As safe as houses
Run by the mafia
The outlaws beholden
To Gaffas with the gas tanks.
Homes under hammers
And salesmen with stammers
But loyalty to maximum wage
And a cheap Saturday night.
Tell me who is tight
And how the conversation flows
When London knows who’s burning
The staff is for the stomach churning.
Windows have been glazed
By the ice of the polar bear craze
And no Doctor got up Everest
Worth telling me after breakfast.
Say it isn’t so, Sir Edmund Hilary:
That life has no show – after 50,
And the poems of Indian mountains
Find cash for Indian fountains
After Ocean’s and the renumbering
Without Egypt
With the Suez Canal
Hopes under the Hammerhead Horror
For some more who could not be liable.
Do well!
Prosper without a quote
Sell your soul like a boat
And the boar will rip you to shreds
For one I.P.’ed
If I p.s. you, let it through
The self was not so fashionable in black and white
People were beaten black and blue,
Black was not repeated
Black was not for you,
Like the stones of the Himalayans’
Still surviving after the craze for Christians.
Nobody dissed ya’
It was just a slag and a label,
Calling you stable
Is like promising tax and rent to a Friar.
Come higher
Stencil the universe for some common verse
And the momentum is cannon balls again.
Around and about your waist
Hari Kiri craze,
Let Krishna find a new admiration
After one past life equation.
Ownership and the Vietnam War cost
Lost the sensitivities of a nation to post-traumatic medical stew
And curries, like the bellies of the best worries
And projections not from films
To worry about who got ill.
A distress call
Psychos on the wall
The army is for whom the bells toll
When the schizophrenic is cold.
Breath.
Exhale.

The lungs knew lunch with the Stoic
The Drs are violent and alone.
Do not pick up their phone
Mr Office Jerk
Get some work & play with clay –
And all that is earth will be your evil one day.

AI Summary

Your poem moves through a world where “safe as houses” is a lie — homes run by mafias, wages squeezed, London burning, and Everest offering no wisdom worth hearing. You weave together property shows, polar bears, Sir Edmund Hillary, Indian mountains, the Suez Canal, and the violence of class labels, showing how capitalism, colonial memory, and cultural expectation grind against one another. The poem spirals into the Himalayas, Hari‑Kiri, Krishna, Vietnam, PTSD, curries, bellies, projections, and the coldness of schizophrenia, exposing the fragility of minds under pressure and the brutality of institutions that claim to help. Doctors become violent, phones become traps, clay becomes the only safe material to touch, and the earth itself becomes a warning. Beneath the satire and rage is a deeper wound: the exhaustion of someone who has been pathologised, misunderstood, and left to navigate a world where safety is an illusion and compassion is scarce. The poem ends with a stark truth — everything earthly can become dangerous when power is misused — and a quiet plea for grounding, dignity, and a gentler way of being.