This is Not my Empire

"This is not my Empire"

What if the negro-manacling,
aborigine-annihilating, squaw-raping,
peace-pipe-smashing, Celtic-erasing,
Welshman-ignoring, Irishman-starving,
jungle-stealing, guru-snubbing,
Brahmin-whipping, native-infecting,
continent-carving, tribe-splitting,
war-causing, Highlander-massacring,
hypocrisy-spreading, Bible-slamming,
Catholic-burning, Krishna-mocking,
pygmy-robbing, shaman-shooting,
farmhand-conscripting, peasant-enslaving,
viscount-licking, workhouse-building,
child-hanging, chimneysweep-buggering empire
could redeem itself
by stopping a jackbooted
toothbrush-moustached Anglophilic fellow-Saxon
who drowns nations in gunfire,
with no help,
no over-saluted Mason-Dixon
apple-pie-chompers around for two years
to (what’s that, Jim-Bob?) “bail it out”,
from chalking his blue-eyed battering ram
and, as Lenin’s cue-ball head careers clattering
to the ground, rolling over the beer-and-blood-stained carpet
and under the Nazi fruit-machine (lemon, lemon,
Göring’s face), smacking into the pocket
like a mono-testicled Steve Davis Omsk, Irkutsk, Petropavlovsk,
Anchorage, Seattle, Chicago,
Washington, and rescuing every human
on this raison-d’être-starved husk
of a planet from a lederhosen-fetishist’s ego,
stopping the world from turning
into a concentration camp
(which is another great English invention),
wouldn’t that be cause for pride and pomp?

Not really, because by burning once-gorgeous Dresden
to a skeletal necropolis all England did
was pluck the planet from a bonfire
that it and its rivals and friends lit
in the first place, that every empire-
fondling, dreadnought-dreaming, lambchop-
sideburned chimneysweep-buggerer in Europe
had stoked, carving a bombshelled
barbwired scar through poppy-fields
and young men’s heads, all in the dirty double-barrelled
name of bourgeois-democracy, then swiping cabbage
from German mouths, spectacles from German eyes,
fabric from German society, sweeping their own cultures
into the Mickey-Mouse-eared Coca-Cola-sloganed garbage-
pail of goddam history. So, sorry, girls and boys,
but being as English as those absent-memoried land-filchers
is no food for pride.

But being English is no food for shame, not
for my people, who marched level-eyed with bold Gurkhas,
noble turbaned sepoys and loyal African lions
who squashed the swastika. Brave British workers.
Just as my people marched, clad in irons,
blanketed in mud and cholera and mustard gas
and took sword-gashes, grenades, spears and arrows
for them, not for us,
dancing for centuries a chained one-legged tango,
all the while thinking, “This is not my empire.
Hii si himaya yangu, a maro
samrajya nathi, ini bukan
empayar saya, das ist nicht mein Reich.”

Society, you still owe my people our land
fit for heroes. Society, you owe the working class
everything.
But instead
we pull levers, carry barrels, stack shelves, kiss
arses, repeat clichés, toe lines, sell our souls
along with our labour, for a loaf of bread
and pint of beer an hour, to cunts in suits.
Like we’ve done for centuries. Instead we lie in holes,
buck our ideas down, say “Phwoar! Tits!”,
fight each other, draw penises on school desks,
learn to be good robots, while at Eton and Harrow
and every other plummy-voiced bumming-parlour
chaps learn to fly planes, design mosques
or bomb them, biographise Emperor Nero,
speak Greek, use the right spoon, disarm Wat Tyler,
just like when they sat sipping Chablis
while Private Thompson saved their empire
with blood gushing from his throat.

Society, with your transparent ideals and wobbly
morality, you owe the working class
everything.
The working class does not
owe anybody anything, no matter what
the Guardian-reading champagne-glugging
mugger-hugging fundamentalist-wanking couscous-knitters hiss
at us. We wipe our arses on your nagging.
Your imperial-guilt-driven values don’t apply
to us, and why?
Because of the lines of cloth caps, shovels and typhoid bugs
along the mud-tracks to Westminster,
because of spinning jennies, nine-tailed cats
and soot-blackened children holding canaries.
Because we are the natives, we are the colonised,
we are the slaves, we are the Niggers of this land.
Do you understand?
Of course you don’t. You never do,
you cleaner-than-clean right right right sanitised
bourgeois slime-shitters. So,
if we want to complain that positive discrimination
never works in our favour
and only exists to pit race against race
worker against worker, play us off each other,
sow resentment, divide and rule and force
the unwashed smelly plebs away from the hammer-and-sickle,
then we have that right.
And you ought to listen to our anger,
properly,
and cease your smug liberal heckle
because, unlike you, the working class
have got some balls
and can see the machinery behind the stage,
can see further than how fair
the ballot-box is, how morally huge
and jaw-droppingly not-racist we jolly well are.
Do you understand?
With your semi-detached houses, completely-detached lives
and no identities. Who the fuck are you anyway?

And if we want to wave the flag of our land,
sing “Rooty-tooty-too! Oi!”,
juggle Eccles cakes, race hedgehogs, shower in brown ale,
stick a budgie on one shoulder and a patch on one eye,
tell Anjem Choudhary and his cabal
of bearded gay-bashing whore-stoning scum-of-the-earth
who say British working-class streets belong to Allah and not us,
that they should have been drowned at birth
and should fuck off out of our green and beautiful country,
then we have that right
and it’s got nothing to do with you.

Society, you owe the working class
everything.
You ought
to offer us every last sauce in the pantry,
kiss us all over, teach us the cello,
pay us before you even consider
paying anyone else. Until you do,
if we want to shit on your pillow
then we have that right,
if we want to shout and swear and make you shudder
then we have that right,
if we want to hurl a concrete slab through
a bank window, throw a general strike,
sign on the dole, sabotage the stock
exchange, burgle a millionaire
or seize this country with guns and bombs,
then we have that right.
Or else the opposite might transpire
and instead of a system through which social justice hums,
we bring to power another Hitler.
And if we do,
then it will be your fault.
Not our fault,
but your fault.
Do you understand?
Do you understand?
Do you fucking understand?