coldest planet

As your number one prose fan, I have to say this poem is up there with the stories. The controlled anger is brilliantly done and I hope it gets a wide audience. Have you ever tried reading? This one would be an excellent place to start - and if you do, please put a link on here.

one small typo - you've put 'descent' and I think it should be 'decent'

ps I also love the title

just realised - the teaser needs to be U rated because it goes on various pages on the site. Could you please  change it, or just remove it altogether if you don't think it's necessary - it just defaults to your first few lines?

be like a Clydebank version of Christopher Ecclestone reading out John Cooper Clarke's Positively Chickentown, only they would be your own words, so it would be twice as good.

Exotic forms of poverty, well they're the ones with all the kudos aren't they, everyone else with a mobile phone and a telly only have themselves to blame. I think the 'Stay aways' really work well in this, it reads like a shout.

Very powerfully spat out. Good shout!.

I though you were speaking to double glazing salesmen for a fleeting moment.

Having been at the wrong end of social services, this feels very true to me. To have problems of any kind - mental health, unemployment, disability is now seen as your own fault. I wish I could write my anger the way you have.

Although, having fallen from the grace of a middle class upbringing would come out more of a whine than a shout

"Disgust leaves no wiggle room for must" is GREAT

I always thought as I got older, I would become more right wing than my socialist early self, but that's like saying the older you get, the more of an uncaring, stupid cunt you become. I am at a loss to understand why people vote the way they do. I also thought the Trump arming teachers was a fake news headline, because surely, no one in their right mind can think that the answer to that tragedy and all the other shootings of kids in schools, is to put guns into classrooms? That can't be real can it? Loved your poem. Made me feel like Fox Mulder. We are not alone.

look hard enough there is poetry in poverty, but it's not the hearts and flowers kind.
You should do a reading, Jack. Stick it on YouTube, it would melt the net.

This is our Poem of the Week and also our Facebook and Twitter Pick of the Day - congratulations! Please share/retweet so it gets the audience it deserves.

Pic:https://tinyurl.com/y8gtfndf

FUCK yes.

Why do 'nice' people often have a thirst for squalor when it is presented with a broadsheet patina of social concern? Dullness, a sense of lack. But they need to fix their own lives, try to find some of what's missing, not indulge in the readymade secondhand thrill of nosy vampiric disgust. Greedy, 'the coldest star'

Good poem. 'Stunted childhoods creeping into old age' hits the target.

It's like the song "Common People" But there is also a thing about reinforcing the distance, a scramble to get on the high ground so smugness isn't threatened. These days trying to make everyone think the poor deserve to be poor, rather than are deserving of escape routes

Great poem. I loved the coldest star line. It gives the great feeling of distance and unreachabiltiy]....oh I can't spell it and I'm not even sure if it's a word anyway! Unreachable will do. Propaganda in every country, I would say.

I was wrong to say that. I am sorry. I relapsed and was unwell when I wrote that. Please accept my apology. Poverty does exist in scotlands citys. Sorry.

It is you who is the poet not me.

ah- ok, ignore my message on your other post. You've left a lovely apology, and I think if I delete the original it might delete the apology too. I'm sure Celticman will understand. Good luck with your journey Thornwood, take care xx

Nothing to add to what's already been said, and agree that I would love to hear it read.  Pretty damn good, Celtic.