which could have me sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Come friendly bombs and fall on Queens!
It's full of snooty human bein's,
All in thrall to vile machines.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
That suburb of designer-jeans
And folk who sneer at processed beans,
But have canned minds, canned breath....
(The New York semi-suburb of Queens has Botanical Gardens, lakes,
an art-gallery, a golf-course and a 'neighborhood' called Utopia.)
Read the long original poem here.
5 comments:
Anthony, Morrissey adopted the poem for his own purposes back in the 90s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Gee3THtb8
The link you give is for this chap Morris Sey singing "Everyday is like Sunday" which bears no relation to the Betjeman poem - or mine!
Would you care to elaborate ?
The lyrics contain a reference to the Betjeman poem.
See here:
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/morrissey/everyday+is+like+sunday_20096007.html
and here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/aug/25/popandrock.poetry
I hate to be niggly (no! I love it!) but Slough is not a seaside town. It is one of the English towns farthest from the sea. Morris Sey's comment is, of course, predictably, pop-singerly tame, and lacks the glorious outrageousness of Betjeman's outburst, written at a time when Britain was frantically re-arming in case it had to deal with Hitler (a vegetarian dog-lover like me) at some time in the future. Which it decided to do, after much hesitation, two years later.
Morrissey, pop-singer tame? No, Anthony, no. I believe you're familiar with his Desert Island Discs interview where he defended and praised the act of suicide, a stance that gained him the appropabation of the ignorant hordes...
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