The pain I withstand for I have a dream.

Know who you are, know the ground on which you stand.

Never build your house on a bed of sand.

Going Places

Going Places

Another

Cigarette ash,

Television serial-filled,

Advert-analysing,

Cupboard-starving,

Front room-filling,

Tea-slurping,

Mind-chewing,

Brain-burping,

Carpet-picking,

Pots-watching,

Room-gleaning,

Toilet-flushing

Night,

With nothing to do.

I think I’ll paint roads

On my front room walls

To convince myself

That I’m going places.

Gil Scott-Heron

Gil Scott-Heron

Gil Scott-Heron shines

In tightly cut rhythmic rhymes.

The Harlem hero strikes again,

Jazz in the house, milk the pain.

From politics in poetics,

The symbols in the lyrics

Shut in the drum ripple in the skin

While the bass dives deep and digs in.

Gil Scott-Heron shines

In tightly cut rhythmic rhymes.

The Washington wonder strikes again,

Jazz in the house, milk the pain.

And Brian Jackson in zoot suit

Places into the root the sweet flute,

Black and in Britain we know what Scott means

When he documents the siege of New Orleans,

With subtlety in vibes and lyrics giving clues,

The man talks in colours in the inner city blues,

Explained how television would not be revolutionised

And how the revolution would not be televised.

This panther is black, catch its silhouette,

Cutting a shadow to outline the debt.

Martin Luther King and a cut of Malcolm X

Wrapped in the musical strength of the Amnesia Express.

Gil Scott-Heron shines

In tightly cut rhythmic lines.

Another black hero strikes again,

Jazz in the house, milk the pain.

Godsell

Godsell

You knock upon my door

And open.

I drink to you.

This is a bad trip,

Something about Armageddon

And pigs possessed by devils

Flinging themselves from cliffs.

Look back into my house and I may turn to salt.

Blackened horizons itch with locusts,

Whole pieces of earth slump

Swallowed by the devil’s breath;

Yea, as I walk through the valley of death

With Lucifer in the crick of my back,

An avalanche of commands befalls me,

And I whimper from the cross and catapult

In the child’s hand,

Clutching a lock of my own hair,

Feeling the heat of a burning bush

Singe the back of my neck.

Three score and ten years of this;

Look back into my house and I may turn to salt.

Where is the chariot of fire?

Where is the chariot of fire?

I, one piece of thirty pieces of silver,

A possessed pig, laugh at the cliff’s edge,

Snort and fling myself to the rocks.

When I meet Peter

I shall bribe him,

As I have been bribed.

Flushed

Flushed

Why

Can’t

Heads

Have

Overflow pipes

Like toilets?

If

They

Did

I

Could

Pull

My

Ear

And

Flush

It

All

Out.

I Hate You

I Hate You

You’re as popular as a posted

Birthday gift to someone who’s just died.

I once said you weren’t that bad,

I lied.

You’re a conversation number,