Time Crisis Poem by Tom Sinclair

So it’s World Poetry Day
I’m still in France
(A temporal migrant if you like)
And the conservative party conference drones on
I am surrounded by my privilege
My choices
Starting with being here
Having a passport that lets me be anywhere in Europe
For a time
To be able to have pocket change
To spend my diminished euro on a coffee I don’t NEED
To sugar or not to sugar
To taste before adding milk
Whether to add the milk?
And whether to even bother drinking the coffee at all

So I think if my only logical choice was to sell everything I own
Give all that little money to a people smuggler
To then sail me in a rickety boat to a foreign land
Where I don’t know the language
Nor the people there
And I may still die in the attempt
Then to hear some right wing,
White collar all her life in a £50’000 plus job with no minimum hours to work, with one of the best
Publically funded pensions and employment benefit schemes
Who had a free degree in Oxford
(I checked her Wikipedia page, careful which Teresa May you google)
Complains that with taking on these asylum seekers taking these risks
That they might not add anything to the UK economy
She deserves a good egg and flouring at the bare minimum
And if Jeremy Hunt thinks that reducing benefits incentives
Will make people work harder
Then why not cut MP’s benefits, so they work harder?
Nimby – ism
Not in my back garden-ists
People happy to be ‘considered’ kind and morally sound and pro asylum seeker
As long as they don’t live to near them and mess with the geraniums
Purpose is luxury of choice
Survival is a luxury of circumstance
Ignorance is a luxury of privilege
So just one day for poetry
leaves 364 for poverty
I know it can feel like
Everything has been said before
Everything has been done before
Everything has been written before

But my life will never be lived again
Possibly no one person’s life will ever be lived again
Just one shot for sure
I’ll pray to Zeus
My new Mecca will be Mount Olympus
My rosary is to be made of six sided die
And a Vatican priest
Sacrifices his position in hope
That I hope is not in vain
Plato’s republic fell
Socrates was executed
Nero went mad
Atlantis sunk
But the stories of how we live
Are told by those who survive us

I choose to see the patterns
I chose to drink the coffee
I choose to do more than survive
Because I can
What would you do, if you couldn’t?
It’s hard to imagine
I imagine
It’s even harder to live