Sick and Tired of Anarchists...

...being imprisoned. I don't care what they did. If s/he's really an anarchist, all the way through, then it was the right thing to do.

From Anarchy Comics #4, published 1987:

On the night of March 3 1982 teenager Jimmy Heather-Hayes hurled two petrol bombs into the local police station in the West London suburb of Teddington. The blast and flames caused minimal damage and injured no one.

Although he escaped into the darkness the cops had no trouble tracking him down and charging him with 'arson and intent to endanger life'. The young anarchist poet spent the next four months in a solitary cell waiting to go for trial.

I'm locked up in here with two hundred of my kind
Rejects of the system, rejects of the mind.
A restriction of the freedom
It cuts like a knife
Crushing me slowly
Eating up my life
The cell's walls enclose
Cutting out the light
I feel myself cracking
I know this isn't right.
But I declared a war on a system with no heart
And now it had decided I no longer play a part

All you lot out there
Don't make the same mistake
That revolution glory
It's all a bloody fake.
Know the system before you fight it,
Suss out what it's like
'Till then just bide your time
Wait before you strike

On July 6 a judge at Londons Old Bailey found Jimmy guilty, sending him back to jail to wait for the sentence. The next day, locked in his cell, Jimmy committed suicide.

Hanging from the rafters on a greasy rope
When they read your note they say
'He couldn't cope'
'Life ain't a game', they reckon,
'for the weak, corpose on a rope,
was just another freak'

Jimmy Heather-Hayes, Ashford Prison 1982

I claim all rights to write some anarcho-punk music to this poem by the way. If anyone turns this into an alternative rock song I will be so pissed.

One sad thing about anarcho-punk culture is that it's not on the internet.