M.I.A.'s new video, "Born Free"

I have just watched M.I.A.'s new video, Born Free, which has been banned from YouTube; but which is still available on Vimeo. The video was viewed with lofty and light-hearted sarcasm by the New York Times, and dismissed as sledgehammer in its subtlety by The Guardian. With a video of such graphic content, responses will often be intensely personal. For my part, I think it is one of the most visceral and vital music videos that I have ever seen. I have watched, over the years, hours of reports on the slaughter of innocents; but, until now, it has been difficult to feel much more than deep sorrow. M.I.A.'s video gave rise to an unfamiliar feeling: empathy.

The video is nine minutes long; it depicts US soldiers storming into an apartment block, threatening and beating some of its occupants, before rounding up a redheaded youth and shoving him into an armoured van. There he finds a dozen or so other boys like him, who are driven - past a trio of rock-throwing youths - to a desert. There, prompted by Alsatians and the sight of their youngest number shot point-blank in the head, they are forced to run for their lives; whilst the soldiers use them as target practice. None of the youths escape; one of them is blown apart in appallingly slow motion.

The video, in my view, is truly exceptional. It places you right there in that van with those boys and their terror. And of course, they're not just redheads, the metaphor works beautifully. They are gays, Jews, Muslims, Armenians...the power of this video is that all of a sudden it makes sense. Srebrenica makes sense. Gaza makes sense. The Holocaust makes sense. It feels real, that at any moment anywhere in the world this could happen, is happening. There are times when you doubt so passionately the ability of art to make a difference - then this comes along. Oh my God. M.I.A., take a bow.

"Carnivorous", a poem

Carnivorous -
Clasping a Guinness, as
I slip through the dark, skipping past any witnesses,
Starving and shivering, I charge through the city,
Sniff, sniff goes my nose on the path of the bigoted:
Stench grows in my nostrils,
Scent makes me hostile,
Once too many they have meddled with my relatives,
Now my appetite's turned devilish,
I'm getting very peckish, and they smell so delicious -
Now they've seen me coming, they're running -
Those columnists leaking hate from each orifice,
And the cruel priests who would keep us all closeted
And the policemen who shoot for no reason,
The far-right-winger with the military interests
Who cannot play the skinhead, so funds him instead:
All these, I'll eat -
All these people concocting their viciousness,
I am a fox, they're a box full of chicken wings;
So they flee: they're desperate, see,
They know that they're each putting red on my teeth:
Soon one of them trips and then falls;
I sip, sip my Guinness then I lick, lick my jaws:
This first victim's a man, and he's old -
I've smelled something horrid at the bottom of his soul;
It smells of -
Silenced Jews and borrowed gold
So I take a deep breath and I swallow him whole;
He tasted of capers in vinaigrette -
His spirit pickled hatred into bitterness -
Didn't think that I would be a good cannibal:
But it makes a strange kind of logic, to be honest;
It's the only way I can stomach all the horror
Since each time I feed, there's a little less of it

David Cameron sends a black man to calm down the KKK. (Not quite - but very, very close.)

This is bizarre and appalling. David Cameron is sending his most senior gay MP to Warsaw to tell a group of proudly homophobic politicians to behave. (Click here for the story in the Guardian...and if you'd like to learn about the cultural context in which Cameron's tactical deployment was made, please click here.)

You couldn't make it up. There will be some who read this post and won't understand what I find offensive here. For the avoidance of doubt, I consider this as thoughtless as sending your most senior black delegate to a Ku Klux Klan convention. The most powerful show of progress and inclusion would have been if Mr. Cameron himself went to Poland. Apartheid fell when white people turned against it. Homophobia will fall when straight people turn against it. Indeed, this is why it is falling. But this...As a piece of gesture politics goes, it's a slap in the face.

For the record, I don't think that David Cameron is prejudiced. I just don't think he "gets it" when it comes to gay issues. To wit, there's his distastrous interview with the Gay Times where he's flummoxed by the simplest of questions.

A pattern is forming here. There are many people who will be very well served by a Cameron government, several of whom are dear friends of mine. But the Cameron government won't be serving the gays too well; and that's not just a shame, it's shameful.

Drilling for Poetry

Writing poetry is both the easiest and the hardest thing I can imagine. Or maybe that should say "finding poetry". Yes, I have that familiar belief that producing poetry is like drilling for oil. Dip a pen deep enough into your soul, and you're sure to draw out the purest form of self-expression.

Some poems flow out so easily, it's as if they've been conjured from a Saudi oilfield. There, in those places that supply a quarter of the world's petroleum, the crude sits so close to the surface that the merest incursion sees it surging towards the sunlight. That's how poetry feels on the easiest of days; the joy or rage is so keen to emerge that all you have to do is press a pen against your feelings.

On the hardest of days, writing poetry is as tough as scouring Alberta's tar sands; you know there's oil there, but it's damned if it'll come cheaply. Poems like this announce themselves not line by line, but word by word, a fragment or so with every passing week or month. What's more, the speed at which a poem leaves you is no indication of its quality. Some of the best pieces I have produced were years in the extraction; some of the best also took mere hours, minutes.

Some poems, like the sludge you can dredge from the Earth, were hard to behold once I brought them out. I have written more than any other theme on the feeling of jealousy, which to me is the ugliest of all human emotions and therefore the one that I, as a poet, should address in my work at all costs. And each time I have published a piece on this topic, I am suddenly afraid that I will vanish from someone's address book, as they recoil from a friend who could harbour such bile. (But, worringyly or not, that's never happened.)

There are some days and places where drilling for poetry is more fruitful than others. Like now. Right now I'm on the top floor of the 26 bus, heading into Hackney, with a warm, slow day behind me. There's a pint or two of ale ahead of me if I want it, but more likely there's an evening of work on the last pages of my football manuscript. There's a tune by drum-and-bass outfit Atlantic Connection in my ears, mirroring my default mood, which is melancholic. Yes: there's a self-indulgence in gentle misery, which I think might be the greatest luxury in the world.

So this is the mood that I find best for poetry, when the sands that yield creativity are most pliant. The shuffle and rustle of drum and bass, and that awful hollowness in the lowest part of my gut, as my eyes look further into my head for images I haven't yet seen.

It's not the most beautiful process, but long ago I found it hard or arrogant to define what beauty even was. What I can say is that, for me, beauty is this: to express feeling in as raw and powerful a form in that which you feel it. In which case, I have achieved beauty only rarely; but all the same I can't wait until the next time that I drill.