Sometimes they just don't happen and sometimes if they do, I don't always put them here.
Two favourite targets of mine to make merry with in recent years are perhaps all the more so because of the high regard, or particular fascination, I held them in during the 1970's when I was an impressionable teenager. They are the avant garde and campus Marxists (but not necessarily Marx himself).
Then I regarded bookshops or libraries as places full of things worthy of my attention that it was up to me to find out about. It has taken a long time to realize that I'm not interested in a lot of it and some of it isn't much good, either.
The few poems I have toward any new booklet are beginning to look somewhat curmudgeonly with unflattering sketches of cavaliers and teenagers among them. It might soon begin to look like a book of Satires in the spirit of Juvenal or Horace. But I doubt it. There is a long time to go before any new title is to be considered and by then these few poems might not be very prominent in the selection.
Troglodytes
Campus Marxists
They told themselves the time of day
and it was always half past four
on sun-drenched bourgeois afternoons.
But it’s dark so far underground
where moles tunnel through acrid soil
disseminating furtive plots,
where time stands still, strangely enough,
and what was inevitable
was indefinitely postponed.
So old-fashioned and orthodox,
and some with Jesus Christ haircuts,
how odd their hard-won piety
resembled most the religion
that they denied and ridiculed,
quoting chapter and verse to prove
something they had known all along
while smoking their own opium.
