school, not managing to finish my A Levels, my self esteem was pretty low as was my overall confidence, so I just accepted that I wasn’t meant to be a scholar, and bummed around getting into trouble for most of the time, yet that didn’t sit well with me. As I got older I started to read more as I always had an interest in philosophy. I got hold of books that I wanted to read not those the school did. I read Plato and Machivelli at 17, I also started to get into Sun Tzu, Focult and Kant at about the same time. Poetry was always there since the age of 15 which I always used as my private form of expression. Over the past 3 years I have found a complete sanctum in books as I self educate myself on anything I can. Subjects spanning comparative religion, African history and ancient Egypt, philosophy, politics and world literature. At this stage in my life, after having written 3 books and working on a novel, I believe that the real lesson began once I made my way out of the classroom.

Q4: What do you think the future holds for mankind and how can we help to make this world a better place?

A: I think we as a people are incredible; everyone in my opinion is a born genius. Our problem lies in the fact that our social system is designed to do all it can to kill individuality, destroy that very faculty that has been solely responsible for all the greatness mankind has ever achieved. We are prompted to conform and abide by rules that are unyielding and unoriginal. Our schools and curriculum systems are all formulated, meaning it gets harder for creative people to find their niche and start to exists outside of the mediocrity. We seem to put so much emphasis on universities and degrees like we believe them to be the ultimate salvation. When we stop and realise that the West has been experiencing a severe case of academic inflation, and qualifications are hardly worth what they were 10 years ago, we can begin to take the emphasis off these institutions and think for ourselves. My main contention is that our schools do not encourage us to think for ourselves, with our own spontaneous and creative faculty. Instead we are told what to learn, told that this is the Truth and become manipulated into believing that the teachers books must always be right. I left school thinking the British Empire were great, after reading up on Africa and the Native Americans, plus the other 54 former colonies of the British Empire I’m not so sure.  It all starts with education and once people learn that intelligence is not measured by how well they do in an exam or how well they apply what they have learnt at school to their jobs, then we can start seeing some great things happen. I’m not promoting anarchy by any means, im simply saying that we give up on our true selves far too easily.

Q5: Do you have details of any tours, gigs and new stuff?

A: I have been living in Thailand for the past 6 months, working on new material and travelling around. I plan to return to the UK in the autumn for the Urban Green Fair as well as supporting MOBO award winner and founder of the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, Akala on his UK tour in November. I have an e-book of poems that cover a whole range of issues from the political stuff to the private stuff called The Lost Definition of Hope, its available to download for only £1. I also have two other books Card Not Accepted & Poems To Maya that are available to buy from my website. I hope to have my novel finished within the next few months. The books premise being a tribute to creativity and how our society undermines and in my opinion doesn’t really understand the way of those born creative. I have an official Facebook page as well as my website http://anthonyanaxagorou.com/.