You don’t know me

You don’t know me

I barely know me

Nothing I say

Has any relevance

To the proof

Of my disguise

Or is it disingenuous

Pretending to agree

With the empty vessel theory

Of everything

As beamed in

From the outside

An English channel

Tuned ethereally

To long wave,

Radio Luxembourg

Always seemed quixotic

Fading in and out

Elvis in uniform

Buddy Holly reminiscin’

On what he’d been a missin’

Oh boy

The voices caught

In flagrante

As allied broadcasts

Must have felt

In the second world war

When the first one

Was not an end

In itself

As they promised it would be

Faded images

Flickering on cathode tubes

White men in tight collars

And a shaving rash

Promised to safeguard

The hand that rocked

The cradle

To the grave

We had never had it so good

Even as winds of change

Were sweeping them away

Did we all dream in colour

Or was that a sixties thing

Dreams are barely worth

Remembering

When they are so far

Removed from reality

Would that they were

As vital as Martin’s

As magical as Midsummer

Perhaps then

The words I choose

To use

Would be more closely

Allied to the soul

Fiercely protected

As it is,

Finely crafted

Rather than randomly

Selected

Plucked from a story arc

Partially submerged

In the murky shallows

Of a collective

Unconscious.