A time of boastful vanity

When we were young we set our feet on undiscovered ways, some cheered us on, others called us, ‘Good for nothing layabouts,’ being different in the 1950’s and 60’s was a very dangerous thing. They told us in school, “Get a career, and be a useful member of society!”

Some things run too deep to cry tears for, and those lies now cut me to pieces.
It was a world where the teachers and paedophile abusers had the equivalent of a box of, ‘Liquorice all sorts’. ‘Pick your perversion!’ And they did it with impunity.

When they couldn’t beat education into us, they laughed and derided our disempowerment, as they sentenced us to a lifetime of sweeping the roads, and cleaning toilets, in unseen underworlds.

I became a ‘Butterfly that escaped the wheel’ somehow I got out of illiteracy, now I know the game very well, but, knowing the game does not help anyone but me.

Boastful vanities still tower above us with great swelling words, words that display above the, ‘Workman’s entrance’. “Don’t think for yourself, trust us, we can do all the thinking for you!” There is a wonderful artistry in the way these bastards do their thing. An aching gloom remains in the place where hope should be.

Is just living ever going to be allowed?

When I see the young, their faces alive with hope, all too ready to launch themselves into vast dogmas and illusions, I fall away into time, and emerge as part of the crowd, cheering “Our Boys” off to the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendaele.

It is this unbearable burden of knowing, that all will go the way of that terrible swampland, that processes my entire being where words fail, and hearts explode at the noon of that dreadful day.

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