Mick Moss
Mick Moss is 62 and lives in Liverpool UK. His poetry has been published internationally in print and online: PK Poetry List (featured poet), Poetry Super-Highway (poet of the month), Here and Now (ed. Allan Irtz), The Worm, The Liverpool Poets 08 compilation, Transparent Words and Poets on Poetry. His poem 'If Wordsworth Had a Mobile Phone' is used as part of an Open University literature course. Moss was asked by the makers of Wright's Coal Tar Soap if they could include his piece 'It Could Have Been Me' in their history archive. He has run creative writing workshops all over Merseyside since 2001, including The Poetry in Practice Project in the waiting rooms at Castlefield Medical Centre.
And Yes, our servants could have read it if we had them
but we didn't
We laughed at such absurdities
but raged when they locked up Mick and Keef
who would break a butterfly on a wheel?
The News of the World with no news
but vicars and tarts, prurient
where Oz never was
yet still they slammed it
the small minded blinded Mary Shitehouses
of this scandalized post Profumo island
where the pavements of Grosvenor Square
were splattered with teenage blood
where Queer was a dirty word
where a young milk snatcher rubbed her dry cunt
dreaming of Maynard Keynes and the power
she would one day wield
in Middle England
where a nouveau-riche phoney middle class
sold votes for loadsa money and the right to buy
their council hovels
where joy riders ripped up the night
and raved ecstatically until the Public Order Act
repossessed the right to dance
Until WE had had enough of things never getting better
and got THEM out
only to find we've swapped the same old thing
for a brand new drag
and the 'special relationship' dragged us into
yet another pointless war
Meanwhile Headmasters fake results
for pupils playing Nintendo in class
where English is reduced to CU L8R
tapped out between votes for this weeks pop stars
And I'm Still Howling
at wounds festering
under a Karma Suture
thistles stretch their prickly arms afar
Still Howling - the next Generation
(inspired by Ginsberg)
I saw the not particularly bright minds of my generation
driven to obscurity
red brick Mickey Mouse degrees promised us
interesting world changing careers
but all we got were mortgages
interest rising
Thrust expectantly from the womb of a post-war
black and white, still rationed, once great nation
that shared its greatness if you were born from the right stock
but we were not
From one room to baby boom, suburbia,
Bevin's babies with national reassurance
blue collars stained white by the new blue whiteness
of copy-writers' lies
forged in the white heat of technology
gadgets in the ideal home
for the nuclear family
Our optimism shattered by Cuban missiles
and a man on the grassy knoll
While bombs rained down from LBJ
mothers running screaming napalmed
Buddhist monk barbecue
Charlie's brains blown out for the camera
boil in the bag convenience TV tea time
bland horrors daily
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh and Che washed up
in a Bolivian bath house
while Mao Tse Tung said - change must come
through the barrel of a gun
Terence Conran made shopping fun
as our habitat degraded
buy now, pay later, must have, have not
pot bellied, fly blown black babies starved
still - we had the Beatles
Yeah, yeah, yeah
born with plastic spoons in our mouths
substitute fabric for the modern world
moulded multi-coloured
scream in your grave Henry Ford
any colour as long as it's black can sit in the back
too much it's a magic bus
They taught us Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen
but not Ken Kesey, too merry a prankster he
for their sensibilities incensed by DH Lawrence.
thistles stretch their prickly arms afar
Militant Thistles