Bill Atkins was a small scale dealer
Who specialised in making deals
Selling grass to public schoolboys;
To be precise, to friends of mine.
I’ll admit it: buying drugs,
Like voting Tory, is not my game;
The protocols involved elude me,
So I’d smoke other people’s stash.
But that’s the way I knew Bill Atkins:
My mates dropped by his Northwood flat,
A ground floor bedsit, weirdly tidy,
That smelled of amyl and stale spunk,
To score a bag of this or that,
With me in tow, quietly observing.
I doubt he even noticed me,
Another punter passing through,
But I noticed his large, square head,
His haircut that didn’t quite fit,
His rangey good spirits and the way he
Spouted wisdom of a sort.
He’s long dead now, a brief statistic,
In a file that’s since been lost,
Dying in custody, another
Instance of the silent pogrom
It’s indecent even mentioning,
The ways they’ve always cleared up crime.
And even if, in those ecologies
Where he fulfilled an obvious need,
I got a sense of barrel scraping
Selling dope to twats like us,
In druggie terms, the rough equivalent
Of cabbies on the Heathrow run,
Not quite as bad as pills for schoolkids
But hardly Pablo Escobar,
But nonetheless he deserved better
Than dying in an echoing cell
With a knee pressed on his neck
As the filth put out the trash
Entrenched, beyond reach of redemption,
Deep in The Disposable.
Yet, in his time, he spouted wisdom,
Of his time, and of himself;
Foul, brutal wisdom, best forgotten,
But still wisdom, nonetheless.
So, having acted out the courtesies
And had a smoke to seal the deal
If you found you couldn’t now drive
“Have a drink!” Bill would espouse.
Likewise, if drunk, a spliff would sort you,
And thus restore the Cosmic Balance,
Rebalancing the Humours,
Propitiating his stoned Zen.
“All women like to be knocked around,”
He’d then say with a crooked grin,
“And those who say they don’t are lying!”
We’d laugh at him, and he’d laugh back,
And no one sought to put him right
Beyond a mockney slew of swearing,
For after all, what was the point?
He was only selling grass.
And yet, beyond the grave, Bill Atkins
Spreads a hand around the globe
Establishing new paradigms,
Underpinned by jokes and violence,
That anyone who disagrees
Isn’t expressing an opinion,
But lying, lying in their teeth,
To trap you in their evil plot.
Thus entrenched, your rectitude
Is buttressed by the frightful fact
That your opponents are so evil
They lie to douse your burning truth.
And No means Yes, and all is Fake News
As part of vast conspiracies,
A comfort blanket for extinction
A mindset for the Final Days
An insight from a dead drug dealer’s
Northwood bedsit, the crucible -
Aping Marx’s British Library -
For Our Last Enlightenment.