Wash the streets

Let me tell you about my chum Terry Barridge,
the result of an experiment with Jamaican condoms,
a land-quake affair without catholically slammed brakes,
in a garage filled with figurines, mandrakes and tom-toms.
Terrence is as sweet as pancakes, one of London’s
truest, with elaborate silly handshakes in abundance.
He’d prop the bar while chasing ales devoid of basic flavour,
impersonate Darth Vader and lament how great Ralph Nader
might’ve made the States, sat by a flaking radiator
in a long black jacket, looking like a caped crusader,
when he’d break off his narration of a tale he’d save for later
of a toothless ex-conquest who’d made a safe fellater
and face me, stating “Mate, this place is laced with space-invaders,
bargain-basement Ronnie Krays, we ought to slay the traitors!
We ought to get us organised and fight the spiteful riflers,
the tooled-up plumber-knifers and the stifling life-triflers!”
I said, “Terry, you’re a jobless East End piss-head muff-diver
and you’re sour, crowded full of powerless spit and saliva
like me, a magic-realism-imbibing contriver
of riled rhymes and son of a minicab driver,
we ain’t bloody Spidermen and no-one else is, neither!”
He said, “Let’s not be passengers and sicky-throwing skivers,
life’s become a breed between an advert and a gulag
to the hum of feed-the-proles-tuppence-ha’penny muzak,
come on, let’s wash the streets! Because it would appear that
Neighbourhood Watch is rubbish, how can a meerkat
see off a rottweiler?” I was dreaming at a beermat
of being Wat Tyler in a medieval queer hat,
spread-eagled on a castle long before its rheostat
was installed, oblivious to Terry’s diarrhoea-chat
until I woke with “Wuh? Are you talking to me?
Get the gin and coke in, it’s a quarter to three.”

His girlfriend’s name is Tabby, she’s a bloody fine colleen
in an X-Ray Spex tee-shirt reduced now to a smithereen,
and in she sauntered, pigtails flaunted, through the tavern portal,
to find Tel telling how he’d like some gun-powder and mortar.
She nodded briskly over her whiskey and tonic water
and thought, “How ought I take all this slaughter-talk, with salt?
Should I sit and blub about my scarred arms with smudged mascara
or plant some shrubs around the charred farms of the Sub-Sahara?
Come on, let’s wash the streets of those who’ll take no blame,
who are blindly forgiven by the unscratched but lame,
these swaggering braggarts calling everyone faggots,
the sperm of Margaret Thatcher, the cankerous maggots!”

On the lookout for some spineless shady bandit schmuck,
in a Nineteen Eighty Transit, our henchmen try their luck
down streets that’d make a French dung-beetle say ‘yuck’,
flicking back and forwards like an ice-hockey puck,
carting sticks and cricket bats and honest British pluck
about with us (oh, and a Salman Rushdie novel stuck
in my back pocket). So, there’s five of us inside the truck:
a fleshy Bangladeshi with a machete carefully snuck
inside his jacket joined us, and a buoyant blonde who struck
me (though I’m no clairvoyant) like she didn’t care to muck
about with us when we were singing “Blimey, luv a duck,
let’s all go down the Strand!” But then I see her buck
two teeth are the only teeth inside her head! And I think, “Chuck
me cockles down the frog and toad by Christ and Friar Tuck,
old Tel, is this the girl you said was great at giving…” “Ruck
alert!” he blurts, as now a dozen dirty chickens cluck
and peck around a bloke we know, old Mehmet, the proprietor
of our local doner-shop and definitely no dieter,
a man on whose top shelving stands, upon a random plate,
a sixteen-inch-high model of the Brandenburg Gate
sculpted out of chip-forks. But now he’s getting savaged
by the ‘Stab The Disabled’ Crew out on the ravage,
yes, twelve bland, branded, blade-brandishing scabs
against one plump fork-welder and saucer of kebabs!
So we get out and wave our cricket bats in the air
and the gang of cabbages just vanish into nowhere
as we sing, “Let’s wash the streets of the crown-jewelled, humourless,
me-first, postman-slicing, ‘pussy’-saying pugilists
from buggery, the first-degree scum in your garden,
as smug could be ‘cause burberry’s become the new tartan,
these swaggering braggarts calling everyone faggots,
the sperm of Margaret Thatcher, the cankerous maggots!”