More poetry by Pip Wilson

Page 5

All poems Copyright © 2001-now, Pip Wilson, Wilson’s Almanac

 

The Long Day Child Care Centre

Rochelle and I, we’re modern guys,
we own four gourmet delis.
We own our joint at Greenwich Point
and watch three Blaupunkt tellies.
We decorate in global chic,
at home we wear sarongs
we always mix with nice ethnics
in Fiji and Hong Kong.
 
We have two kids that cost us quids
I think they’re James and Kevin.
I ring them up at ten o’clock,
Sue rings them up at seven.
At night around the TV
it’s almost like the Waltons.
Our Bible is the Film Guide
by Halliwell or Maltin. 
 
Chorus

  Drop another kid and cut the cord,
  dispose of the placenta.
  Drop another kid and drop it off
  at the Long Day Child Care Centre.

Sue and I we’re modern guys,
we want a second Merc,
in style we’ll drop the kiddies off
between our home and work.
Communication is the key
to bringing up young kids.
Like the intercom in Kevin’s room –
so he won’t die of SIDS.
 
  (Repeat Chorus)
 
Each morning James and Kevin wake
all childish and all horrid;
we stick their names, Kevin and James
on their bottles and their foreheads.
Then Ms McGuinn she takes them in
and sits them in the middle
and all the day our kids can play
with their best friends, The Wiggles.
 
  (Repeat Chorus)
 
Till evening comes they suck their thumbs
and watch the big TV.
(Kevin smiled on June the ninth –
he’s doing well for three.)
And Ms McGuinn does colour-in
with Kevin and with James.
She even might, one coming night,
remember both their names.
 
  (Repeat Chorus)
 
 
Our Visa card is working hard
to bring up both our boys.
They want a little sister
’cause they’re sick of all their toys.
We’re 38, it’s not too late
to make a big decision:
will we have another child
or another television?
We thought we’d get a refugette
but we weren’t allowed to rent her.
We’d give the world to drop a coloured girl
at the Long Day Child Care Centre.
 
Chorus

 Drop another kid and cut the cord,
  dispose of the placenta.
            We’d give the world ...
            to drop a coloured girl ...
  at the Long Day Child Care Centre!

 

 

 

 

(For the context of the following poem, 
you might like to read the editorial for Dec 26, 2001 here)

 

Reds Under The Bed

Reds Under The Bed

 

Memo To:

Those schoolboys in the 1968

puffed up, lip curled

surrounding this boy

with the indictment of parrots

“ Reds under the bed,

reds under the bed!”

Unanimously willing victory to the bloody Vietcong

to rescue Vietnam from oppression.

Who grew up to turn their florid cabernet-sauvignon faces

from the boat people millions

who drowned rather than stay behind

to play barbed wire shuttlecock

with the million in Uncle Ho’s

re-education holiday camps.

 

Memo to:

The suckling schoolboys who waved their Little Red Books in 1967

while Mao did Hitler proud

and dug the graves of 30, 40, how many millions

to pave Karl’s criminal road.

Oh your childish voices ring down the decades

“China is not Australia.

We cannot judge them.

They’re not really Communists.

What do you mean by classicide?

Marx has a different view of human nature.

He says truth is not absolute.

It’s all relative man,

and economically determined.

Whatever that means.

Teacher said so.

What about Coca Cola?

That’s much worse than Communism, it rots your teeth -

and they advertise.

You haven’t read enough.

Reds under the bed,

Reds under the bed!

Our teacher told us so.

They don’t kill anyone in China.

It’s Australia and America that are evil.

Much more freedom in China than America.

What do you mean they’re killing millions as we speak?

Look at our Prime Minister

he’s got big ears for Christ’s sake!

We can’t  judge China.

We can only judge America.

Sir said so.

What about Kentucky Fried? Surely that’s worse.

Haven’t you heard Crosby, Stills and Nash?

Four dead in Ohio.

Four dead in Ohio.

You’re unhip,  you’re a fascist.

Reds under the bed!

Reds under the bed!”

 

Memo To:

The teacher of English

1969

not much English but

lots of politics and puffery

and Chomsky and charlatans

and misinformation and Marx

and deconstructing grammar

(society won’t need it in the ’90s you said)

flinging with effusive wit and originality

a grin across a class of boys

and pointing at

“the reds under my bed”.

Great politics. Great teacher.

DURRHH!

 

Memo to:

Quote progressive unquote university colleagues in 1973

thousands lined up like ten pins

impossible to bowl over,

with their tenpin lecturers,

the dogmatists of deceit

taking turns at bowling tinpot arguments,

and the vacuous incantation

“Pol Pot is liberating Cambodia from

evil US hegemony”

 Ah, you were all avowed individualist free thinkers,

weren’t you,

so must have discovered

your profundities

severally and separately

with your undergrad knowledge of history

and political science…

to say nothing of Pol Pot’s brainbuddies,

Marx’s dull intelligentsia

in the whited sepulchral faculties

softly muttering Lenin’s mantra

Quote: Telling the truth is a bourgeois prejudice,

Deception on the other hand, is often justified by the goal. Unquote

Ah, those professors done a job on you my friends,

with their Mao caps and their banal, biased, convincing critique.

There should be a special place in scholars’ hell

for those who pervert the naive idealist with lies.

Ah, you students knew it all

“The Khmer Rouge is liberating Cambodia

from Coca Colonialism

and the Sandinistas are democratic nationalists,

not Marxists”

(did you even know what that meant?)

“And Ethiopia will benefit from

Mengistu’s Marxism

and deliver the people from poverty.”

Did you choke on your focaccia

when Bob Geldof finally appeared on your screen?

Or did you still say that the famine

was engineered by McDonald’s, not Marx and Lenin?

Do you remember Pol Pot’s 1975

and kindly pointing out to me

and the ogling others

the reds under my bed?

Do you think that on the Killing Fields

they have forgotten the loudspeakers

blaring out economic determinism from dawn till night?

Ask the Jews to forget the ovens.

Ah, how the Left ceased its silence on Pol Pot

when Vietnam overran Cambodia.

What a coincidence!

Ah, how bitter is this vindication,

ah, how unashamed my tormenters.

 

Memo To:

The myriads of philosophers of the ’80s

who rabbited on about ASIO

when told of the complicity of the KGB

in scores of millions of bleeding deaths

and who,

when pressed for honest debate

denied my original premise

and said what about crappy American sitcoms

and baseball caps …

and referred to a certain red presence

under where I slept.

 

Is this emotional?

Yes this is emotional.

A lie that is half a truth

was ever the best of lies, said Tennyson.

What think you now of

the entrapment of young idealistic minds,

who crawled the scholarly halls of the globe

and still await their day

in their armchairs of certitude

and corridors of false premises?

What think you now of Marx’s prescribed word “despotic”

and Engels’ word “terror”?

Did you blush with shame at Tien an Men?

Did you blush to hear Gorbachev admit to fifty million dead?

How shall we calculate

Your debt?

Your debt to the bodies and scars without number.

Your debt to honest scholarship.

Your debt to truth telling.

Your debt to the forcibly re-educated millions.

Your debt to the babies on the Killing Fields

and men cooked on spits over Cambodian fires,

all for an ideology of deception.

Your debt to the millions fleeing Cuba.

Your debt to the gash on Africa.

Your debt to the multitudes on the trail of sea and fleeing.

Your debt to the Peruvian hilltribes in terror of Sendero Luminoso.

Your debt to the congregations hacked by the NPA.

To the bare bleaching bones on every continent.

The burned books and the cacophony of classicide.

To the bourgeoisie who quote must be swept from history

and made impossible unquote.

To the terror that again slouches

towards green minds to be born.

What do you owe,

you flocks of independent thinkers

with nothing under your beds

or between your ears?

 

What do you owe the voiceless ones

who clamoured for your honesty and tears?

 

I reckon you owe me a beer.

 

 

For a grieving family    

By beaches of white shining, where the turquoise tide returns
the sound of children's laughter rings through eucalypts and ferns;
the kookaburra answers with his old familiar song –
they will be forever young.

The crystal healing waters from the mystic mountains flow;
the wounds are sweetly mended where the herbs and flowers grow.
There is a place not dreamed of, nor ever told by tongue
where they are forever young.

The children are not distant, for the place in which they live
is in our hearts forever with the blessings that they give.
Listen! they are playing now, their limbs again are strong –
they will be forever young.

At evening when the kookaburra hurries to its nest
and we grow ever older, the little ones will rest
beneath the holy arbour with the fruit so heavy hung –

and will be forever young.

 

 

 

                                Poetry index                       Next »

    One-man band
If you are moved on any of my pages, please don't just move on.
Like a street performer, I earn my living by moving my readers, so I will have done worthwhile work. Kindly click my puppy to help this work continue.

 

Tell friends about this page