Britannia, I fear you have seen your better days.
One - handed Nelson keeps it all inside,
he can find no tongue for his disdain.
A pallid, grey-streaked shadow.
What are you doing about your enemployed?
Life's over at twenty.
Complicated schemes to save eternal estates,
the House of Lords has lost its spark.
Seventeen suicides a day.
Britannia, what has become of your self-preservation?
If you can't save yourself, is it worth the effort?
Your poets arey dying,
they have no place to go.
Wher do you go at night, Britannia?
And you thought the whores were here to stay,
how wron you can be.
Britannia you thought that it would be all-so-easy to sell yourself,
noone's buying.
Summit meetings, philosophies, and neutron bombs.
Britannia, where are we going?
I can no longer weep,
I can't see the point.
When the be notting usurps the being, it's all over bar the whimpering.
Big Bang's in disrepute.
Darwin was no more than a fool.
How did we get here Britannia?
You waited for me to turn my back, you didn't know I was peeping.
I saw it all Britannia, you're a fake.
You can't drop the masquerade.
We're dealing with the Human Race, can't you see that?
I too, live the lie.
I read The Times in my windy tenement
and pretend that everything's really alright,
but Btittania, it isn't
You've forsaken each other and nobody gives a shit,
America won't talk to us 'cos we sent no troops to Grenada.
Russia wont talk to us 'cos we got them big missiles.
Irelamd won't talk to us 'cos we're schizophrenic.
France won't talk to us 'cos we're not French.
Britannia, we're out in the cold.
The summer's broken, nothing but great gusts of wind.
Snowdrifting towards anonymity.
And what of your mighty garrisons?
2000 in The Lebanon.
Two and a half dozen guarding penguins in the Falklands.
A handful in Belize.
None in Grenada.
Britannia, will Lean spill the beans?
God knows we're all repressed,
but couldn't we try,
just this once?
Pop goes the weazel
and then it's all over.
Britannia,
Champion of the Oppressed.
But tell me, who invented the Concentration Camp?
Who sent their poor to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread?
Who gaoled Mahatma for spreading the disease of Love?
Your viginity's taken quite a beating, eh what?
Still, when you cannot bleed you cannot bleed.
You don't want to be known as a nation of shopkeepers, yes,
that's quite true.
But what do you want from me?
You've talen all I had, I have no more to give.
Leave me alone.
Your publishers send me rejection slips time and again.
What am I to do?
Suicide's a platitude, besides,
Heaven is probably drugless,
no, I don't want to die, not yet.
Britannia, I am going to reform you!
You're due for a beautification, if not a canonization.
Oh, but forgive me my Irish upbringing,
it still escapes me,
why are you not a Catholic?
I don't want to be Prime Minister, despite the fact that I'm an
Australian.
Britannia, you have quashed my hope, I no longer want to be a Saint.
I am merely an unknown artist, I drop acid every chance I get.
You thought you knew me?
Don't make me laugh, I'm in a serious mood. I'm responsible and upright
and I think I am going insane.
I hope it doesn't last for long.
Britannia, you don't seem to realise that I take my paranoia seriously.
This morning I fell in love with a Soulful blond on the train.
I thought she was gone but she reappeared at Vauxhall Station.
Casting furtive glances I watched her walk beside the Thames, I was
on the other side, she looked as though she were a secretary but she
whirled and sat at a bench along the Albert Embandkment. I knew that I
loved her. I knew that she was going to throw herself in, panicking,
I hurried on. How do you say, "excuse me but I don't think that you ought
to drown yourself. Who am I? Oh, remeber, I was sitting opposite you in the
Tube and, by the way, I love you."
How do you say this to someone who is sitting there smoking?
I gave up three and a half days ago.
I've taken itt up again - What's the use?
Warm with love, cold with piles of black and white, I hurried on
to my office.
Will I see her again?
Britannia, it seems you're in distress.
Yes, yes, I know that I digress
but I'm terrified of your policemen, they're terribly intimidating,
you know.
Though once in Oxford my friend was drunk, I flagged them down
and hitched a lift.
I told them I was a poet, I had half an ounce in my pocket.
I was sober and dreaming of saving someone, or of being saved.
Britannia, why have I adopted you?
I say it was all a big mistake,
I could be right.
Britannia,
give me a first full of pounds and I'll be off.
A chateau on the Cote d'Azure, a garret on the boul' Mich'.
A return to Victorian values?
I applause your promiscuity.
By night I slink about the streets of Belsize Park, sneezing at
the lampposts.
They unfold their arms and laugh at me, arms akimbo, foolish, nuisance
and smirk, I walk away in silence.
They're all in Cahoots, you know, every damn one of them.
You think I'm trying to be a mystic, but you're wrong.
"I calls 'em as I sees 'em" you know the syndrome.
Is it not a miracle that a child can laugh?
Britannia, you'll try and squeeze that laughter out of her in a
few years.
But you can't get them all.
This is your failure.
It is my success.
Britannia, it's all a Commie plot,
they're all out to get you, the CIA, FBI, MI5m MI6, ASIO, Mossad,
the fringe theatre, the Tory Wets, CND, the poets, the painters, the
sculptors, the guy in Oxford Circus Tube station blowing his sax,
even Van Gogh's self- portrait, you know, the one where he's got his
ear bandaged.
Let's face it, you haven't got a Chinaman's chance,
they're all after you, all except the Merchant Bankers,
and the car park attendants.
Well Brittania, I hope you rot in Hell, God knows you deserve it.
Britannia you're a classist bitch.
if you could only see you as I see you,
but then,
you'd just be a platitude.
I think I'll bide my time...
