Sharp Cockneys

Some people inform me that I ought to be a geezer,

I should be a street-talking bandwagon-seizer

who says “Football, birds, Kentucky Fried Pizza,

look at me, I’m a geezer-of-the-geezers-on-the-streetser

who keeps his trousers in the freezer,

who’d never say nothing, mate, what wouldn’t please yer”,

not a touchy-feeler of Keats and Blake or a cheeky rapscallion,

but a brawny stallion with a backing-track

whinnying medallioned maxims back-to-back off a stage,

until raging feedback attacks him, in slang-jammed persiflage.

They’re trying to blindfold me with my own tongue,

counting dropped aitches like we’re not on the same rung,

lecturing through shuttered eyes gutterised mucky lies:

you’re nothing unless you’re in with the tougher guys,

true caterpillars don’t become butterflies.

Well, park your Khyber, listen and prepare to be debunked

or the Cockney accent, character and history are sunk

and the Artful Dodger can consider himself defunct

when Jafaican can concoct a cocktail that gets a metropolis drunk.

 

Sharp Cockneys recognise full-stops,

we muck out pigs, we plant the crops.

Screw your cliché-speak,

your ne’er-do-well chic,

some of us read more than porn mags and red-tops!

 

Now London’s more barren than the tundras of Siberia,

sinking under immaterial inferior opium for the

downer-with-the-kids-than-thou,

more-bullshit-than-the-holiest-cow,

cool streetsy streetsy cool denigrating denizens of cool,

mimicking gimmicks with the zeal of a cockatiel,

as challenging as “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” on a glockenspiel.

I yawn as you jostle for this fossil of a format,

this “I represent every council house doormat”,

all savvyer-chavvyer-and-sitting-on-the-lavvyer-than-thou,

all my-rhymes-are-cackier-and-where’s-my-baccyer-than-thou

like there’s nothing to life but glancing at underclasses

and tag-sprayed underpasses through rosy-varnished glasses.

Don’t throw “You is a pussy and I is proper feral”

mangy mongrel street slang at me. Ignore me at your peril.

 

Sharp Cockneys don’t just trivialise,

we can fix our brains on things that might surprise.

We don’t wear left-right blinkers,

we’re unrestricted thinkers,

watching a world that smacks us right between the eyes.

 

And while the capital’s old markets and squashed-in shops and boozers

are trampled into the red carpets of our new emperors with bulldozers,

while concrete palaces in the shape of chemically-enhanced vegetables

and Ritz-esque rents hurl artists out the city by their testicles,

you sit there mumbling in accents copied from a gold-chained flock

about training shoes and barbecue sauce and your cock,

what a crock of rot! You blockheads don’t care a jot

for those at the bottom, who slave or beg or squat.

All you can do is highfalute floppily

against nothing that pollutes properly.

Flagless, you salute sloppily

and you just

don’t

get it.

 

Sharp Cockneys are mental grafters,

not you Hampstead hoodies smugly ever after

spitting your tenuous rhymes,

committing your cultural crimes,

howling rude-boy patois to the mock-Tudor rafters.