Thanks to the Punk				

Thanks to the punk who
bothered to
do a bit of neat graffiti by the bank.
You changed my life,
stripped away
all that flim flam about democracy.
Your neat row of Xs
showed our ration of the stuff.
“Your entire life’s share” it said
along Lloyd’s trim brick wall.
Every five years if we were lucky, a little x.
Every five years a change of faces
in distant places.

Thanks to the bikers who
bothered to
put up that ‘Third Reich’ poster
in the bay window by the fish shop
when Mrs Thatcher gripped our necks
for the third time.
Quaint Gothic script
struck out across Gloucester Street
annoying posh voters.

Thanks to all outcasts,
oddities, eccentrics, rebels, cranks, hippies, activists,
folding leaflets, addressing envelopes,
delivering up tower blocks,
or rotting gates collapsing in your hands.
This is how we build the promised land.

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Pat Jourdan is a painter from Liverpool College of Art. Winner of the Molly Keane Short Story Award and second in the Michael McLaverty Award, won the Cootehill, Poetry Pulse and Veterans Awareness prizes, published in  200 magazines, with 4 self-published novels, 5 short story collections and 6 poetry collections. Mentioned in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, p137 as “Pat Jourdan, a little-known poet of the Liverpool School.”

Lived in Galway for 10 years; divorced; 2 sons; now lives in Suffolk down a country lane.

Blog-of-sorts at patjourdanwordpress.com.

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