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
Brilliant, so enjoyed it, if only!!
Sadly, one day I sat down and discovered that I had become the person I was rebelling against. Thanks Anna for your overly generous words. I have a part 2 that I will write up shortly. They are extracts from my first book – a mish-mash of unreadable garbage. I’m rescuing a few of the poems caught up in the jetsam.
Can’t wait.
I’ll get to it soon.
Stuff your nine to five,
Stay in line,
Muzak filled brains
That hum all day on nothing
And feel indifferent
When work is done.
I think this is the common man’s malady. You have either high pressure career jobs or this… Neither of which are living life creatively, as you say. You feel you have settled into the same old same old, but you’re still fighting back with your words…
Well I did my stint as a student on the assembly line and my career, which I enjoyed greatly, at the high pressure end. Now is the time for a brief burst of creativity – to unleash the pent-up force that is waiting to erupt.
I feel a poem coming on!
Hon, you’re ALWAYS feeling a poem coming on! LOL The floodgates have been opened to drown that stuffy world you wrote about! 😀
Well that’s because you keep sparking off the thoughts! I can’t help it! Got to get it running better somehow!
Well don’t ever stop trying… If you do, you’ll stop being Opher.
Never!!!
Overly thought out! Whoa.
In what way?