The BATTLE OF THE BEANFIELD

In those days wearing beards 

was an arrestable offence.

Hair was gelled back rigid,

and the only value recognized 

as worth your time was money.

It was a cookie cutter age.

Even music was all synthesised 

to squeeze the human out.

That’s why they beat the shit 

out of the hippies at the Solstice.

We’d wanted a free festival 

at Stonehenge on the longest day.

We drove buses there from anywhere

that life had left the land.

Thirteen hundred cops attacked 

six hundred rainbow travellers,

smashing up our heads and buses,

throwing pregnant women on the ground,

and terrifying kids.

One threw a fire extinguisher at me.

Thank fuck his arm was weak.

A reporter for the tv news 

declared it police brutality.

It was a clear move by the government 

against the counterculture,

whose love of drugs and bright clothes,

whose preposterously wild hair,

might offer an alternative 

to the pile of gold they sat on  

that they'd stolen from the poor.

But you know what? Margaret Thatcher’s dead.

And most of her government are dead.

And the chief of police in Wiltshire, dead.

I want to know his secret 

if he’s not, the vicious bastard.

They’re gone. But I’m still standing here.

My beard is even longer than it was then, 

and my heart’s unchanged.

I’m freerer than the Wiltshire wind

that blows around those ancient stones.

It’s just my bones that slow me up these days

especially when it’s cold!

written using things people told me and stuff I read