Britain – Page 2 – poems 2 die for

HISTORY CHANNEL

HISTORY CHANNEL (KIND OF REMEMBER ME THAT SIEGFRIED SASSOON) watched a video on World War One who started it who finished it who went who stayed at home who came back like my Mother’s Dad big gong of a medal around his soft young neck which is just as well otherwise wouldn’t be here myself to waste your time as Siggie’s bishop himself didst poetically proclaim the ways of God being satirically strange watched a video on the channel on World War One same as the last one same people won

BLACKPOOL

BLACKPOOL
“how many holes it
takes to fill the Albert Hall”

I came to
Blackpool, Lancashire,
to be conceived
my soul already garbed
in tangerine

inland from the Irish Sea
I lived
our little river
up to something

revolution in music
to be remembered forever

there in that old, dead
slave port
swept up by voices, songs
steaming in
from a wilder West

brief Renaissance they
just had to
weed out

the fiction of Empire
in such dire need of it.

I came
to Blackpool to
get conceived

though sex, as Larkin said,
waiting for its establishment

ALONG

UK OK (not so very)

still solid
(courtesy of Victorian
architecture)

crazy high aquaducts
(now exactly what
do they do?)

university I went to
down main road manchester
freshly
returned from
south africa

settler colonial
(apartheid to
god knows who else
and me
and you)

but on that diet of dismal
how stuff going to grow properly?

how stuff going to flourish
when for best moral fibre
getting
force-fed gloom

red, white, blue
flag should be slate grey and
colour
most exploitative

see your politicians now
scared at the thought
people

might
have their
own ideas

university down oxford street
(or was it road?)
                 taught me something
about the
    economic of F and K
(plaque proclaims
them
                    the previous tenants)

anarchy
OK OK    strawberries
spoiled, by
                      this time
was
          the late 70s

ust rattle your cheap jewellery here
and I’ll
imagine
in falsetto

less than happily singing along