Saturday 20 April 2019

Baa! Baa! White Sheep, Have you any Cool?

You suburban kids who flash around in falsetto stripes
with your shoulders back and forth like gutter ghettosnipes
as bold as packs of couscous, booming great stereotypes,
down Conifer Cul-de-Sac, you summer-in-Sorrento types,
what’s this fighting posse-speak, this sinister sermon-slurring?
You’ve got white rosy cheeks like Reichsminister Hermann Göring
but kiss your teeth, “Don’t diss me, chief, is it cos I is blond?
Or cos I has a patio, some French doors and a pond?”

Baa! Baa! White sheep, have you any cool?
Yes, sir! A Bangladeshi sweatshop full!

But those whose stock is out of stock, who’d rather be Americans,
don’t shock me, they’re a flock, like flapping, waddling, worm-stuffed pelicans,
they’re from a herd of merchant bankers, what should I expect
except for them to prospect for gold, power-based respect?
These Home Counties homies in their backward baseball caps
who’d count a homely counter-culture as disgraceful crap
could not, and would not, point out Sheffield on a map
’cause every inkling of their Englishness has shuffled down a gap.

Baad! Baad! White sheep, have you any cool?
Yes, sir! A blank-faced nation full.

Goodbye, Cockneys! Hello, Jafaican royal-highnesses
and Middle-Britain Wiggers in jeans that show your anuses,
believing Nike-swooshtikaed motherfriggers geniuses
and triggers make you bigger than politicians’ bonuses.
Rebels? Rebels? How do you confront the plutocratic juntas?
Draped in dollar signs and strutting up and down like Berkshire hunters,
mental runts, you’d only scrawl “I is da bomb” on the Berlin Wall
and “West Berlin Crew rules!” You drooling goons are rebels? Suck my tool.
Tories drip down into you in caviar and velvet,
liberals kneel before you for a flavour of your helmet.

Bang! Bang! White sheep, have you any cool?
Yes, sir! Three dead schoolboys full.