David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Tuesday 15 April 2014

Troglodytes

There haven't been many new poems on here recently but nobody has complained about that.
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.