A poem of defiance for Renee Good, the woman killed by ICE

When I visit my eldest sister, she’ll sometimes say, “Why don’t you sit down and relax?” but, just like for her, relaxing is one of the least relaxing things I can think of. I need perpetual distraction. I need to eat up novelty wherever I find it.

January is rarely much of an On The Road month. This is a period of rebooting, doing the mundane things, like finally remembering to invoice for all the work I did the year before and reminding my family what an annoying presence I am until they break and send me back out on tour. 

Without the novelty of a new town every day, I walk. Walking is increasingly important to me. It exercises my eyes as much as my legs. I rarely use public transport when I go to London. I want to see more than an advert for Malta and the confusion of a tourist on the Piccadilly line. I have started taking photographs as a reminder of what created a spike in my brain.

I see a pattern. I fizz. I catch it. The search for changing geometry means I can crush the boredom of waiting for trains. A 40-minute delay at Crewe becomes a solitary game of I-Spy. I walk around and look at the angles of piping, shapes in the walls, archaic signs, the dead land where something wild still lives. I follow the philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes: “There’s treasure everywhere”. 

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I look through last night’s walk to St James’s Church in Clerkenwell. There’s the neon of the St Athans Hotel sign, made even more fabulous by the rain on the lens; there’s the pattern of a fire escape; the lines of the brutal block at the Brunswick Centre; diamonds made by the lights against the supermarket. The same path is never the same path. 

Read more:

• We must allow ourselves to feel joy wherever we can. Just ask Rod Stewart
• Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal by Robin Ince review – wise, witty and compassionate
• Top 5 books to inspire you to write poetry, selected by The Poetry Pharmacy’s Deborah Alma

Olivia Laing, in her superb book of art essays, writes that we spend too much time identifying poison and not enough time seeking nourishment. There is so much poison visible to us at the moment. The brutality in the USA, murders in Gaza, Sudan, Iran. 

We can feel guilt for any joy when so many are facing the worst of humanity, but anxiety does not save. It exhausts. We must find time for nourishment. 

Seeing the murder of Renee Good, the stomach pounds with an impotent rage. On that day, I started to walk and gather. Renee was a poet. Poets are always looking for the beauty. Poets know the world is worth fighting for. 

If you are a “self-proclaimed poet”

It is important that you know that  

The USA may not be the place to be 

When writing verse that’s free 

You may be eyed suspiciously 

They may sneer at your creativity 

“Does it make proper money…

…like the arms industry”

But know those voices who only see

the money deal 

Will never find a way to feel 

The beauty and the power

The rebellion and the revolution 

Of Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni 

Walt Whitman and Andrea Gibson 

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton 

Who heard those hollow hearts

around them 

Knew the damage they would do 

With their deadly dull, dull beats 

That imitate a life 

And instead, chose unfettered 

imagination 

Rejection of presumptions 

Where the limit of your life is the 

colour of your skin 

Or the clothes that you are put in 

They threaten the system of control 

Say “no!”

To your expectations 

See through your pathetic frame 

Your manly girdle and those blue pills 

Which aim to inflate your ersatz 

genitalia 

And in the anger of your impotence 

You’ll burn the library down

Not knowing that the ashes will 

fertilise the soil 

You will shout at the beauty 

Infuriated by the rainbows 

Cut your fingers as they tear at the 

roots 

And those bloodless hands will 

shrivel 

Scream at the unfairness of justice 

finally served 

All because the “self-proclaimed 

poet”

Dared to proclaim 

Dared to tell us 

“Take your mind 

And take your pen 

And poison the monsters 

With love that will choke them”

Robin Ince is a broadcaster and poet.

Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth: Poems about life, death, and the odd bits in betweenby Robin Ince is out now (Flapjack Press, £12).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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