Marxist. Trade Unionist. Socialist-feminist. Author. Poet. Speaker. Tutor. RMT ex-Exec. Workers' Liberty. Autie. Bi. PUFC fan.
Having written and performed as The Big J in the 1980s, Janine started again in 2014, after a brief interlude of around a quarter of a century.
Froms sonnets to villanelles, limericks to ballads, the occasional rap and plenty of straightforward rants, serious and humorous and sometimes both, here is Janine's verse.
Janine's poems have been published in numerous poetry and other journals and websites, including Algebra of Owls, South Bank Poetry, the Daily Mirror, PUSH, Hour of Writes, Proletarian Poetry, Confluence Medway, Screaming Violets, Poetry24, Solidarity, Stand Up and Spit, Hastings Independent, Freedom, Women’s Fightback, the Morning Star, Rising and TenFootCity; and in anthologies Spies4Life, Poems for Jeremy Corbyn, Justice: Poems for Grenfell Tower.and Ashes to Activists
There once was a Tory, his name is Neil Parish
Attracted to tractors in "a moment of madness"
And now Mrs P is extremely embarrassed
A big-wheeled beauty with a powerful horn
Harvesting hot stuff down in the corn
Who wouldn't love agricultural porn?
Pompous & Opulent
Prosperous & Ostentatious
Profiteering & On-the-take
Parsimonious & Obstinate
Penny-pinching & 'Orrible
Private & Obscene
Perfidious & Odious
Poisonous & Objectionable
Punishing & Oppressive
Petition & Organise
Protest & Outrage
Picket & Occupy
Public & Ownership.
She provoked him.
She said she was leaving him.
She’s been looking at other guys.
He had to show her.
She had to know
She isn’t a person in her own right,
She’s part of him.
She is the buffer between him and a hostile world.
Artillery rounds
and a barrage of shellfire
It looks and it sounds
like extending an empire
Bombing and shooting
civilians slain
Expansionist Putin
invading Ukraine
Threatening nukes
and rain hell from the skies
Dismissing rebukes
with chauvinist lies
Conscripts uprooting
and sent in to 'train'
Murderous Putin -
get out of Ukraine!
He was taken aback
by a slice of flapjack
Spliced by an iced bun
that jumped him for fun
And the poor bloke was wholly
jammed by a roly poly
He was knocked quite agog
by a shocking chocolate log
He was stunned by a lunge
from a moreish Victoria sponge
Wrapped up like a noodle
by a furtive apple strudel
Bring your own booze
Bring your own excitement
Bring your own rules
Bring your own entitlement
Bring your own germs
Bring your own immunity
Bring your own free pass
to party with impunity
A golden shovel based on the final stanza of The Mask of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
They hold us down but still we rise,
deference dies, we bite them down to size. Like
Jayaben roars, we are the lions,
Mr Manager, you'll do no more damage after
we've dealt with you. Stretching from slumber,
Flexing our muscle, exercising our minds, in
readiness for when they find that they are not unvanquishable
as they thought. They bought power but we have number.
Our public sewage industry
was sold to private bidders
Who don't dispose of putrid waste
but dump it in the rivers
They take responsibility
and flush it down the loo
For building up the affluent
builds effluence up too
The Tories' excremental sale
saw treatment work neglected
As income goes to bonuses
so beaches are infected