Blood on the Bread OR No Street Cred, Only Shame

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

[Update 1/1/2018): Here in London during New Years Eve and early on New Years Day, four young people have died in unrelated knife attacks! More wasted lives, more families left grieving...]

[Update 21/2/2018: Two more young men, victims of knife crime, died yesterday near where I live in Kentish Town, London NW5. So tragic, and senseless!] Two more families and their friends left to grieve.

The villanelle below was written on June 29th 2008. On the previous day, another young person had been fatally stabbed on London’s streets. Tragically, the poem is even more relevant now than it was then.

Official figures released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS)  in April 2017 showed a very significant increase in violent crime across the UK, much of it gang-related. Knife crime alone had increased by 14 per cent year on year by 2016 to levels not seen since 2011; a leap from 28,427 knife offences to 32,448.

The greater tragedy is that gang-related violent crime remains prevalent on the streets of many countries worldwide; such a waste of human lives where, more often than not, contemporary society fails to provide constructive alternatives offering potential solutions.

Whatever, these people commit violent acts by choice and the buck stops with them. If they have a conscience at all, they need to come to terms it, start steering a kinder course through life before they, too, become just another fatality statistic... and what kind of footprint is that to leave behind?

Society as a whole needs to be less complacent, more judgemental and remember hat actions speak louder than words; it is no time to be treading on eggshells for fear of offending the many high profile socio-cultural-religious bigots among us.

‘His [Jack's] mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.’ - William Golding [Lord of the Flies, 1954]

  

BLOOD ON THE BREAD or NO STREET CRED, ONLY SHAME

Don’t carry a gun or knife,
a young friend said;
show more respect for life

I want a career and a wife
(and a four-poster bed)
don’t carry a gun or knife

Let years of pain and strife
stand peace on its head?
Show more respect for life

Though gang rats run rife,
and blood on the bread,
don’t carry a gun or knife

Let me look, dress how I like
if it makes me feel good;
show more respect for life

Streets of fear, tears of grief,
saw him shot him dead;
Don’t carry a gun or knife;
show more respect for life

Copyright R. N. Taber 2008; 2017

[Note: This poem first appeared under the title 'Blood on the Bread'' in Poetic Expressions, Poetry Now, 2009 and subsequently in my own collection, 'On the Battlefields of Love' - Assembly Books, 2008.] 

Profile of a Hotshot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

For a minority of young people, being in a gang is exciting, even glamorous; a life of crime, even violence, brings them local street cred. For some, too, it provides a sense of belonging that, for various reasons, may be lacking at home; invariably, they discover soon enough how seriously flawed this simplistic perspective can be, paying for their mistakes with prison or worse...

There is no excuse for gang crime. A prevailing irony and tragedy lies in the fact that, given an opportunity, most gang members have a positive contribution to make in the very society that condemns them.

There are two sides to every divide and both need to find a way to be reconciled. Society needs to ask itself where it is failing some young people to drive them into a gang culture; what does a gang offer them that it cannot, and why can’t it?

For their part, gang members need to ask themselves what they really want from life and make a bigger effort to find it; they certainly won’t find it by using weapons, shooting drugs or compensating for their own fears by terrorising others. The chances are the false security of being part of a gang, and the price they must pay for exercising their contempt for society's better values, will come back to haunt them in its prisons, those universities of crime that major in the art of self-delusion.

Meanwhile, the majority of decent young people remain under threat of being stereotyped by a mindless minority.

  

PROFILE OF A HOTSHOT

We called ourselves the Hotshots,

my gang and me

Upholding the right to use a gun,

in our constitution

We’d pick fights on street corners

and raid stores

If some little old lady or a war vet

in the way…too bad

We were the Hotshots, graduated

from school to streets

No one could touch us because we

had youth on our side

Looks, girls, designer gear and guns

made us invincible

We even hit prime time News once

(fame at last)

Then a hotshot turned good citizen

and grassed us up

Disbanded now, gone to this prison

or that graveyard

Me, once Mr Fox, now chickenfeed

among old lags

We were the Hotshots, thought guns

were cool

[From: On the Battlefields of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010]