Remember causes

and affectations of effect on rain-swept city streets

and war-zones now gone five-star?

 

Remember anger

and maintaining rage at symbolic loss

while secretly at home with the familiar futility?

 

Remember sexual honesty

and fucking whoever felt like you

and confining safe sex to heart condoms?

 

Remember dope

and discovering the ‘real’ you

and waking each time forgetful of the revelation?

 

Remember music

and believing decibels were antidotes to megatons

and lyrics could shield you from the Press?

 

Remember death

when it belonged to rock stars

and an endless list your mother claimed to have known?

 

Remember revolutions

and the bloody gutters of freedom

because fascism belonged to the right? Right?

 

Remember social action

sitting in smoke-filled rooms with Nescafe activists

and Housing Trust women with no teeth and less hope?

 

Remember children

sneaking past full lives and empty wombs

to be raised in the fearful parentheses of generational skipping?

 

Remember parents

left on some private shelf

in case they portrayed you to anybody that mattered?

 

Remember party politics

and seeing neighbours become politicians

only to fall in clay-footed exhaustion at the barriers?

 

Remember health

when it was something other people ought to have and

you weren’t smoke-free, mineral water in hand and smiling at God?

 

Remember money

and how it was never going to concern you

and then you learnt the golden rule and its defensible limits?

 

And do you remember when the penny dropped

that the personal was the political

and you found out you had to change?

 

And you decided to forget the revolution?