This is Hackney

 

A Narrow Way

Reserved for buses and pedestrians

Congested with motorists

Taking a shortcut to Mare Street

Ignored

By policemen intent on the serious business

Of harassing young black men

 

This is Hackney

 

Electoral fraud

Leaving a hung council

Incapable of redeeming

Years

Of quick fixes, political posturing, gross mismanagement

And insidious corruption

And hanging with the Damoclean doom

Of direct government

As if it were a troublesome Irish province

 

This is Hackney

 

Impolite requests

Illegally fly-posted

For the beheading

Of the Chief Executive

For the treasonable act

Of trimming services

And cutting jobs

 

This is Hackney

 

Home to the Angry Brigade

And its homemade hippie bombs

Courtesy of the Amhurst Road commune

More recently to become

Class War kicking (unsuccessfully)

The rich scum out of Hackney

 

This is Hackney

 

Subterranean manoeuvreings of PKK terrorists

Seeking to infiltrate Kurdish refugee groups

 

This is Hackney

 

Revolutionary republican nonconformists

Plotting the overthrow of the monarchy

Before they became respectable

Upholders of the liberal establishment

 

This is Hackney

 

Empty industrial units reborn as Power and Glory Ministries

Anarchist football matches (with or without a referee?)

Libraries shut on Saturdays (and not just in Stamford Hill)

Illegal monkey parts sold in Ridley Road

Babylondon - graffiti scrawled on a factory wall

Homerton High Street constipated once more

 

This is Hackney

 

A Narrow Way

From which there is no shortcut to heaven