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.

*

But don’t pin it all on us. Blame Generation X and their Ottolenghi
salads, their Grand Designs, and 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 plastic down, recognise the brand names on the bags,

CHORUS


And now I 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.

CHORUS x2

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? It’s complicated, it’s complicated…

CHORUS

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!