Stuff the hole in your culture

I did not like or appreciate the regimentation or life. It looked mindless, unimaginative, empty and lacking in inspiration or creativity.

I wanted some awe, magic and wonder.

I wanted to rip the fabric of society apart and replace it with something that was more alive.

I watched my father go off to work on the same train, come back at the same time and follow the same routine. There was nothing to think about or feel.

Life proceeded.

The countryside was imprisoned in hedgerows and beaten down, tamed, ploughed and planted.

The streets teemed with people all looking straight ahead without a laugh.

The TV was short of poems.

I wrote a poem for the boring world of my father. I was afraid that it was one I might come to inhabit.

 

Stuff the hole in your culture

 

Stuff your neatness

Your ‘just so’,

Put away

Orderly rooms;

Your street signs

In straight lines;

You rectangle homes

And concrete lives.

 

Stuff your tidiness;

Your squares of countryside

All neatly trimmed hedgerows

And pruned trees;

Your great productivity

And boring productions;

Your quantity of rubbish

And forgetfulness of quality.

 

Stuff your career;

Your conveyor belts

That feed machines

With human fodder

Producing

Endlessly,

Endless producing

Plastic trinkets.

 

Stuff your nine to five,

Stay in line,

Muzak filled brains

That hum all day on nothing

And feel indifferent

When work is done.

 

Stuff your greediness

As you hoard the plastic trinkets,

The car and TV,

Three piece

And bidet.

 

Stuff the values that are told to you;

All empty without purpose or reason,

That maintains

The status quo

So your orderly life

Proceeds as yesterday.

 

Stuff your boring natures

That create the apathy you live in.

Where the effort of real life

Is too much

For your programmed existence.

 

Stuff your TV shows

That are on at seven every night;

Identical

Formatted into episodes

That are formulaic

And meaningless

 

Stuff the whole of this empty culture

And let me breathe.

 

Opher 1977