The White House

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Yesterday I was in London, in wet weather, protesting on behalf of the hunger-strikers at Guantanamo Bay. They have been on strike for more than a month with no coverage in the mainstream media. It was good to hear speakers from a variety of backgrounds weather the pouring rain to deliver a message more people should have been there to hear. Words like those from the poet, Ibraham Sincere, whose poetry was searching and incriminating towards the wicked tyrants of injustice. Ibraham, as well as reciting three of his own poems, also read one from Adnam Latif, who died in Guantanamo after having spent a third of his short life there. It reminded me of when I was writing protest ballads myself.

I wrote the little offering below in 1989 when Ronald Reagan, original mouthpiece of the "War on Terror" phrase, retired. By that time drone attacks were already in the minds of the US hierarchy with a military scheme called 'Star Wars'. The writing was on the wall. Since then the planet has come a long way downhill. 

THE WHITE HOUSE

(Country and Western Ballad on the Retirement of President Reagan)

In the land where the free bald-eagle flew

they built the biggest, stinking loo

the empires of the world had seen,

a perpendicular latrine,

the White House.

With a constipated grunt and groan

an actor-bum came to the throne,

hellbent on this, his greatest role,

to fill the presidential bowl,

the White House.

Now the bowl gets filled with his daily voids,

he holds a donor card for haemorrhoids,

assured if he forgets his words,

he can fall back on this bowl of turds,

the White House.

Its sewerage system spans the earth,

distributing crud for all it’s worth,

one vast fertilisation plan

to shit on every living man,

(and woman too, Mary Lou),

the White House.

It has a privy chamber  with gates galore,

a closed Watergate and a welded door,

Irangate, that’s a sluice-gate, sure,

backing up in the open sewer,

the White House.

With a big, big bundle of stars and stripes

Uncle Sam gets up and calmly wipes

his gerontocratic arsehole clean,

then pulls the chain in the earth’s latrine,

the White House.