Kevin Higgins knows about growing old as a Lefty
My Militant Tendency
It's nineteen eighty two and I know everything.
Hippies are people who always end up asking
Charles Manson to sing them another song.
I'd rather be off putting some fascist through
a glass door arseways, but being fifteen,
have to mow the lawn first. Last year,
Liverpool meant football; now
it's the Petrograd of the British Revolution.
Instead of masturbation, I find socialism.
While others dream of businessmen bleeding
in basements; I promise to abolish double-chemistry class
the minute I become Commissar. In all of this
there is usually a leather jacket involved. I tell
cousin Walter and his lovely new wife, Elizabeth,
to put their aspirations in their underpants
and smoke them; watch
my dad's life become a play:
Sit Down In Anger.
Revolt
His world cracked like a brandy glass,
when she said she was leaving, had
met a man not yet beyond repair.
The universe chuckled and moved on,
not wishing to afflict the mocked. Now,
he texts her to say he thinks he left
his life's work in the back of her car; and
though the rabble-rouser she married
vanished around 1975, he's still against
poverty on Wednesdays. She replies
she should have known: inside
yesterday's perfectly sculpted revolutionary
was always today's paunchy liberal who slugs
his cabernet, and watches daytime TV
with an elderly Labrador named
Adlai Stevenson, the Fourth.
Hat-tips to this one and that one.
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