To Be English

[billy]

some good edits throughout the poem jack specially the second stanza
i'd advise you out it to rest for a month and come back then, so as to not edit it to death.

Third edit:
To be English is to be the shadow of an Empire,
the depressed brown grass that remains
when a castle has been torn down.

Our lords and ladies,
sacred relics meant to be admired but nothing else, no need for [meant]
now flash their artifacts, for a price, should it be artefacts
a shallow attempt at brotherhood,
while their suits of armour,
coats of arms, history of oppression,
crumble beneath them
as sand through an old man's fist. a good edit on this stanza. i'm glad you got rid of siblinghood.

Lady Sue and Lord Reggie are opening their doors,
revealing their plunder at last to the unwashed hordes,
to us peasants, us cretins, with our cameras
and fashionable shirts.

The slow death of the aristocracy,
who bathed their whores in Ireland's blood
and clothed them with its skin,
is a great comedy at which I guffaw
into my two pound ice cream,
while clutching a program
covered by their mopey faces.

The royals remain, beneath a pretence of "tourism",
courting grubby dollars and Euros
like the streetwalkers they've become.

With each dying spasm comes an ascendance,
a paving with our Lordship's bones
the path towards enlightenment,
where the worthless - race, class, "Britishness" -
is replaced by what marries us all: the impermanent soul, and death,
that truly united kingdom.