Beachhead

Millennials! Gather round and let my Insta Insights clock your age and social grade.
Form yourself into a mob, the churning brick dust sea behind you, grey clouds

swelling over head, and watch me clamber on this pillbox, its innards slick with litter,
its purpose long forgotten. Hear me preach: click-click along to the sorrowful sermon

I wept into my MacBook as Boris alassed nearby in a minimised window.
We didn’t see it coming, did we? That we’d be bitching over pronouns

as the structures of the state were duct-taped, cable tied and bundled in the boot.
Terrified eyes. But don’t pin it all on us. Blame Generation X and their Ottolenghi

salads, their Grand Designs, their Blairist Britpop, their noughties land grab
of all the decent rundown seaside towns. Those bastards! Blame good design,

capitulation to the colour wheel. Blame all this good living! It wasn’t our intention
but we made being the good guys look like being the bad guys. O I dreamt

of revolutions but I can’t be arsed to this rinse this carton out. I gawp at docs
of Chinese peasants melting all our plastic down, recognise the brand names

on the bags, then wrap my compromise around my neck like a vintage scarf
and take it for long walks around the one of the less fashionable run-down seaside towns

and contemplate how it will go from here as Gen Z manufacture memes to mock
our Hufflepuff humble brags and stupid skinny jeans. Of course our parents double-down

on history they learned by rote, on how the Empire did such good. Just look
at all those statues. There’s your truth! No one wants to admit they’ve been a dick 

their whole lives. What’s to stop them stepping round the bars of our manufactured rage.
As I declare today: I will not lift a pixel in your culture war! As if I hadn’t picked my side

some twenty years ago, took a short haul flight to Damascus to avoid the road, offset
the carbon. Picture me, gazing from the 80s, snug within the poetry of papers on the breakfast bar, 

an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rumbelows, and Michael Palin patronising arabs on a dhow. 
Look! Look! I watched the wall come down from a sitting room in Essex Here it comes!

I saw the millennium rumble towards me in a mist of dry ice and laser light
and knew that it was mine, marching up Embankment with my Blair mask on,

falling out of bars on Hoxton Square. I took the rule book and I drew a cock and balls
on it but never dared to rip it up. And now I shake the Etch-a-Sketch until my wrists ache

as a 22 year old who really actually doesn’t secretly think that skinny equals cool
stares me down from an app I don’t fully understand with a simplicity I didn’t realise

was permitted and asks me, straight out: Why didn’t you do something about all of this?
While over at the corner table the Boomers puff on their Captain Tom ceramic bongs, 

and say: See, it’s complicated, isn’t it? O I want stop and gaze at waves but all I see are
dusty fighting pits and rings of baying punters waving wads; the sinewed muscles

of the men, the pistons of their shoulder blades. O the crack of bone, the smell of blood!