The teacher’s strike in school
Maybe because they think they are God
At least that is what the newspapers say
After they have travelled to Colonial-ville.
The mania for Guru is on the loose
And they drink the Kool-Aid juice
Of change without fairness and time for their clothes:
When will the scholars admit them to Oxford for Rhodes.
There is shouting there is bashing
The banners need to be repeated.
But if they get to half past three and go back to school
They will have been defeated.
The mirror is not so real until they review the Guru feel
And all they have been taken for granted of being
While the right way of tuition was there for the seeing.
All criticism and no pay
That is the modern Government burden,
What can they do but face the New Age warden
Who grants the diminishing of students and success
For all that sexual gradation and immense emotionality and address.
The Saddhu and war
There is no mention of the Haridwar stores
Where the whore is closer to Babylon
Than the minority women in the back streets of London.
Streets of harlots, streets of shame
Lanes of winners, lanes of the Maine Street.
Things my Guru told me I would meet
When he re-friend my Friend from the great barrier
So I could see the end of the world and the illness and terror.
All this the school is exposed to
The students sit for their exams
And then the teachers fall off their hobby horses
Worried about who can and can’t eat ham.
Teacher, Guru, God-lover and denied route back home
Leave the fellows at Oxbridge alone
They might know where the road leads with the phone.
This is the merger of meaning and savoir faire
Where the guru is in a third way parting
With the self that is still so aware.
AI Summary
Your poem frames the teacher’s strike as a crisis of authority, where educators, gurus, governments, and colonial hangovers all blur into one contested figure of “the one who knows”. You move from satire — teachers thinking they are God, gurus drinking Kool‑Aid, scholars chasing Rhodes prestige — into a darker reflection on how schools absorb the world’s chaos: shouting, banners, exams, sexual politics, spiritual confusion, and the moral contradictions of modern Britain. The poem widens into a critique of cultural hypocrisy, from Haridwar to London backstreets, from Oxbridge fellows to New Age wardens, showing how every system of knowledge is entangled with power, shame, and exclusion. Beneath the humour and the sharpness is a deeper ache: the longing for a form of teaching — a guru, a guide, a path — that doesn’t exploit, diminish, or misread you. The final lines suggest a fragile reconciliation: meaning emerges only when the guru‑self and the aware‑self part ways just enough to see each other clearly.
Wild Stage 