Wednesday 9 December 2009

poverty


HOW DO YOU DO…

poverty



Reality

Covered by the House of Scope, trying to fight with the now teenage washing machine, loud reverberating shudders, not staying in it’s place, preferring to spill all around the kitchen refusing to do even the basic of tasks, “clean my clothes!” So you’re mopping up with red inked letters you’ve used as plates for those value beans and (not in a good way) crusty loaf.

After you shuffle through streets sneering at stray dogs for being so well off you reach the library where you sleep because your freezer of a bedroom smells too autobiographical. There you dream of 2nd hand newspapers left over Mc Donald’s cheese and emigrating to China.

But poverty is not exclusive. Poverty is universal so any poverty is relative. There’s rich people in Ethiopia, they’re just criminals, warlords or Christian missionaries hoping the population find God first; food and wellbeing later.

If you’ve twigged we live in an utterly man made contradiction, three cheers, hip-hip, hurats.



Fake poor

Not those fella’s who beg wearing thinly veiled suits and a bmw picnic hampers next to a sorefull bleeding desperate hobo and nicks his footfall because he bought a book on business stragegy, cos he’s not really homeless. Not them.

Those people who can’t buy anymore Renoir’s this month because the manorhouse needs serious renovations, I mean, they almost had to sell it, heavens. She opens it to people up because of the historic service this gives in educating the commoners into facing up to never been able to own anything of this majesty. By charging £20 it makes them feel honored to even breathe the same air as aristocracy, I mean they don’t. I breathe pure oxygen nowadays darling.



Groundlings

Poverty has been prevalent in Britain since, ever, yes ever, as in for ever. There’s no real chance of eliminating it throughout the world if we can’t even do it in this country. We’re simply either rubbish at distributing wealth or just too mean to care. While charity organisations accost and guilt trip working class relatively poor people into giving more because if we don’t we don’t care. The rich elite order their supermarket servants to deliver their supervlatives while those off shore tax havens get richer and bonuses flow directly to Mayfair and Park Lane.

Old Kent Road meanwhile has to resort to getting cheaper and cheaper goods from dodgier and more salacious means while the media expect us to buy premium, British, organic and fair trade. Cost consumerism keeps us in our place and provides us with less choice and more compromise. Giving more of what we earn to landords, if we don’t we’re on the street or in jail for being on the street. A bit like that game, where you take chance, the Game of Life.



If you don’t eat it, I’ll send it to Ethiopia

Yet those people in those adverts who were born in even greater extremes of poverty show us just how bad humanity has got. They can’t even eat their cows, unless they like ribs, their crop fields are pissing deserts. It’s basically the wrong place to live. Their forefathers should have just gone “look, fuck it, I know it’s a nice mud hut but we live in a desert. The birds are even flying away, the only reason eyore is here I because we tethered him up to that stick, but he’s been chewing.”

Now there’s no space, even Saudi Arabia has a population crisis, Saudi Arabia. Who’d have thought, y’know I’ve always wanted to live in sand sanitising seawater. Britain even has a population issue, bizarrely it’s because no ones leaving, we’re apparently happy, or glued.



Tramps

“Spare some change muv'r.” So there are homes derelict yet people live on the streets, I think we should start a movement to get tramps into squats. Fuck with those hippies who want some idealistic boho existence while slyly funded by mummy and daddy. Give them a bunch of tramps with liver disease, an addiction to weeing in corners and ten dogs, see how reality bites.



Improvising

If poverty has taught anyone anything other than poverty is well rubbish, it’s taught us to be resourceful. Gone are the days of throwing things away, now we’re like crazy bob. Holding your wee in because you don’t want to lose the free heat. Hoarding plastic containers, bags, broken electronics, stamps, coppers, while recycling clothes, food, cigarettes and furniture. Growing vegetables, herbs and relationships with the woman who puts the discount tickets on food. We now even repair stuff; well try to repair stuff, if you count poking a screwdriver into 21st century nano technology.

Networks of sharing free stuff and actual trading have begun conjuring up the ancient age of exchange and prosper that begot our modern obsession with money. Making us think less about cost and desirability and more about worth. Whether this will continue relies a lot on the population’s own functionality as a self-generating resource. Or will we suddenly want more new things again. Old used crap, shiny, flat screened, I-things. I give it a years interest free.



Look up

“When you have nothing, it’s a liberating thing, you feel free” a gay heroin addicted, hepatitis positive punk once told me in Melbourne. Now my description of him could flavour the statement but it shouldn’t, it’s to add context, I could have included seventies side burned, SnM enthusiast, poet I could have just said human. I’m merely saying that colouring a person’s lifestyle into quick quotes shouldn’t take away the merit of the statement or the actual sense of being a person can have, someone who believes and lives a lifestyle which by some people’s sensibilities isn’t for them but for others inspiring.

Poverty can, for some be joyous, it’s animalistic it’s rebellion of the system that binds us. To let loose any concern for things and instead just be, was for me also revelatory. The tropical weather, free fruit from trees and gritty rebellious fun of it all may have helped.



Final call

Alas, I'd reached the stained index of the pornographic pamphlet that was my time in Australia. A 27-hour flight to Manchester Airport yanked body, reattached its blinkers and age-old sensibilities sending me crashing in the dole-drums. But memories although distant still permeate and colour the greyscale landscape I now find myself in.

I’m ready; I just need the start up capitalist.

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