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.

Friday 21 October 2016

Campus Marxists

There is already a poem, sometime ago, on here called Campus Marxists but it is now in the B section of the folder of Uncollected Poems and thus unlikely to make to next booklet because nothing ever recovers from such a relegation.
But thirty-five years after my release from that safe haven of ersatz academia, there is still something needing to be set down about the smug righteousness of those cosy renegades from their nice houses whose parents still looked after them, who were as bad as any religious group with their doctrines, litanies and mantras.
It is not Marxism itself I have an issue with, it was the demeanour of some of its devout followers, specifically circa 1979.

It's not as if I write many explicitly political poems so I thought I'd treat myself to a second attempt. If this doesn't look good enough in weeks to come, I might have yet another go.



Campus Marxists

They knew it backwards, their critique,
the Levi jeans, air of mystique,
the scriptures that they would explain
in pious essays, John Coltrane
- you didn’t know the half of it
if you were a mere Menshevik,
not so committed to the cause
to take part in their class wars.
One must never be sceptical
when things are dialectical
because the sociologist
is as unable to resist
the vulgar lure of certainty,
the soporific poetry,
the faith that’s a comfort to keep
while they recite themselves to sleep.