Bellenden Road Man is suited and bruted and looking for land.
I still walk around Peckham like it is 1983 but it's full of dead ends now because someone somewhere decided there were too many dead boys there, I've got an idea let's block them in because we've already stacked them on top of one another like old bibles yellowed at the edges with sin.
So I end up stuck because my feet are three years old but my thoughts are thirty-odd year old moulds. My thoughts got spilt on them streets when three white boys threw a paving slab in my head in 1999 and blood poured from my head like purple Wisteria from a twining and climbing vine and the Chinese man said unless you wan' speshull fwy wice I should come out of his shop, my mother taught me to respect my elders so I did as I was told and when I got outside I dropped and that was when I learnt to love Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani right then. I don't know where they originated from but I know they were men and they stayed with me until the Ambulance came, the paramedics asked me my name and looked in my face with a tinge of disgust as if they could taste the escaping lust I had stored in my loins for my crack-dealing boyfriend.
Yeah mate, my thoughts know these streets better than my feet or yours for that matter. My thoughts know say everything in the dungle scatter scatter like in Kalakuta Republic. My thoughts are used to the misappropriation and the bullshit.
The weight of my thoughts has cracked these pavements like Bellenden Road men's falling wallets or the weight of young men felled by stray bullets. My thoughts need a staycation but now there's this big gentrification and I just want out.
These people with lots of money have come down these parts and dem start going on funny like they're going on vacation only they stay looking for investment potential.
There are no more postcode wars, just these postcode whores looking for a backyard, a space for the car and open-plan living over two floors. Yuck. You suck and so does your loft conversion.
They've got white, brown, yellow and black faces and who knew rich people's tastes could be so fucking tasteless. Who knew rich people's smiles could be so fucking faceless. Who knew they had all them 'spensive things but as my mummy would say me never see noh cases.
I can only write in rhyme when elite shit makes me think in poetry. I can only write in time when I write it from memory. You see I sung my way above the sidewalk, I didn't shout. When they left me there bleeding I'd already found a way out. I graduated (twice) and when my family thought me principicated I made myself small and the smaller I made myself the bigger my problems came.
I'm saying - I am Peckham. I have been beaten. I am Peckham. I have been overlooked. I am Peckham. I have been accused, then charged, never convicted always scarred and now there are these people coming to buy what's not for sale. They've come to buy the remnant because someone convinced them that the people in Peckham failed.
But most of us sailed and we're still sailing while the Bellenden Road Man searches for a tutor because his rich kid is failing in that 'spensive-ass-school.
We all know about the death in the stairwell but do we want to know about the private hell of people who no matter how hard they push they are destined for the impoverished end of the social scale. Do you want to know about the poor sail in the political wind or would you rather watch Top Boy and think ... these dirty negroes sink and these white trash boys don't think or work or study hard enough all they do is fuck and spread dem seed, which is why we need a selective breed. Go on ... call my bluff.
The cleaning agent used in social cleansing is called Gentrification. Out with the social housing, in with affordable housing while espousing all this nonsense about Brave New Britain and some of you fucking fools are so fucking smitten. Ooooooh look a Waitrose and you scrunch your working-class toes the way I scrunched my fists behind my young back that day in 1995 when the policeman put his foot in my back and told the fucking nigger you are lucky to be alive and then he kicked me ... he actually factually kicked me off the 37 bus.
Not a word Tafari.
Don't you dare cuss.
Not a word Tafari.
Or somebody will get dem neck bruk.
Steel bracelets dangling from his waist and now copper's shiny handcuffs are smiling by his face while I am compiling reasons why surely this isn't racial violence. My silence. I was talking about my cowardly silence, which when confronted with racism amounted to little more than self-inflicted violence.
This is not because my skin is ... (you know) ... (don't say it) ... he'll call you a racist if you call him black. I will call you pathetic if you don't and as far as racist, I prefer eugenicist actually because I prefer to use my terms factually, but who am I.
I am an accident of history. I am a Trans Atlantic mystery. I am a master of misogyny. I am the boy that man dem can no longer call batty because now man dem ah call me to dig inna dem panty.
I am an educated failure. Just some man from Peckham with three year old feet that lead him into walls and a head full of thoughts that probably mean fuck all.
And one more thing Bellenden Road Man - All the pictures in all the publications that paint Peckham as the new upcoming, trendy hotspot are missing one vital thing - the black people.