Let’s Paint the Town Red and White
This responds to “Operation Raise the Colours,” where some have painted the St. George’s Cross across streets, roundabouts, and takeaway shops. Claimed as patriotism, these acts are vandalism and an attempt to erase community spaces and stirring division.
Red bleeds across zebra crossings,
slick on high street tarmac,
smearing over takeaway shutters,
stretched across roundabouts, stubborn as lead.
Rollers scrape and flake,
pigment cheap, sunlight shakes it loose,
drips into puddles,
history seeping through plaster,
like damp beneath primer that never hides the past.
The streets run red and white,
paint claimed by hands insistent on marking stone, brick, tarmac—
silence made loud in streaks and drips.
Roundabouts stand proud under fresh coats.
Slash Dulux over despair—
coverage meant to hide, but failing.
Paint bleeds over more than roadway—
onto takeaway windowpanes, pavements, shop signs—
a mural of identity, impulse, defiance.
Undercoat logic tries to cover the past,
but no sealant ever lasts.
Brushstroke patriots,
disciples of feeling,
armed with rollers like substitute rifles.
The painting’s wrap is hollow,
dressing decline as though it were destiny.
Every slogan,
a stencil sprayed on the breeze.
Pigment flakes with ease,
truth showing through the layers.
Heritage red becomes eviction scarlet,
brilliant white papered over target.
Crowns drip Crown paint onto stone,
monarchs in tester pots,
empires reduced to monochrome.
Borders cut by shaky hands,
masking tape straining against the straight line of intention.
Edges bleed in private,
lines never straight.
Revolutions run off into puddles of hate,
mirroring the sky distorted,
clouds stretched, colours torn thin.
Tins are stirred, paint slapped on the ground.
Every revolution circles round,
because property cannot be glossed,
despair cannot be mapped.
Whitewashed roundabouts cannot hide the cracks.
Paint peels, drips, bleeds into puddles,
but the fissures of history remain—
veins in stone, stories in tarmac,
layers no roller can erase.
Crowns, crosses, streaks of red and white
twirl and fall like the last dance
over streets that remember,
over walls that refuse to forget.
The cracks take the floor,
silent but insistent,
and they will not be painted over.
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