Heavy bourgeois stone

Composed of music, Pop Art

Cult of youth, sexual reform

Love rhetoric

 

Hides darker truth of

Racist chants, stiff-armed salutes

Gas mimed through hissing teeth

Bananas hurled from terraces

At startled, spittle-slicked forwards

 

Boys raped in children’s homes

Voiceless class

Prey for the Great and Good

Gagged tight for decades

Snarled

In silent pain

 

Doors slammed shut

As post-War ardour cooled

And paranoid elites felt

Ladders must be

Pulled

 

Baby Boomers

Made the stone

And guarded it:

Now their light fades

 

Their capstone crumbles

Stirred by squirming

Truth.