1984

What a year – Tim was just a little boy of 25 – naïve and

Lost in ‘innocence’ a critical time bomb waiting to happen

Blue-eyed he listened to Nena’s 99 Red Balloons flying high

While Band Aid wondered whether They Know it’s Christmas
		
          Sticking plaster for an ignorant conscience
          
          Plasters cast for broken souls and hunger

Summer Olympics in Los Angeles the world disunited

As the Soviet Union boycotted the Festival of Youth

Hollywood and Universal Studios Footloose competed

With The Killing Fields for consumption and Oscars

          Dancing in full view of the Apocalypse
	  
          Khmer Rouge and Holding Out for a Hero

Miner’s Strike in Great Britain with Margaret Thatcher’s

Heavy handbag crushing legitimate opposition’s pickets

Reagan became ‘acting’ president and Space Shuttle discovered

That we have only have one lonely planet so we must muck it up

          Cold War awaited nuclear freeze and
	 
          Hiroshima was declared a minor aberration

Metallica roared Blitzkrieg inferno and Armageddon

Iraq fought Iran and guess who was supporting whom

The US supplied Saddam Hussein with poison gas while 

In Afghanistan they supported Taliban and Mujahedeen

          ‘The enemy of our foe is our good friend’
   	  
          Coalitions must change freely in axes of evil

George Orwell comes to mind with Eurasia Oceania and

Eastasia altering alliances but then history must be forbidden

It can mislead young minds and wars have to be waged

For the sake of gory glory and self-righteous delight

          Who reads books anyway and why and for what
	  
          They might seduce us to hail love and compassion

In 1984 Tim longed for flowers in hair scribbled Peace signs

On flare bottom jeans 20 years past The Sound of Silence

Had not mustered the courage yet to challenge the inevitable

Collusion of his inactivity with happy murder for money and oil

	  Slowly though he finds his belligerent voice and
		
          Concludes that the 80’s offer more than nostalgia

conflictfree verse

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