Skew Left

When did we get so puritan ?
When did we lose our common sense ?
When did we get so keen to ban,
And get so keen to take offence ?
Why did we frown and lose our humour ?
Why did we break our self-made laws ?
Why did we credit ev’ry rumour,
Just as long as it helped our cause ?
A lie was told,
A line was crossed –
And this is how the left was lost.

We used to be the peace-and-love brigade,
We used to be on your side.
We used to be so unafraid,
So when did we grow so terrified ?
Now we’ve become the rage-and-shun regime,
The ones with the hate-filled mouths –
We loathe you almost as much, it would seem, 
As we secretly loathe ourselves.
Our bleeding hearts
Have turned to frost –
And this is how the left was lost.

When did we give up on forbearance ?
When did we grow so paranoid ?
When did we all become our parents ?,
Overwrought, not overjoyed.
We’ve bought into the capital con
Where individuals demand respect,
With all sense of community gone
For a constant “I object !”.
We won our place,
But at a cost –
And this is how the left was lost.

The New Victorians

These days, just as we’re losing our prude
For fruity language that once gave the vapours,
Just shrugging-off cusses as barely that rude,
When reading them often in novels and papers –
Slowly reducing the shock of the swear –
We’re far too open-minded to care.
We’re liberated and in the nude,
Released from po-faced capers.

But then, out of the void, we heard
How modern ears are being rocked
At a brand new crop of age-old words –
That blanche the permanently-shocked.
We need to learn to take offence, or
We’ll upset the lib’ral censor,
Who demands our tongues are slurred
To keep our language locked.

The new lords of the orthodox
Are getting too big for their britches –
No longer just a chatterbox,
They’ve now become a gang of snitches.
Scanning all communications,
Seeking phantom motivations –
Boldly stating roosters can’t be cocks,
And canines can’t be bitches.

Fashion Police

Who invented dreadlocks ?
I honestly don’t care,
Anymore than who should get to sport blond hair.
No one-individual
Gets to tell us how to dress,
Though there’s plenty self-appointees who will do so, nonetheless.
They want to segregate our tastes
By banning admiration,
And assigning each of us a race with no miscegenation.
Appropriating history
And guilt about the past
Into a streak of pompous and self-righteous counterblast.
This is the Left at its ugliest,
So puritan, so sure –
When our romanticism turns to petty civil war.
Equality, fraternity,
They both must come to grief,
As liberty herself makes way for the canceller-in-chief.
But culture is an interchange,
Not a way of scoring points –
And no rule can be airtight when there’s far too many joints.
So the mixing carries-on regardless,
Like it’s always done –
Cos culture’s not a lecture, it’s in way of having fun !

Greysuits

They are the people in control,
The They who run the show –
Shadowy backrooms, secret goals,
To prop up the status quo.
Unstoppable authority,
With fingers everywhere –
Except…the They are simply We
When seen from over there.