A SOCIAL DRAMA .. .

the czars paid full price .. . 

. ..

Catapults and carnage
the winter solstice it is done
Michaelangelo performing
at the Duomo the dying swan

Auntie Edie hangs her washing
on her taught, rope-twine line
hides her knickers under jumpers
her chalk-line spies are out in force

peeping through net curtains
while making gossip notes
old men scratch their scrotums
young men spoil their votes

see yellow primroses on the hill
cousin Judy on her pony approaching
her semblance of disorder
has always been the same

they wrapped your vanilla ice-cream
with newsprint in a cardboard sleeve
grandma does not say much at all
rinses curly cabbage through a sieve

copper-headed, she is a blithe snake
collecting dripping under muslin
imagining it a classy dressing
especially spread on doorsteps

not so good for hearts or livers
those tasty wartime snacks
fat to stay alive and waiting
for the revolution to arrive

and when it came in earnest
women threw away good bras
men we all wore rubber johnnies
they often split, which was shit!

one million little tadpoles loose
in Blackburn, Lancashire
we slept on Sandown benches
there where we really learned a lot

waiting for the band to begin
we waited so long to hear them sing
when cousin Marvin learned their song
he’ll sing along, those words of love

days of freedom became a curse
rodents swimming to the shore
get on board acceptable vessels
capitalism wins, socialism dying bleeds

Arthur Scargill, Lech Welesa, Michael Foot
Tony Benn, JFK, all men who tried
to understand Marx as a philosopher
not a religion, not a schoolmaster

negative appraisal sets you back
to the struggle up the union ladder
if you don’t have an uncle who’s a printer
nor a working class hero, an inverted snob

I remember the days when Lennon was shot
and JFK, I cried that day for the first time
and the last time over politics
never again its never mind the bollocks

we grew up loving marijuana
claimed vehemently it didn’t harm ya’
but yes it did it opens you to coercion
then to addiction, it is a horse that’s trojan

we travelled once around the moon
and once the sun just like Yuri Gagarin
suddenly his name is not worth squat
he was born in the same country as the Russian

sanction Abramovich, sanction Solzhenitsyn
Nuryev, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Yeltsin
Anton Chekov, Michael Bloomberg sanction
the history of Russia for the sake of one mad Putin

this is the social drama we join at birth
the eloquence of reason for living on this earth
find your place, stake your claim on this Galapagos
of peoples, extinct and struggling in the chaos

©edenbraytoday30.05.2022

‘I do not demand recognition, rather I assume it, as a basic human right, like the right to pee in a bucket’           ~  edenbray