Maternal Expectations

My poor long-suffering mother
wished me not only to enter
respectable society, but to excel
within it.  But I never joined.
So never coined.
The only job I ever had
was an unregulated, untrained,
unqualified teacher of "Liberal Studies"
to day-release engineering apprentices.
It was the early 1960s, when there were apprentices.
It was in Belfast, so they were all Protestant.
I encouraged my 'pupils' - who were only slightly
younger than I, and far more savvy -
to tune into life, turn on their brains,
and drop out of the rat-race.

I had read Kafka but not Kerouac
or Ginsberg. It was nearly 20 years before I myself
took cannabis, let alone LSD, so I guess
I was a sort of proto-hippy.
It was such a pity that Timothy Leary
fancied himself as some sort of
psycho-cultural guru-midwife...
I am now Emeritus Professor of Dissident Mumblings
at the University of Life.