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.
