We, the little bourgeois, bathing in political nothingness

Can’t complain much. We own our houses and our pensions

That keep tinselling in our purse like pure richness,

Helping us buy our Mediterranean diet grocery collections

And we travel free with senior passes to any train stations.

Our only worry is that our left foot is in the grave

And our right foot is painful with arthritis.

Until the day we forget what we crave, 

Nothing that cannot be fixed — unlike moralitis —

That social disease of moral paralysis.

Aspirin, Prunelax, Panadol and other wonder pills

That help us go through the enjoyable days, 

That we gleefully interrupt with a siesta for an afternoon daze.

We can’t even resent our kids, grandkids and their brats

Who want what we’ve got now. Now.

We can’t tell them that in our youth of chills and thrills

While working like slaves for the long gone mills

We lived in flats,

Unfair for rats, 

Full of mould and humid like grottos.

They would not understand that we did not have a smartphone

To contact a million friends we did not know

And they would laugh at us if we told them so. 

Knowledge is what you’ve got.

We are of course better off than refugees in canvass camps

Or the penalised loving couple getting ten years of prison

For dancing with abandon.

We are better off than women having to wear clothes like tents

To religiously hide their fragile femininity

While suffering from vitamin D deficiency.

By all kinds of luck, most of it self-made, we managed

To fall through the cracks of hardship and end up in the fool’s paradise below.

It was hard work, mind you, 

But we never worried much because whatever happens to you

Had nothing to do with us

We had RedHead matches to light barbecues on Sundays.

We protested against the Vietnam war and the one before,

We went through two world wars

And held-up placards

Against nuclear annihilation to no avail and with no vanity

So, if this horrendous finality happens, don’t blame our failed roar, 

Or our friends in Russia. 

Blame our nazi relatives who escaped to the USA 

And invented better ways to destroy humanity —

In an empire that grew from goodness into insanity

By trying to avoid paying taxes on a cup of British tea.

We’ve concluded that god doesn’t exist.

Because if he did, despite His need to challenge us with some testing batshit,

The world would not be so crazy — while there is around so much beauty.

In His wisdom, god would not have allowed us to invent plastic.

Plastic is like a forever inert evil

— As if there was not enough eternity already.

So, on our way to oblivion, whether it’s personally singular

By our old bones giving up,

Or collectively by a big mushroom cloud going up.

We can do little about anything or may be add a smile.

Yes, we know, the news are pumping a lot of useless

And tired opinions,

That we have already explored since the dawn of time, Diogenes’s barrel and the Roman empiricons.

New cascade of menu-ed influences on the behaviour of kids,

Is about the same quality of the cardboard we had for quids

Though there is more of it, with added ADHD-ed alleged fashions,

Things go too fast and too erratic like butterflies on too many missions.

Faster it seems, though the flowers still take time to bloom, 

But for how long?… The warlocks of gene manipulations

Work tirelessly to create new monsters of beauty.

Comfortable and swinging in the rocking chair,

We’ll carry on giving useless advice because no-one wants to listen fair.

Old folks have lived their adventures, some rotten some unfair…

Young kids are read-ish to embark on theirs…

They will make the same mistakes, they will experience the showers of hell,

And tempt the fascist demons.

The psychos who run most of the human world affairs

Know how to make Lucifer palatable.

In our days, here I go like an old fool, the goose-step marches, the raised fists

The uniforms, the boots, the guns, the medals were amongst us

Like respectable Sunday spectacles.

Nowadays, the goose-step marches, the raised fists

The uniforms, the boots, the guns, apart from the medals,

Are hidden from view, in somewhere else that we pillage for profit and give poisoned apples.

The intent is the same, except WE suffer less as the expression on other people

Is more painful: we are free not to be free as we give freedom confusion

like a prison.

And using the past as a crutch, we blame others for our hypocrisy.

Our misgivings are not our problems anymore, because we would cry if we paid attention.

We will still warn you about what was totally ugly.

Though we’ve got no idea about what went wrong.

Covid, global warming, economic burn-out (yours not ours)

Enslaving technologies and psychological manipulations

As if our weird ideals to make life easy, 

made it lazy and shifty.

We did our best, though.

The Ponzi scheme of capitalism is working well so far.

Without it, our pension would go back-pedalling afar

And we would all need a security system around our houses

Like the one Elon installed for his dad’s mansion.

Yet, we rely on the goodness of people who may humour us,

As we should do the most important things in the world without having to mention “trust”:

SHARE.

CARE.

RESPECT.

These tenets have been the core essence of Aboriginal societies

That, because they adhered to these principles of simple sobriety,

Never reached the destructive capitalist status of hubris and greed.

So we taught them to become drunks.

                               Robert Urbanoski (1 february 2023)

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