Playing For Pride

First poem ever written 'Born in a box' 1982 after signing on at my local Unemployment Benefit Office in Darlington, the start of a long, enduring, love/hate relationship between the State and one of its artists.

Born in a box

A four-walled 50’s fortress:
windows, bricks, a door.
New life in your hand and
ashes on the floor.

A gaggle of geese in a corner,
a comedian heckles the staff,
a snatch of speech in dribs and drabs
a man with spots, a woman with scabs.

Smoke drifts in the silent
currents of eddying sighs,
you wonder which one tells the truth
and which one tells the lies?

And the woman with six children
demands an equal say
and the teenager boy who lives with Mum
demands his equal pay.

A black and white procession
through a silent film moves like
the small hands on a clock face,
like a stylus in the grooves

and an old man cannot see
he’s of no use no more and
a young man is only shown
the way to another door.

Frustration screams in silence,
depression shows no remorse
and an overfed computer
prepares for second course.

Poetry Scum Recording, 2020
Born in a box, A madman comes to dinner, I see it all in a rising dawn and The the problem with chocolate.

Tony Stowers @ Some-Antics 10-07-2020
I see it all in a rising dawn

Tony Stowers at punkpoetry.com click to view

Tony Stowers- Chocolate, 2020
track from Doin' It 4 The Kids (double charity album)
by Punk 4 The Homeless

The Ranters by Attila the Stockbroker

Ranting verse – a name coined by Seething Wells and Molotov Comics in the early 1980s to describe a new form of poetry which has as its main objective entertainment, information and humour, usually in an oral rather than printed setting. Ranter – a poet who rhymes ‘comet’ with ‘vomit’, who is generally well left of centre and prepared to brave hostile and uninterested audiences to put across his ideas and wins those audiences over. If you can’t win over a negative audience you’re not going at it the right way. Ranting is about communication, being funny, being political, taking the unaccompanied spoken word to places it has never gone before and showing people who have never trusted words before that they can be a great source of pleasure, enjoyment and information.
Ranting verse – a label, all labels are bad, pigeonholes stink, all positive, articulate, caring and humorous poets are good, whatever they call themselves. ‘Poet’ – a weird definition, someone who uses rhyme + metre: there are many self-indulgent wimps around who have given the term such a bad reputation that if I say I’m a poet to people who don’t know me they expect me to fall over when they poke me with their finger !
Ranters, poets, writers to check out: Porky, Peter Campbell, Swift Nick, Kool Knotes, Dino, Little Dave, Seething Wells, Little Brother, Benjamin Zephaniah, Tony Stowers, Ginger John and more. Many other people write good stuff but I don’t know about them.
We aim above all, to make POETRY a decent thing to write. Poets are, rightly maybe, regarded as weird and psychedelic beings by the majority o0f people – and that’s at best because most people don’t even think about poetry. We aim to change all that by making poetry accessible, by demystifying it and making it available. By showing the way for ANYONE to write and perform punk broke down the barriers in music, so we hope to in poetry. ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’ (Adrian Mitchell) This is what we’ve got to change.'

Tony Stowers @ Some-Antics Online 3 05-06-2020

A Year in Provence it ain't