Paul Summers


les soixante-huitards

once they dreamed
themselves astride

a barricade of railings
near porte de paris

spouting some litany
of hopeful proclamations

daubing crude rainbows
in rouge & noir

now they have beards
& gall-bladder issues

unhealthy obsessions
with the age of steam

birkenstocks, professorships
the cook-books of diversity

a regular dividend
from privatised utilities

brigades of children
distant & estranged

whose names are lifted
from an existential genre

all history repackaged
as noble defeat

the solidity of promises
reduced again to air

an epoch of betrayals
exacted in their name

some days i feel
this futile need

for someone else
to shoulder blame



building eden / pathology

first, transport a destitute & ‘criminalised’ underclass to a largely inhospitable territory. police/domineer/subjugate them with a militarised administration of god-fearing, self-serving, conservative, imperialist keepers. let them loose with a slightly dysfunctional model of self-betterment & proto-capitalism. promote aspiration & deference in equal measure. grasp the idyll of painless heather. dream of the stag & the snow draped weasel. feign classlessness whilst remaining subordinate to monarchy & the church. exact genocide. deny consequence. never bother to learn how to spell egalitarianism. cultivate the anxieties of an insecurely attached child plagued by catholic guilt. mistrust all thought & reflection but celebrate athleticism, larrikinism & anything remotely automotive. actively encourage the adoption of the outmoded & morally irreprehensible ideologies of white-supremacism, patriarchy & homophobia. allow countless profiteering global corporations to rape the land of its finite resources. at all costs do not properly tax or regulate them. exempt yourself from any complicity in the doomsday scenarios of global warming. she’ll be right. sign up to a gestural federal model of governance but continue to behave like the six anachronistic & protectionist colonies you have always been. embrace america, with all her malls & homogenous car-parks, her prematurely sexualised child performers, her gun laws & her pretty dreams. embrace china. she’s loaded. hate cane toads & asylum seekers with equal vigour. employ the hollow concepts of mateship, a fair go & a light upon the hill ad nauseum in any rhetorical context, appropriate or not, when in the cold light of june they mean fuck all. issue a raft of muttered half-meant apologies that are & will remain for the foreseeable just words. choke on the lines of a scotsman’s florid anthem. stick your pension on a nag, cremate another tasteless snag, crack open a cold stubby to wash it all away.

Paul Summers is a Northumbrian poet who now lives in Central Queensland. Latest collection is primitive cartography, from Walleah Press, Tasmania.
 
 
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