AHEM Poem by Martin Figura

After Ginsberg
I saw the best suits of my parents' generation
destroyed by poor tailoring, synthetic fibres
and hysterical lapels,
dragging their shopping down the high streets
of Albion in Pacamacs with hairdos under
hairnets and headscarves,
Brylcream-headed husbands burning pipe tobacco
in walnut bowls and inhaling through
the clenched teeth of repressed ardour,
who feared the wind rush in the negro streets
of Victoriana blowing the sounds and smells
that threaten the unfamiliar and didn't
even know Elvis Presley existed yet,
who got drunk on home-made egg-flip at Christmas
and sang the old songs around the piano
while their kids were happy with a tangerine
and dinky toy,
who saved so that one day they might have
a little car and be saluted by the AA man
as they drove by,
who were all the time boiling vegetables to eat with
Spam while listening to the radiogram valves
singing hot with Family Favourites and after sprouts
there was Much Binding in The Marsh until
Billy Cotton cried out WAKEY WAKEY and
Bandstand glowed out in the deathly grey
of cathode rays,
who on Fridays went dancing up the club in sixpence
a week Montague Burton suits and crammed into
eighteen hour girdles and mail order dresses with
their blue hair piled on top, but just too soon to have been teenagers,
who tripped out to Skegness Vimto-fuelled in charabancs
to shine under Billy Butlin's neon "our true intent is all
for your delight" while being served brown ale by lasses
from Doncaster in grass skirts under plastic palm trees
in The Beachcomber Bar,
who never used the front room but kept it pure and the
antimacassars pressed for visits by doctors or
vicars or teachers for tinned salmon and tinned pears
and tinned milk and polished their front steps
and never ran out of string,
who knew their place and never thought the universities
were for the likes of them but prayed for office jobs
for their children and stood for God Save The Queen
at the Empire and said how wonderful their policemen
were and fought in the war for the likes of me,
who had more words for toilet than the Inuit have for snow
and put their teeth in jars then slept in their vests
under candlewick counterpanes in cold bedrooms
with dreams of winning the pools and bungalows
in Cheshire with inside loos and labour saving devices,
who at dawn trod into brown slippers onto cold brown
linoleum and could only face the day through the
sweet brown haze of a hundred cups of tea and
twenty Capstan full strength.