More Chilli Sauce, Mate

What was Dorothy on about?

No place like home

She must be kidding

She never lived on my fucking estate

 

Putting dogshit through letter boxes

Smashing the windows of a slow-moving hearse

Women and girls shrieking, crying

Grown men fighting as the police arrive

“Here comes the cavalry,” someone shouts

Scag-Head Sid threw a copper off the first-floor balcony

 

There’s no place like home    

There better fucking not be another place like this

 

The sign screwed into the end wall

Of the ground-floor flats says, No Ball Games

Yeah, right. Good one. We use it as an imaginary crossbar

Playing football from sunrise to sunset in the summer holidays

Ignoring the old ladies who call us “perishers”

And tell us to clear off

 

Going to Camberwell to play snooker

Staggering back arseholed in the early hours

Taking the no-no of a cut-thru down the back garages

(Why’d you do that, you silly sausage?) 

They put a knife to my throat

Shoving me hard against the graffiti-covered door of a garage

They’re not fucking about, this lot

Pulling off the ring I got for my 18^th and the engraved watch with the leather strap

Playing pat-a-cake with my pockets

“You’re safe, mate,” they said. “You’re safe.”

 

“Fuck off, you cunts,” I shout

Once they had disappeared back into the night

 

Spending dole money in afternoon pubs

Losing at pool and darts

 

Watching old men grin, each paying

A young stripper an extra pound

To see her take a piss in a bucket

 

Listening to the stories told

Of stabbings and robberies

And the things that happened to Brummie Lee

When he got locked up in Feltham

 

Out on the lash. Karaoke. Playing cards and doms

Don’t drink in there, it’s an IRA-pub

Crowning the night off by watching girls fight in the street

Hair yanked out. Knickers flashing. Blokes cheering

And then in the hammered queue for a tasty Doner

 

Yeah, go on, more chilli sauce, mate

 

I don’t remember any sense of community

Or working-class solidarity

On that estate

 

People vanishing into thin air, will-o-the-wisps

Turning into rumours and jokes, gossip and legend

Locked up. Hysterical. Homeless. Dead

Or off to the mystical realms

Of Sutton, Worcester Park and even Thanet

 

I found mystical realms, alight, wanking into a sock

 

There were secret places to wander

Going to the Tate and trying to make sense of Blake’s gods and demons

Rothko’s walls of blood. Walking along the Thames and wondering how

To build a boat which could take me to foreign lands

 

Other days, I’d stand on the top floor balcony of the flats

Where I knew none of the troublemakers could find me

And I’d stare at the London skyline

 

I found places where I could be alone

As that’s when my mind slowed down

I’d smoke a joint and drink a can of Super T

Dreaming of France and India, proper-mystical places

Where people were not fucked in the head

By fear and anger and fuck-all expectations

 

Never my home and yet

There really was no place like it

Difficult to put into words

 

That estate is always with me