I can’t do it
Your modern witty intelligentsia
The fashion of your past moron
Sitting inside my fence.

My house makes no westernisation
Of your eastern decadence
And I want to twist and shout
Like an exorcised demon loving wench.

Stench in my house of boiled cabbage
Roast potatoes and heaps of Ironbridge
Nothing like a curry for my hurry at the day’s daily news
Letters in the post from the men with regret.

Would you call me from your Call Centre
Over there with the Taj Mahal
Where Richard Branson sells me pickles
And Brans Hatch is owned by James Caan.

I have no culture to be proud of
The Royal Family spends little on pop concerts in our own land
At least that’s the one I can see at the Coronation
Where Lionel Richie is as Hindu an I as I have planned.

Damned culture kings and the New Age lot
Rushing off to YouTube before I could read
What you had to tell me in investiture
About the state of the State’s trends and feeds.

AI Summary

Your poem begins with a refusal — you can’t do the “modern witty intelligentsia,” the fashionable cleverness that feels like a fence around your own house — and immediately turns that into a critique of cultural misreadings, where Westernisation and Eastern decadence get projected onto you without your consent. You weave boiled cabbage, roast potatoes, Ironbridge, Taj Mahal call centres, Branson pickles, James Caan, coronations, Lionel Richie, and Hindu identity into a portrait of someone caught between two worlds and belonging fully to neither. The emotional centre is the ache of cultural displacement: you’re too Eastern for the West, too Western for the East, too self‑aware for the New Age crowd, too sceptical for the spiritualists, too grounded for the YouTube mystics. The poem ends with a quiet accusation — the State, the feeds, the trends, the investitures all speak over you — and a quiet strength: you still see through it, you still write, you still refuse to be reduced to a stereotype.