As I lay here dreaming of past days, each catch in my throat
clicks out the word mum, mum, an insect-like far off recording
from wherever such memories are stored, where it still exists,
continuing, all those little scenes in the timbre of an echo

crawling down to the end of it, whatever any well-wisher
said by way of encouragement, let go of, the bastards are right.
I'm awash in my own excrescence, I'm gasping for breath
while the bastards who ripped me off roll around in clover.

Plain-talking John-Boy took it all down in private shorthand.
Aghh, you'll never get anything good out of a doctor, they don't
do much for their money, they just refer you to somewhere else
and during the delay the last pill has been bought and paid for.

Never mind, it wouldn't have worked anyway, your body's
reserves of strength were used up to fight off the side effects::
a deep scouring pain across your back, a near heart attack
followed by recurrence of the original problem in harsher form.

The prescriptions will fuck you up more often than not and
if that's medicine how about the rest of civil society. How
about employment legislation, social engineering, education?
A quango tango, a pass the parcel of permanent deferment

until you touch the groundless ground of the bouncy castle
on which you may run as long and hard as you like, forever,
from here to infirmity, while Khan, the mysterious genius
behind Response Teachers, is laughing at you, he'll never pay

and the headmaster of McEntee School, Greg Levitt, plants
stories in the press to suggest that his school, auctioned off
to a private tender consortium, provides a service to consumers
who have little choice, anyway. - and will occasionally riot.

Fill in a writing grid of a childhood memory, block in a scene,
ticking on the form whose goals are discipline, love, respect
and the greatest of these is respect, as Aretha Franklin sang it,
not remotely meaning respect for the law or the authorities.

Doing the quango tango, all of them, lapping up the juices
of your blood orange, cultivating their little tricks of attitude,
their secret passwords in the ante-chambers between altitudes.
The air is thin up there, thin but clean. It stinks everywhere.

John Muckle