The Public

I'd like to think this is a 'work in progress' that might extend eventually to 8 or 10 stanzas of this sustained attack on 'everybody else apart from us', and thus finish any next booklet I publish on a long poem in the fashion recently in vogue with such models as O'Brien, Harsent, Mooney et al.
That is what happens. You think you are your own man and think you only do what you want to do but you crave to be like the people you admire.
Although, for the most part, the poem seems to provide a rickety raft from which to lob missiles from a superior position at virtually everybody else, it will have missed its point if the ending doesn't make it clear that the speaker is guilty of many of the faults he finds in others. Not long after starting to write it, I realized how difficult I find it to write a poem that Larkin hadn't done much better several decades ago and in this case it is Show Saturday,

The Public

They are everyone else but us, the ones
not here to defend themselves or listen
to what we think of them or recognize
that it’s them we mean. For we wouldn’t wear
clothes like that, Adidas or Matalan,
or drink the wine they buy in restaurants
but they are in our way in queues or aisles
of supermarkets, texting each other

messages that we wouldn’t understand.
And they are everyone we’re not, guilty
of everything we’d never want to do,
the pop records they dance to that they heard
on the radio in traffic jams, on
i-pods because they thought they wanted to
and thought that it might look good at the time.
They like it when the weather’s warm and spread

themselves in outdoor places making it
untidy and decide they are in love
with one of the rest of them, usually
someone who’s quite conveniently nearby.
I’m glad we are not like them and would die
rather than do such things for we are made
of finer stuff and deserve much better
than them. And that is why I love you so.