Back to Basics

By John Aldred

Back to basics, make a wood fire
Pray to the moon, sacrifice a boy child.
Dig a hole for the bodies certainty mire
Life lived in the wintery wild.

Eat potatoes, peas and hot soup
Find a cave and shelter in there
Raid a rich man's chicken coup
Catch the rain with the greatest of care.

Return to Victorian ideals
Where the sun never sets,
High ornamentation cosily conceals
The poor from the blinkered lorgnettes.

Return to the days of political power
Over the tribes in primitive state
On their knees in subservient cower,
Leave the poor to a Dickensian fate.

Trade is the god of a dominant class
Steal the world's riches, no questions asked.
Dirt and disease will produce all that brass,
Tyrants in workhouse's never unmasked.

The world was so large that those of idealistic yen
Still believed that religion would solve all the ills,
That women were there for the use of all men
And the poor, well the poor, die from their chills.

Back to basics, mud in the streets
Turn back the clock, bring back the leech
Outlaw the unions, resurrect the outdated leets
Don't forget to muffle the speech.

Back to basics? the clock cannot work in reverse
Canute found the tides just a little too strong.
Fate moves forward the whole universe
No Mr.Major, you just might be wrong.

Copyright © 1999 John Aldred