They tore down Number 25
Cromwell Road in Gloucester
But not before they’d disinterred
And laid to proper rest the victims
(Many of them his children)
Fred West had raped and murdered and then dug
In to its foundations.
And now downstream in Bristol they’ve torn down and thrown
Edward Colston in the dock,
Boston Tea Partying the kind of killer
Whose trade gestated Those United States,
Dealing in the blood and bones they ground
To line and waterproof the pits
Of their self-satisfaction.
Let’s list the things we should tear down,
An inventory of shame,
Those edifices pocked by Time
Which History pimps as shrine and not memorial;
Where the Crime Scene serves as sacred
To the criminals still sacrificing human offerings
At all these altars and these icons to propitiate
Themselves.
Though when the bulldozers are done
With Windsor Castle, Bath, the Bank of England,
Oxbridge, Eton, Kew, the Stately Homes,
And blood bubbles in the rubble of the pebbledash
Of heritage & shackling charm beside the gift shops,
And that whole haul from conquest, theft & slavery
Starts stinking in the exhausted sunlight, then recall:
Swift, too, lived off the proceeds of the slave trade.
Because the thieves’ and killers’ projection of reality
Has even had its knee on satire’s throat as well,
It seems forever.
Though where 25 Cromwell Road
Once rumbled with the screams downstairs
There’s now a public right of way.