Thatcher Years … or the Devil done bin dead at last …

  Welfare cheques, Guinness and hashish … fire, blood and sirens … miners, pickets & police lines … the groups: the International Marxist Group, the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, the Socialist Workers Party with their 'Jobs Not Bombs' - the papers: Black Flag, Freedom, Xtra with their 'Bombs Not Jobs' - Squats, pubs and a dog called Trotsky - Elections night and hurling a brick through their window - The Kite, drunk George, & Irish songs on the jukebox - Pool, punky-reggae parties, and the punks, oh the punks - Airey Neave, The S.A.S. & the National Front - The Irish Hunger Strikers and solidarity marches and vigils - Bobby Sands elected as an MP, now that was something - Birmingham and a Bloody Sunday remembrance and a crowd of hostile skinheads - Magic mushrooms, Cambridge eternal at night, a dog called Desmond - A squat in Stockwell, a night in Brixton, fires, flames and a warning to go no further - Snatch squads, tension and rage - 100 jobs up north for 10,000 school leavers - Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, & Norman Tebbitt - and through it all her voice, and her hair and her horrendous preaching and lecturing and strident pontificating tone - and a pub in Brixton the evening after the IRA almost got her and the grumbling old men - and the feeling of 'almost, almost'  - and her party and her people and her followers - of the fucking horror of it all - and the headlines and the news and the talking, talking heads - and it never got better not for the millions who suffered - and some died, were damaged & deranged - and nothing seemed to make a difference, no matter what and she always came back and dismissed and went on, and on - and her lecturing the soccer hooligans, the rioters, the 'enemy within' - and the families broken, children wretched & despairing - and always the Irish, the Irish - and the poor, all over the place, and still her vacuous defenders, those red faced white men  with tight collars - and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and John Cooper Clarke and the Clash - and the punks, oh the punks - and now she's gone, left her mark, done her deeds - have I forgotten anything, passed over anybody, failed to remember - I'm sure, I'm sure - but she's gone … finally … at last.