' ...Just Another Day Down On The Dole Queue.... '*

I am a bad pacifist
when my local job centre
told me 'We have targets',
as if their aims at life
had been stunted before then.  
I replied 'Targets are for armies.
Am I in your line of fire?'.

I half expected one of the staff
to throw a pen a me, and say
'There you are' as their idea 
of inclusive school boy humour.

But they did not even suggest
that I look at the cards on their boards, 
profiles of jobs that folk might apply for
where if job adverts came with 'sell by' dates
then half of what advertised was past it.

They had long since marked me down 
as 'passive aggressive-unemployable
for lack of experience'. I was one of many,
but one of the few to attempt the wit to prove it.

*A line from the prologue to the side long suite
by Roy Harper 'One of those days In England Parts 2-10',
which took up all of side 2 of his 1977 LP 'Bullinamingvase'.
Find the whole album on youtube here.      

Roy Harper On David Bowie

 'When I first met David he was performing mime. In that respect he never changed. His life was one long brilliant mime. His various personas were the equal and musical equivalent of his favourite, Marcel Marceau.

He mimed many of his contemporaries without really ever copying them. His particular genius was to see an attitude, feel an inspiration, delivery or emotion in someone and be able to replicate and transgress that in an often superlative way of his own, which could not only give added insight to that source, but often lend it a satyrical edge, a playful touch or an irony.

Back in the day, he sold me a pair of Tibetan boots he’d got from a monk. He was more broke than me, and I gave him a ten bob note for them. He was gigging with just an ageing Grundig tape recorder at the time. The boots were really uncomfortable. The soles were made of wood and didn’t bend. They only lasted for a couple of years. Wish I still had them.

Wish we both still had those gigs to do.'.

written in 2016 and taken Roy Harper's facebook page.