six☮︎tees…

.

who arrived like a creeping ivy
    stalking-leopard at the zoo
a Regents Park type break out
    changed our spattered disguises
aided by clearasil, germolene, chapstick
    while a nuclear threat was forming
the colour of your hair was running
    at football grounds from conflict
into Mary Quant’s quaint eyeshadow
    of glass, black vinyl and chrome

Branson, once a happy, hippy mogul
    through virgin skies we launched
Uri Gegarin, Tellstar, Maharajhi Yogi
    transcendent, guru masters of baloney
fish eggs, fish crap in heaps, fools caviar
    spaghetti bolognaise, tikka masala
Colonel Sanders arrived in white suit
    trucking around the US, Canada for a-while
sixties turns up, time to show some style
    savants, intellectuals agree

              it’s a time to be free
 
So I go to the Festival Hall, moody blue
    these are the days of future past, lead on 
Inna gadda da vida, sunshine of my love
    tambourines, krishna’s, eskimo’s, let it bleed
smokin weed, droppin acid, everyone is placid
    till Quadrophenia, skinhead boots and speed
politicians, plumbs in throats, Yorkshire drawl
  Tony Benn, Guevara, Khrushchev, man
called John from Brookline, Massachusetts
  he took a bullet for Democracy

               shattered dreams

tie-dye shirts, flarey jeans, wooden beads
    no bra women, so, we had contraceptives?
‘sexual revolution’, love the one your with
    some clung to marriage, it’s a magic bus

               mini’s, volkswagons

some to chillums, spliffs, n’brownies
    Billy Butlin holidays in ticky-tacky chalets
sonic screams in the court of crimson kings
    wind-chimes, mersey-beat, Stevie Wonder
Warhol’s plimsole, Lichtenstein, Tony Hancock
  stand up mother’s little helper

                 Social Drama’s 

cos’ revolution’s here, you know what i mean
  Steve McQueen, Bullitt, Thomas Crown
Great Escape good name for films a’plenty
  Hollywood’s copulating, inventing names
Hoffman, Hepburn, Monroe, Bardot, Newman                               
  currency of change, lies on the cutting floor
Lumet, Kubrick. Kurosawa, Lean and Wilder
  made their beans out of the masses
the sugar of molasses, the candy floss
  picture houses, palaces where heroes live

                   and die, Alan Ladd, Marilyn

popular philosophy, Orwell, Huxley emerge
  Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung
Anthony Burgess, R.D. Laing, Tolkien, Jung
  no one reads Worlds in Collision anymore
the Politics of Experience, of Ecstasy or Jung
  the revolution died on a Summer Holiday
on an RT bus like Mahatma Gandhi on 3oth
  January 1948, with three bullets in his chest
the ‘sixties’ was a social revolution that died
  not just marajuana, the way we felt inside

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                          ©edenbraytoday07.11.2021

rare author’s note:

I didn’t expect to write this piece – it just happened – did the six-tees happen at all? – I’m not sure they did – yet I was there and remember a certain excitement – we felt something was happening – and we didn’t know what it was – but in so many ways – it was better than what we have today! – I wrote this as a garbled flow of consciousness – as I remember it and things – as things were – as each day life was exciting – as each day was an ‘event’ – not a mundane existence – I wrote it as I sensed it – as I felt it and I didn’t use the word fuck once!