MICK MOSS

Still Howling - the Next Generation

dedicated to Alan Ginsberg

I saw the not particularly bright minds of my generation
driven to obscurity
red brick Mickey Mouse degrees promised us
interesting world changing careers
but all we got were mortgages
           interest rising
Thrust expectantly from the womb of a post-war
black and white, still rationed, once great nation
that shared its greatness if you were born from the right stock
          but we were not
From one room to baby boom, suburbia,
Bevin's babies with national reassurance
blue collars stained white by the new blue whiteness
          of copy-writers' lies
forged in the white heat of technology
gadgets in the ideal home
          for the nuclear family
Our optimism shattered by Cuban missiles
and a man on the grassy knoll
While bombs rained down from LBJ
mothers running screaming napalmed
         Buddhist monk barbecue
Charlie's brains blown out for the camera
boil in the bag convenience TV tea time
         bland horrors daily
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh and Che washed up
in a Bolivian bath house
while Mao Tse Tung said - change must come
through the barrel of a gun
Terence Conran made shopping fun
         as our habitat degraded
buy now, pay later, must have, have not
pot bellied, fly blown black babies starved
still - we had the Beatles
         Yeah, yeah, yeah
born with plastic spoons in our mouths
substitute fabric for the modern world
moulded multi-coloured
scream in your grave Henry Ford
any colour as long as it's black can sit in the back
          too much it's a magic bus
They taught us Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen
but not Ken Kesey, too merry a prankster he
for their sensibilities incensed by DH Lawrence.
And Yes, our servants could have read it if we had them
         but we didn't
We laughed at such absurdities
but raged when they locked up Mick and Keef
who would break a butterfly on a wheel?
The News of the World with no news
but vicars and tarts, prurient
          where Oz never was
yet still they slammed it
the small minded blinded Mary Shitehouses
of this scandalized post Profumo island
where the pavements of Grosvenor Square
were splattered with teenage blood
          where Queer was a dirty word
where a young milk snatcher rubbed her dry cunt
dreaming of Maynard Keynes and the power
she would one day wield
           in Middle England
where a nouveau-riche phoney middle class
sold votes for loadsa money and the right to buy
           their council hovels
where joy riders ripped up the night
and raved ecstatically until the Public Order Act
repossessed  the right to dance
Until WE had had enough of things never getting better
           and got THEM out
only to find we've swapped the same old thing
           for a brand new drag
and the 'special relationship' dragged us into
yet another pointless war
Meanwhile Headmasters fake results
for pupils playing Nintendo in class
where English is reduced to CU L8R
tapped out between votes for this weeks pop stars
          And I'm Still Howling
at wounds festering under a Karma Suture