Pearls of Wisdom from my Childhood #poetry #Earthweal

Chewits are chewier than Barrow-in-Furness bus depot
Milk is what Ian Rush drinks
Accrington Stanley is a club you’ve never heard of
Don’t play with a kite near overhead electric wires
Don’t ever talk to strangers, especially if
They have a car boot full of puppies, or
They offer you sweets, but
If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit
Join our Club
Pppppick up a Penguin
Or a glass and a half of milk disguised as
A nutritious chocolate bar
Called ‘Dairy Milk’
It’s full of palm oil nowadays: 
Tastes like shit.

How times have changed:
All the sweetness of commercialism turned sour
Still those Wagon Wheels keep on rollin
As long as we pipe oil, and gas and coal in
Keep em rollin
Till there’s nothing left but rock
That doesn’t roll.

© Experimentsinfiction 2020, All Rights Reserved

This started off as a bit of fun which turned into something more serious. I loved adverts as a kid, I was spoon-fed commercialism, alongside some scary infomercialism.

I am posting this in response to Earthweal’s Open Link Weekend #40. I think we’re starting to reap the dubious rewards of rampant commercialism now: Cadbury was taken over by Kraft which became the sinister ‘Mondelez‘ whose cocoa plantations are contributing to the rapid depletion of the natural environment in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. And despite the problems we are seeing from just 1 degree of warming, our leaders in their infinite wisdom continue allow the building of pipelines and seek to exploit the resources newly exposed by melting sea ice. It should be criminal and yet we call it progress.

In case you missed out on a 1980’s childhood in the UK, here are the adverts/infomercials I’ve mentioned above (which I must admit, I thoroughly enjoyed watching again):

Featured image photo from Southportvisiter.co.uk.