When Home Is a Prison

Verse 1

Home is a prison when

            Lighted newspapers come through the frontdoor

Home is torture

            When graffiti is plastered all over the walls

Home is purgatory

            When my children are spat on and kicked

Home is nothing

            When my grandparents are beaten up

Home is far away

            Thousands of miles away when boots crush my skull

Home is on another continent

Maybe I’ll return there one day to escape the daily hostility

Verse 2

I don’t live in a cardboard box

I live in a shit smeared block of flats.

I’m not a prisoner of conscience

I’m not fighting a bloody war

I’m living in East Ham in fear

I’m not a powerful mad man killing all

I’m behind a wall

Cowering frightened

Waiting to be attacked

I’m a Pakistani in England that’s all.

Verse 3

White neighbourhood watch scheme

Keeping an eye out for the blacks,

Waiting to shop them to the police

Just for being in my street, being black.

Verse 4

I build a monument in my living room

To the brutality shown in the TV arena

Where lions devour my children

Teachers wipe out their faces

The monument I build

Is made of bones taken from Dachau

Transported to Coventry

I sleep next door to the SS men

Who want to cut off my feet

But I don’t sleep

For I am building a monument

That will live after I have gone

To choose a name for my work

Is simple enough

Mein Kampf

The monument is of me

Kneeling in chains

Under the boot

Of the skinhead regime.

Verse 5

The baying of wolves

The darkest moon of condemnation

The banners of injustice

Pass my front door

As if to ignore

My imprisonment.

            Ye turn out in numbers to party

            To bring the eyes of good men to shame

            Ye learn not of the golden light

            But that which scolds the power of fame.

Listen ye not to bringers of noisy processions

Tell yourself that good will triumph

Only when all good people

Leave their video armchairs

Proclaim that peace is not a gift

To be found in the future

But is the essence of justice

To be found today.

Make tomorrow’s love today’s reality.