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CAUGHT IN THE NET 100 POETRY BY MICK MOSS

Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit - www.poetrykit.org
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You can join the CITN mailing list at - http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/index.htm and following the links for Caught in the Net.

Submissions for this series of Featured poets is open, please see instruction in afterword at the foot of this mail.

______________________________
Zoom

Push. Slap. Waahh
Mumma. Dadda
ABC

Pop. Clothes. Pills
Second-hand car
University

Job. Rent. Bills
Wife. Brats
Responsibility

Prostate gland
Write a will
Eternity
_____________________________
Bargain

Crossing the old border for the first time
without Charlie checking my points
or the Stasi giving the once over, at least twice
I walked through the Brandenburg gate
and felt the weight of history
that wore these flagstones smooth
the ebb and flow of shiny boots
marching along Unter den Linden
from Paris to Moscow
and back
the only army now
a rag tag band of displaced persons
scraping a living, from misplaced Russian gear
in reclaimed no man’s land

Dollars? - he asked
Deutschmarks - I said handing them over
and waited for change that never came
the hat didn't fit
but I considered it a bargain
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Rwanda

10 years old
with an AK47

his tribe
have killed their tribe
back and forth
across the frontline
that used to be a road
running between the villages

but now it's a frontier
littered with flyblown corpses
including his parents

the journalist asked him
'why are you a soldier?'

he didn't know
'I just am.'

______________________________
Loneliness

Is a self esteem thing
a weight
an ordeal
like depression, it holds you down
oppressive
preventing you from feeling you have anything to offer
to any other people
to social groups of interactive individuals
who enjoy each others company
who have some social collateral
with each other
even if the only collateral is acceptance
is having shared interests, and opinions
But when you are not interesting
if your opinions are unimportant
if you have no personality for others to enjoy
That erodes your self esteem
and even though it might seem
that you have something to offer
to other
people
you can`t imagine any other
person
finding you interesting enough to want to know you
But you know yourself
and you don't like what you know
it`s a serpents tail
back biting yourself
over and over
as the tears fall
you feel fuck all worth
Worthless
un-liked, unloved, unwanted
Lonely
Loneliness is a self esteem thing.
- - -
Sitting at home, alone by the phone
waiting for the girl to call
she's out and about, in good company no doubt
while I`m on my own, with a silent phone
a second hand PC, and a worn out TV
three days stubble, and a beer belly.

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Fake

I’m not a real poet
not like she is
she can spin words
I can only put them in place
like bricks, Leggo
a kid banging square pegs
where they don’t want to go

She gives you an idea
and lets you bounce off it
leaving it up to you
where you want to land

Me?
I can rhyme and play around
with metered time and rhythm
working with that discipline
I often loose the meaning
and the reason
why I started in the first place

Her words skip and trip
and dance from her lips
mine are regimented into place
You - go there, you have to

Hers don’t have to go anywhere
they hang in the air
free floating, an essence
of essential meaning
like dreaming
it takes a while sometimes
to see what she’s saying
her words are playing

but mine are always fighting.

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It could’ve been me.

Next to the painting it said ’Mother washing baby in sink’ - 1953 the year I was born we bathed one after another in a tin bath that was kept outside on the coal bunker during the week on Sunday nights, bath night, just before supper it was dragged into the scullery
which was what you now call a kitchen and filled with scalding water from the copper which you call an immersion heater and scrubbed from head to toe with Wrights Coal Tar soap you don’t have that now
you have herbal body wash from the Body Shop and use a nice soft natural sponge our mum used a wooden scrubbing brush that took your top layer of skin off these days it's called exfoliating
and is supposed to keep you looking young we called it torture and made us look like burn victims you smell like the scent of a summer breeze we smelt like disinfectant
you have organic pizza and low fat chips
with sugar-free juice and watch satellite TV before going to bed in your own centrally heated room under a cosy Teletubbies duvet we had toast
and as a Sunday treat cocoa made from condensed milk and slept head to toe under sheetless blankets when we eventually stopped shivering.
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Black and White

It's like Pandas
sitting in a shaded bamboo grove
or better still
Zebras

the wind blows the trees
the shadows move
now you see them
now you don't

we're like that
hiding in
incomplete shadows

but our black and white
our camouflage
is more emotional
than physical

and rarely protects us
from predators


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Still Howling
- the next Generation. Dedicated to Alan Ginsberg

I saw the not particularly bright minds of my generation
driven to obscurity
red brick Mickey Mouse degrees promised us
interesting world changing careers
but all we got were mortgages
interest rising

Thrust expectantly from the womb of a post-war black and white
still rationed, once great nation, that shared its greatness
if you were born from the right stock
which we were not

From one room to baby boom, suburbia,
Bevin's babies with national reassurance
blue collars stained white by the new blue whiteness
of copy-writers' lies
forged in the white heat of technology
gadgets in the ideal home
for the nuclear family

Our optimism shattered by Cuban missiles, and a man on the grassy knoll
while bombs rained down from LBJ, mothers running screaming napalmed
Buddhist monk barbecue
Charlie's brains blown out for the camera
boil in the bag convenience TV tea time
bland horrors daily

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh - and Che washed up in a Bolivian bath house
while Mao Tse Tung said - Change must come
change must come through the barrel of a gun
Terence Conran made shopping fun
as our habitat degraded

Buy now, pay later, must have, have not
pot bellied, fly blown black babies starved
still, we had the Beatles
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Born with plastic spoons in our mouths
substitute fabric for the modern world
moulded multi-coloured in factories
scream in your grave Henry Ford
any colour as long as it's black, can sit in the back
too much it's a magic bus

They taught us Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen
but not Ken Kesey, too merry a prankster he for their sensibilities
incensed by DH Lawrence - And yes our servants could have read it
if we had them
though we didn't

We laughed at such absurdities
but raged when they locked up Mick and Keef
who would break a butterfly on a wheel?
the News of the World, with no news - but vicars and tarts
prurient where Oz never was, yet still they slammed it

The small minded, blinded Mary Shitehouses
of this scandalized post Profumo island
where the pavements of Grosvenor Square were splattered
with teenage blood, where Queer was a dirty word

Where a young milk snatcher rubbed herself dry
over fantasies of bean-counting gurus
espousing trickle down wealth, in a money drought
and the power she would one day wield
in Middle England

Where a nouveau-riche phoney middle class sold votes
for loadsa money and the right to buy
their council hovels
where joy riders ripped up the night - and raved ecstatically
until the Public Order Act repossessed the right to dance
and four kids on the street was an illegal assembly

Until WE had had enough - of things never getting better - and got THEM out
only to find we'd swapped the same old thing - for a brand new drag
ask yourself not what you can do for your country
but which, rich, motherfuckers own it.
as the 'special relationship' dragged us into - yet another pointless war
the point of which was oil
where the same badly equipped council estate cannon fodder are sent to die
on the say so of a sexed up swerve ball dossier – or lies, as they used be known

Meanwhile beleaguered teachers, plagued by league tables
fake results for pupils playing Nintendo in class
where English is reduced to CU L8R - on txt spk phones
and voting means evicting this week’s moron, from Big Brother
to satisfy the nations' voyeuristic eye on L.C.D. TV
that’s ‘lowest common denominator’

Laugh in your grave Eric Blair, as CCTV on every street
records the pissed up, drugged out, lager louts and shag-tarts
descended from the archers, who were dumb enough
to go and stand at Agincourt

And I'm Still Howling -
at wounds festering under a Karma Suture

_______________________________

I expect

I expect I will die alone
unloved
and largely
unknown

the good and bad
aspects of my
personality
not remembered
nor commented on

my achievements
my creativity
such as it was
unsung

all the art
music and literature
unseen unheard
unread and forgotten

the output of a lifetime
regarded as nothing more
than the accumulated detritus
of just another old man

but I know
that in my lifetime
I have touched one or two
and that
is all that matters

3 - Afterword

Email Poetry Kit - info@poetrykit.org - if you would like to tell us what you think.

We are looking for other poets to feature in this series, and are open to submissions. Please send one poem and a short bio to - info@poetrykit.org

Thank you for taking the time to read Caught in the Net. Our other magazine s are Transparent Words ands Poetry Kit Magazine, which are webzines on the Poetry Kit site and this can be found at - http://www.poetrykit.org/