The Wonderful Naffness of Things

And when the Russian bombs
evaporate us all I’ll think not of
great art or love perhaps,
but the wonderful naffness of things.  
 
1970s sitcoms that lasted one series,
starring John Inman as
a fish-and-chip merchant
who goes to run a bonbon factory,
the jokes so bad they make you smile less.
 
Channel 4 “youth programming”
that’s really just pathetic pranks
like taking strippers home to mum
and windmilling your cock at passing cars.
 
The Coke and cooked breakfasts
my mum would bribe me with
so that I’d spend my weekends at her flat.
 
A girl I met whose teeth were mostly gone
and always had a share bottle of Coke
ensconced in her handbag. How I’d
have liked to ask her if her mum
was anything like mine: hooked on
what’s bad for you and yours.
 
I’ve always loved what’s junk and tat,
obsessed about bad horror books
from 1985, watched trash TV,
collected weird religious tracts,
and ran with wild glee to buy
US marshmallow cereal so sugary
it’s mostly banned from UK shelves.
 
I’ll think as radiation blasts the weirs
and meadows of our New Jerusalem
how once I had to stay my hand
from ordering a pricy book
on British sex farces, redundant by
the new millennium, let alone Me Too.
 
How eager was my mind to fill
with evangelical cartoons
depicting childminders as
the Devil’s filthiest harlots,
and Power Rangers as a scheme
to make your children queer.
 
The crappiness, the meagreness,
the futility of human ambition and need,
to find escape or answers or just profit in
the platitudes that end as cultural offal.
 
There’s beauty somewhere in that crap,
a self-deception so like us it stings,
and speaks to how a lot of us get by,
bent on the wonderful naffness of things.