The Shoah of us all

Concrete walls

Chucked up quick, cheap

My first home

…….

My dad he’d shipped West Africans

From the Gold Coast to Burma to fight

The Japs. Sunk, he was, three times,

No one thought to teach him to swim.

Dispensible he was, like all the other working class lads

Determined to do their bit

No bugger taught them anyfuckingthing.

………

We played all around where we lived

Belting down the double hill to see me aunty (well her Alsatian, Prince)

On a three-wheeler

Flying arse-over-tit into the flooded foundations

Of yet more homes-for-heroes. Men, who’d fought in the

Western desert or liberated Concentration camps dug the foundations.

They tried so fucking hard to get back to something like normal.

Wives, bored with their sweating bed-wetting, dreamed

Of the black GIs who’d lit up their imaginations with their fucking eyes.

…….

These sadnesses I did not see.

Such desperate longings lingered all around me.

Underneath the West way blasted the Pink Faeries