Britpop Now

I hadn't considered that mods essentially saw strings

in music as a joke, not as a luxury,

and yes most of them became reactionary 

with royalties,

get royalties and become.

I'm not sure if Ken Loach was a mod,

or if he appropriated strings

to say something about class,

I don't have time to track everything down

he did for the BBC,

plus the internet is broken now

and now the BBC really does seem

obsessed with influencers and kleptocrats,

but he was from a small market town

in Warwickshire,

not London,

so maybe strings seemed funny.

By the way Kes is phenomenal,

don't bother with the subtitles,

just go with it.

It's weird, man, it seems like the BBC was

really holding a candle up to institutions,

as an institution itself.

And I've been there,

I've been in Maida Vale

so I've seen the large halls

where the strings were

broadcast live.

So maybe the BBC is a psyop as well.

I heard yesterday Kevin Shields said

Britpop was a psyop

and I totally buy that

from a person, who it turns out,

was born in Flushing,

and, I've been told,

into generational wealth,

though I wonder if that person

who I once worked with 

and told me that is a psyop

himself.

I suppose I am myself,

I was white, then mixed-race

and now I'm not white,

but who knows where I'll

end up next.

But yeh,

Kevin Shields,

releasing a record once every 20 years

and sleeping underneath guitar amps

says Britpop was a psyop.

There's a photo somewhere of me with 

a St. George's cross painted on my face

before the 1996 European Championship

semi-final. 

I took an exam like that.

Thatcher spent 14 years hammering away

for Blair to deliver the death blow

and I'm there hunched over a desk,

red and white dripping down my face

never once considering

I doth protest too much.

An Ex-President Downloads Duolingo

He’d planned on learning Italian in retirement

The honeymoon in Florence

Those state visits to Rome, his jokes

going over the head of the Pope

But when he downloaded Duolingo

there was some kind of glitch 

--or maybe more user error--

and the only option left was Arabic

He found it to be an unforgiving language

He’d never been one for grammar

His throat resisted the fruitless torture

of medieval sense and sound:

mother, baby, widow, orphan

cold, hungry, shelter, corpse

arms, legs, siren, crater

oil, water, blood, burst

There’s more to life, he thought, than self-

improvement. He, who always slept

untroubled, now found himself waking

out of unfair dreams each night:

Oily arms

Bloody water

Hungry craters

Sirens sounding 

Like orphans 

With a sense of relief he resigned

himself to quitting after just two weeks

His golf game needed work

The Pope’s English was pretty good

He had no use for Arabic; no plans

to return to those ungrateful lands 

which had turned a deaf collective ear

on all his efforts at teaching them 

a better way of life